REID #79

Reid Pope

Apr 05, 2022

SHORT:

It’s the morning… What innately-human-involuntary thing will I get absolutely humiliated about today? I wonder…

Comment below with your I-H-I thing of choice.

Also with whatever you want to read about next week.

I’m trying 2 make this thing more interactive again.

MEDIUM:

I am currently at a cafe and staring at a child who is an adult. This small person knows more than I do and has seen more of the world than I have and knows the secrets of life. I can tell. By their bowl-cut and red corduroy overalls and the way they hold themself – head held high, bouncing around the coffee shop with quiet confidence.

I just marked my calendar for an incredible night when I, my gf, and my gf’s gay brother will be sharing 1 couch for 5 million dollars on Fire Island. I hope it’ll be fun, but I’ll probably spend the entire time wishing I was a 6ft. tall beautiful gay man and then being like “just kidding, I love myself”. At least there’s a pool. And it’ll be warm.

I cannot believe I still work for a bean company where I get paid a small amount to make graphics for Instagram that say “Bean-jamin Franklin” where Ben is a bean and the kite with the key attached is also a bean. Sometimes it feels like I will work for beans for the rest of my life and feel the exact way I’m feeling for eternity.

I spent the last 45 minutes googling how things survive at the bottom of the ocean and what happens if they float up to the top of the ocean. They survive by making their own light. If they are brought to the surface too quickly, they explode. Because of the change in pressure.

Sometimes that’s how I feel when someone cancels plans or surprises me or when I have to travel or abandon my regular routine… I’m farting around in the depths, making my own light, and then all of a sudden I’m thrust into an environment with different pressure and parameters and I can’t adjust fast enough and I feel like I’m gonna combust.

Some people become so much more annoying when they turn gay… including me…

These are some thoughts I am having at the cafe.

LONG:

I watched The Grammys last night. Singing is so embarrassing (which is, of course, why I love it).

I am still at the cafe, and I went to the bathroom and there was cute wallpaper. I find it interesting that we, as a species, do things like declare war on one another and shoot each other and also take the time to put up cute wallpaper in a space designed for defecation.

I worked out a few days ago which made my abs sore and I have a cough so I keep coughing which hurts my aforementioned sore abs – this is what many people are calling: a little annoying.

I’ve had the aforementioned cough for two weeks and it won’t go away so I keep trying to see if complaining about it will make it go away faster.

I am now reading about The Coen Brothers. People r praisin’ them for makin a few movies, meanwhile my sister brother and I have about 900 home videos we made on windows movie maker. I don’t hear any cheers 4 us…

Clownfish live on the same anemone for their whole life and have a symbiotic relationship with it. They’re immune to its sting. They feed it with their waste.

Sometimes I feel like that’s what the internet is to me. I need it to survive. I feed it my waste with the hope that it will protect me and nourish me in return.

But most of the time it doesn’t actually help me. And I’m not at all immune to its sting. The internet is a FAKE gaslighting anemone!!! (cut to sum1 publishing that in digital media theory textbook 12 years from now).

[I also think maybe I feed the internet important things. Not “my waste”. And maybe I should just keep those important things to myself and for myself and I would feel less horrible]

This week my 76 year old professor sent me an email with the subject line “LESBIAN JESUS IS PREGNANT WITH VIBES” about my eponymous play.

Seeing it in my inbox made me laugh harder than anything I’ve ever read or watched.

Instead of television or books, we should just have old people send us weird emails. It’d be cheaper and better.

The content of the email was incredibly nice.

I am begging myself not to become a conspiracy theorist and negate the reality of the email with 1 million disclaimers like, “he actually didn’t mean any of that because he actually has been stricken with a disease brought on by the cruise he went on that makes him say only nice things that aren’t actually true etc. etc.”

The professor worked with August Wilson which confuses me because I don’t understand time or decades, so to me, if he worked with A.W. he’s actually not 76 but actually like 300 years old.

Anyway I am shoo-ing away all the ghosts trying to place tin foil hats on my head about this email and taking it as the encouraging piece of electronic text it is.

I am now walking home from the cafe.

And passing a bunch of people on the street.

Nobody knows that I just used my computer to make a graphic of a bean founding father.

We really don’t know that much about one another… do we? Hm.

But you know who does? That little kid with the bowl cut.

I swear to god that kid was… god (so then I’m swearing to the kid? Human language needs some work…)

Ok…

Well…

C u next Tuesday.