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end of march, april, and so on

Buffalo 66 and Bullshit found somewhere on Broad street (2024)
I watched Buffalo 66 for the first time last summer. It was the end of August. The sun was hot, and I was beginning to settle into a pallid, post-birthday devastation.


I had spent most of August logging films like Prozac Nation and Drugstore Cowboy and Thirteen into Letterboxd, hoping that an ex-boyfriend (who followed me on the app because we broke the rule of no contact because summer was just too long and too harsh to not pretend that there was some solace there) would see it and email me again. He did. Those email threads were angry. He’d say things like what the hell are you watching, don’t watch that, or if you do, you will actually be really sad and die. He’d say things like I can’t help you, or you should try going to the gym because it helps with happiness.

So I ended up watching Buffalo 66, in bed with a stuffed cat and a cup of coffee. I was excited to see Christina Ricci play another girl I knew. Prozac Nation had felt like someone cracked me open and looked at the bones and horror underneath. I hoped Buffalo 66 was the same. I’d press Letterboxd’s “watched this film” icon and rate it four and a half stars, and that’d be it.

Except it was worse. Buffalo 66’s starring male character and creator and director and glorious, self-gratifying god was Vincent Gallo. So it was a lot worse, like skin-crawlingly so, which was awful because even in films where girls I knew were ghastly and bleeding, I did not flinch. Those felt like a mirror. Like home. Buffalo 66, or Vincent Gallo’s Wet Dream, felt like a cartoonish proclamation of my romantic sins, which caused me to get so sick that I stopped sending emails to my ex for a month and only resumed to inform him that we could not continue doing this.

Gallo’s character, Billy Brown, kidnaps a girl named Layla to present a girlfriend to his parents after returning from prison. Layla still felt like home. Like I know, I know, I know that docile hesitation those eyes those words. I know it. And then Billy comes in, hollow and horrible and correct (and if not, soothed to rightfulness), and god, I really had to ask myself — this is what you want? That coffee began to make my stomach swirl.

Billy made it real. Which I’m sure brought Gallo much smug glee, because for him, it was real. If it is for me, too, then it looks like we are meant to be. Gallo, or Billy, or a Boy Who Makes You Feel Sick, is probably my inescapable purgatory. Hallelujah!

Pretend that god asks you what you want. Is this what I want?

It isn’t. It really isn’t. I’d rather be at home, sick on my own, getting better with more coffee and maybe jam toast on my own. Unfortunately, I seemed to forget this when I ran into a Billy on the road (on the internet).


He was, literally, Billy. A photobooth clip of him and Layla was this man’s profile picture. It was a brief encounter, an exchange of appreciation for Jacques Lacan and political philosophy and, on his end, a girl who appeared to need rescue from the difficulty of interpreting Lacan.


I can read Lacan just fine, I said. And I can. I enjoyed Noam Chomsky’s bit on his capacities. It’s why I have “charlacan” as a username. ha ha.

Well if you need a sweet British man to help you, I’m here, Lacanian Billy replied.

After feeling overly perceived and looking at his Instagram, which was mysteriously curated with photos of skinny trousers and leather boots that I didn’t really like much, I decided I didn’t really like him. He was also an English right-winger. I remembered that Billy Brown was a scary man.

I blocked this Billy. A few days later, I received a message from a completely different account:

“Change your name to charlatan because you block people for not being Marxist. Narcissistic and awful person.”

Bullshit! I call it. I might ask you why you’re not a Marxist. And I did! I asked him.

You’re just a little scary. And I don’t want to get sick.

Bullshit! I do, because this past May, when the house was so suffocating and streets within a half mile of it were unwalkable due to the very real possibility that you’d run into a conceptual Mr. Big wearing the same color scheme as you (blue and white, denim, and cotton, please just let me have it…), I’d go all the way to Broad Street, dreaming of scones and a second iced latte, and let my mind slip, occasionally, to that Billy Brown. He had told me he lived in Oxford. I asked if he studied at the university. I don’t think he ever answered.

I slipped, felt sick, and wondered if Lacanian Billy was somewhere around. If he attended the philosophy lectures I skipped, or if he had strutted past me in those mysterious (very mysterious) leather boots. I think that would have been funny, although I’m sure I wouldn’t actually laugh if we had both shown up to the Oxford Philosophy Society’s talk on psychoanalytical theory.

At least four times a week, I’d be somewhere on Broad Street, and if I couldn’t get through more than twenty pages of the book assigned by my tutor, I’d sit on a triangular wooden bench surrounded by cigarette smoke and imagine run-in with Lacanian Billy. Although this would last two minutes at most — some strange man would walk by wearing black ankle loafers and I’d immediately start reading again — I think I would have preferred it to what actually happened. Not fucking with you. I promise.

****note from 2026:  calling funny england guy conceptual MR. big is giving him way way WAY too much credit.  england was a big fat joke...the true attempt starts now, in berlin. now this is a city with many many conceptual (not real) mr bigs, and it’s the greatest show on earth to watch.  Big wears the same boots that I do. Big still wears all black.  Big has swapped the cigar for coke.  Big does not act his age, and it would be better if he did because that’s literally just so much better.  The word to remember here is conceptual. Where’s the real thing?

The Funniest Thing I did in England (2024 in the summer)



I went to church and felt mildly religious. The other options (attempted punting, drank beer from Magdalen, kissed a guy, cried in piss-smelling alleys at night because of a guy, walked up a down escalator, called my ex, etc etc) just seemed like context to the humor that is me feeling more than the holy reverence I was required to have by birth. I do think I should include the fact that I was listening to Preacher’s Daughter the entire time.

Ethel sounded like a gospel. I strayed away from the tour guide group, not because a blonde-haired Somebody was in it, but because I really did need time alone to stare at the church’s mahogany arches and listen to Ethel sing about how god loved me, but not enough to save me. I lit candles. Whispered to myself, which was really to him, like always, asking for a way out of sure death by thirty. Or a painless way into it. No answer yet.

I sat in those tiny spaces made just for prayer with the body and blood. The tiny wooden chairs and embroidered pillows felt like home. Here you go again! Whining about home, like always. Ethel cries: am I making you feel sick?

You are! Dear England, you are.

I was sick of the rain after a one-week heat wave during which everyone took to Magdalen’s lawn, I was sick of Sainsbury’s nine-dollar wine bottles that I’d buy, with a side of dark chocolate digestives, instead of their sometimes desolate meal-deal options, and I was sick of feeling so desolate myself that I could not love England like I wanted to. I wanted to. Again, because I did before.

During the last week of Stanford’s winter quarter, my friends and I gathered for several goodbye dinners. I was going to Oxford, and my roommate, Michelle, was going to Berlin. We wouldn’t be seeing our friends for six months, so giant, steaming hotpot meals and giant, steaming Gott’s burgers (the California one, because, you know, California is delicious) with them seemed right. After six rounds of beef bulgogi and fish balls and orange creamsicle soft-serve, we’d all still be laughing about the past year’s fun, and Michelle and I would promise to bring back great tales from Europe. We were both very excited. She’d practice saying “danke,” and I’d continue gleefully saying “chewsday,” since I had recently discovered that Filipino-English As Taught By My Parents does not include “toos-day.”



I yearned for England at Superhot. Clearly, I was not feeling sick yet.

And I didn’t, at least not for the first few weeks, during which I drank too many half-pints of bad beer and enjoyed, most mornings after, a cream tea at a cafe in front of Radcliffe Camera.

I was in love — with England’s breakfast selection, with Oxford’s cobblestone streets, with my daily walks between coffee and books and pubs.

Then some things happened, some things didn’t. Somebody cried, Somebody didn’t. So I ended up in a church in Salisbury. Please laugh.

After years of attending catholic mass the way you are supposed to attend a catholic mass, I felt slightly sinful in wearing earbuds inside the church. I figured god would be fine with it, because no one was actually sitting down to pray there. Tourists and tour guides were its devout congregation. Listening to Ethel seemed to be an equal level of devoutness. Her voice in my ears, catholicism’s existential philosophies as I remembered from years of being taught it, and the church’s striking wooden interior just did it. It was a personal sacrament, and the weeks prior were my preparation.

This is all funny. I find my melodramatic moment of religious awe and romantic penance hilarious.

I must have looked odd, I think, just pacing the church, looking up and around and muttering things (the lyrics, and little phrases like please this and please that) as Somebody glanced at me from time to time. He was not religious, which made this whole thing even funnier. Or worse. A guy pushing me closer to god? I’m snorting.

I laugh at the image of this, but the truth of it really isn’t funny at all. It’s kind of like how I laugh and reminisce about my time in England, summing it up to friends by saying it was the spring of sangria, Saturdays in London, and another awful (I grin more here) boy. I say that with a cackle, but it’s just not that funny. The funniest thing I did in England was not be in England at all. It was all so ghastly. I just floated past.