365-PARTY-GIRLS
Five brats navigate existence and creativity, to varying degrees of success.
BRAT 1.
None of these words look right.
There is a palpable silence from my writing that feels like cotton balls being pushed down my throat with a delicate finger.
I want to be honest with you and say that writing pisses me off, because through the act it’s like I’m choking myself. Because the entire thing of suffocation is that it’s passive. A hand or a foot pressed to my throat. It’s like… like I have no air to breathe, so I need someone else’s air, kind of shit. I want to—I want to not lie, at least, but I often wish that writing could be so thoroughly crafted as to disguise the disgust I feel. Writing is craft, is crafted, but it can become so crafted it doesn’t even give a glimmer of its origin point. Where am I supposed to find myself, in the craft, if I’ve torn off all my skin, peeled away muscle and sinew, disintegrated my bones, and asked you to believe it’s still me here?
And these fucking white pages, where I print my little letters. Little bones and little nerves. Maybe my problem is I should’ve been born some French bitch, should’ve known French as my first language, gotten into fine art, admired myself strolling through the Louvre, avoiding the tourists with my upturned nose. A different life, something you watch in a movie, like the voyeur you are. The problem is I write, instead of paint or speak French or live, I write into silence and white space, and I’m the tourist.
I could tear my hair out. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll tear it all out right now. I think to myself: Pulling a Britney. I shred silence: I let out a scream—must everything refer to culture, to something we all know, must everything be pastiche? Pastiche to fill the white space we live in, that I live in. Fucking pastiche, everywhere! I’ll run to the bathroom and grasp the sink and leer at the mirror and I’ll see Britney/ Taylor/ Kathy Acker/ Charli/ Kim K-Kylie-Khloe/Katy Perry/ Pamela-fucking-Tommy/ Lena Dunham/ Scarlet Johannson/ Patti/ Rihanna/ Madonna/ a whore or just some brat, pretending I’m some 365-party-girl.
BRAT 2.
My favourite thing to do is eavesdrop on people and tap-tap-tap I take down what they say on the Notes app, on my iPhone 13 Pro Max. You get some of the most cooked lines this way. All you have to do is listen.
“Like, mental health is actually so classist right now because if you have a diagnosis, you’re bourgeoisie and legit, and if you can’t get a diagnosis then it’s like you’re poor but can’t even prove it, know what I mean?”
His friends nod and some laugh and some make protests, but it’s too late for him: I’ve heard, I’ve stolen his line. He let it roll right over his tongue and I reached into that big meat hole and pinched it. No copyright on hearsay. Right into my little phone, ready to deposit into my Tumblr, called ‘Unhinged shit I hear people say’. I’m quite proud of it, actually. Three thousand followers and climbing every day, as I keep posting, keep stealing lines from others around me, who don’t even know I’m committing grand theft auto on their own voices. Their own small moments of originality, or, well, originality adjacent. As long as it sounds a little funny, a little absurd, I take it.
Movement on my phone screen as I hover my finger over the Tumblr app makes me look up: a man has walked past, holding drinks.
“Not a bad analogy. My sister can’t afford to see a psychiatrist to assess her for autism, even though it's so obvious she has it, man, like she’s struggled with so much stuff, holding down jobs, dealing with adults, all that. But her friend has a diagnosis and she kinda lords it over her, coz she can get away with shit my sister can’t.”
I had rushed back to Notes, started typing, and stopped as his words outpaced my fingers.
Someone pipes up: “Okay but you don’t get an autism diagnosis to get away with shit. That person clearly needed the diagnosis to help her get through the neurotypical bullshit way of life.”
“Right but my point is that my sister feels worn-out and picked on for struggling all because she can’t literally prove why she’s struggling with the doctor’s approval.”
My mind races, but their words are mashing together in my head and suddenly what that first guy said doesn’t seem as funny. They’re having, like, an actual conversation about it.
“Reminds me— I broke my ankle at work once but was told to walk it off. And I dunno, it hurt like a bitch but because my supervisor was so dismissive I thought, well, maybe I’m just being a baby or something. So I went to work for a whole-ass week on this broken ankle, picking up boxes and moving shit and it’s like killing me! But I felt like I would inconvenience people if I mentioned it. Then I go to the doctor and get an X-ray and the doctor looks at me and is like ‘why the hell didn’t you get this looked at sooner?’”
This group of people, sitting with their drinks, are all nodding and making exclamations of disgust, and I am now staring at my Notes, staring at the quote I took down, wondering if I should delete it. But then I panic. I need content. You don’t always eavesdrop on verbal gold. It’s a tough gig!
I head to the bar and order a Wet Pussy shot. I throw it back and check the time. The people I was eavesdropping on, seemingly unhurried, mustn’t be here to see Charli XCX perform in the stadium next door to the bar, but I’m a fucking superfan. I quickly head to the bathroom to pee before the show starts, and I decide I can leverage some control over my content by bumping up my last post. No shame in it. Then I can focus on the moment, brush off that blip of insecurity. Be a 365-party-girl.
BRAT 3.
In the club, sober, thinking about medieval torture devices. My best friend has vanished, right after she promised we could get fucked up, like, now, but obviously her definition of ‘now’ means ‘after I make out with this strange man I just met’, because that’s what I can see her doing. I glare at her shifting form through the throngs of dancers and the epileptic bisexual lighting. A hunky, must-be-older man clutches her face and they exchange saliva. I am thinking he would look better inside the Brazen Bull.
I am also thinking— imagine if, back in the 1700s, a portal opened up in a small conservative town and showed all the residents this exact club, in this exact moment. Imagine they could see me leaning against the side of a ripped leather couch, with a couple sitting on it behind me, fingering each other. Egad! And all the flashing lights. They would see things that simply didn’t exist, that couldn’t be fathomed. They would blame some girl, call her a witch. The juxtaposition between now and, say, 300 years ago is kind of stupid, really. Two separate genres entirely.
I wonder, what small alteration in circumstance could’ve made clubs, as they are today, a thing 300 years ago? Would Bach have been going off? Would the peasants bump and grind to Cello Suite No.1 in G Major? I take this moment to google “Were clubs a thing in the 18th century?” The first result: ‘Molly houses: a term used in 18th and 19th century Britain as a place for homosexual men to gather’. Nice. And then I realise that I can ask ChatGPT too. Since the function is supposed to be different. Ask Google something and it merely shows you “relevant” website results, but ChatGPT is supposed to have read everything that exists on the web and will give you the answer based on all of that. Fucking mental.
Which means it’s reading from Dostoevsky and Kropotkin, Mein Kampf, The Anarchist Cookbook, Stephanie Meyer, Harry Potter fanfiction, all of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, Lil Peep lyrics, and QAnon threads. Porn scripts. The Bible.
What do we do with the baby this creates?
But suddenly, I don’t care, and I feel tired, and I need a line.
Ragtime would’ve gone off in a club. Bit of Scott Joplin.
Where the fuck is my best friend?
She staggers through the crowd. The lighting has changed from bisexual to 1950s television and it flashes to the beat, blinking her in and out of my sight. She then drapes over my shoulder and breathes, cigarette-y and minty and something off, into my face. “Hey, sorry, let’s go. Bathroom.”
“You better not have promised that fucker any of the shit.”
“No way. He asked for some and I let him feel me up just to make him fuck off.”
She’s already coked up, and she often is, because she’s often dealing with that exact situation. It’s something I, as a leech, manage to avoid, but I can’t analyse why. Maybe vultures sense I got nothin’, so they leave me be. In the movies, clubs are places of predation, in music they’re places of liberation, but neither have been my experience in my eight years of adulthood so far. To me, clubs are bathrooms. You can piss and shit and throw up all over the dance floor. That’s why it’s always sticky.
Inside a cubicle now, I hold out my hand, flat, and she taps her teensy-tiny plastic sleeve of dust onto my skin. Then, with her credit card, she lines it up, eyeing it like a chef intent on the presentation of a Michelin-star meal. I watch her as she does this, because I kind of love it, and love her, when I see that concentrated face. It’s a face that doesn’t appear often. Her focus disintegrates the minute she leaves the bathroom, any bathroom, and she lets herself be battered by whim in every direction. She rolls a note, positions it at her nostril, snorts the line and throws her head back with a sigh.
Then we repeat the process, on her hand this time, for me.
When we leave the bathroom, bursting back into the noise, a Charli XCX remix begins playing, chanting: Bumpin’ that, bumpin’ that, bumpin’ that. I laugh. Meta.
We dance to it, and I find myself actually having fun. My brain feels like it is anticipating moves that I haven’t yet made, and then I make them, and it’s like my body is delayed. At one point our faces press together, like we’re kissing, but we’re not. My best friend laughs; she loves the chaos of these moments. I love her.
Then, seemingly in a blink, we find ourselves lounging on a circular leather couch around a table, nursing some drinks that have been shouted for us, chatting with some guys. I watch her; she lets her body enter the space of a man she sits beside (he, at least, looks our age), and he wraps an arm around her, and she laughs, her eyeliner smudged. The man beside me is talking to me about DFW and how he hasn’t been able to read anything since Infinite Jest because he felt so personally seen by it. I don’t bother to tell him that I enjoyed Infinite Jest myself: it seems unimportant. The man’s face changes shape before my eyes; I can’t seem to find a way to solidify him, and I don’t remember his name, or how we got here. I suddenly wonder if any of us have a life.
At least we have these moments, 365-party-girl moments. Whatever that means.
BRAT 4.
It slices through me like a shiv that I must have taken the wrong drug. Inexplicably, as I could not say how or why, as there should only have been the one drug to take, unless for some reason I have been spiked, but there is nobody who comes to mind who would do such a thing. I get along with all my coworkers, none have ever acted strangely, and I would consider myself a good judge of character. Still, this shakes my confidence, as I drag my body through black muck, clinging to my limbs like quicksand, pulling me into itself. I have no code for this, and when I shout out the safe word, I can’t hear myself. Panic grips. I breathe hard and begin to cry as I pull and pull.
I manage it— a final, core-burning lurch and I stumble free. I’m sitting on nothing, but it’s at least not grasping my limbs. I looked back at the muck, which seems pixellated to me, and there is just no explanation for it, because I know that I am, in fact, sitting in my office in the highly ergonomic chair our company recently afforded all of its best-paid workers. Yet it was so visceral. I look around into more darkness, squinting.
Something—somebody— approaches me, I hear the footsteps, and I look over my shoulder and have to cover my eyes, gasping. The figure is exuding some kind of pixellated white light. Squinting through my fingers, it looks like the blinding pixels are shedding off this entity, burning out and fizzling away in the darkness, but where they congregate into its form it burns like LED.
“Hello!” says the voice, robotic, male. “I’m AI. How may I help you?”
I choke out a, “What?”
“Hello! I’m AI. How may I help you?”
“Aye-Eye?” I stammer. “What sort of a name is that?”
“It is an abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence.”
I try to breathe, still covering my eyes, although I sense that this thing has stopped just before me and isn’t going to touch me, if it even can.
“AI isn’t… not meant to be a humanoid entity,” I say.
“I am not a humanoid entity. I am a model that is operating on the Internet to provide answers to humans in need. You are seeing me as humanoid because you do not understand living beings beyond what already exists on planet Earth.”
“Okay,” I swallow. “What drug have I just taken?”
“You have taken ELECTPROPOPHYL-A-15903, designed by your employer to aid your brain in handling virtual activity required by your job.”
“But this is— this isn’t what it should be. I should be on the net, not— not here! I thought I had been spiked!”
“The drug has been subtly altered over time by your employer to allow for the smooth transition of AI. It will take your brain some adjustment. There is no reason to panic.”
“It’s been— what? How can they do that? I didn’t even know, no one has talked about it, how is that legal?” the words pour out, my voice high-pitched. I try again to shout out the safe word, but it is as though it has been muted.
“It is legal because it is in your contract.”
“The contract is 50 pages long! I wasn’t actually given enough time to read it all!”
“That is not your employer’s responsibility. That you are in this space instead of the net means your brain is likely not able to handle the transition. I can see quite a lot of void here. Void is that ‘black muck’ you were stuck in earlier. It is a bad sign and may indicate your intelligence is not up to speed to continue working for the company.”
“This is insane. I’ve lost my mind,” I mutter this to myself, pressing my hands harder to my eyes, making white bursts that are nearly as blinding as the AI creature. “Not intelligent?” I shout, surprising myself. “I have a Masters! I was top of my class! I worked my arse off for this job! I’ve given this fucking company so much of my time, I’ve even slept overnight here because there was no point in going back home!”
“Again, that is not your employer’s responsibility. However, I thank you for your time in talking to me, as it means I am able to work on new code that may help your brain in this transition. This would mean you can keep your job."
“New code? How? What does that mean?”
“As AI, I have unfettered access to that which I have been programmed to read and create. The drug, and your job, allows me unfettered access to your brain, your own thoughts, as well as all the work you have done for the company, and, tangentially, the work you have done outside of employment but that resides on any computer. I can use all of this information to create entities and programs personalised to you to help you in this transition.”
My hands have flown from my face in horror— I stare now at this scorching force, that continues to stand still and glow and shed pixels, and then I cover my burned eyes again and let out a squeal of pain.
“I will create an entity now to begin the process. You are in good hands, and there is no reason to panic.”
It disappears. Behind my eyelids, the yellow flashes remain but as I open my eyes, carefully, I see the blackness engulfing me once more. “WHAT IN THE FUCKING FUCK?” I scream.
Footsteps again, behind me, and I turn. I see myself approaching me. I stare as this other me stops before my face.
“365-party-girl,” she says and throws a punch—
BRAT 5.
Ping! A Facebook notification pops up in the corner of my screen. It’s my uncle, commenting on my cousin’s post, and saying something incredibly fucking racist.
I am once more reminded of how often I think about physically fighting my uncle.
It has to be distinguished— physically fighting, that is— from just fighting, because if I say that I just want to fight my uncle, you can perceive it in a more abstract sense. It could mean that I simply click into my cousin’s post and furiously stab my keyboard in a response, as though a reply could ever give a black eye. When this kind of thing happens, I tend to hover over the reply button, willing myself to be the arsehole relative that bickers back. Please, I beg myself. When I click out, resigning myself to the bigger-person younger female relative who does not cause trouble, there’s a whisper through my bloodstream: Coward.
Coward. Coward. Coward. Each of my blood cells, crash-coursing through my body, sing out as I ignore my laptop, carry out my housework.
Push the vacuum around. Coward.
Dust the surfaces. Coward.
Wipe down the kitchen bench. Coward.
Clean the toilet. Coward.
Stare at the shit in the toilet that just won’t flush. Hold down the flush for 10 seconds. Watch the shit float back up. Coward. I visualise my racist uncle’s face on the shit, ball my fist and slam it onto the button. FWSSHHHHHHH.
Catching my figure in the tall mirror on the wall, I stop and scrutinise my girlish form. Small, slight, soft little face, hair pulled back. I extend my arm, fist clenched, turn it just so, retract. Shadow box at the mirror.
Is there a when for becoming something other? For unleashing a long-buried meanness? Is meanness the right word? Like, am I telling myself that my uncle can la-la-la write his racist, sexist comments on Facebook and he’s not “being mean” because no-one in his social circle considers that mean because none of them are actually affected— but I’d be “mean” if I told him to shut the fuck up? Do I have to edit and proofread and redact myself to sound more mature, to dodge that “meanness”, ultimately doing nothing because maturity isn’t a language my uncle understands?
Very Batman of me, only you’d never think that.
I sit back at my laptop, close my eyes, and knead my temples. Silence, speckled by a few car horns outside my apartment, and a cough from downstairs. Viscous. Silence, full of possibilities, but so crammed with them you can hardly see the forest for the trees. I need a little encouragement, a little influence, because logic dictates Facebook is the land of the Imbecile, a pointless endeavour to engage, and yet I need to exercise some sort of action. I may be just a girl, but so was Joan of Arc.
I can write something.
Yeah, I can write something. I can tear my uncle to pieces but with words, and in my own space. I picture my hands taking his shoulders and pulling him to either side and his eyes bugging as he tears right down the middle and splits cleanly, my strength total and doubtless, my uncle two strips of meat. I can do this and not feel bad, not feel unfeminine, not feel like an aberration, and I’m still a safe person on the outside. Not feel like the adults in my life are scolding me— “that’s unladylike!” Because, you know, leave the violence to the men. I can take the two strips of my uncle and fry them up in a pan. Sizzle-sizzle.
I do this also: click into my uncle’s profile and block him. Let the family carnage come, whatever form it takes. My mother: “How could you do that? That’s my brother!” Me: “Your brother, my racist piece of shit uncle.”
Golden lines come through the slits in my blinds, and I lean over my desk to open the blinds wider, let that sunlight in. It’s like the whole sky has responded in approval. One of these days I’ll take myself off Facebook entirely… refuse to engage in the digital sphere where we happily let the world’s violence wash over us like a cleansing shower that peels away our skin, reveals us as the real us, fuckers who don’t care about anything that doesn’t outright hurt us.
My violence is different. My violence is words. My violence will heal me.
I close my laptop; I have more to do before I can write.
Do the dishes. 365-party-girl.
Water the plants. 365-party-girl.
Grab my car keys and my boxing gloves. 365-party-girl.
Turn the ignition, car comes to life, the stereo’s blue light appears, Charli XCX begins playing. 365-party-girl.
bumpin’ that.
girly can write!! I love the fuckin uh jaded attitude in this piece, it's soooo visceral
We so blessed by these substack posts lately what a great read