Enter the Labyrinth
Life in Morocco in 2026
If you want to feel like a vengeful but slothful vampire, taking a break before your next gorgeously Bacchanalian slaughter before you go nap in your riad, I suggest you get a poppy flower scrub in Morocco. I wrote this to you in my head while waiting for the poppy flower to settle on my skin, staring at the ceiling that was probably older than America, and was like: damn. My life is improbably excellent right this second. I wish I could share this with my friends. So here I am.
I went to a local hammam near the hotel I’m staying at for a few days and it’s the average amount of beautiful you’ll find here - stunning gorgeous but also normal around here. The kittens that live in the garden are incredible entertainers and they have a manual for visitors the size of an encyclopedia in five languages. I love rich context. When I was waiting for my scrub down, I was staring at the ceiling for an untold amount of minutes - a forced meditation. The circulation holes in the ceiling looked like a belly button, the plaster the color of skin, and so I imagined myself in the earth’s womb, all fresh and new and ready to get my heart broken by the state of the world again and again.
I am used to this cyclic descent of despair and rebirth by now, as a Buddhist and simply as an American. Buddhism prepared me for the current state of America; it taught me about samsara. A thorough hammam scrub feels like you’re born fresh; the one I got the other day felt like the exact bridge point between life and death, like samsara. Dirty skin came off in inelegant rolls all around me, gently and inevitably and then in great sheets, still painless. The pomegranate and poppy flower is a dark maroon red, which can be frightening if you aren’t prepared, but the mixture they used also smells nutty, almost but not quite chocolate. It looks gruesome and smells delicious.
Right now I’m living in Fez, a city that is almost five times older than American Empire, and I’m having a great time. I am going to different hammams and perfumeries and farms for research. Fez is a labyrinth; the oldest and biggest in the world, and for the next few months researching and writing the proposal for my next book while thinking about how I want to celebrate the paperback tour for House of Beauty. Speaking of HOB, please pre-order the paperback, out this fall! After much debate - and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of subtitles, we came up with a new one: Dispatches from the Glamour Machine. It’s a little reference to a war book I love by Michael Herr and the cyborg nature of the beauty industry. We are all cyborgs and glamour is a machine we make.
I’ve been silent on this Substack for awhile because the last few months have been a period of immense transition and art for me and I’ll be slowly executing plans to leave this platform to less fascistic pastures. I had to handle an international move in between two artist residencies in different countries; the newsletter had to take a breather while I did that.
What that meant in execution: in April I did a very fun, very challenging tech-based artist residency in Los Angeles at CultureHub LA for Museum of Nails and then sold all my furniture in LA and packed it everything else to leave the country. I’m not living in Morocco permanently - this is a two month writing residency - but I am changing my relationship to America, and have been in the process of doing so for the past year. I suppose I’ll write more about that for paid subscribers down the line. I am frankly still figuring out how much of my life I want to share in this era.
