On Monday I go in for the final round of interviews/auditions for my dream job. Everyone please pray to your respective gods/celebrities that I get it. It would be a total game-changer for me.

Anonymous asked: You break my heart because I can feel (what I interpret as) your self-loathing coming off the page. There are people - random, stranger type people - who are reading your blog and love your writing out there. I love your writing. I hope one day you have the time/resources you need to just sit around and write everything you've ever wanted.

me too

Until I can find a job there’s no point in writing. I’m not in school to become a better writer, I’m in school so I can get health insurance and the resultant interventional medicine for my spine; I’m in school so I can subsidize my job search. If I have to write stories for professors for the privilege of dulling the pain of this body, then that’s what I’ll do. If this morning means another four cover letters for four indifferent HR managers who will likely never read them — deleting the email as quickly as they pass the job to their nephew — well, then that’s just the direction my ‘writing’ will have to go. For the foreseeable future. Until something changes. 

I want so bad to write ‘literary’ stuff. But I feel such guilt at giving time to that when I could be writing another cover letter. One’s hierarchy of needs. I want to get better at writing, and I know what that takes (a friend commented that Gaby Dunn went into 100 interviews a decent writer and came out a great writer) but until I can pay rent and put food on the IKEA table I still haven’t been able to purchase, I have to consider it secondary — like getting in better shape or learning a foreign language — a useful skill but not something I can spotlight until other things are settled.

So I spent tonight kind of scrolling through old writing of mine. I’ve only been ‘writing’ for, what, I guess getting close to a year now. My Park Slope Ex was going to move to NYC and wanted me to come along and share an apartment with her. She thought I should apply to MFA programs, too. She had this whole Saffran Foer/Nicole Krauss thing going in her imagination. So I applied and I got in right beside her and that ended up being really alienating to her. So she got mad and told me that a twenty-six year old ‘man’ without a job wasn’t much of a man at all, and if I couldn’t swing a job as security guard at SEARS it seemed pretty fucking unlikely that I’d be able to hack it as a writer.

I was so mad. Mad and sad. I did that thing eveyone does when they are kicked out of a relationship: work obsessively at improving themselves soas to show your Ex how fucking dumb/wrong they were. So I wrote a lot. Which was challenging; thanks to some truly backwater regulatory guidelines there in the American South, I’d been allowed to graduate from university without having to write even a single paper. I hadn’t actually written anything since the 11th grade and certainly never fancied myself a ‘writer’. I barely read; some nonfiction science stuff, sure, but nothing like literature. So I had no idea how ‘writing’ looked. What was coming from my pen From the edge of my pen looked a lot like what I’d been taught by middle school teachers:

-don’t start sentences with conjunctions

-paragraphs are four sentences

-First, Next, Then, Finally,

-never end a sentence with a preposition

-watch for fragments.

Very stilted and unfeeling. Tentative. I didn’t know what was allowed and what was not. It’s funny: I’m not much good at writing now, but I definitely feel as though my technique has grown a lot since then. Not because I’ve become so much better, of course, but because I was soooooooo clueless and confused and unfocused and just aimlessly probing around, having to reinvent the wheel to solve any sort of narrative challenge.

Oh man, it sucked.

As did my writing.

Some of which I feel compared to share with you, Soos of Doha, Qatar; Michela of New Hampshire, USA; Emil of Washington D.C. by way of Peru; and whoever the other four people or so Google Analytics assures me actually reads this waste of a blog. I want so badly to post new stuff, to work through the backlog of now twelve articles I need to flesh out and publish, to announce the book that is my master’s thesis, to say something here that someone might enjoy…but there’s nothing new. Every day is the same rotation of Craigslist, Careerbuilder, Simplyhired, USAJOBS, and the others. So here’s my middle ground, my pantomime of releasing new work: some random, out-of-context paragraphs from before I could even string sentences together—nonsense exhumed from MSWord tombs buried deep in my subdirectories. It goes without saying that all of these are drafts, waiting for a time when I’m financially comfortable enough to work on them again.

#1:

On the days before the accident, when I had a credit score good enough for my own lease. A mutual lease:

When we lived together I dominated our living room. I could see her from the couch:  she’d kneel out on the back porch and battle the heat, battle the sandpaper and the wood panels, scrape gesso into a toxic white cloud, inhale the cloud, collect the cloud on sweat-slick arms, let it harden, let it itch, scrape and sand and push and flip and cough and wipe her eyes, wipe the sweat gesso into her eyes and feel the sting and the burn and sweep the legs out from under an oncoming cry, grunt, get angry and push frustration into her muscles, scrape harder and smoother, fight until she was one step closer to the art she held in her mind, and then her unemployed boyfriend would pull open the sliding glass door and say something like, “Hey babe, I just got the Patriots in Madden to trade me Tom Brady for fucking Reggie Bush and some draft picks. What a buncha retards, right?”

And she’d say, “Tom Brady’s really good!”

And she’d say, “So what’s your team’s record now?”

And everything felt like progress.

#2:

 On my first exposure to ‘writing’, which came at the expense of a 25 year old woman bondage queen who drove down to the South to statutory rape me:

The remote was bolted to the nightstand. That kind of motel. I don’t remember Valencia’s travel bag, but it might have contained Herbal Essences. I know it smells like her. Or reminds me of her. I don’t know. Valencia told me that love has no limits, no age limits or nothing, and besides souls are ageless and ours were intertwined. She said her lip gloss tasted like Kit Kat bars. She said maybe I should get drunk first. When she drinks, she wraps her lips around the bottle and gulps huge. My lips press the bottle like a trumpet. I thin sip and burn. I cough. I get sweaty and think of the internet.

The first thing I did the first time I was ever on the internet was download a picture of the Millenium Falcon. Then I downloaded a sound clip of Luke Skywalker shouting “Noooooooooooo!!!” Then I searched for “lara croft nude code” and when my dad told me to log off so he could make a phone call I clicked a button and Luke Skywalker screamed “Noooooooooooo!!!” and my dad laughed but really he did need to use the phone.

I discovered chat rooms during my second login. I found a video game room and typed “Playstation sux!!” over and over, and I loved how fired up it got everyone. People threatened to kill me. Nobody had ever threatened to kill me before, and I was surprised at how good it felt—how important I felt. I spent hours trolling different chat rooms: telling Brazilians that Brazil sucked, telling Jets fans that the Jets sucked, telling book clubs that “I disagree.” I was a child at a computer pulling emotion from grown-ups I’d never met.

Drunk on the power of my keystrokes, I joined a Dungeons and Dragons chat room. I didn’t know what Dungeons and Dragons was, but I assumed I could get a reaction by insisting that at least one of those two things sucked. I tried dragons and got nothing, so I switched to posting about how dungeons sucked until I realized that was actually a pretty reasonable viewpoint and started insisting that maybe dungeons totally ruled. Nobody seemed interested. The room was full and active—perfect conditions for stoking some rage—but nobody wanted to chat. They were too busy pretending with each other to give me attention. Something they called role-playing.

Valaria_Rose enters the tavern, a lithe Celtic beauty with daggers as sharp as her wits. Emerald eyes scan the bar’s inhabitants before she settles onto a stool and flips her crimson tresses back over her shoulder, her tight leather armor creaking against her skin.

There were swordfights and flirting and quests and everybody was so good at pretending to be attractive. Players spent paragraphs elaborating on cheekbones, smiles, breasts and asses. I’d felt so good about being able to provoke rage from strangers, but here I was faced with people who could sit at a computer and create arousal in a child they’d never met. I knew what the world called people like that: writers.

I was awed, envious and aroused. I wanted to play. I wanted to be like them. I asked my dad to drive me to the bookstore and we bought stacks of high school-level vocabulary books and he was so thrilled that I’d decided to start taking school seriously. I learned words like ennui and indignant and denizen and amble and ensconce and crepuscular. I subscribed to Word of the Day newsletters; you’ve got mail was an imperative. I knew that if I wanted to be taken seriously—if my character, the half-elf Jameson DeRune wanted to be taken seriously—I’d have to write like the older and wiser players.

I started slow. Jameson stayed low-key, hung out at the tavern bar and got what I imagined drunk was like. He made conversation. He eavesdropped on the more important players and familiarized himself with their rumors. I learned more words. Jameson grew bold—willing to trade rumors for silver. He started to attract attention. By the time I’d graduated from middle school, characters were seeking him out. Players were sending me private messages, coordinating when I’d be online so they could progress the scenes and storylines that were so much more fun than Little League.

            When they asked, I said I was 24. I invented long-term relationships and an imaginary degree from Georgia Tech. I complained about car insurance and Bosnia—things I still don’t fully understand.

            I put in my time, and when the head of the thieves’ guild disappeared mysteriously—the player behind the character having been deployed or something— I was named as a possible replacement. Meetings were held. Grown men with families and lonely women with cat families sat at their computer and advocated on my behalf. I was chosen.

The position had its perks. As the new guildmaster, Jameson turned heads. He commanded attention. He was a rogue, a rake, a danger and a temptation. The new crop of players—posted quietly at the bar—whispered among themselves at his arrival.

Jameson_DeRune pressed open the door of the tavern and ambled toward the bar, his cloak flailing wildly in the harsh winter wind that blasted the faces of the tavern’s crepuscular denizens. He felt their eyes against him. He felt tongues bound by recognition, indignant yet silent. His associates were everywhere, obfuscated in each dark corner. Now firmly ensconced at the end of the bar, the master thief smiled.

            Valaria_Rose continues with her conversation, but not without casting several furtive glances at the new arrival. So this was the new guildmaster…

           

 

The position granted some sort of malformed status out-of-character, as well. Since I was playing the chief of the underworld, most storylines would eventually require my character’s attention. Other players had to plan their scenes around my schedule, which I assured them was packed full of things that were definitely not baseball games and spelling bees and my graduation from middle school. This “power,” attracted groupies. Private messages would start with something like,

            Valaria_Rose: when you gonna be around for scene? Valaria needs to buy some tainted opium to poison the captain of the guards.

            And end with,

            Valaria_Rose: haha, love when Jameson quips at the new players. It’s like, welcome to the dark Ages, bitch!! Haha

            Valaria_Rose: lol, shuldn’t drink pinot noir and play :PP

            For some reason probably related to flattery and boners, I started taking webcam chats with the players I got along with best. I had a webcam, I said, but it broke and so I’d just have to type while the other person was on video. It had nothing to do with my age being discovered. It had nothing to do with my voice cracking. It had nothing to do with my mom watching Touched By An Angel on TV in the other room.

            Val’s voice was low and sultry. She was—to my relief—not a fat white man. She had a tan. She had glasses and wore pajamas when she talked to me, sometimes for hours.

            Valaria_Rose: weird how you understand me

            Our characters started dating. Jameson helped her ascend to the top of the merchants’ guild.

            Valaria_Rose: your character turns me on

            Valaria_Rose: but then they’re your words so…??

            She grins big white teeth. She buries her face in her palms.

            Valaria_Rose: I shouldn’t drink shiraz and talk to you.

            At school, kids leaned up against trees, formed circles around the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

            Valaria_Rose: maybe gonna have some vacation time coming up, if you can get outta the office

            I confessed. I had to.

            Valaria_Rose: how far apart are your parents from each other, like in age?

            I said, like fifteen or something.

            Valaria_Rose: and how are far apart are we?

            Less.

            Valaria_Rose: so we’re less scandalous than your parents, who are probably not all that scandalous to begin with right? =P

             We continue playing together. Years pass. I get a growth spurt and learn to dunk a basketball. I buy a webcam for real. She says she is going to visit sometime, for real.

            In the hotel, she unbuttons her jeans. She is so tan and lace.

            Her friend goes to get some ice.

#3

Diary entry from the piece about the mental ward that got scooped by another piece about the same thing in Thought Catalog. Probably good that happened, half the stuff in this story is way too personal to be putting out there on the internet, especially when employers might google me.

12/15/99

rich folk come thru. and newspaper. and we got a giant tree with lights, and food in the silver boxes with the burners underneath. we sat boy-girl-boy-girl but instead of girls it was old dudes in suits who ask too many damn questions. one asked what i was gonna be when i got out of school – not what did i wanna be, what i gonna be, since we supposed to set ourself up to succeed by thinkin positive. and then when you get out of school because everyone always pushin for us to stay in school. and old dude said it on purpose. everyone say stuff like that on purpose. i’m used to it now. so i say i’m gonna be a lawyer – not i wanna be a lawyer – and that made dude happy, he said, cuz he was a lawyer before he retired. now his son’s a lawyer. he said come by in ten years cuz his son could use a few good men like me around. i said yessir. i knew if i was ever in a law building they’d think i was lookin for a mop.

after food the newspaper took lots of pictures. we had to stand next to ‘charitable donors’ or whatever and smile. i hate that. my teeth are all messed up cause i ate a two by four a while back and so i try to smile with my lips closed, but Dr Sydney like ‘come on jack, smile’ and i thought probly nobody will see this anyway and i gotta do what Dr Sydney says to ever get out so. hated it, tho. and all cuz of rich folk. rich folk come round once a year i guess and we suppose to make them feel like they doin good. BS. hope they all die in y2k.

#4

Narrative section from that same piece. I swear that place was toxic, like everyone came out worse than when they went in.

There was arranged on the door to the cafeteria a spectrum of laminate faces, the color and expression of which corresponded to some quantifiable amount of happiness from ‘one’ to ‘ten’, and as we entered the room each day we were made to point to the face which most accurately reflected our mood. Most days, I pointed to six. To point any lower was to invite questions about your day, your thoughts, your mood – questions which might earn you points for being forthcoming and honest, maybe, but which never seemed to me as beneficial in the long-run as consistently representing low-level contentedness. Of course, the higher numbers weren’t much better: a finger toward the more effusive faces would very often pique the interest of the counselors, who would not be out of place in wondering how about one experiences a “nine day” while locked in an eighty-degree, fluorescent-lit room full of clipboards and social workers. This, too, was behavior which could send up alarm bells.

I pointed to six.

Dr Sydney led the group to a cluster of plastic foldout chairs arranged around an A/V tray supporting a respectable name-brand TV. She told us we would be watching a short film before breaking off into group work. I noticed there were only boys in the room. I asked Dr Sydney what happened to the girls. She said they were having their own discussion in another room and we would merge groups later. I thought that was suspicious but didn’t say anything. I nodded and thought the words ‘polite’ and ‘of course.’ I hoped the words would come from my face and she would see them.

Dr Sydney turned off the lights and pushed the tape into the VCR. There was a pretty high school girl and a guy with a letter jacket. The girl kind of looked like an actress that was hot but I couldn’t remember her name. The girl was trying to get with the football guy but he didn’t seem to notice her, at least that’s what she told her best friend. Her friend said she should dress sexier and then he’d definitely notice her. So the girl dressed in some slutty clothes and the football guy asked her on a date. The girl was very happy and had fun on the date. They went to a fair. He did the game where you shoot a pellet gun at targets and got a bull’s-eye. She looked impressed. Somebody in our group went hoooo! and somebody else went shhhhh! and Dr Sydney gave a look. After the fair, the guy drove to Lookout Hill or some place where you make out. The girl was really excited and they made out. Then the guy stuck his hand up her skirt and she said she didn’t want to go that far on a first date. The guy said he couldn’t help himself, she was so beautiful, and he kept doing stuff. The girl said not tonight but he kept going. She kept trying to stop him. He was like you know you want it because she was dressed sexy. Then he got frustrated and just held her down and choked her and hit her and raped her for like five minutes. I looked at Dr Sydney but she just kept looking at the screen.

After the video ended, Dr Sydney turned on the lights and stood next to the television. “So what was the message here?”

I waited until it was obvious nobody else would raise their hand, to that moment before she would be forced to call on someone, whereupon I could lift my arm in faux-reluctance and provide comfort to my fellow patients who, ideally, in their relief at having dodged that bullet, might overlook my psychiatric Uncle Tom-ing – my willingness to cooperate. Better if Dr Sydney, too, saw some reluctance when I answered, that she might attribute my initiative to her own manipulations: evidence not of obsequiousness, but of progress. These were the games we played. These were my concerns.

“I think like,” I said, “the message is don’t rape. That rape is wrong.”

Dr Sydney cut in. “But what if…”

And I cut back in. “Nope,” I said. “Ain’t nuthin that makes rape okay.” I knew this was the right answer, but Dr Sydney wasn’t giving me credit. She was still looking around like this was open to debate.

“So does everyone here agree with Jack?”

A voice spoke up from behind my chair. “Yeah okay, so I know a rape not right, yeah, but you got to see it – that it part her fault for doin what she did, what she know she was doin to him. It was part her fault for all that – not all but part her fault. I mean she talk to her friend, she schemey, she know she have a plan. Like girl do. Not just man to blame. She deserve some.”

“Naw man, see that’s that thing.” Look at this sap, I thought, imma bout to blast this one outta the park. “There ain’t nuthin you can do to deserve a rape. Nuthin. Ain’t possible. There’s no thing you can do where rape is like, the appropriate response; where you can look at the victim and be like ‘oh yeah they deserved that rape.’ Nawamsayin? That’s like sayin a murder victim deserved to be murdered.”

“Yeah,” said the voice, “but sometime folk do deserve to get a murder.”

“Oh, shit.”

“NawAMsayin?”

I said, “Yeah, no, that’s a real good point.”

But Dr Sydney said it wasn’t.

#5

From a later segment of Hunting for Religion. It’s actually a three/four part story that I’d really like to tell some day.

“You can’t just explore religion,” he says. “You’re born with one and that’s it, that’s the one you get. It’s like your dick.”

“Nobody worships my dick.”

“No, I mean—I mean the fact that you’re born with it and maybe it’s not the best, but it’s not something you can really change, so you eventually just come to grips with what you’ve got because wishing you had a different one just leads to frustration, you know?”

“So you’re telling me I can’t convert because you’re unhappy with your dick?” That seemed to me a bit unfair.

The woman in the kimono returns with a collection of pamphlets and we kneel in front of a large wooden altar, in front of a trio of concrete statues that have been painted to resemble gilding. She covers her face with an Akomeogi fan, “for reverence to the Great Teachers.” She is not even vaguely Asian, and her Appalachian drawl crawls up into all her Chinese words and wrecks them in a way that makes me fall in love. The chopsticks in her hair—she’s trying so hard.

“Confucius, who shows us virtue…”

“Buddha, who guides us to enlightenment…”

“Lao Tzu, who reveals the Way…”

Brandon is visibly uncomfortable. He kneels at the altar but doesn’t look at the woman or the statues; he doesn’t want the Virgin Mary to get the wrong idea about all this. His belief system requires him to remain constantly vigilant against sources of possible damnation. Salvation is a plate that must be constantly balanced and spun.

As a child, this paranoia developed into a compulsion that became theologically self-defeating. His id would betray him if left unattended: in basketball, for example, he might declare, “I bet my soul I’ll hit this jumper,” and then, before the ball hit the rim, scream “I don’t mean it!” His explanation for this behavior was always just Jesuit school, and apparently it was a common enough occurrence that none of his peers found it strange.

#6

Later, in another section: 

The mosque has been burned out, and looks as though it’s been that way for a while. Just a blackened husk in a parking lot cracked and choked with weeds.

I say, “This is depressing,” and Brandon takes pictures with his cell phone. He lays on the asphalt to get different angles.

He says, “Almost makes ya want to convert to Islam just to spite whoever did this, right?”

And then, quietly, “I take it back.”

#7

Maybe the first thing I ever wrote. The story includes an overview of the many infestations of our old, dilapidated house.

The fly infestation brought with it an army of opportunistic spiders which buried our backyard in thick, translucent webs. We had a common enemy; we should have been friends. I suppose we almost were. Jacob and I would sit at the window and watch the webs spasm with every kill. We developed favorites, oooh!-ed and damn!-ed like at a football game. Jacob said we should name some of them, but I said that was David Sedaris.

He said, which one? The banana spider?

I said, no, the act of naming spiders was kind of made famous by—

He said, because that one’s a real motherfucker.

Eventually, the backyard overpopulated. Newer spiders were forced into the ceiling and the walls and my shoes. I got bit twice, the same place on top of each foot, and the skin melted into oozing, dime-sized pits. I asked Jacob if foot scars were cool. He said stigmata was cooler, and that I should get my palms bit, too. He had this idea like maybe Catholics would pay five dollars a piece to touch me, but then someone lent us a lawnmower and we forgot all about it. 

#8:

Notes, not yet turned into prose, detailing the whereabouts and monologues of a handful of people on a particular Bastille Day.

CECILIA gets a text but doesn’t recognize the number, which is weird. She’s called wrong numbers before, but never texted one, as far as she knows. It’s a weird text. She celebrates the day at Chez Pierre in Tallahassee, Florida, like she has every summer since the Study Abroad semester that got her into it. Her husband keeps his elbows off the table, rests his forearms easily against the edge. She loves his forearms—loves the width of them. It was one of the first things she noticed about him other than his smile. Movie-star white smile and perfect, like him, like finally someone who’s actually a really good person ends up with a really good body.

She knows the Kobé beef here is overrated. You can’t even get real Kobé beef here in America, she says, it’s like a trade issue. She orders the duck but doesn’t remember how it was prepared. She’s gotten the duck for years but still doesn’t know the exact ingredients there. She could look online but whatever. After dinner she goes to Bullwinkle Saloon. It’s famous for carding and for selling Bullwinkle Cards which are like two hundred dollars or something, she says, but then you can drink all you want unlimited for the rest of the semester. She doesn’t have one of those but it really draws in a lot of students, and so despite carding it’s constantly full of juniors and seniors and townies. Tonight is no exception. She laughs with her husband at how crazy it all is, this tradition of hers, and the trucker hats and the watery drinks and the awful band and the girl crying and texting in the corner.

She shouts Woooooo! Bastille Day! with greater frequency as the night pushes forward.

LARA is on The Fly in New Orleans. She is drinking OCTANE 180 from the drive-thru daiquiri spot on Carrolton and Saint Charles. She’s pretty buzzed and so are her friends: a bunch of folks from the law review at Tulane. Law Review is like the prestigious writing club for the biggest nerds at a law school. You have to either be very good at writing memos and opinions and legal Bluebook-style research and shit or, she adds with noticeable disdain, just be a total fucking gunner and finish exams with one of the top five grades, which you have very little control over since you can study all year for an exam and get a B+ and then not study at all and get an A+ depending on where your paper lands when the professor tosses it down a staircase to ‘grade’ them. Her friends basically agree. One guy can barely keep his eyes open. Sprawled out on the bare grass, he is baked in his entirety. When she receives a text, she shakes her head and her drawl flies in from Appalachia: what an asshole.

ARIA is putting on heels. She loves that she can wear heels with him. She is almost six foot one without shoes on. With shoes, she’s a giant. Lanky like a volleyball girl but with an ass like a Colombian. Like she needs more attention, she says, but whatever, he likes it; she does it for him. She checks her phone and sticks her tongue out. Blegh.

She thinks back to a point in her past. Her apartment is better now. Her boyfriend is better now. Her work is better now. A party photographer asks her to smile, so she does. Her boyfriend asks for the web address. He pulls her onto the dance floor. They are almost all tall as they are drunk, but they’re both good dancers. Which is good, she thinks, since everyone is always looking at them. But then it kind of doesn’t matter because it’s dancing, whatever. Actually, maybe she’d love him more if he didn’t know how to dance and tried anyway — if he was just that confident and perfect. She pitches up her voice a little, like she does whenever she drinks too much. She says everything is perfect and agrees with his kiss.

#9

On the value of phone privacy, or why I was so terrible talking on the phone — how those muscles had atrophied or maybe just never quite developed properly. It certainly contributed, along with the early exposure to vocab books and internet roleplay (lol), to my preference for writing letters and text messaging. Anyway, this is just the opening to a 10,000 word piece about sexism and racism in a Southern workplace.

I suppose another reason I like messaging you is that, in my house, every phone call is a performance. This place is built like a bunker: four thick stone walls held in place by an immovable foundation and a singular, flat slab of roof. Hurricanes are meaningless; in a nuclear war, I imagine I’d feel safe behind the protective lead of our home’s paint.  The place is impenetrable to everything except sound, which reflects and amplifies off the terrazzo floors and through the misaligned doors. A phone conversation spoken, quite literally, into the furthest stone corner of the house will be heard with resounding clarity by someone standing at the front door; to whisper is to reduce your audience to only those in the laundry room, the bathroom, the next bedroom, the living room. I can remember my mother cooking breakfast and hearing my brother, on the phone in his room with the door closed, saying the word “damn.” She banged on the door and stood there, arms crossed, letting the eggs burn and smoke. She gave him a furious, violent lecture on how he was a role model, goddamnit, and if anyone from the church had been visiting for breakfast she would have been humiliated. Is that what he wanted? To humiliate his mother?

Cell phones were a godsend, even if we couldn’t afford ours until long after they were popular. When my brother or I had to make a call, we would fabricate errands that needed running and friends’ homes that we needed to stop by. I would drive to a nearby baseball field and park under a tree, open the windows to let the breeze in, then chat on my phone. It wasn’t that we were doing anything wrong; we weren’t setting up drug deals or coordinating raging underage parties or calling phone-sex lines, we just wanted to be able to say words, SAY ANYTHING, whatever stupid words we wanted, without our first thought being on how they would sound in the next room. I liked being able to focus entirely on the person at the other end, at being able to just relax into a conversation, and being able to laugh without feeling eyes slide in my direction. Even college provided better insulation: most everything other than the creaking of metal bed frames was kept trapped in your room by the unfeeling cinderblocks and solid airlock doors.

#10

More from the body of the piece. On one of my coworkers. True story: my first job was answering phones, and, because it was the South, a huge number of people didn’t much like being called late at night by some “faggotty-ass sounding college queer.” It’s worth noting that I don’t have a lisp. And I’m not gay. I actually have a very low, almost monotone voice. I was getting this shit mostly because if you’re a drunk redneck and the motion sensor at the liquor store is wailing all hell, you sure as fuck don’t want to hear some well-spoken, composed, multi-syllabic student casually suggesting you get off your wife and drive the truck 30 miles into town in the pitch black to shut off an alarm that the damn rat probably triggered. 

And so the manager suggested I just do my Southern accent. Don’t hold back. Sound more white trash, not less. So I did. And I ended up being the employee with the highest customer satisfaction. Being a gold ‘ole boy with the clients was exactly what they wanted, and the more I emphasized with yanow dat shit and mumbled, the more they were okay with whatever I said — and whenever I said it! And I wasn’t even an Appalachian accent, I’ve been straight swamp lowland forever. Didn’t matter. It was enough. The downside, however, was that to this day if someone starts talking to me with a Southern accent, I will uncontrollably switch over into my own. Just like I used to on the phones. 

Anyway, the excerpt:

Charlie blew air through his teeth and waved off my concern. “Oh, it ain’t shit. Just Kelly needin to know everything bout everybody. Girl’s got a big mouth,” he threw himself back down into his chair and rolled over to my side of the divider. “Which is good, I mean, for her, ‘cause it’s the only way she’d be able to fit all those black dicks in there.” He laughed and pounded the table before smacking my keyboard with his palm to wake the machine. “Nawww, I’m kiddin man. She never been fucked. No shit. Just a giant, and I mean literally a giant, fat giant virgin. At age 48 or whatever, although when they look like that who can tell? She could be 80.” He turned and looked me over for a long, uncomfortable moment. “Youer been fucked, Jack?”

 “In more ways than one.” I said, and that got a laugh from him. He pounded the desk with his fist and when the vibration knocked over one of the mice (that were never used) he backhanded it into the wall like an actual vermin and leaned into me, putting a hand on my shoulder.

 “I like your fuckin style, man.”

 We developed an quick rapport, so much so in fact, that when I asked him on our next shift if he was high right now he told me outright that he was. Superhigh, actually, and he laughed to himself. But when the phone rang he answered and handled the account from muscle memory. The client couldn’t hardly tell. I wondered if I would ever be that good and he told me that everyone gets that good, even the fucking retards that work here. It was encouraging, because most of the time I didn’t consider myself to be a fucking retard.

I had read on some business web site that you should ask the more experienced employees for advice and tips when starting a new job, and so I did. What he told me was that, “Alright, listen, this is the best job you’ll ever have. I know this is your first job or whatever, but jobs are fucking terrible. This job ain’t terrible. I have a real job. I have kids that just fuckin bleed money away from me. All the money I make at my real job? Goes straight to my whore ex-wife so she can maybe buy my kids cereal and jumbo-packs of Magnum XLs. For her boyfriend, I mean, not the kids. My kids aren’t fucking wearing Magnum XLs for fucks sakes. Not yet, at least.

“Anyway, this is my life.This is it. And you know what I do at my job? Bullshit. Actual bullshit in the projects and shit. Every day I wake up and ask myself what I would have to do to get fired. But I don’t. I go to work, because my kids need cereal and my whore ex-wife needs to get it in every fucking hole, apparently. That’s my day. So I come here, I sit back and read some books or watch DVDs, make a little spending money, and nobody gives a fuck. I’ve been here twelve years and I’ve never seen anyone fired. There was a college kid once who conned the company out of like seventeen thousand dollars. They put him on a work program until he earned it back – wasn’t even fired! Especially on this shift, this evening shift, when the entire office is empty? You can’t fuck up enough.“

I thought they might have been the words of a man rapidly approaching middle-age, trying his best to look hip for the college crowd. I didn’t know at the time that he was completely right. That he couldn’t have cared less about what I thought. “You know how you can tell if a woman is right for fuckin?” he asked. “That old rule. Half your age plus zero.” Charlie was who he was and wouldn’t never apologize for nothing.

#11

I took a flier and submitted a piece of fiction-but-not-really (Jonathan Ames-style) to PANK. It was a bit optimistic. PANK is undoubtedly, to my mind, the best online literature source on the internet. I’d rather be published in PANK than the Paris Review. In terms of literary journals, I can’t think of one more relevant and important at this time. It’s submissions number is more than most other ‘big-deal’ literary magazines’ readerships. It’s a behemoth. Everyone should be reading it every month. It’s edited by Roxane Gay, who is like the Queen Bee of the current Alt Lit scene, and, really, I can’t say enough for the journal.

This piece had to do with sexual desensitization — the issue of sexy things slowly losing their adrenaline-producing capacity and how, for that type of person, the constant need for the next big thing must eventually hit a plateau.

Baptists love the fence, love the medieval kitsch: the mouthfeel of stocks. Hang kids from the chain link; tan the damnation and let the righteous Southern sun sweat sin from the tempted. No talking. Never water. Both hands on the fence behind you. Listen:

            What’d he do?

            Dunno. Something.

            Better kids line the blacktop and pick their teams.

            Think he gon’ get prayed on?

            Shoot, when they gonna stop prayin’ on him?

The short and the unpopular take the shade of an overhang and pretend they didn’t much want to get picked anyhow. They try to ignore the game, look past it to the fence, see what gossip got strung up today. The fence gets the bad ones. The fence gets the attention—what’s supposed to be shame.

Y’know from last time, what it was?

Whassat?

Kissin. Said he was kissin but Pastor pulled him outta lunch, too, so how much you wanna bet it was more than kissin?

I scratch my nuts through my pants. 

#12

Later on in that piece, after things have progressed,

Carbon steel knife in the refrigerator. Sub in the shower. Denatured alcohol bottle beside the box of latex gloves beside Community: Season 1 on DVD beside my computer. Dan Harmon is drunk on the commentary track, I think. Sub comes out of shower. I say, “that was too quick,” and “get back in there and really scrub, for real, safe sane and consensual, asshole. As in, safe. Come on.”

Sub goes back into shower. I watch some of the blooper reel. When Sub comes out of the shower again, I realize I’m disappointed about being unable to finish the blooper reel. Donald Glover is a brilliant improviser. I mentally rehearse the scene. My adrenal glands are set to DMV.

I say, “I’m thinking of maybe just becoming a eunuch.”

            Sub says, “Shit, that’s pretty edge.”

And I think that’s enough for tonight. These aren’t even the twelve outlined and mostly ready articles I mentioned before; these are older bits and pieces of stuff I stopped working on months ago, stuff I might consider fleshing out and publishing if things work out for me — if I can find that job out there in the city which allows me to pay that last month of rent. God, I want it so badly. I want to shop for groceries without shame. I’ve still never done that. I always feel like I’m doing something bad. Wrong. Spending money I can’t afford to spend. My mother used to really get it if she spent too much money at the grocery store. I guess it rubbed off on me. I don’t know. I just want groceries. Rent. To come home after a day’s work with reliable income and the knowledge that everything is going to be fine, just knowing that I can open my laptop and start writing without it feeling like a diversion, like an escape, like something which will directly contribute to my crying stomach three weeks down the road, when the last dollar turned into the last can of cold chili. 

I prayed the other night. Told God that if he just finds me a job somewhere, I can promise I won’t become one of those people whining about the speed of their iPhone, or paying too much for a cab to Williamsburg only to discover the opening was tomorrow, or making passive aggressive facebook posts about the coworker who went to SCAD instead of Parsons and insists her New Media platform gets more relevant pageviews or whatever. 

I’d just be me, I told God.

Only happy.

Anonymous asked: what can a girl do if she's got a crush on you?

Reexamine her life. 

Anonymous asked: What do you do when you have insomnia?

Stay awake.

Anonymous asked: Do you have any advice for young, aspiring writers?

Go to Chelsea Fagan for advice.

Anonymous asked: Hey, Jack. Three Questions: (1) How much of your writing goes unpublished? (2) Before you sit down to write something do you usually intend for it to be for published, or is the process more organic? (3) Do you floss?

1) Depends on the metric. On a page by page level, probably 50% of my work is rejected (or accepted, if you want to be Glass Half Full). But this is mostly because Stephanie Georgopulos inexplicably likes me and publishes a relatively large amount of of my three-page articles for Thought Catalog. The stuff that doesn’t fit (via size or theme) on Thought Catalog — like a 35 page exploration of trailer park poverty — gets submitted to other places. Places which almost immediately reject my work. But hey, on a story by story metric, 95% of my stories get published! For money! (this interpretation is what I tell my grandfather)

2. Whenever I sit down to write (I actually lie down to write, since I don’t own a chair. And that’s not meant like “I don’t own a TV” — I just haven’t found a chair that I can sit in, on account of my back, for longer than five minutes or so), I intend for it to be published. I can have a conversation with myself without the aid of Microsoft Word. If I’m typing into a computer, it’s generally because I want to communicate something to a Real Live Human somewhere.

3) As a young man, I took a two by four to the mouth and that ruined my teeth forever. I brush twice a day but we’re seriously at a Deck Chairs on the Titanic-level here.

Anonymous asked: You should mimic Fight Club's narrated, "I am Jack's _____,"in an article about what it's like to feel the chronic pain from your.... raging bile duct? colon? broken heart? I guess the body part doesn't matter, as you insist it doesn't, but I want to know what it's like to never be physically painless. And you are so adept at finding the right words to properly evoke understanding and empathy. Please? Pretty please? -- a loyal reader

I assure you, you do not want to know what it’s like to never be physically painless.

fl0werviolence asked: I just wanted to let you know that I love your writing. It's very inspiring to me.

That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone describe my writing as “inspiring” but cool, that’s nice of you to say.

Anonymous asked: Mr Jack Cazir, nothing on TC soon? (and by soon, I mean very very very soon, please?)

I spent a lot of time working on a particularly huge, multi-part piece, and then a 900 word article on the same topic got published the day before mine, rendering mine at best redundant and at worst irrelevant.

So after putting in all that effort I felt sort of burnt out, which is why I haven’t written anything since. There’s no malice there — it was just bad luck — but that bad luck has been particularly demotivating.

Sorry.

It’s been a rough few days. I haven’t been checking my email much. I’ve been kind of struggling through the loss of my best friend and unemployment and several health problems which led to a recent hospital visit. So today I’m lying in bed and going through my email and, like it’s been targetted to reach me at my most low, I find this:

“[tc writer]’s writing suuuuuuucks, [they] do the opposite of writing. [they’re] not trying to write, [they’re] like, auditioning to be a guest-host on Bravo or something”

“[another tc writer] has the exactly the horrible old job that I had that made me want to puke.  It’s where [they] was born to be.”

And because that just seems mean, I engage. Which is a mistake. I just…can’t stand people being so needlessly cruel. So I say that one man’s dead end job can be a dream come true for someone else. Different fits. That it would be the happiest day of my life — I’d be the most successful person in the history of my entire family — if I could pull off some of the credits both current and former Thought Catalog writers have pulled off. That being unemployed has really taken it’s toll on me and so I can’t join in, like he apparently expects me to, in mocking writers for trying to make a career out their writing. I thought I was being honest and open and vulnerable but real and reasonable.

This was evidently not what he was looking for.

“Suck it up…if you want a job in NYC, you can get one. I had the same shitty job that [TC writer] has, and it was worse than having just a normal office job. It was bad because I still cared about the writing, and so was bad at it, but [TC writer] doesn’t care, so [they’re] good at it, which anyway is how I got in trouble with the job. Being a waiter and writing what I wanted on the side would have been better.”

I said it was hard to get a job for me and I looked up to that writer for being able to support themselves from it. They actually had what seemed to me to be a dream job. That at night, I confided, I do in fact dream about one day having a job like that, and I have nightmares about being unable to pay rent and forced into homelessness again. I have nightmares about freezing on a park bench again. I thought maybe my honesty here would, I dunno, make things better.

“I think you’re an ass…what the hell is your probs, dick?”

Huh? I said I didn’t understand. I just wanted to explain that even if a job isn’t right for one person it might be nice or, jeez, even life-saving for another. Sorry, but, you know, I kind of responded with a lot of honesty and I’m a little vulnerable now so

“Decide if you want to be sad, or if you want to be an overbearing dick.”

“I’m sorry that you’re poor.  I’m poor.  It doesn’t give me free reign to say awful stuff.  If you want to be Mr. Writer Dick, then do that, but you combine it with wanting empathy…”

“Trust me, my girlfriend is freaking terrified of you, for instance.”

etc etc etc

I have never met this person in my life. I’ve certainly never met his girlfriend. I don’t see a whole lot of cruelty or hate in my writing, but apparently at least one person does, and has taken offense. Or has taken offense at my refusing to take shots at others for pursuing their dreams? I don’t know. I really have no idea. Just that this hurt me more than normal.

Thing is, I try to be nice to everyone I meet, and I try to…I don’t know, be honest and thus, since it often comes with honesty, vulnerable both in my writing and in life. I guess I think this will let me connect better with people. I guess I think that if people were just honest and kind to each other the world would be nicer. 

But I suppose that isn’t the way things are. In person, people seem willing to smile and be nice to each other. They seem to be happy for each other’s successes and the creative work they sweat to produce. They seem appreciative of each other’s candor; they order each other drinks and give compliments and understand that a certain amount of a person’s life, their soul, if you will, has to be stripped away and exposed to the world to produce this kind of nonfiction, and so they respect the basic human dignity of these writers by not walking right up to them and twisting these vulnerabilities into cruelty purely for the purpose of hurting them — of cashing in on some petty jealousy or unspecified distaste. In person, this sort of behavior would be considered disgusting. Psychopathic.

But for some reason it seems like it’s the norm online. Something we’ve decided to accept. This incessant shoot to kill / fuck everyone attitude; the ability to disassociate the names on bylines from any sense of humanity. The idea that life is zero-sum, and any occurrence which doesn’t appeal directly to you is a personal fucking affront, as if you’ve suddenly been robbed of something. If Ryan O’Connell writes about panic attacks in New York City and you’re sitting in a comfy chair in Seattle, it’s not acceptable to take a moment to contemplate a life and world different from your own — this very personal experience he has decided to share with you — no, instead, it seems the gut reaction of so many people is to immediately and eternally affix a note to the piece saying that zzzz…..i dont know if u know this ‘ryan’ but there is world that exists outside nyc and also outside YOUR HEAD. who decided to publish this???

The urge is to attempt to actually harm a person merely because what they wrote about was not targeted directly toward your pleasure. And it is harm. Social rejection such as the above, in text form or spoken word, activates the same parts of the brain that process physical pain. This is because, in the earlier days of human development, rejection of this sort indicated a disconnect from the greater tribe and thus an inevitable but slow starving death apart from the tribe wherein your genes disappeared from the pool of humanity forever. So it’s supposed to hurt. Whether Ryan O’Connell claims he’s no longer bothered by these responses or not is irrelevant when it comes to the original intent. When you decided to take this action, you were acting to cause harm; which is bad enough, but the fact that it came instinctively, as an instant gut reaction, is disgusting. And this is apparently our norm as humans consuming art online.

It’s apparently also socially acceptable, if Chelsea Fagan parlays a fun little piece at Thought Catalog about dating Disney Princes into a fun little piece at Grantland about dating celebrities, to take a shot at her, too — maybe while eating a salad at your computer during your lunch break. You wouldn’t walk up to her on the subway and start shouting obscenities — in fact, the cops would probably drag you away — but it seems it’s totally okay to post that someone needs to stick a patriarchal dick in that mouth so she’ll stop polluting the net with regressive anti-woman hate speech. That sort of harm is apparently totally okay if you’re in front of a computer! It’s not at all psychopathic behavior, willful infliction of physiological pain, as long as you’re on a Macbook! Go ahead, pile on with everyone else! Make it a communal effort! She spent her Tuesday writing a piece about how balloons remind her of something weird that happened, rather than creating the Next Great American Novel, ergo we can permanently affix to her reflections a note indicating that we can’t wait until your boyfriend finds someone more talented and less full of themselves and still go home feeling like a good person. We can still write on our OKCupid profiles that we are caring, considerate, and full of love.

Gaby Dunn gets a spot at the New York Times after working her ass off, and if we ever meet her we will say congrats, but then we’ll go home and complain to every single person on our contact list about how someone who occasionally writes for an online magazine that occasionally sources articles from writers that don’t 100% cater to the idiosyncrasies of our life in particular has found a job and since you wanted that job this is indicative of a moral failing on Gaby’s part and an act of open warfare against you. Or maybe you aren’t even a journalist, but the fact that Gaby is a journalist and you aren’t and she had something good happen to her means you should be upset. Because the online world is zero-sum. And this is a win for journalists and not for you. And everything that isn’t pro-you is anti-you and deserves your contempt. Zero-sum.

I don’t know. I’m just exhausted. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of people. I can’t afford to go out too much because New York is expensive, because my best friend dies and I’m mourning, because I’m sick and can’t leave the bed, whatever the reason du jour, and so I spend too much time online. I spend too much time exposed to these legitimately psychopathic norms. I don’t see the social silver lining that comes with face to face interaction, just the evident roiling scorn people seem to have for each other. For anyone not themselves. For people who take time out of their day to attempt to entertain you. For people bearing their humanity while trying to tell stories. For people daring to attempt to make you laugh. With the audacity to be introspective about the human condition or the search for common ground. At best, these people are Creators of Art. At worst, they’re just some folks who posted words on a webpage nobody made you connect to. Either way, people get behind a computer and decide this is a behavior that must be punished. Readers decide these people deserve harm.

And they feel nothing.

The feeling comes from the sick guy in bed in Brooklyn who refused to join in. Who decided when he wrote about loneliness, or manners, or the South, or how the last week left him kind of vulnerable and sensitive — who decided when his gut reaction toward the work and success of others was joy — that he wasn’t part of the angry mob, but a target. 

And that feeling is sadness.

Pretty, pretty fucking low and sad.

[note: leaving out the email author name cause i don’t wish hate or embarrassment even on people who heap it on others. and the tc author names because i don’t want those comments to actually hurt someone. there’s enough mean things about tc people out there that we certainly don’t need to amplify them to specific individuals]