FIRST OF THE

MONTH
A Website of the Radical Imagination

Youth
April 1, 2022 by Zalokar

..My greatest desire is to be desired. And yet, my desire is most intense in insomnia (the
insomnia of the nineteenth century), in months of limerence, months of mania (love is the only
thing that has ever made me manic), in epiphanies, in Baudelaire’s cities, in despair, on long bus
rides where I feel a fever coming on, when I haven’t showered for days, in temporal vertigo, in
the Patagonian abyss, when I remember her shoulders (shoulders more than any part of the
body), when she’s disappeared to another country (the absolute love I felt for B when she left for
Oaxaca, and when she returned I kissed her cold sored mouth for the first time), when my heart
is a desert, when I’m fleeing a murderous pimp with a ten-inch dick in search of “the mother of
all poets,” when Juani’s lips and fingers were blue at night in the Cambridge winter cold,
smoking a Clove cigarette, when we went inside and she snorted H before talking to her family
for their nightly Jehovah’s Witness Bible study, when Marianne the winter before talked to me
about The Cherry Orchard, Rilke’s Duino Elegies with the German on one side of the page,
Cortazar’s Rayuela, when L talked about astrology and mental illness, when Olive looked at me
with lust in their eyes and said, you’re evil, when butterflies, when a woman of twenty-seven on
a beach, preferably in Spain, on the Costa del Sol, but any beach will do, when you haven’t slept in
a bed in days and you arrive at dawn in the nowhere town, existentially nowhere, of Esquel,
Argentina, and you see an unbelievably attractive man hammering a wall (he’s constructing a
boxing gym) and you immediately masturbate, watching him from the window, when you
learned how Pierre Guyotat wrote his novels, with one hand glued to his huge dick and having to
be hospitalized for starvation at the end of each one, when you’re on the verge of tears
(dacryphilia), when you’ll never know her secrets, when you return to the source of your being,
when you watch two strangers have sex at night on a beach in a town you know you’ll never
return to or see again, when you return to that town in your memory, but it’s no longer the same,
it’s something else entirely, and the couple, they’re no longer there, no one’s there, just the dark
form of desire in the sand (it’ll be gone in the morning)…

***

..First memory: I am three years old. My parents are having friends over in the backyard. At this
house, we have a pool (paradisiacal for me, a source of psychic anguish for my dad). My parents’
friends have a teenage daughter. I’ll never know her name. She’s beautiful, I think. At that age,
I’m told, I was constantly falling in love with young women, older girls, barbie dolls, femme
characters in books, etc. I want her to look at me, I think. I want her to fall in love with me. I
throw myself in the pool, though I don’t know how to swim. Now, I think, she’ll have no choice
but to fall in love with me, when she sees that I’m dying. Better, I think, to die, so she’ll never
forget me. But secretly I’m hoping she’ll dive in and save me. When my dad comes to my rescue
instead, I’m flooded with shame. (Memory begins in shame, shame in memory)…

***

..The first time I cum, I’m in sixth grade, summer is approaching, and it’s to my childhood best
friend’s girlfriend. Jenny R. She’s wanton, she has big tits, pale skin, auburn hair, dreamy
birthmarks whose meaning I spend my days in class trying to decipher. She doesn’t give a shit
about the other girls (she hangs out with us and Robby, the autistic savant with a violent temper).
She’s a talented artist. Later that summer she’ll cheat on my best friend and fuck a bunch of
older guys, but not before he fingers her. I cum thinking of her a lot before I move onto other
girls, having spoiled her, knowing I can return to her whenever I want. She haunts me. She starts
to drink and use drugs in seventh grade and I only see her as an apparition in the hallways. I’ve
started to keep a diary inspired by Kafka’s in which I write long, cruel, depraved, enigmatic BDSM
sex scenes that double as Aggadot, as obscure philosophical dialogue, but a philosophical
dialogue between two killers or two insane asylum patients in the dark. The summer after
seventh grade her parents catch her at a wedding giving head to her dad’s best friend. Everyone
hears that story. That same summer my cousin Tamara comes to visit from Slovenia to hang out,
learn English, and swim on the swim team (she’s bound for the Olympics). We’re both quiet, and
very shy around each other. I’m abstractly in love with her, and I still love her more than any
other cousin, probably, though now she’s off with her wacko bitcoin antivaxxer New Age husband
with their two young children running around the country dodging creditors and repo men, or
maybe she left him and took the kids back to Slovenia, I’ll have to find out. At camp, a girl named
Hayley, who’s kind of got redneck vibes and big tits and a big gap in her front teeth, adopts me as
her boyfriend, takes me into corners to make out, and sucks my dick in the back of a movie
theater one August afternoon. She tells me she’s in love with me, and makes me say it back,
incessantly. I want to fuck her best friend. Then I go to visit my grandparents in Cincinnati and
her AOL profile suddenly has all these gooey proclamations of love for some other guy. I
confront her about it and she says it’s a joke. I don’t really care, though the pain of abandonment
seeps in. I love spending time around my grandparents, who soon, right after 9/11, will move to
Virginia to be near us. When I get home, Hayley calls me and tells me that she fell off a horse and
has retrograde amnesia and doesn’t remember me. If you don’t remember me, I ask, how did you
know to call me? Secretly, I’m relieved. I got the sexual experience I wanted out of her and now
her antics, her proto-mental illness (or her adolescent mercuriality), is starting to annoy me.
Well, I guess if you don’t remember me, I say, that’s that. I might have even said: I’ll always
cherish the time we spent together, even if all trace of it has vanished, for you, into the waters
of Lethe, the sweet waters of Lethe. Though I probably didn’t say that. But then she starts to call.
At first just once in a while and then multiple times a day. I’m remembering more and more of
you, she says. She claims that now that her memory is being restored, we’re technically still
boyfriend and girlfriend, and that she wants to see me. So, I agree, because whatever she says has
an air of authority to me, because she’s a girl, even though she’s a fucking nut. We go to see The
Blair Witch Project and she takes along another guy. He’s taller than me (I’m pretty tall), good-
looking, kind of a bad boy vibe, etc. She’s all over him during the movie. I’m uncomfortable, but
turned on. Maybe this is the origin of what was my cuckold fetish, which lasted until I
transitioned. Or not the primal origin, but the dress rehearsal. When the movie’s over, I don’t
even think we say goodbye. I never see or hear from her again.

***

..There was nothing wrong with the sex we wanted as kids, it’s just that that want occurred and
unfolded in the midst of a holocaust. If you rewind, change the soundtrack, dub the words, etc.,
you’ll find that our youth was actually a bucolic orgy, a midsummer night’s dream, a
polymorphous feast, an Arcimboldo feast, the most innocent cannibalism, a psychedelic carnival,
a masquerade, a lurid hallucination, a crack-up, a madness, a moveable abyss, an excess, a
Bataillean profusion, a wet dream, a soaked dream, a waterfall, a rainbow, a suicide, etc.
Extraterrestrial anthropologists, watching us and knowing nothing of our social system, would
conclude that our youths were a primal eruption of life, vitality, and beauty, and not, as they really
are, the beginning of our sickness, our trauma, our cruelty, and our retreat.

***

..We are all, at the end of the day, moody teenagers in our bedrooms in the psychopathic house of
capitalism. Cute is a class position. Mimesis, schismogenesis: we’re trapped in capitalism’s hall
of mirrors, its bejeweled image prison. And yet, our bodies, our aesthetics, are prefigurative: they
point the way to heaven, or to hell.

***

..What the self-styled “angelicists” and the other mediocre neoreactionary trusties chasing
Peter Thiel’s patronage don’t understand is that the image has no substance, and that the prison
we’re in is made of fiber optic cables, of satellites, of silicon and coltan, lithium, hydroelectric
dams, structural adjustment plans, the National Endowment for Democracy “soft power,” the
metaverse and other forms of sensory enclosure, they may embrace the beatitude of
“extinction” but Africa won’t, the Matrix won’t operate forever, Elon Musk is a fraud, Grimes is a
CIA plant, she doesn’t exist, she won’t fuck you, she’s a hologram and you’re a little bitch.

***

..Queerness is a question that the capitalist system tries to turn into an identity. If you can’t bash
the tranny’s skull in on the street, then you’ve got to have her sponsored by Wells Fargo or
bombing Yemen into the stone age.

***

..The secret they don’t want you to know is that patriarchy is dead and no one can enforce order
anymore. Transhumanism is a mirage, deck chairs on the Titanic, etc. From here on out, it’s pure
violence, and you’re on your own.

***

..We’re sitting by a fire at night and Maya is laughing at the fact that their dad is in a psychiatric
institution. Send all daddys to the loony bin. A serious white girl with a sad look in her eye turns
away in disapproval.
 ***

..Sometimes I feel I am floating away on a cloud of estrogen over a sea of nothingness. As I go

(before I become rain, become nothing), I wave to the people below. Goodbye, beautiful people.
Sorry you’re fucked forever. Fare thee well. La di da…

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