The Vibes Bulletin: a column by Vivi Hayes.
April 6, 2026
Oh man... the bullshit piled up so fast this past winter, you needed wings to stay above it. And at a point, I could no longer.
A perk of the whole situation, the day to day minutiae of it all, is that I can now say I know Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock" intimately. I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.
All that to say, I'm hardened. And one thing about me is I do have a fabulous tendency to retreat into myself in times like these. A minor tragedy that made that impossible is the fact that my earbuds (standard Apple USB-C, inexpensive) got stolen at a party two or so weeks ago. I'm not exactly "liquid" enough to replace them, so I've been forced to part with the comfort of constant skramz in my ears as I commute, as I venture. This has actually penetrated the darkness in a very exciting way. I've heard golden snippets of conversations from passersby. While I have documented several things I've overheard, I feel inclined to keep them secret, just for me, and to honor the fact that these are moments I'm lucky enough to stumble into, and that these lines don't belong to me at all in the firstplaceOKFINEIwillsharejustone.
My lack of earbuds. I’ve been without my shell, my armor. Through this, I met my animus.
My animus was walking past me in Bushwick, wearing a green 2007 Abercrombie hoodie, talking on the phone. He said to his friend: "wow, nice... how was reading the bible at the beach?" Put your ears to the ground and you might hear the flowers growing.
Being hardened begins to feel very self-indulgent past a point. And I care too much about the people around me to expose them to that further. I resent this intensity I've been carrying around (see last month's vibes bulletin, which was literally about the evil villain energy in the air, girl chill). I'm being mindful about what I expose myself to. For the greater good. I'm a real saint!
LEVITY is the soul of WIT… that’s not what Shakespeare said, but it’s what I say. I implore you to lighten your vibes. Here are some concepts and things I'm playing with related to levity:
🎵
In your lifetime, if you care about music, you'll meet a SMALL handful of people you can blindly count on for recommendations. I met my friend @KIAN in middle school. The center of our music taste Venn diagram has grown along with us, and I'm always in for a real treat when he sends me something. Part of my Kian music homework was Buckle Up by Josephine's Next Million Miles, which, in the days that followed, I'd also heard about from some of my NYC pals. What a debut. I'm just excited about it, and that's really all I have to say. Spring fare. I listen and I'm happy. Let an album as sincere as this one be your compass in the deluge of uber-contemporary electronic music. There are literally birds chirping on it. Also worth mentioning: Kian put me onto friends&, who reference Perfectly Imperfect in their bonkers new music video.
3️⃣
Kathy Joyce is among the most exciting emergent voices in young NYC lit, and 3, her official debut collection, is formally interesting and simply fire. If Andrea Mauri's Perfectly Imperfect recommendation of her Changa project Chica Mob Quarterly was your introduction, you're already familiar with her singular wit and charm. I attended her launch, where she signed my book looking intelligent, thoughtful, and somewhat gothic doing so.
▶️
Yeah so it's gotten to the point where I can do this on my own now, no external stimuli needed. I can rotate Reese in my head and automatically hear a song like "My Own Worst Enemy" or "Dirty Little Secret." Spiked up hair, sleeves cut off a t-shirt, running late to school, fighting people for no reason, lowkey operating at a level of consciousness that calls for a conservator, sprinklers running, Lois yelling, the world could be a beautiful place. You can microdose this from TikTok or Reels, if you just search "Reese Malcolm in the Middle edits." For some light reading, there are some hilariously stilted and awkward sentences on the MITM Wiki. However, I found this to give you the Reese digest: "Reese has extremely little to no empathy, with virtually no sense of right and wrong, and basically enjoys doing bad things for the fun of it, despite the trouble he gets into." “He is as psycho as Lois and as immature as Hal. It is assumed that he is schizophrenic.”
♥️
Don't we owe it all to the incredibly talented animators on Flipnote Hatena, and to the cultural archivists who had the foresight to upload hours of its content to YouTube? This was my introduction to everything (I mean that). Back then, everyone laughed at anything. It was about hiding under the covers, watching flipnotes past bedtime and quietly closing your DS the moment you heard footsteps in the hallway. Smash Mouth's All Star was the funniest thing you had heard in your entire life. Somehow that was enough! That was more than enough.
🗣️
If you say this the way I say it, it comes across as post-ironic and quippy (as opposed to cold and over-therapized) and you can wield it to worm your way out of the more serious tête-à-têtes you never needed to be part of in the first place. In my life I've been subjected to so many serious conversations that amounted to nothing, that taught neither me nor the other party any lesson. Sometimes people ask, or even worse, blurt (word I hate award) things simply because they like hearing the words come out of their own mouth. Give someone a captive audience and they become very perverted.