I think about the black and white photo of the construction workers having lunch on the scaffolding. Those men aren’t up there anymore. They’re backend coders. They buy bitcoin and pitch up their voices on Ableton. They’re on my For You page because they’re for me. We’re the American workforce and our scaffolding is on Zoom.”
-Madeline Cash
Earth Angel
My divorced parents both gave me blankets this year for Christmas. Last night I dreamt I was Elon Musk’s mistress. I loved him. We fled Ukraine together. With a few other people. Our pent-up anxiety over escaping was worthless after all — the guards at the border let our entourage through without fuss, saying: ~we’re not like the other countries.~ At first my friend was his mistress, but with more time spent, attraction grew. I remember his softness and smell, that he barely brushed his teeth but his breath was still somehow sweet even though it could also stink. Claire Boucher was even there sometimes, with her own entourage, picking up and dropping off babies. I felt her kindness was sincere. She had zero distaste towards me as E’s new lover. A position we all knew as fleeting as true. I rarely went to him, but he’d come to mine most nights. Mine being some adjacent room. Don’t recall anything graphic or inherently sexual about the dream. Emphasis on the effort we made to be together — the coming and going from each other. Before the whole affair, we were in some other estate, flying around high ceilings, hiding from something, preparing for some large event or move. There was a strong sense that someone was coming soon who would halt and change everything as we knew it.
*
(since cutting back booze last summer dreams’ve become more and more obscure and memorable. most bizarre of 2022: this guy I knew shoved a stick of dynamite into my mouth, woke mid-shriek / pre-explosion. some same-old recurrings: big waves about to crash, rushing to lock a door to keep an intruder out, flying away — feels just like breaststroke.)
Donald Winston Avey on Kodachrome film. 1930s, Cincinnati, Ohio. Kodachrome was released in ’35, so must have been the latter half of the 30s. This was high school graduation, I believe. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force shortly after and was deployed to Italy. According to his scribbles in newspaper margins, he wished he was deployed to France, where the women were reportedly more fond of American soldiers.
in
time
this
will
make
sense
Yves Saint Laurent and his chihuahua Hazel. Rue de Babylone, Paris. 1974.
it
can
all
be
ericaavey.com 