L12: Bye Letters Home, hi New York

I don't want to die without shaking up a leg or two / Yeah I wanna do some chatting too

I was supposed to create a new substack name and custom domain by 5pm today but it’s 2pm and I haven’t done any of that so that’s not going to happen. But I have to send out a post today or pay my friend Uri $50.

So instead of any of the posts I’ve been working on I’ll send out a little goodbye to Letters Home before I move on.

This post consists of:

1. Some details from a party I went to last night

2. A description of where I live

3. A discussion of Plato, catharsis, and a scene from August: Osage County

In the last two years I’ve only done one update, and it was pretty thin. A lot has happened in this time. I hope somehow someday to capture it all, if not literally than in spirit, but the main thing, for the purposes of this substack, is that I’m not traveling anymore, and ‘letters home’ no longer feels right. I live in New York now and I’d like to make this my home.

Also, I’d like to write things that would be easier for people who don’t know me to read, so I’ll have to assume less continuity of readership and knowledge of Steve lore.

I’ve thought about creating a new substack entirely, but ultimately it feels almost self-flagellating to start over, to throw away all my current subscribers. One of my current jobs is doing social media for a tech company, and it occurs to me that once in a while I should mix in a little corporate pragmatism to my neurotic artistic will-to-purity: What Would A Social Media Manager Do? I think letting people unsubscribe themselves is fine. I’m 40 years old and I live in New York. I can’t afford purity. And anyway the zeitgeist, to say nothing of life’s finitude, whispers in my ear that actually, I never could.

Maybe there’s something I can write now that wouldn’t fit into the kinds of more thesis-driven posts I plan to write from here on out. One last purely autobiographical bit? Sure— I always liked in the epistolary culture that my friends and I briefly recreated in emails in our early 20s, which I’ve tried to recreate with this series of letters, the convention of describing where, physically—and spiritually?? 😜—you’re writing from.

So I’ll do that here.

I’m sitting in the vertex of the L-shaped couch in my living room in the house where I live in Bushwick. I’m beside a window that looks down on a backyard with funky all-weather furniture around a fire pit and a Grecian-looking blue-and-white bullseye nailed to a tree that I’m told people, at parties in warmer months, try to hit with a toy bow-and-arrow while standing on the roof. The neighbors have a bizarre latticework of metal rods and felled branches that canopies their entire backyard; I do not know what the deal with that is. A cover of “Naive Melody” just came on on my bluetooth speaker as I started writing this sentence. It’s from a playlist of covers of that song that I sent to my dad when I was encouraging him to cover songs popular among my generation, which I’d seen someone my dad’s age do successfully on YouTube (the Gloria version turned out, coincidentally, to be the favorite of both my dad and me). The playlist this song is actually playing from right now though is the “Blend” playlist of a new friend, David, who invited me to do the “blend” thing an hour or so ago. I’d never done it before. We matched at 84%. He said that was a high %—a childhood (“pre-k”) friend of his was at 89%. That felt good—but then, David is also really naturally charming. Is he charming me? Don’t I want to be charmed? David and I have known each other for about a month. He’s in med school. I told him he should have a Twitter bio that reflects his personality more but he said would you want your kid’s doctor to be funny on Twitter? I said “…Yes??”

This was the conversation we were having last night at a party that I really cannot do justice to here, it really requires its own whole post which I may never write or maybe I will. It was called “Love Science” and was intended to be like a live OKCupid. It was at the apartment of a “well-known data scientist” who has a massive loft in the Bowery and who coordinated with 10 of his closest company-running, podcast-having data science pals to give a lot of people a massive OKCupid-ish survey and then arrange us into highly compatible subgroups, denoted by glowing bracelets many shades of which I, colorblind, could not really distinguish. Which—very late in the night I realized my colorblindness could have been a good ‘opener’ to start a conversation with someone I didn’t know—but it was like 4am by then and I’d survived the night till that point without any gimmicks, and it didn’t seem like the time to start. Mostly I spent the night talking to people I already knew, or with whom I’d stood in the same circle at previous parties without having directly addressed.

What’s a representative vignette? The closest thing I had to a pickup line was asking people whether they’d figured out a good pickup line. A little guy with a well-groomed beard passed me in the hallway to the bathroom and said “I’m so skinny! I’m so skinny!” while holding up his hands; later, in another room, on the floor, this same guy told Avital and me the story of his first-ever New Years’ Eve kiss, which, in the story, was interrupted by a different girl he’d promised to kiss. He said, to us, “Is this what K’s like?” I talked to a Princeton researcher about all the obscure orgs I’ve been working for lately, including one that was announced publicly just a month or so ago, and I said, “I don’t know if you know any of these things,” and she said “I know all of them!” A guy shouted “I’m the gayest person here!” and a woman beside me said “Well, I’m a full-on lesbian, but how are you the most gay?” and he shot her a sassy look. In his defense, he had tried really hard to create a “gay room,” and tried to kick me out of it, but I wouldn’t go—it was where the astrologer was. I got a reading, and I told the astrologer I assumed since she was here she knew what EA was? And she said no, she just knew a guy. I said probably a third of the people here were EAs, maybe a quarter. Some people were out on the fire escape. There was a roof, which was cold, and from which you could look out at the lights of lower Manhattan, with the people you were sort of maybe flirting with, or at least discussing the subject of flirting with, coldly. There were people in white lab coats who you reported your crushes to, anonymized via some random-ass mumbo-jumbo. Someone who had done drugs got carried out on a stretcher by EMTs but was conscious, had been helped by Narcan. There was a modest amount of public making out.

My roommate Sage just sat down on the couch across from me. A dramatic song about London is now playing.

Where I live: the Bushwick house is an effective altruism house, meaning everyone who lives here is involved in effective altruism, mostly directly, through their work. This includes me—most of my income is now coming from writing and editing contracts with EA orgs. (If you’re curious about my recent work, a bit of it is listed here.) I’ll be in this house till May. The number of people with whom I cohabit is six, but this number is highly fluid. We have a lot of visitors. One guy arrived on Friday, came up from the basement around 3pm while I was finishing my lunch and said it’s curious to me that in America your hosts don’t feed you. It was his first day ever in New York. I had not known he was in the basement. He’d also been invited to ‘Love Science’, and he and I took the J into Manhattan together. Along the way he told me about how in St. Petersburg, the quality of life is “the same as here” but an apartment costs $300 a month. Well, okay. If that’s how it’s gonna be.

Cam just came in and handed me a pack of 12 blue V7 Pilot pens I ordered off Amazon, calling me “Señor Tomas.” Cam was also at the party last night. Hillel just came out of his room and snuck into the bathroom.

It’s Superbowl Sunday. The two friends I would least suspect to go to Superbowl parties are in fact going to Superbowl parties today, so, as always, I still have much to learn about America.

What is there to say? I spent this morning litigating, with three other guys, the pros and cons of mutual ghosting after an unremarkable first date. Strong arguments on offer from all sides; The Cut’s affirmative stance in their recent etiquette guide was considered. The dialectical synthesis: maybe it’s probably fine sometimes, especially if it’s really obvious the other person isn’t into you either.

I have this allergy to ever mentioning something more than once, even if it was just in an obscure Instagram caption, but I feel like that’s something I should change. I saw this being advocated by Sasha, who picked it up from Visa. So, in the spirit of doubling down on a theme: I often return to this line from the intro of a translation of Dante’s Inferno, about how Plato’s major literary innovation was shifting the dominant mode from drama to dialogue, and in doing so gently guiding our attention away from our personal tragedies to how nice it is to shoot the shit. Like, prior to Plato, the prestige format was catharsis via depiction, diorama-ing, building fucked up little dollhouses to make mommy and daddy scream at each other and weep, to trigger us in a controlled environment; it’s an essentially emotion-driven, trauma-rehashing pursuit, and this is where the literary talent of Athens at the time was being funneled. But then Plato was the first quirked-up brainiac to be like, hold up I think it’s good to chat with your buddies; maybe even better than it is to watch people scream at each other and pretend they’re your family members.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been fully sold on Plato’s discourse-above-all bit, but it recurs to me because whenever I’m shooting the shit, as I’m doing now, or as I did with the lads this morning, I have this nagging feeling that I’m neglecting something, even disingenuously repressing something. That something of course is my personal tragedy, which sometimes feels like the underlying premise of my life. And talking, writing, communicating is like the jet ski I use to try to jet ski away from the ocean of my troubles, when really there’s never any shore in sight, is there, little guy? You can zoom zoom zoom around but it’s all just ocean, and you’re a little jet ski. Where you going, buddy? This is ocean world, buddy. There’s nowhere to go.

Okay so my half-mast hungover brain appears to have drawn me to a particular scene in August: Osage County, a movie I’ve rewatched more times than any other movie except perhaps Funny People. In this scene Meryl Streep as the drug-addled domineering traumatized matriarch (Violet) jumps out of a car on the side of the road and runs into a field that looks like the fields I grew up running into and her daughter, Julia Roberts (Barbara), calls out to her. Here’s how the script describes it:

Barbara turns, simply to get back in the car, sees Violet running through the field.

— BARBARA
Mom?

Violet keeps running.

— BARBARA (CONT'D)
Mom?! Where are you going?

Barbara watches for another moment.

— BARBARA (CONT'D)
Goddamn it. Mom!

Barbara takes off after her. […]

It's an odd sight, the two women, racing through the grass. One almost seventy, the other nearing fifty.

Barbara is slow in her pursuit at first, maybe because of her shoes, or maybe because she just feels silly. Then realizes that Violet is not stopping... not unless Barbara stops her.

Violet runs through the tall grass, puts a foot wrong, goes down. Barbara catches up, out of breath, collapses. They lay on the ground, wheezing, sweating.

— BARBARA (CONT'D)
Where the fuck are you going, Mom?

And now we see the full beauty of the land, the distant horizon, the high cumulous clouds, the endless blue sky. Barb and Violet two dots, lost in the unforgiving prairie.

— BARBARA (CONT'D)
There's nowhere to go.

There is somewhere to go, though. You can go to New York.

It’s still early days, and things may change—maybe it is all ocean world—but why not say how I feel right now: I like New York one hundred times more than I’ve liked anywhere else I’ve ever lived. It’s a shame it took me this long to get here. But I’m glad I’m here now.