THE FEELING: The (Real) Real

Plus: subjugation, summer solstice, the Strawberry Moon

Pals,

This week has been Regular but last Saturday was Perfect.

I have five best friends and two of them live far away, one across an ocean and one across a country (plus that little bit between Toronto and the U.S. border, the golden horseshoe and its rural-suburban downwind economic beneficiaries). The San Francisco friend — you know, this one, the Teen Dream, the embodied rainbow, the golden-hearted, one of the two most-popular people at my wedding party (the other one was my friend Dirt: not me, not Simon), and one of the most-popular people I know, in general, and yes, I’m still convinced that after five years of Gentle Prison that was pandemic and a baby, I know everyone — was here, and the day-long hang, split between fields of grass and city concrete, spanning gossip and revelation and silence and jubilance, flavored by free popcorn, Popsicles, cigarettes, and Fun Little Drinks, made me feel, as hangs with her always make me feel, like I was levitating.

If marriage is mostly/ultimately about “talking,” friendship is mostly/ultimately about “rolling.” Yeah?

Still: what I liked most of all was how very for-real that day was. The literal “touching grass” of it all. The friendship (a long-term, long-distance friendship, sustained by voicenotes and semi-regular visits) as lit-er-al, not theoretical, when many friendships seem more like a promise, or sales pitch, than anything with a steady, regular emotional rhythm. And it was in practice exactly what we had wanted it to be, as opposed to making a dramatic, sexy, Instagrammy plans-y plan with an impossible schedule that is subsequently downgraded three times until you land in some compromise zone. This was deeply in, and of, reality, and that reality was perfect, ideal, just right. Reality meeting itself and being found to be enough. Anyway, this is how I’m trying to live.

Ram Dass wrote in Be Here Now that when he was a professor at Stanford and Harvard (he had “a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Triumph 500 CC motorcycle and a Cessna 172 airplane and am MG sports car”) he was “living the way a successful bachelor professor is supposed to live in the American world.” And this is the part I love: “[T]he students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they’d all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered — that was real.”

So, yeah.

“I just want what’s real,” having identified “reeeeeal” as a wantable commodity, is sort of kid-corny. Like: …yes? What else? But, it’s so easily obscured. I’m increasingly fixated on: What do I really mean? What do I really care about? What do I really like and love? What makes me feel good? And expanding beyond the immediate experience of the self: What is sustainable? What is inclusive?

Usually, when we (“we” being, I guess, my little generational cohort, my little set of buddies, and my little imaginary friends) decide on things like our “word of the year” or “Summer of Whatever” or some other particular focus for a particular expanse of time, it doesn’t stay afloat in our individual or shared consciousness. (Maybe if you’re the kind of person who loves gold stars and can keep a food journal or exercise log or “streak” of whatever stripe going.) But almost everyone seems to want to cling to a word or a theme, because it’s so clean, and such a relief, like the effort of believing and doing and maintaining belongs to the idea or resolution itself, like the momentum will come from there, instead of from us. And offloading the work, both onto a phrase or the rule it names, or onto some future version of yourself, feels like heaven.

For me, anyway, the only resolving of this kind that works is when it comes from me unintentionally and unprovoked. (The un-and-sub-conscious: real!) I’ve used “Back to center” as an effective incantation for a long time, for exampsies. And for the last, I don’t know, year, six months, or a couple years (I don’t know, within any form of “knowing,” about time; nothing about my body or brain relates to it, and anything that has happened was either last week or in 2008), I’ve been saying and relying on the phrase “What is reality?” Like: “What is real, here? What is the reality?”

What was the reality of my friend’s visit, when I drill into our history, our present, our hours, our mutual weather? What is the reality of getting this newsletter out before daycare pickup? What is the reality of 2025?

Even saying it, asking it, of yourself or others, is a 10/10, menacingly useful statement of purpose. (Simon was on the phone the other day, trying to get someone to the point, and cut them off mid-sentence to say “Okay, let’s talk.” Damn damn damn!) It’s brass tacks, brass knuckles, brass balls. It is an impossible edit, request, or prism to squirm away from. What is the reality?

(Feelies like you and me loooove to squirm, to just wriggle around in the theoretical, atmospheric, thinky-dinky soup. Being confronted with “reality” can feel like someone’s being really rude to you, right?)

This started after I read something about how a very effective way to support people who are going through something hard is to ask them what they think will happen, and/or what is likely to happen. Usually, when we answer these questions, we’re right. Usually, we’re right. (Marianne Williamson says “Everbody knows everything.” Damn! Damn damn damn.)

I asked someone I love very much what he thought would happen within a difficult circumstance (and barffff to the distancing vagueries here, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, but also, I know you get it), and he outlined a very bleak scenario that, yes, was and is the likeliest one. (And in fact, that’s what’s actually happening, here in reality.)

In that particular context, identifying reality can be a comfort. In others, like, planning how to spend a full day, but only one day, with a love of your life who lives in California (or just, planning how to spend a full day in the Muppet-y, Miami-hurricane mush of your daily existence), it can be freedom.

STRAWBERRY PATCH

A sweet idea from The Girl Herself: she regularly says “tochuther,” to mean “each other” and “together,” as in, “Let’s hug tochuther.” It really does a job, doesn’t it?

FROM THE MANAGEMENT

Oh, guess what: not only did I misidentify Roman as the youngest Roy in the last edition of THE FEELING (Shiv is actually the youngest) — this is regarding the Squirm TV Show of the Century, Succession — I realized I’ve made that mistake in public, either on socials or en newsletter, once before. I really want Roman to be the youngest! I need it!

CURRENTLY

This week’s top fivey:

• Is anyone else singing Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” — which would be called “Please Please Please (Motherfucker)” if she were cool — with The Smith’s lyric “Let me get what I want” (from their — more grammatically polite? — song “Please, Please, Please”) aurally pasted over “Don’t prove I’m right” from Sabrina’s song? Hmm. (Maybe if you ARE, you are ALSO a Millennial who bends like a baby tree in a storm toward Gen X influences due to childhood precocity and a series of influential older siblings, friends and boyfriends, and then bends back toward Gen Z influences due to the secular Western world’s domineering youth culture?)

  Related: I’m happy and relieved that “begging” has re-entered the overculture’s lexicon of vibes. (Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter was, of course, really good, but removing the pathetico pathos from “Jolene” was a miss for me because… I don’t know… Maybe if we didn’t know so much about Jay Z, who is so regularly referenced in the “Divorce Him” canon.) I mean, obviously there is a lot there for us pillow queens and power bottoms to get into, but from a *bats eyelashes* cultural-studies perspective, it’s so much realer about the exhaustion of the moment. Even inside of stupid, fun shit like pop songs, a little desperation is very much on-track in this era: post-hustle-culture, post-boss-bitch, post-girlboss, post-pantsuit, post-fake-smile, algo-optimized personal brand… Effort is yes, but effort without effect (so, an equivalent purpose, need, and cost) is no.

• The flip side of this, this week — in which the opposite of “begging” is… destroying? What is it called when you simultaneously end someone and create a profound onstage moment of unity? — has to be Kendrick Lamar’s what-the-fuck, holy-shit diss-plus The Pop-Out concert (and on Juneteenth, Jeeeeesus!) which had a Tupac-at-House-of-Blues all-timer quality, and which as of this moment you can watch in full here, fingies crossed. I didn’t note the timestamp but “m.A.A.d. city” is great.

• Happy summer solstice, also. The solstice is about “transition,” of course, which I’ve noticed is usually interpreted or presented the same way that every single monthly horoscope (at least for Capricorns???) is interpreted or presented: as cutting ties, letting go, shifting energy, moving forward (bad writing in general loves to “move forward”), finding your voice, locating a secret something inside you that needs to come out. (And of course, all of that is true, because all of that is always true.) In astrology, you seem to be always on the verge. (Again: maybe this is just boring, rigid Caps?) And as much as I am magnetized to ideas of renewal and change, and more specifically, by doing anything and everything I can to elevate and refine what is mine about my day-to-day life (including, you know, indulging in astrology: like, I just learned that my midheaven is in Scorpio which is apparently why I can tolerate so much chaos??? I would like to tolerate much less!!!), being told every month that your sign is being released from a years-long pattern of some fuckshit or other has started to make me feel crazy. And, yeah, there is nothing more real, more of reality, than the shift between seasons, and within nature, and within the human body, so, this is an instance of both “okay, fine, sure” and also, the only real thing, the realeast real.

• Oh, and on the topic of “Moon Illusions,” tonight’s moon is the Strawberry Moon, which means it is so low that it looks huge. (It is “strawberry” for strawberry season, the strawberry harvest, not the color, but it will be — or likely will be? I forget — sort of red based on the positioning. Either way, cool! Or: cool to me!)

• A rec, if you finished the third season of Hacks and then immediately screamed “No!” in a sharp burst because it was over too fast: its star Hannah Einbinder has a comedy special on HBO (duh) called Everything Must Go which I liked a lot, and also, appreciated very much as someone who uses the details of their good fortune in life not as an actual brag, come the fuck on, stay with me, here, but as a way toward vulnerability and self-deprecation and... reality. Probably watch the new seazy of Couples Therapy too, okay? But I have to go. I love you.

xx

Kate