Nation in Decline Autofiction Think Piece

You awaken to find yourself dressed as Chris Chan in the Sovereign House telephone booth. You’re feeling existential. They stole all the good books off the bookshelf, now it’s just 8th-edition freshman intro to econ textbooks and Steve Sailer print-on-demand slop. The DJ is doing a nettspend industrial noise chop n screw where you can’t tell if it’s the smoke alarm beep ringing in your ears or if it’s just a soundboard hit. Everyone here is 23 or 65+. There’s a thick haze of grape vape and the floor is littered with empty whipit canisters. As you stumble toward the bathroom line you nick your rugby shirt on a pile of rusty scrap metal and get elbowed by a fast-walking Beckett who turns back with a scowl. Nearby there’s a Girl in platform boots who seems to be dressed as The Ring, or maybe she just looks like that. On her chest she’s got a “Hi My Name Is” sticker with “Eugenia Cooney” scrawled on in crayon. (She is for sure not Eugenia Cooney). You shout up at her to try and attract her attention “YOU LOOK LIKE LIV AGAR.” She is nonreactive, like she hasn’t noticed you over the noise. “HEY... I SAID..., ‘YOU LOOK LIKE LIV AGAR.’” She appears to be faking catatonia to get you to go away. Like a K hole or something.

Ah, she didn’t like that, you think.

You scan the room for your next victim. There’s a man wearing a top hat and a cape fashioned out of an American flag. There’s a prominent memepage admin here but you don’t really have anything to say to him. It’s a dense crowd of unwelcoming people in severe outfits whose attention seems expensive. You forget why you got in the bathroom line, it just didn’t seem like there was anything else to do. You walk out back and strike up a conversation with some tech bros who are discussing custom PC cable management. They lecture you about how idiotic your component selection was for your pandemic-era Nvidia-Intel Mini ITX build. Your voice is too spent to carry over the chatter and you’re as drunk as you care to be for this time of night. The volume in the room has ballooned to the point where conversation has become impossibility. For you the party is over. You go home.

Browsing the net you learn about how apparently this gathering was a crypto-fascist flash point where some very ‘You-don’t-want-to-be-associated-with-them’-type scum bags conducted critical dialogues with high-ranking nasties from the such-and-such cabinet. Uh oh. Is it true? You writhe in bed at 2 AM.

You are in anguish about the direction your life is going: K hole girl didn’t follow you back on Instagram. Your body attempts to perspire out the Stella you consumed earlier. Maybe you left the bathroom nasty for her and that why you had left a bad first impression. You passed your Stella migraine threshold. Stella hasn’t ever been a friend. Experiences such as this are common at Sovereign House.

Tomorrow is a literary reading. Good, a highbrow event, something with a high barrier-to-entry. Surely only people of taste would seek out such an event. Our host is the esteemed Christian Lorentzian, or Dean Kissick or someone similar. He neglected to prepare a Piece for this event so instead he reads a recent chain of emails from his inbox.

The first reading-proper is an autofiction essay, like this one, revolving around some MFA's psychosexual angst surrounding her ex(?), Ethan. You are told the MFA is very important. The MFA hasn't gotten over Ethan emotionally and this essay is going to explore that. It starts out with a kind of intentionally gross and overwrought description of how the fork felt against her chapped lips at Sweet Green one morning and then descends into a kind of post-structural stream of consciousness thing that's heavy on repeating Ethan's name. The cadence and intonation are modulated to give it a kind of quasi-poetry Spoken Word Music effect. She lets silences hangs solemnly in the air.

Ethan, Ethan. Ethan.

The MFA’s eyes are closed and she is kind of snaking slowly around the mic stand as she speaks. At some point the performance ends. It was difficult for you to really get much out of it. The thesis statement was unclear and you can’t tell if it was satire. You wonder what type of life or personal relationship would lead to such a performance, but nothing occurs to you. Maybe you have more to learn about humanity, you think to yourself. My ass is sat down and listened.

The second piece is not actually writing but instead an interpretive dance.

The third reader is a no-show.

The fourth reading is also a dancer. The dancing continues but you have work in the morning so you can't really stay past 12. Goodnight!

Malaise has followed you the whole week. You book tickets to the Ivy Wolk show to lighten the mood. The opening act consists of a woman in a clown costume making aggressively unpleasant slurping noises into the microphone and harassing the men in the front row. Ivy's routine revolves around self-harm and anhedonia. You instinctively move away as far as possible from stage in case anyone notices you. Hunched over in the far recesses of the dark room, you feel inspired: no more drinking, no more debauchery, you think to yourself. Me-cels have actually evolved past the need for social drinking, or e-cigarettes. This time I'm really going to do it, find something worth doing, deadlift 500 lbs, get my act together. I'm finally going to start living meaningfully.