Its Summer and Everyone is Manic

I’m probably lying when I say this, but this is the first time in my life where seemingly everyone around me is genuinely fucking nuts. Or maybe this is just the first time that I don’t think it’s cute and move on. I’m not necessarily sure if/what I should do about it or just sit back and watch the sky fall. The latter is definitely the right bet. I should also acknowledge, everyone could very well be normal and I could be the crazy one, but I don’t want to believe that.

Anyway, aside from the mass hysteria spreading through Chicago, I’m blonde again. My nails have been chartreuse for a month, and I don’t plan on changing it anytime soon.

I’ve been working a lot, and the financial return is lackluster. Or it might just feel that way since I’ve been hiding all my money from myself. Probably both.

In the 24 hours since I started this post, the most Fame Hurts things have happened to me.

First, I find an envelope on my windshield after work. “FROM ONE RANGER TO ANOTHER… KEEP IT- POSSUM.” I open the envelope to a very small plastic possum. On the west side of Chicago. So curious, who did that? Like this was supposed to be a Jeep thing, like y’all got your waves and rubber ducks and shit. I didn’t think I would have to participate in the totem culture with my Ford Ranger, but I guess here I am. It feels like something that I should keep considering it seems to have been given in good faith, but also what the fuck am I supposed to do with a half-inch-tall plastic possum?

Second, I’m sitting in bed and get an email notification pop up, it reads, “Would you be willing to send a belly vid?”

There is no fucking way on God’s green earth that BELLY MAN would 1. come back and 2. FIND MY FUCKING EMAIL????

The last time we spoke, I was 21, it was early 2025, and he hit me up to ask me to be his girlfriend as his last dying wish. I asked why he is dying, or moreso what of. Chronic back pain. He then explained to me how he is “Starting to realize how Michael Jackson felt taking so many pain pills.”

God, I just wish that I took screenshots when I had the chance.

Anyway, when I tried to sell him videos of my belly, he got mad and told me that all women ever want is money and he is just trying to enjoy his final moments with a woman he loves before he dies from his back pain. So, I ghosted him. He continued to text me for a couple days, and with no reply, his final message to me was “Miss you my (N word).” With hard R, and blocked me on Instagram. It should go without saying that Belly Man is a white man in his 30s who lives with his mom in Jersey City. 

So for him to FIND MY PERSONAL EMAIL AND MESSAGE ME FOR BELLY VIDEOS A YEAR AND A HALF LATER IS CRAZY.

I guess this means he survived the pills and the backache.

I must have really manifested the return of FAME HURTS on accident. I spent the past 8 months fantasizing about the return of my lost effigy.

The universe has given me the opportunity to fulfill my dream of returning to her, and it would be a waste to not take it.

I lost fame hurts to casting iron and working blue collar jobs without the union, to getting my degree and trying really hard to eradicate so many of the people who fame hurts felt so connected to. It is time to resurect her in her new world. A world where instead of spending 8 hours in a room with 5 gay men, 3 furries, and a bunch of waspy nepo babies, I spend 8 hours with white men who either have or have had dreads at some point in their metal casting career. Its a whole new world for fame hurts and she got a bit lost in the security of it all. I realize now that she never left or got lost she just stopped doing speed and dating twinks. 

It feels like there is something else that I needed to mention, but I can’t remember what it is. Hopefully it comes to me soon, but I’ll probably just post this now because I have the itch.

There is a lot happening in my life and the lives of the people I care about right now. It is a great feeling to see the people I love do what they love and continue to find joy, and I hope that this vibe, no matter how manic, continues.

This is the type of weather and happiness that makes me want to move to The South and pick up a new hobby like fishing.

I should probably ride a horse this summer- seems like the right thing to do, all things considered.

Maybe Bennett and I were onto something last year when we talked about becoming hot tub streamers. There is something too enticing about sitting in a hot tub and shooting the shit. I worry that Alabama Barker might be too good though.

As always, I love Chicago, I love life, and I am not ready for whatever the fuck the next 4 months bring me.

Winter came early and I cant stop thinking about 2018

There is so much snow on the ground.

All I can think about is being 16. Although I don't remember being necessarily happy back then, there is something about it I just can't seem to shake.

I was a sophomore in high school who wore too much mascara and filled in my eyebrows with Anastasia Dip Brow. It was kind of awesome for what it was.

I think about the friends I had, and where they are now. All of the people who weren't able to make it out of that barred-out town, who are still God knows where doing meth and DMing me on Instagram when they get fucked up.

I have this subtle heartache in the back of my mind lately. An ache for the fact that I was able to subsequently get out and somehow others weren't. And to be clear, I grew up in an affluent town in an affluent county just 30 minutes from the 3rd largest city in the country. There is nothing tragic about my life or the lives of these people I cry about. The tragedy is merely abstract, and I'm still not entirely convinced it's not just all in my head.

I will never forget befriending the new kid in 7th grade after he complimented my Adidas Superstars when the popular kids were bullying me, asking why I wore my bowling shoes to school (lowkey they were right for that). Anyway, this new kid—he told me about how much he hated school and how he was going to drop out of high school so he could be an artist. I was so scared of authority back then that I told him that he needed to graduate at least so that he wouldn't get in trouble. So cute of little 12-year-old me.

Anyway, after years of high school and falling in and out of lust and friendship with this new boy, I ended up graduating high school early. He was one of the only people who believed that I would actually do it. And when I got my first apartment my sophomore year of college, he came over for a party we were having. We sat in my bedroom while an art school house party screamed on in the background, and he looked at me like I held the moon. He reminded me of that moment back in 7th grade and acknowledged the irony of me being the one to leave high school early. He told me how proud he was of me. I had gotten everything 16-year-old me had ever wanted but never knew how to put into words.

I have no clue where he is now. Last I heard, tweaking out somewhere in the burbs. My heart aches for what he could've been. Strangely though, I don't think it aches for the version of him that exists now, or because I necessarily want him in my life, but it aches for the new kid in 7th grade music class who was nice to me when I needed a friend. To the 16-year-old boy that worked at the local ice cream shop and would bring pints of my favorite flavor to my house in the middle of the night after his shift. To the 18-year-old boy who damn near cried for me when he saw the life I had made for myself when I finally "got out."

He deserved to make it out as well, and if not physically, then he should've at least been able to live his dreams too.

I wonder if it is just a symptom of the place, part of the drill. Some people "get lucky" and others stay back and do kratom. I figure my "luck" wasn't even my own doing either. I accredit everything I am to the mentors that allowed me to see myself beyond the age of 16.

I'm revisiting this now in May. I now know how severely I was going through it. But I stand on my word.

I know that the experiences of me and the new boy are not unique, and there are a million other versions of him and I across the world, living in similar realities, both at 23 and 16. I refuse to chalk it up to "America under capitalism" or "the ups and downs of youth" because that is too systematically biblical. I really do hope that he is okay wherever he is. He might even read this. And if he is, I'm sorry, both for airing you out and for whatever you are going through.