UNDER EMBARGO Until 18.01.2021 00:01: Epiphany Lycanthropes
Orthodox boys fucking under the chemtrails over the country club
I tell her I’m bisexual even though I haven’t slept with a girl since 2018 and that was over the summer I was trailing London, building bridges over the course of a prolonged breakdown. My iPhone flashes No Caller ID, but I know who’s calling. Should have said I’m Greek, then the bisexuality would have been implied.
The posse I find myself a part of at 13 would have had Lana Del Rey write songs about us (well, herself through us). The next summer we joke Phillip needs therapy for only finding connection to things that had been extinguished for millennia. He likes sculptures even though he, like the rest of us, lacks the vocabulary to talk about them and their effect. People with access to very little tend to focus their attention on one or two concepts and let them overpower their imagination till they’ve exhausted every possible outlet of expression. I have an Anais Nin book on my lap, while Drop It Like It’s Hot is playing.
At summer’s end we say we should don our swimsuits and partake in the epiphany come January, diving to retrieve the cross (“Make it silver, we got the muscles to lift it out of the water.”) and on reemerging clasp torsos and make out. If they want our bodies, they’ll have to take them as we offer them. Part of the problem is we hate everything the culture produces, seeking foreign interpretations of ourselves in books and beyond and making grand statements about writing the new culture into existence. I too had my meds right and my boys who got it.
Norman and I have been so starved for cinema over the lockdown, we create our own film festival straight out of our bedrooms for an audience of two. I name it Hard Brit Lads as we begin with If…, lusting over the piercing blues of Malcolm McDowell. “Paradise is for the blessed, not for the sex obsessed.” Straight to hell for me and all my friends then.
During the summer of dissolution I was so drunk I took to rambling with randoms in smoking areas and explaining my plan of changing things I disliked about my life, partly inspired by my friends Isabelle and Chloe, who were also falling apart, the three of us turning up to work to type emails like, “Please find the press release attached for review,” the effects of the night before still visible, evident on our breath. I don’t remember the details of that plan, but the friends I made, though not for too long, thought I was a blast. We spent the summer drinking in bars and bathtubs, all of us recovering from broken relationships or other self-inflicted derangements.
On Monday I receive a torrent of DMs alerting me that Lana has dropped her new song and music video, Chemtrails Over The Country Club, another ode to wildness, now with a dash of hope. Isn’t being wild a consequence of being unhappy and becoming unhinged? The song, which hints at a new direction for the unfolding decade, features her signature haunting vocals and overflowing romanticism, climaxing with distorted sounds not dissimilar to her Venice Bitch triumph. Themes of love, melancholy ever-present. We’re all Anais Nin’s children, even if we don’t know it, even if we’ve found new models in the Rob Doyles. There’s a calmness to the new track, like she’s left past trauma behind, mirrored in the video with a transformation. I do push ups with the song on loop as Lana and her friends, under the cloaking of darkness, metamorphose into werewolves. On the other side of the tornado, she seems to suggest as she shatters through glass unscathed, we’ll be free, more powerful.
The song’s most beguiling line, “I want you on me like when we were kids,” is nostalgic, involuntarily transposing listeners to their own youth. On the second listen, I recall a day at Stefan’s. Phillip waffles about an archaic festival in the south that posed the threat of cannibalism and werewolf transformation for the male youth. Our teeth would sharpen, our senses would quicken. We’d be stronger. Our ribs would crack and twist in new shapes. “We’d be even hotter.” I wonder what could be hotter than all of us perspiring in our underwear as we smoke, legs dangling in between the railings of the juliet balcony.
Someone tweeting under the handle querelleofbros posted a snapshot of two twitter search terms: “my big fat greek cock” and “my big fat greek dick.”
“Forgotten nationality,” I respond. Name one Greek author. I certainly can’t.
SO hot
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