wcw

I was riding the subway this evening after going to gallery openings and answered to myself a question Gabriel asked me a few weeks ago. He asked me how I had so many crushes - how I didn't suffer from heartache all the time. And a couple weeks ago, I gave a glib answer. Tonight, I confessed, ready to cry, I don't know. I am not sure if I can continue to do so. It is a lot that you give when you have a crush, and when it doesn't succeed, man, that feeling, that heartache is unbearable.

On that subway, that crowded last car I was on, I wondered how everyone does it - that everyone seated there, standing here, all either are doing so now or have done it in the past, pining for someone who they won't get and won't understand why. I was certain that it was just not me thinking of a crush on that subway ride home, that other people were thinking of their failed interactions with other human beings they were attracted to, all mulling over what this meant and either trying to minimize the effects on their self-esteem, or wallowing in those effects, enjoying that singular perverse pleasure of indulging in self-loathing. And I was involved in some mixture of the two and wondered how other people rationalized loneliness. A train full of broken hearts, everyone so lonely and how we all manage to get up and walk, I couldn't understand. And I wanted to indulge everyone's self-pitying instinct and imagine what rejection still stung them, what crush they still desired on subway rides home.

Was this the effect of Yoshitomo Nara and Marcel Dzama, looking at their sad drawings? And was that giant head with the eyepatch and glasses that appeared throughout the Dzama show supposed to be Joyce?

I don't know.