sunday (march 8)
It’s March 8, International Women’s Day. In 2024, the marches were so furious that my building shook as if there were an earthquake as protestors smashed windows, sprayed monuments, took over a government building. In 2025, I didn’t feel a thing. This year, I saw several posts lamenting the participation of corporations, lamenting the total lack of change. The defining characteristic of our time is stasis, everything staying exactly the same despite, or maybe because of, how much we all talk about how everything is changing. Bombs rain down on Tehran. Burger King celebrates 8M with purple hamburgers. On an industrial farmsite in Brazil or Texas a cow’s legs break, unable to support its artificially inflated bulk. The animal dies in its own filth, ignored, in terrible pain. In “This Progress,” a piece by Tino Sehgal, a child asks a museum visitor about their idea of progress and they have what seems like a conversation but isn’t. It was shown, or exhibited, or whatever at the Guggenheim in New York in 2010. I either went or thought about it so much that it feels like I went. Then I thought it was deep, it might even have inspired me to go to grad school. Now I think it anticipates AI in the most boring way possible. As in, thinking you’re having a conversation with someone who is not having a conversation with you.
On March 8, 2023, my dad died. I sat down in the dirt. My mom told me she told him, I love you, then left the room. When she came back he was gone. Today, on March 8, 2026, my aunt died. She and my uncle were driving in Florida. They stopped at a rest stop. A woman came out of the bathroom while my uncle was waiting and said, are you ___? She must have said his name before she left. The other day I was thinking of that scene in The Fugitive: “Richard…? Richard.” I wonder if that’s how she said his name, quietly, first with confusion and then with pride. I wonder what it’s like to presence a death in the women’s bathroom at a rest stop in northern Florida.
I didn’t know her very well. She and my uncle were reclusive until recently, when they decided that they might as well go out and do things because who knows what might happen? Which turned out to be true, nobody knew that this would happen. I thought it would be him, my mom kept saying. Tell me something good, she asks. I say, I came down from my mushroom psychosis and went to the bathhouse. How many twinks did you fuck? she asks, smiling as she downs her fourth martini of the day. My other uncle, who was almost removed from my brother’s wedding for drinking too much gin, shuffles over for a refill. He’s doing all right, my mom says about him. He’s still himself. What else would I be? he laughs in his thick Maine accent. He’s wearing Birkenstocks with no socks, like always.
At the rest stop somewhere in between West Palm Beach and Hilton Head, my uncle tells his sisters and brother-in-law, who are two hours away, not to come. He calls my aunt’s family, who are four hours away, and they start driving down. Why do we do these things? Last night I checked Facebook, I’m trying to figure out if it’s useful to maintain my artist Facebook page and it’s nice to check in on family. My uncle had posted a photo of all of them at dinner, the last dinner he ever had with his wife. It’s a great photo. Everyone looks happy, healthy, pleased to be at the same table. She always struck me as quiet, strong, with a gently sardonic sense of humor. I don’t know when the last time I saw her was. I don’t think we ever had a conversation, just the two of us. I drank a beer for her but I don’t know if she drank.
The day my dad died I went to the Japanese Mexican Society. There’s a good restaurant there set in a calming hillside. I ordered a beer and uploaded a picture of it to Instagram. I said something about John Wick and someone replied thinking I was talking about the movie. Since then — since before then — I’ve been wanting to write something about the movies and my dad, John Wick, who would have hated the movies John Wick. I have a show on in the background as I write this, “Dare You to Death” on Netflix. The premise of the show is, can you annoy someone into loving you and also solve a series of increasingly violent murders. Three characters are gathered in a coroner’s office gathered around the body of a girl who died of an acid attack. The coroner is trying to get the inspector’s number. Goofy sad dog special effects let me, the viewer, know that the third character is jealous. The girl is covered by a blue sheet, her feet are discolored, dirty, green. The mood is lighthearted fun. Happy 8M.