A Sobering Truth

Everything we've built here has been rendered obsolete

Yesterday, on my bi-weekly tour of my Notes app, Camera Roll, interior thoughts, etc., all in the hopes of harvesting some tiny morsel of nothingness to expand into roughly 400-700 words on this Substack, I came across a startlingly clear sign. It’s not often that the universe appears, in the very moment of your tribulations, to gift you a truth so clarifying and honest that it rattles, vigorously, the gilded cage in which your slumbering soul lies.

What is our larger project, really? What are we truly trying to accomplish here? Is it the gradual, painstaking excavation of the soul of effete PMC culture? Or is it a gimlet-eyed, cynical send-up of the Indian-American male, his id and his perversions—his essential nature? Ritam and I stroll through the garden once a week, in my great-uncle’s palatial estate, for hours on end, with cups of dessert wine and finger sandwiches in hand, to bandy about these vital topics—and only after we’ve reached some rhetorical breakthrough, an edge not yet considered, only then, do we come up with the blood on the page you’re reading right now.

And so it was that we found ourselves here last night:

I was shaken to my core. There was no longer any point to writing this newsletter; it had already been done for me. A concise, evocative tale that contains every shade of shame and disgust we have been aiming to cultivate for years here. There’s nothing I could say here, today, that would be funnier, or more embarrassing, or more sobering than this vaguely questionable Dean Kissick tweet. You gotta hand it to the guy. He read us for filth.

What to do now? Back to the drawing board, I guess. Nothing else is coming to mind for me. I don’t know what’s been interesting to me these past two weeks, so you guys are out of luck there. Maybe in two weeks something cool will happen (Ramadan’s coming up, so surely I can squeeze some juice out of that one). Could do a check-in on the Chalamet vs. Butler vs. Elordi vs. Mescal power rankings—something for the fellas and the ladies all to tune into. Guess that could be fun.

But as it stands? I’m unmoored. Listless. Wandering, dazed, through the intellectual wasteland we’ve created for ourselves. What is our purpose now? Can anyone tell me? Fortunately, deep in the QTs, a random man has explained it perfectly:

“What is their lore? What’s the perception of their vibe?” - @thepizzaburn, 2024

What is their lore, and what’s the perception of their vibe, indeed—it’s up to me to figure that out.

Ritam’s Footnote: