More on Banality, P.S. Your Party’s a Purgatory – Michelle Harlow Han

May 21, 2026

Tired smokes, threadbare slingbacks, spectral codes of judgment (pejorative) are setting and scanning the scene. Self-proclaimed tendencies towards nuance are superficially textbook, an obsession over bored categorical (hierarchical) dissections are the truth. Even the suspected sweeter of exchanges elude you. You kiss a boy to speed up space, but when your lips meet it falls short of carnal necessity, it lapses into cheap convenience. To build tunnels out of this built environment is a trap in itself met with discordant unease the occasion does not deserve, not for frivolity but for everyone is so in spite of it while lacking any depth requisite of solemnity.

Between breaths you take enough pills to feel pathetic for even entertaining the circumstance. There is a sense of resistance that grows rotten in your teeth amidst the banality. It builds like molten plaque, it rises in heat upon specific sayings, it disintegrates your physiological fibers in hopes of the long lost savior of one nonpredictable performance but sentiments are already burnt beyond save – and no performance tonight will be unpredictable, regardless. Take a drag, or three, bite into an apple and pretend it’s warm flesh. There are apparently no apples available, no basket to be found. Hostess chalks it up to the excuse of nighttime, but these hours of noir are bearing none of its more supple orgasmic fruits either, allegorical or appetizer.

Current clock reads the worst stretch of the party condition where the hours are neither the greeting nor the goodbye that serves as the sugar coating to top off banality, this is purgatory. Such gatherings signify – gone are the pretenses of the artful flair of hosts or the down and dirty habits of hedonism, present are the pretenses of dogmatist opinions over cocktails not cheap enough to be the product of dive bar vitriol but not expensive enough to ignite the emotion of taste. Taste is an emotion, as said by Lee Radziwill (dubiously doted princess by self, Truman’s swan, fanatic voyager into fashion editing, TV acting, talk shows, decorating, and curating Jackie’s Givenchy), also allegedly bedded said sister’s husband, which just about testifies to the relationship any witted individual should have to appraising the value of quotes.

Continue looking for that apple, salivate while you search. Your hands are extending, prolong your tendrils to achieve the pretense of grasp. Pills start to kick you in delirious. Taste it on your tongue, it’s as red as the organ is bitten raw. Furl your lips around the remnants of intoxication, fall into the determinate descent of chosen chaos, bask in internal artifice as opposed to that of the crowd. Manmade destiny is a fallacy, it suffices in boredom ethereally.