May, Assessed Under Field Conditions
Odd Future is having their moment and the moment is correct. Popcorn: still blameless. Lactase tablets, white socks, balaclavas, pregnancy vitamins taken as general nutritional supplements—all of it quietly good, all of it suggesting someone who has thought about survival at a base level. Becoming the full festival creature, the kind who arrives with a tent peg in one hand and a clear set of bodily intentions in the other. Getting fucked and fucking back. Collecting enemies the way other people collect shoes. Distributing mixtapes nobody asked for. Arm wrestling. Drawing on yourself below the belt with neon markers at 3am because the night has arrived at that particular station. Cooking with coconut milk. Sitting in the garden waiting for nothing specific. Fireworks detonated for no occasion. Today being, by any honest reckoning, measurably better than yesterday.
The other column: soy milk. The white iPhone, which managed to be simultaneously smug and dull. Kim Gloss occupying space in the public consciousness. Big Brother still running in some format. Excel spreadsheets as a substitute for interiority. Office people whose only weather is caustic. High-tops worn without conviction. Taking the subway when you own a bicycle. Bureaucracy—permanent, seasonal, international, inexhaustible. Carefully observing the expiration date on food you purchased yourself and are eating alone at noon.
Accidentally swallowing your ex-girlfriend’s contraceptives. Osama—this month you couldn’t say the name without a room reorganizing itself around it. Ai Weiwei in a government facility somewhere while his retrospectives toured Western museums, which is the most precise possible description of how states feel about art that looks directly at them. Hollywood in the abstract. The nuclear question that Fukushima made unanswerable. Horny pigeons. The slowness of things that refuse to move on their own. Allergies. All of them.
May, then. Most of it just weather. Some of it worth wanting.