Living in a border city means that you may have to occasionally smuggle some drugs between countries. Don’t worry! We’ve got some tips.
Headed to SXSW this week? VICELAND has you covered. For full details and RSVP, head here.
I met Zacharias Dimitriadis a few years ago at a bar in Athens. My friend thought he was cute and I was drunk enough to chat him up—a unique technique I sometimes use that mostly involves me talking about work—then my friend got annoyed, stormed out, and I had to chase her down the street.
Since then, Zacharias moved to New York, I moved to London and we haven’t bumped into each other since. However, I have been regularly checking up on his photography, and I promise that’s not because he’s rejected all my friend requests and it’s the only way I can keep tabs on him. It’s just when you live away from home—a home that happens to have turned into a melting pot of hatred and hostility in the time you’ve been away—it takes a very particular type of talent to keep you from giving up hope on your people, and Zacharias’ photographs do just that. There’s nothing better at reminding me that, through the clouds of tear gas, the Greeks are a bunch of very sexy people.
Girl News - Girls and Fucking Off
You guys say “fucking off,” right? Or “fucking around”? Could be a regional schism, like whether you “smoke up” (country kids), “smoke down” (city kids) or “smoke out” (a lezzie high-school basketball player I remain in active if long-distance love with). So for our purposes, fucking off is, like, screwing around (except, “screw” is so gross except in finite circumstances, like Screw the porno magazine—this is the same kind of rationale I apply to being just-fine with any and all excrement used in the context of a performance, but having 5,000 divorces in my future because if someone does or even thinks about any Bathroom Words while I’m around I’m fucking gone).
HANGING OUT
Why are all the little sticky labels we have for fucking off (the best one) so bad? We’ve covered screwing around, but there’s also “screwing the pooch” (I can’t), “fucking the dog” (no), “hanging out” (cornier than the Fort Gibson Sweet Corn Festival, which begins on Sunday in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, which I found out about in an article that begins “Hang on to your niblets”). So bad! We’re supposed to be meme-ing all over ourselves with Tumblr linguistics and there’s no common way to explain doing nothing much at all together that doesn’t invoke “bro”? When my guy friends go on their all-guy guy trips in a camper that they rent so that they don’t have to be away from each other for too long (zaaawww) they call it a “Manwich.” None of this is for girls, except the always-noxious “Girls Night.” Fuck all of you forever. F minus.
So the secret thing about hanging out—my secret, in my secret My Little Pony diary, with the heart-shaped lock—is that I can’t do it. An actual agenda item with my therapist is How Do People Watch TV Together? Because unstructured activity time of the “Come over and hang out” variety remains semi-foreign to me (I grew up in a big house all alone and not lonely with my Little Women and Secret Garden and The Little Princess and and and and), even after a high-school era where my house was the party house with the makeout couch, you know? Even after five, six years of not having anywhere to be at any real time and having to reshape time in my own image, I just… I dunno. I’ll do anything at all for eight hours, anything. I’ll go anywhere. But showing up at someone’s house in the mid-afternoon feels like fire ants infecting my ambition and purposefulness, like, especially if your friend is a slow and wants you to watch them roll first, then wants to talk about your other friends in advance strategizing about what to do. Like, let’s just choose a fucking beach and falafel place and then talk on the fuck the way there. “Let’s see where the day takes us” is totally fine too if you immediately get on your bike and push off into a mad, adventuring vortex right after you say it. Otherwise, like, CHOOSE A THING.
Structure like the kind I want might violate our mandate of untethered friend time, and its real, inherent value, but I don’t so much care. Even on a Sunday. Especially on a Sunday.
PURPOSE
Is hanging out (have just been informed by my friend Paul that “fucking around” usually denotes sex. Pervs.) something that is idle and dumb and distinct somehow from regulated fun? The semiotics of partying are expansive. What I do know is that none of it is without meaning, that the pursuit, and it is a pursuit, of blowing jokes and blowing lines should still be a Coney Island of the Mind-worthy risking of “absurdity and death,” just like what a poet is supposed to do. Hanging out can be poetry, is maybe what I’m saying here.
On a weird plane ride from Houston to Guatemala City I read a copy of In Style with an interview with Pharrell where he said that “there’s no creativity in partying,” which I like as a reason not to just drink 100 beers as a thing to do, even when the open bar is where you get your dinner. Still I’m not sure. Shouldn’t there be creativity in everything? Shouldn’t little birds dress you in the morning, or shouldn’t you be pre-fight Rocky, just because? Shouldn’t that feeling when you and your friends are in flow—actual “flow,” like Mihaly Csikszentmihaly flow—be understood as real? I think so. I think there is creativity in partying.
CARS
The best place to fuck off is in a car, for sure, which with pals is like a pet-store cage filled up with antsy, caffeinated puppies who need to pee and can only hold it in through a coordinated system of screaming and moving the windows up and down in time with the beats on the stereo. Also a good place to put your bare feet on someone’s neck and face very carefully and they can’t do anything about it.
