“I’m in an abusive relationship with time,” Nate Lippens writes, in Ripcord, his second novel, a rumination on failed relationships, art, aging, lust, friendship, exile, loss, hierarchy, death, and survival.

The narrator is an unnamed middle-aged queen who works as a bartender at a gay bar in Milwaukee, aptly named the Dilly Dally. Equally scathing about bar behavior, gay hookup culture, punk consumerism, New Age vapidity, masculinity charades, elite consumption, and the lies people tell themselves in order to get by, Lippens skewers the norms of polite behavior in a world built on brutality.

Rest assured that this is not the typical middle-age crisis novel dripping in bourgeois pretension: “At forty, I lost my job, apartment, most of my possessions. Starting over felt impossible. So I didn’t.”

This refusal structures the interior narrative. “Isn’t it enough to be alive and more or less intact?”

A scrapbook of thoughts, a collection of anecdotes, and a wayward journey toward internal dissolution, Ripcord is dotted with aphorisms and studded with boisterous insight. In fact, there are so many mischievous one-liners they form their own conversation within the text, a kind of back room. “Some people get the glory. Some people get the glory hole.”

This book is both.

Nothing happens, so everything can happen. The narrator talks to himself, talks to his friends, talks to the world, goes to work, stays at home, gets smashed, fucks another guy who isn’t paying attention to what matters, assesses whether to jump off a bridge, rearranges his books, tries not to freeze in the bitter Midwest winter.

The narrator’s dream of being a heroine in a movie from the Golden Age of Hollywood converges with the heroin that held him like nothing else, and almost destroyed his life. Now that heroin is in the past, “Life is like the placards in old movies: scene missing. But I am living the lost film.”

So this movie, or book, then, sits in the lost film, frame by frame. “Time becomes my friends, the people I thought I was, the girl I was, the man I slipped in and out of being, a hologram.”

Bald, bearded, and in his fifties, the narrator finds himself profiled as butch Daddy material on the apps, a marketable commodity for an aging queen, as long as she can channel the masculine posturing that flattens experience. “When we meet in person, we lower our voices an octave and talk like food is falling out of our mouths.”

Lippens exposes the relentless repetition of dissatisfaction in gay hookup routines: at the bar, “I watch the parade of everyone who isn’t going to get what they want.” But what are the other options? In one laugh-out-loud moment, the narrator responds to an ass pic with “Love the intense pink corona around the beautiful slit of the actual asshole. A stunning male vulva to enjoy.”

And deletes the app.

But we all know how long this will last.

While Ripcord is organized into chapters, it’s the dozens of section breaks within each chapter that structure the book, and thus, time. Nonlinear, episodic, elliptical, the book moves with the narrator’s thoughts—a section could be one pithy sentence, or a longer reminiscence over a few paragraphs.

The narrator moves through problems in past relationships like a slideshow, from a mother who kicked him out at age fifteen, declaring “This isn’t working,” as if she was referring to a jukebox and not her kid, to a recent ex-boyfriend unwittingly mirroring the mother’s rejection from decades prior, saying, coldly: “This isn’t working out.”

The narrator catalogs a litany of dismissals with pared-down eloquence. On a relationship that he ends: “I matched his distance with my own.” On an abusive ex-boyfriend: “I looked for common ground. Like how we both hated me.” On another ex: “the yearning for an apology had replaced lust.” And, another: “What we had was gone but we wanted to linger in the goneness.”

Ripcord also lingers in the goneness—wit spars with want, camp collapses into grief. The narrator remembers Bette Davis interviewed on a talk show, where she says, “Old age ain’t for sissies.”

I guess not, he quips, remembering all the sissies he knew who died of AIDS.

Like with Lippens’ first novel, My Dead Book, these deaths haunt the text, but here the focus remains on those who are left behind—scarred, scared, alternating between rumination and resignation. When a friend says he’s “living for those who can’t,” the narrator disagrees. “I love the thought but it’s not possible. You can’t live for anyone else. You can’t turn memories of the dead into flesh.”

So what, then, are these memories for? “Sometimes I try to remember my past lives. They weren’t good times, but they weren’t this.” Escape without escape: “My mind burned through a sleeping pill like a TicTac.”

But also: “I replay things to wear them down, take the edges off, and make them smaller, handheld.”

Ripcord refuses false hope. “Cynics get rich,” Lippens writes, “Pessimists stay poor.” You can guess which category the narrator falls into.

When Lippens writes, “My faggotry was my passport. It allowed me to rise above my social class,” he’s not invoking the myth of upward mobility, but the “institutionally illegitimate person” who remakes trauma into refusal.

It’s this refusal that shines throughout the novel. “Sometimes when I watch the news, I remind myself I haven’t loved this country since I was a 14-year-old pariah in the 1980s and its citizens wanted me dead.”

Why not aspire to Paul Lynde’s “snarling flamboyance” in a world that wants you dead? Why not linger over past issues of Diseased Pariah News instead of trying to ascend in a culture that praises the romance of the outsider while punishing anyone who lacks enough access to infiltrate?

“I do understand how people disappear,” Lippens writes. “How the cost of interaction is too high. When you see who is comfortable in the world, who thinks that it’s theirs, how can anything but disappearance be an option?”

Is Ripcord, then, about disappearance? Lippens dares the reader to shuffle the cards. “Beginnings and endings are what grief obliterates and life tries to contain.”