notes from october: my residency at buttfart studios

I feel like I spent this month just waiting for it to be over. I just need it to get colder like now. I need the Holidays. I need everyone to be distracted so I can lay down for an extended period without thinking about my next move. I’ve also been experiencing some growing pains. Apparently, feelings are really hard to interpret. I wish I could just know everything so I would never have to interpret anything ever again.

I’m looking forward to November. I’ve done Thanksgiving with my best friend’s family every year since 2020. I can’t wait to be asleep in their guest bedroom after running around their house in my socks all day. Good things coming.

Here are my notes from October:

• I’ve noticed an influx of bug bites around my ankles, but only when I’m wearing white socks.

• I was collected by Karma in Black Telsa Model Y Uber.

• I live on a very busy very loud street. My friend Ian was the first to put words to how it feels to be in my bedroom— it’s like you live on the first floor of an apartment on the highway. I don’t know. I could be a victim of ‘thin windows’, but I live on the third floor and there is no reason why I can hear people making the choice to take another breath as they walk on the sidewalk. I feel like I’m living through some type of sound-related phenomenon, like when someone created the quietest room ever and got a bunch of press for it (x), except my room is the opposite. The most challenging part by far is though that every night around 3 to 4 am someone will pass by my window playing a song that is engineered to be so impossibly loud that I actually feel like I’m being pranked. A cover of the song Donna by a group called Singing Sweet terrorized me out of my sleep the other night. I was fast enough to catch it on Shazam because the first note is so sick and twisted that I snapped into consciousness immediately. This song is crazy loud. It’s kinda good, but also the most insane choice to play at 1000 volume in your car at 4 am in the morning.

• Lots of people I care about in my life have tried to tell me that I have ADHD but I really don’t believe it. I am lazy. I don’t have ADHD. I respect the ADHD community, but I’m not a part of it. I identify as lazy. I am lazy. I am bad at doing stuff because I am lazy.

• Bushwick feels really big sometimes. It’s hard to own Bushwick (and I don’t want to). It’s hard to feel like Bushwick has my back. Every rock has been unturned. It’s so lived-in and unavoided.

• my dad sent me love from his severed finger and heart.

  

• I’ve been more money on clothing than I would like to. It feels stupid, especially after losing my job, but I thought I owed it to myself to get a few nice new things for the winter. I spent all of last winter in my cold-weather clothes from when I was in undergrad in Boston. It felt embarrassing, being this age and walking into rooms in the sweater that added to my wardrobe when I was 21 and felt like everything I wore had to be ‘funny’. I don’t really like wearing funny clothes anymore. It’s hard to treat myself. I felt a lot of guilt in it. After my years in LA where I had so little and made so little, it is hard to accept the new and not feel like I’m jumping off the deep end. I brought it up in therapy, which I feel dumb about. I should be able to accept new things.

• Been wondering when I’ll feel beautiful or sexy again. I have my moments but a moment is just a moment. I’m never living in the feeling of sexy, pretty, or beautiful. Right now I’m just a vessel for the shit I have to do. I’ve never seen a hot vessel.

  

• Just learned that you can breathe through your nose while you eat food and drink water. Don’t care to elaborate.

• The smell of wet dog seems to be following me, it’s not me it’s just in a lot of rooms I’ve entered.

• Participated in many public displays of dance. At a party a girl stopped me on the dance floor and said very condescendingly — yeah girlll you are the HOTTEST bitch in hereee!!! My mom was a wedding singer, the way I dance is a reflection of what I grew up seeing. It’s not about being a hot bitch on the floor. It’s about creating spectacle. It’s about telling a story with your body. It’s about making them laugh. It’s about turning the party. It’s about the love of the game.

• Spent a lot of time Googling what "the pooh” in Winne The Pooh stands for, but it’s just not clicking for me.

• I think any noise-canceling earbuds or headphones are unnatural. Medically they are fine but I don’t think normal people should have them. We shouldn’t be drowning out the world around us. You should be able to hear the train when you're on the train.

• Spent a lot of time on TMZ’s website due to reasons related to Liam Payne’s death. It’s weird. I always thought I would be older when a member of One Direction passed, I feel like I kinda grew up imagining the woman I would be upon receiving the news. I always imagined myself in the kitchen, married, holding a wine glass, with a kid tugging at my pant leg, finger in their nose, looking up at me and asking “What’s One Direction?”. I never thought it would go down this way, especially with the news sandwiched between some of the most absurd clickbait I’ve ever seen. We live in such a weird time and unfair time, I have to mourn the death of a heartthrob from my childhood, but also be forced to consider BEBE REXHA VS. RITA ORA **WHO’D YOU RATHER!? (SINGERS ON LADDERS EDITION).

• Received a nasty ear infection on my own accord. I have a habit I carried over from my childhood; cleaning out the dirt underneath my fingernails with my earring posts. Punishment received. Habit undone.

• Got out of bed and my body was hurting a little too much. My feet sometimes make this god-awful crunching noise when I walk to the bathroom in the morning. I think that I need to start focusing on my health before I receive a consequence. Sometimes I think about myself like a house of cards.

• Met a man named Meadow.

• Got attacked by Swifties on Twitter for lipsynching to a Taylor Swift speech (x). I feel like being attacked by Swifties is something that I need every two years to ground me. It’s annoying and it sucks, but it reminds me to consider the powers that be. One of them found my email and started sending me actually diabolical things, an email (x) wishing that I become a fentanyl addict, and numerous photos of slit wrists that I can share on the internet in good faith. In my opinion, the crime doesn’t fit the punishment, but fandom is fandom and I know that better than anyone. When you live your life for one thing the world becomes really small and your emotions become really big. Swifties are touchy.

• Deactivated my Twitter only to realize that life is so better when I’m constantly checking an app that’s telling me things I shouldn’t know.

• Got out of New York for three hours and remembered that the world isn’t made up of major cities.

• Attended the Timothee Chalamet look-alike competition. I enjoyed parts of it but the whole thing seems extremely poorly planned. Once all the Timothees were lined up the press made a beeline for them which obstructed everyone’s view. The event eventually got shut down and we all had to run through the streets to another location where they eventually (after a lot of stalling) awarded one lucky boy the prize of being the most Chalamet. I actually don’t think the boy picked looks like him, but he wore a costume and people are blind to razzmatazz.

• Had a thought about Joseph Gordon Levitt for the first time in years.

• Sometimes I think I could make music. I told my friend Marissa that I thought I might have an album in me somewhere, but then I remembered that I could never make anything as good as this video of this girl covering Obsessed by Mariah Carey in her bathtub.

• Had an Uber driver late this month that kept falling asleep at the wheel. He kept on putting his head down, closing his eyes, and jolting awake with a crazy snort. I thought he just had allergies, but I was already around the corner from my house when I realized it was serious. I was gonna report him, but my roommate Blizzy told me that he was probably working too hard. He lives another day.

• Peed on the street on a night where i wore tights. Trying to angle the pee with the tights around my ankles made me feel like I was in a new-wave indie VR game created by a company called ButtFart Studios.

• Started creating this beautiful gum statue.

  

• I’ve decided that Camilla Cabello’s album CXOXO is actually good. I didn’t understand it at first, but after really meditating on it, I get it. It’s about Miami. It’s about been young. It’s about the essence of Pitbull. It’s about getting gum stuck on the bottom of your heel right after leaving the house. It’s about crying at the most lit-sauce party of all time.

• I became very sad the other day when I realized that there is a whole generation of would-be artists who want to be Mr. Beast.

• I have carpal tunnel but I don’t want to address it right now.

• I didn’t end up getting any pictures of my Halloween costume. Originally I had an elaborate costume planned, I even bought all the supplies, it just never happened. My backup costume is always ‘Princess Mackenzie’, which is just me as a princess. I would have more to say about Halloween if I wasn’t sitting in my bed trying to figure out if my house keys were stolen from my purse last night. How do you call a bar that doesn’t have a number listed on its website?

  

  ignore the mess on my floor. I don’t have an excuse for it.

  xoxo mackenzie