Nothing Here Is Actually Pink
She’d clearly decided she wasn’t going to be anyone’s easy fantasy—the armpit hair and the dirty black dress adding up to a declaration. I respect the declaration. It also didn’t change what I was thinking. I would still have gone home with her.
Someone called Black Rambo was arrested that week, the final indignity appearing to be a pair of trousers so comprehensively stained that turning him in felt less like snitching and more like an act of basic hygiene. He’s got time to do laundry now. I suggest he use it.
Then there’s the woman in the black bodysuit—badly bleached hair, expression that had moved past boredom all the way to predatory, something in her hands that registered as a serious weapon. That combination of absolute indifference and explicit danger does something specific to the brain I can’t fully account for. She could put me against any wall she wanted. Bang, bang.
Someone had been circulating pages from a streetwear lookbook that week, and the styling made one thing clear: the decisive Hipster-versus-Pseudo-Gangster battle was coming. Place your bets. My money is on whoever’s wearing shoes they can actually run in.
Reality television continues its steady work: find a person, engineer their humiliation, film the bruises, and call it entertainment. The dwarf went home that episode in his underwear. The network called it content. This is the contract and everyone signed it.
The underwear question that apparently keeps people up at night: does the top have to match the bottom? My answer is no—emphatically no—provided the result earns the nonconformity. This one earned it. Keep going.
A well-chosen outfit can turn the grocery run into something worth remembering. The black miniskirt and the matching glasses did exactly that—they turned an aisle of cereal boxes into a reason to look up from your phone. This is not a minor talent.
Emos are dead. The hair, the music, the cultivated wound display, the entire theatrical apparatus of suffering publicly in skinny jeans—gone, finally, mercifully gone. I have nothing more to add except: good.
The Anonymous masks were back out that week—Scientology, Sony’s PlayStation Network, the Spanish government’s internet censorship legislation, whoever else had drawn the crowd. The Guy Fawkes face has become its own grammar: it means there are more of us than you’re currently accounting for. I’m on their side, obviously. Partly out of genuine conviction. Partly because you really don’t want to end up in the other column.