Carriage Return – Manuel Marrero

May 1, 2025

I attended a wedding last weekend. It was the first time in a while I’d traveled anywhere but Miami, my birthplace, the cradle of coca and cabana. Although the famous nightclub first opened in New York, the namesake is a melange of Latin diasporic inflections both cities share. When I’m in Miami, I’m with family, the smallest social unit, per deeply Catholic religious teachings I’m very famously about. Modernity would have you delude yourself into thinking it’s the individual, when the only things of value are our conversations. 

The first night was the bachelor party. A clade of handsome mostly young southern good old boys drank beer, flavored moonshine, and smoked tobacco around a bonfire listening to the radio from a truck. Eventually an eclectic playlist took over. 

Elite cosmopolitans were present too. We dished about mutuals from Los Angeles and New York.

East, West, and digital bloc. A three-body problem. The story of the master of spaces. The liberator, the localizer. New myths are neighborly not plutolatry. 

We don’t talk to our neighbors now. We’re CEOs on private jets communicating across vast distances. 

The south is sweet. The south is salvation. Southern hospitality is real. People smile and say hi and make small talk with you if that’s what’s called for in the event you have nothing in common. It’s good to be in good standing. 

There was a lot of drinking all weekend. Everyone could hang. I’m coming up on four years sober from alcohol. Nobody seemed drunk or zombie-like. Everyone was in a great mood. 

One conversation that came up involved the difference between virtuosity and authenticity. The former centers the performer. The latter doesn’t try to be bold and change things. Rather it takes a common form and adapts it. It’s humble and harmonious. In this sense it’s more participatory. It’s the difference between the Anglican and Catholic Churches. You need the body. Don’t eat the heart. Faith and reason can’t get too far apart or the tension snaps. The two pillars are justice and mercy. Yet still the whole point is Jesus is love. The things someone in your position could do if you accepted the one true path and embraced Christ, and did his work on Earth as in Heaven. Made an instrument of infinite peace to understand the mind of God. Be a Catholic in good standing. 

Reject the education of melancholy, anxiety, and self-loathing. 

It’s hard to explain how much men and women wanted and loved each other once. They dressed like it and acted like it. You could feel electricity in the air. The battle of the sexes is one of the big cruxes we face. It was magic moments we lived for, and still do. We just forgot it’s what we’re looking for. We forgot etiquette, along with how to think talk and or do anything. Along with constancy. And we face this crux grudgingly. 

We used to want each other so bad. We used to be all over each other. We used to make out and try hard. I read something online about 2014 pussy, which eleven years later we’re still thinking about. Back when feminism was good. Black Lives Matter was good. I read something online about how there are only two-three dateable men and they’ll ruin your life, except for one which would make for a mid ass relationship. 

I once went on a date with a woman. This was in New York, West Village. She swayed drunkenly on the train body language open for a kiss, asked me to text her when I was home, but I was resolved to be unpredictable, and suffered for it. But I did not choose misery as she did. She later admitted she felt rejected and wasn’t ready to date. She was traumatized and suspicious.

There are new parties now. Effectively, dioramas of young people having fun. You can look but you can’t touch. May I approach? Boys and girls are separated. The girls are all model-looking hypersexual hot. Not pleasantly beautifully mid like wifey material. More like waif material. Everyone is drinking but somehow never drunk enough. Later someone will attempt to explain the awkwardness by commenting on how people weren’t drinking enough. They’re dressed to the nines. It’s sad how beautiful they look. They’re all wasted. Avoiding eye contact. Asking patronizing questions. Getting defensive. Ketamine and cocaine are in vogue. Weed, once for refined people, has been reduced by commercial culture into a gateway to laziness. Eros is castrated. 

I’d rather have a homely girl who can gut a hog. 

You’re doing too much coke and you’re fucking too much that’s why you’re depressed and can’t produce.

I’ll give New York City an exorcism. 

I don’t like godless things like condoms. Onanism is against my religion. 

People are alive but no one wants to live and who can blame them?

Someone in your position could save the world if you embraced Jesus. You know not what you destroy and you are the enemy of all that is good, which you destroy.

While I was away for just over seventy-two hours, I received too many text messages and emails. We should’ve taken at least a generation to closely monitor the impacts of text messaging alone. The density is stressful. We used to have landlines.

A friend asked me if I wanted to sponsor. I never hear from him. He sounded strung out. My fucks bottomed out again. 

The body and soul. I hope I have treated your subjects kindly, and you wouldn’t have written about it anyway. 

There are cultures where men are looked to for compassion and women for wisdom. 

On Valentine’s Day I wish you’d kill for love. I would do anything for love. The only sex I’ve had in two years was with a girl who really needed to get laid as a rebound. I can do anything. I don’t want sex. I want to be loved.

Then they get even, petty and vindictive in hollow ways.

This is the truth. Sin is corruption. That’s why you feel bad. It’s a compounding dialectic.

Many of you are doing it all wrong and I didn’t have the heart to tell you until now. Maybe I didn’t have the right words but now these will have to do. Everything is botted. This is a collar grab. They’re turning people into bots. We need the unitive not unitary, intellectual companionship and compatibility. You can absorb heresies rather than defeat them wise cunning as serpents innocent as doves, moral teacher deep not wide with compassion, put on the trad wife dress and live on a farm. Host talking parties, not bombastic, lewd Bacchic rites. Do feminine nurturing.

They think their faith will save the world. Praxis.

Touch starved hetero inducements drinking culture positive high bpm music for makeup application bob seger not music for driving no for dancing with dames for drinking for kicking it with the bros. One truth one path no one makes it to the father but through me. The poor will always be with us. Easy listening to tik tokification it’s a short walk from here to there. Travel is over. The monotony of tomorrow gotta get back to the gym. Celebration of love witnessed. Nothing short of a deathbed confession can save this country. I don’t like those people I like you.

Mark Zuckerberg said social media is dead. Facebook is a black op.