Coffeecore: The Goodbye

 

1.

My little flâneur, this time comes for everyone in the City, sooner or later. You give your orchids to Michiko, your spare set of cocktail glassware with the swirled teal stems to Adam and Lorraine.  They throw a small party for you at work; you remember the wide-cut ties and the smell of freshly laid industrial carpeting. You wait for a storm, the kind where you can see the backs of the wind-flipped leaves on the branches and hear the windows getting pelted. There are raindrops the size of train tokens. You walk out the front door of the building, and hear it close with a hydraulic whoosh behind you.

You do not take a key. 

Was this corner here a week ago? A month? You turn to go down the slick planes of the stairs and fold your umbrella neatly as the door opens. Where you are going, you will not need it. It is such a strange coincidence of the City, the ambient suitability to all moods and happenings of its weather. 

Rilke In Neon

Or, A Plague Thinkpiece In Forking Paths

From The Pavillion of The Limpid Solitude: Eight Permutations

Givenchy poster by Tigran Manukyan

1.

The Plague Thinkpiece is the iteration of the old form, the thinkpiece, which is an iterative itself of the essay, which is anew the essai in Anglophonic drag. Irony is dead. Only sincerity lives. Sincerity is the new irony. Thus, sincerity is dead. Only irony lives. Irony is dead.

The voice of your leader reminds you of bluebells/rasping gateposts/the whir of server cooling fans. It calms/enrages/dispirits/enlivens you. You leader is alive/dead/dying. You write Rilke, or maybe Hölderlin, or maybe even Goethe, in neon on the wall of your increasingly adolescent bedroom. In every universe the German Romantics make a new and errant/precise sense.