CONTENT NOTE
Andrew Sutherland’s ‘the bar is decorated wall to wall with clowns’ explores an HIV diagnosis. This note is to inform HIV-positive readers, to avoid being surprised by content you may find difficult or triggering.
Sliding Doors (1998) Comedy/Drama/Fantasy/Romance 1hr 39m
Sliding Doors porn parody where one me is a top and the other is a bottom. Everybody fucked. Sliding Doors but he/they then they/he. Sliding Doors but it’s two hours of Gwyneth whispering ‘I wish you well’ to ski-slope ski-trial man. A friend once messaged me to say I was on a website that told you whether Australian celebrities were circumcised or uncircumcised. I checked and there my headshot was: sandwiched between Bana and Law. I say the algorithm must have fucked up; I’m not an Australian celebrity. Also, my dick’s been free-to-air across mediums and they still somehow got the answer wrong. Sliding Doors but I forget what even happens in Sliding Doors. The premise eats the plot. Sliding Doors but I forget my ski boots, too. Sliding Doors but lacking the ability to imagine more than a binarisation of possible futures shuts the door of all possibilities and all futures, including the imagined (sliding) two. Tempophagy: time eating itself (the final scene of Sliding Doors). Sliding Doors but he never ghosts and we get married then divorced, and all my ghosts get married, then divorced. I could have been in that movie. I could have gotten stuck in that door. A more famous poet told me she had Googled me but couldn’t remember why or what for. I suggested she had probably wanted to see the most objectively beautiful person in the world. She laughed, then walked away. Sliding Doors subjectively a better poem than that Robert Frost. Two roads diverged in a Sliding Door. Sliding Doors but Gwyneth eating tempophagy I am eating door. Isn’t this so ouroboring!!: snaky actors eat own ass. Sliding Doors since both have train and closing door. Sliding Doors but one is sliding, one is door. The lonely body of a Sliding Doors. All is sliding, all is door.
the bar is decorated wall to wall with clowns
I think I wanted to prove that I could go to a gay bar and have the kind of night-at-a-bar that would happen in my early twenties. When every night was a deep pit or a reckoning, like that millionaire and his swimming pool. Unfortunately in the interim I’ve become teacher, sober, mentor, ugly, hot again, 32 and about to move, again. I think I wanted to prove, also, that I could go to a gay bar and exist, or even converse, and disappear into the well of experience without the pre-planning, the Grindr passport thing, the smart way to travel. (Actually, the other reason for this is that my sex worker friend was banned from Grindr so I gave him my login and he got banned from that too. But also—to poetically prove a point.) A shell without history. A former semi-professional model. I think the best night of my life happened in this way: in Aotearoa, my final night in Auckland, I had seen an Ann Shelton photographic exhibition titled my friends on K Road and so I turned on the apps, said I wanted to make a friend, and wound up at Family Bar with a man who’d come apple picking. He had a partner back in France, and I was sort of engaged to the man who would kill me. It was karaoke night. George Michael had just died and we heard a hundred perfect covers of ‘Careless Whisper’. This is also how I met blank, years earlier, in Shanghai. Just past graduation, touring a show, I went out with Morwenna and our teacher, played dice for our drinks and I brought a different man back to my hotel. blank had watched me in the bar and messaged me the next day, then joined my classmates and I for a two-week romance. On the last day, we got drunk on the top floor of the tallest building in the city and he fucked me in a bathroom stall. Later, when I was HIV-positive, the Shanghai Theatre Academy rescinded my Masters offer, but I will always have been pounded down at the tallest point of the next city I should have lived in, and no one can take that away. blank came to stay with me, in Singapore, two months after Shanghai. I was in the midst of seroconversion, the sickest I have ever been. He made me chicken soup and slept in my bed, but couldn’t understand why I was too sick to touch him, and neither could I. When I finally tested positive, blank remained negative, and this was a blessing. I was diagnosed at 22, and it has only recently occurred to me that I was so young. I was so young. Being has such a needy way of being. Why are there so many clowns on the walls of this awful, silent bar? I once petted Lagerfeld’s millionaire nepo cat, and not even I care