Letter to Elon Musk, Video and essay published in RISD: Volume 1 in May 2021:

Dear Mr. Elon Musk,


I used to think that your girlfriend was the shit, and now I am seriously getting worried about the culture being sick, or maybe just dumbing down—I am scared that the culture is gaining ground on me. My father was a 9/11 responder and that makes me proud, I just feel overwhelmed by the Charli D’Amelio book, and the passing of Kobe, and maybe even Billie Eilish, who’s telling me, “I don’t need a Xanny to feel better.”


Every day I take a shower and listen to the Spirit of the Golden Juice album by FJ McMahon and think about my grandfather who served in the navy in 1969.


“A lot of things make me very sad, I understand her personality a lot and I think she needs the right guy,” my father’s iphone said.


Conal and I fall onto the rocks at second Beach and it’s seven hours into the Sunday morning; we light cigarettes. Conal’s credit card insists that their first name is Canal and they relay a sentiment that only my eyes could see identically this morn.


With their idea in mind I’m forced to explain a scenario:


When winter pushes, alcohol combines with xanax in my body, and They meet at the pitbull fight in my body, and They fight each other in my body, and They fight with my body. I drive through my bed, there's people in the car and they’re drinking more. I crumble because everything is so wonderful, I really badly want things to work out all the time, every single time, every single time is so wonderful. Now, designated driving, feeling like maybe I get so high that I see things because I keep my head mostly hollow except for the thoughts of showering in your parent’s house in southern Colorado. Maybe she gets so high that she sees things because she keeps her head mostly hollow except for the thoughts of a specific boy’s facial hair, movement and of wonderful things and a body that is so wonderful. I crumble because your perfect body is so wonderful.


A car ride that’s fading because of the Xanny might seek a stimulant to avoid a wreck, You choose Truly’s because seltzer is light and when it makes contact with even just the half of a pill, this explosion will occur that is so quiet that the ants didn’t know.


I press my ear to the floor, listening for the violence, while real soldiers dance around my body.


Elon, when you are missing fingers, toes, and maybe an ear, you can dance in a minefield with more energy than someone who has kept all of the pieces of their body, due to an incredible amount of hesitation.


I fill a cup of water using the button on the door of my mother’s fridge and I freak out— I really fucking freak out about its cold temperature and how this makes visible my understanding of hesitation, as an understanding of privilege, and I see this idea in the shiny refrigerator door.


Hesitation is a horrible loss, just as stabbing someone forty times over is a horrible loss, in the same remorseful and serious tone.


In a remorseful and serious tone Dad calls my sister and I sad clowns,

probably because we are expecting drastic changes in manner,

and sharp deviations from one’s word,

Expecting great people to leave,

And we are going to have to pay.

I think that you could pull a rabbit out a hat, man,

And while you celebrate its emergence

A hawk swooped down and just ate it.

So in straight gaw, shocked

over a Bruce Weber book found in the springs

With In n Out burger drive-through dinner

And heightened sensibility

or maybe just now understanding that Kayleigh thought I was insane when I attacked time with my fists in front of her,

I didn’t mean to startle you it’s just that I see a Thanksgiving to god in the Del North trailer park and atheism blooming a hydrangea bush in the floor I’m barefoot on

I see brown and yellow becoming purple turning to white and white turning to jets Frost bit the ground and the ground bit the sky, who ate me

I dream of my ex-girlfriend trying to capture my attention with physicality and instead drawing focus from the men in the diner

I dream of stop signs that are encapsulated by morning sun and hay stacks that face trailer parks with ramps that override the front steps to their front doors

I dream of veterans who don’t have to experience rage because they were nurtured And small airplanes filled with ideas supporting the offspring of those onboard and of waking up next to you with money in my wallet.

Passing a pack of crows, at 11:11, wanting to be

My sister’s protector.

I dream of this girl shaking her Ass in my face but in a Bagel shop and I didn’t want it. Passing a pack of Colorado blackbirds, Dad tells me to man up, and I’m effortlessly cultured by beauty, and Santa Fe engines that glow red in New Mexico light. Is the culture dumbing down? Dad telling me to grow up, and also you know how I get, don’t hold a grudge. It eats you up buddy.


I do Dream of the boy in Rhode Island who I don’t know reaching out to shake my hand, wearing bright blue or red sunglasses. Then he walks away to the kitchen because something is going on in there, and his hair is so cool. I didn’t know of him but he did know of me well and his fright was always there and it was blue in oil and I filled the air with words so that your suffer could just silently leave and glide out through the cracked window and I did it for me, not him. If our sufferings saw one another, made eye contact, I think everything might construct and build and grow and then strike down and it would happen fast, but my dreams of it will not stop soon.


Dear Elon Musk, The whole thing has me really upset.

Sincerely, yours, a Sad Clown.