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become impossible, submerged in fog, going about for days, until I reach my advanced age, in and out of feeling and deciding that, truly, the most beautiful place-name in the United States is Embarcadero , Spanish for wharf, a place of departure, I remember renting a van and driving around San Francisco at night, powerful force of country music registering within its coordinates the activity of memory, the split second at which I enjoyed seeing the word Divisadaro on a sign, wondering what exactly Justin Bieber will remember of his travels, his name which I almost wrote here as Justine , like the character in the famous porno fantasy of the Marquis de Sade, prisoner of unsplit will, masculinity reinscribed in the supple dictator’s body around which non-male-assigned bodies cavort until twisted into the chain-link fence that surrounds him, the Marquis, writing on toilet paper, Justine Bieber writing on his iPhone, a hundred wonders that ought to be forgotten but not the alleged nude photos that prevail online and his balls at the tip of a knife, such a different implosion of particulars that makes up a night in San Francisco vs. a night at the Kids’ Choice Awards, onstage, splashed by slime as is Nickelodeon’s custom, and to think, even green goo, the texture of semen, became a corporate signifier, Justine, Justine, I want to call out as I watch him drenched in neon DNA, the purple sky above me untouched by the fog of the bay, so atypical I suppose, but everything is not misfortune and with enough drive the speed to escape this vantage point of the unholy world is enough to propel you beyond, into the nonspace of air travel, globalized bodies of pop stardom, Thérèse beset by misfortune, brought to the mud to make it holy again, the Madame de Lorsagne clearing Thérèse of any crime until she is struck, not by lightning but by the moralistic literary device of a culture about to be wiped off the map, I’m not criticizing de Sade I’m only suggesting this might be his critique, so I head up north to the Redwoods, where, by the end of the twentieth century, 95% of the forest was sawed down to furnish us with a forest of the dead, a ghost wood, the encompassing home of the lost brought together by the crisp air of another day, my feet placed firmly on the spongy earth, I walk with a friend to a tree where many people photograph themselves, likely the most photographed tree in the park, into which I carve Justine, name of our roseate exegesis and a totem, worthy of violation of the law to be written into one of the members of the 5% as permanent fixture, the lonely forest, the place I wish I knew best, which I cannot pass through with the speed necessary to forget it was ever such a roaming territory, endless once, a world of giants in which the living prevailed alone among the branches

NEXT-LEVEL SPLEEN
    I went to my friend’s house to watch a movie while her father was away on business in China. In her BBM to me she had proposed that we watch “something funny like … Clueless .” She made popcorn and whiskey sours in her dad’s kitchen while I stood there watching her, my attention fixed on her hands. I had never seen someone make a drink so elegantly. She dropped ice into the Waterford crystal glasses and the little cubes clinked and flashed in the kitchen’s light like big diamonds. She grabbed me by the arm and took me to her bedroom, where we drank the whiskey sours, took off our clothes, and made out while watching Clueless , visionary film that produced the frenetic self I embody today, adrift in the dreamier American auroras of endless summer. When the movie finished it started again and we watched the sky change. Pollution in the city produces the best sunsets. Tendency in the subject, motivated by spleen, to hate the urban conditions produced by alienation economic and social forces means nothing. I think I just love girls. She jerked me off and I came everywhere.