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WHAT I REALLY MEAN WHEN I SAY I’VE BEEN DOOMSCROLLING by Benjamin Ray Allee

December 4, 2024

We presumed the forbidden knowledge would be some eldritch thing. The death-in-thought, a word for God. A space at the universal end we could not reach. An unthinkable color. A demon in our brother.Horror of all horrors, it is none of these. The secret that obliterates the mind, the antidivinity, it is not great, it is not God, it is not ultimate.Instead, swiping up the cosmic edge, I find:A momma making breakfast. Using more eggs than I would’ve thought, apron on, divulging drama from the clothing store and I do not want to know—An athlete dancing. Sultry eyes for all who sees he sways and lets a rhythm catch him wild by the neck, tear my eyes away—A farmer mourning loss of calf. Seven hundred miles away and I can see his whiskers wet with loss, the space between proclaims heat-death—A toddler learning how to eat. How could I see it, know her name, not picture mandalic lives for her, some pruned by Murphy’s shears—Soothsayer claiming madness for the world. Espousing foolish notions that the secret is a word, a craft, a harbinger, a ghostly God whose visage is a killswitch, voice atomic bomb, a basilisk thought-virus unending and unstoppable, an elder mind we would commune with, be demanded by, and kneel to as we cry—No.There is a plum cut this evening, sweet trickle on the counter for a child I’ll never meet, and I do not want to know that.There is a meal, device, a ritual taken in my backyard by neighbors opening their folds to me look away, look away, look away—There is a quiet dance we’re sharing that once belonged to the space beneath our eyes.I have seen it. I have found the killing thought.

KEVIN CHESSER HAS A HEADACHE: AN INTERVIEW WITH A POET WHILE WATCHING AN ORIOLES GAME by Dalton Monk

December 3, 2024

Kevin Chesser lives above a candy shop in Thomas, West Virginia, which is a historical coal mining and railroad town with a population of less than six-hundred people. I met Kevin almost a year ago when he came to Huntington to read from his poetry collection, Relief of My Symptoms, at a reading series I host called Ham’s House. Kevin read his poems, played the banjo, and made people laugh. I’ve thought of him often since the reading, and so have others who were in the crowd—they’ve asked me about him. He has that effect on people. He makes them feel special.We met at his apartment as the cool, end-of-summer evening swept over Tucker County. He had just gotten off a shift at the Invisible Art Gallery and looked just as sprightly as he had when I’d first met him. His apartment was dimly lit and decorated with nostalgic relics: framed drawings of Garfield and Charlie Brown, childhood photos stuck to the fridge. On his bookshelf were multiple VHS copies of Twister. His partner, Carina, shook my hand and exuded a similar nirvana as Kevin. He offered me a cup of tea, which I took, and then we sat down in his living room while, on the TV, the Orioles played the Tigers. Dalton Monk: Did you grow up playing baseball?Kevin Chesser: I played baseball until I was about thirteen. I was not… I’m not very athletic. When the kids started hitting their growth spurts, I didn’t hit a growth spurt. That’s when I went to my dad and was like, “I’m not doing this anymore. These kids are seven feet tall and two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds.”DM: Did you grow up in Thomas? KC: No, I grew up in southern Maryland. I lived in Elkins [WV] for like fifteen years before I moved up here. I went to school there and stayed.DM: How old were you when you moved to Elkins?KC: Eighteen. I moved up here [Thomas] in 2020. Kind of at the height of COVID.DM: The last time I saw you, you said you see the same people every day. Who are those people?KC: Well, I see my coworkers. I see my downstairs neighbor, which she’s only here half the time. I see my next-door neighbor out walking her dog. She’s usually out walking her dog at the same time I’m usually out walking. I like to walk after dinner every night because I have trouble sleeping…I see a little bit of everybody. Honestly, I run into a lot of people in the alley back there [points in the area behind main street]. Back there is where a lot of people live in these buildings, and the alley is where they actually hang. It’s actually really nice on a walk. I can come across four or five different pockets of people out chilling. Because there’s that big retaining wall over there it kind of makes it feel like you’re in a place that’s separate from town, like it’s kind of secreted away. So, that’s nice. That’s nice right there.DM: In what ways does this town influence your work?KC: I first started coming up here to do readings and shows probably around 2016 and started spending more time here in 2018 or 2019. There’s a really dense concentration of different kinds of artists who live here because this place has become a magnet for all kinds, like transplants and tourists. People up here have always just been really encouraging of stuff that I do. I think that if you’re a local and you live here and you know everybody—if you approach somebody who has one of these spaces here and say, “I have an idea for this,” they will likely give some time and energy to help you with it. If they recognize your face, if they know you, they’re like, yeah. It’s easy to make shit happen. That environment is really good for me. Once you get your boots on the ground here, you get to know people pretty quick. It’s not super competitive. There’s a lot of people doing creative stuff, and there’s a lot of support. If you’re a transplant here, you’re probably looking to be somewhere that doesn’t have too many people but feels funky and creative… I find it inspiring for my work. It’s beautiful. I like that there’s a lot of open space where I can walk and not see anybody. There are trails out in Davis that I love to go on—camp 70 trails. There’s a whole lot of boggy sods type terrain. Different times of year there’s amazing colors and it’s all muddy and weird and there’s trails all through it. I love being out in that stuff. It’s good for my brain.DM: As I was reading Relief of My Symptoms I felt that there had to be an influence from David Berman or James Tate. Then I came across “Self-Portrait at 35”, which is dedicated to David Berman. How did you first come upon Berman? Was it through his music or poetry?KC: His music first. Poetry shortly after. I was a big Pavement fan in high school so I sort of knew about Silver Jews. I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Chapel Hill and I went to some awesome record store in Chapel Hill and I got The Natural Bridge by Silver Jews. I put it on and was like, “I don’t even know why I exactly like this so much but I do.” I got really into them and got his [Berman’s] book a couple years after that. I still love his book. I read Actual Air once a year. Very few people—musicians or artists of any kind that I listened to when I was seventeen—have stood the test of time. He’s something to aspire to. The references, the way that he phrases things. That kind of flat humor that runs through everything. I just love it, and I think it’s only gotten better with age. That poster [pointing to a Silver Jews poster on the wall behind him] is from the liner notes of The Natural Bridge. My girlfriend my freshman year of college gave this to me and I’ve had it in every place that I’ve lived since I was eighteen.DM: What’s your favorite song on the album?KC: The first one [“How to Rent a Room”]. I love that the band is really not trying too hard. The production is pretty middling. He’s not an amazing singer. He writes great hooks and melodies. He writes amazing lyrics. It just all kind of like—it just has some magic.DM: Do you read or have you read James Tate?KC: Yeah, I like him a lot. I feel like his older stuff, like the Worshipful Company of Fletchers, that stuff is a little more interesting to me. As he got older, the stuff was always good, but he had really locked into one thing that he was doing. He and Russell Edson were the two guys who kind of taught me how to write a prose poem.DM: Relief of My Symptoms has several poems in which the narrator details a rich interior life—maybe even isolated at times—but there are also poems in which it’s clear the narrator is around others, maybe too often. Tony Paranoia, or Tony P., shows up a few times. Is Tony P. an amalgamation of several people? Is he made up? Is there an actual Tony P.? Tell us about Tony P.KC: Tony P. has like a seed of maybe a couple people who I grew up with. He’s not really based on anything super specific. I came up with his name in the moment. In that poem that’s called “No Mercy” his name kind of popped up out of just working on that. That poem was written well before I had any idea to make that book. So he was already in that poem and as I was putting together the book I realized I should just bring that guy’s name back in so it would be a character. He’s really just there as one of the people that the speaker is speaking to. Most of what I write is first-person, so I will admit to having a lot of one-dimensional creatures orbiting around me. DM: As a reader, I got excited every time Tony P. showed up. He felt like a friend.KC: Yeah. He really doesn’t do very much. He’s in the hospital and he’s in the baseball game and he’s talking about wanting to play the pipes. I realized that that’s what I wanted to do when I was reading Bud Smith. I was reading Double Bird, that collection of stories. They’re not supposed to be super strongly linked, in terms of characters or narrative. But, for example, in multiple stories there’s references to a store called Food Universe. It’s such a great touch, just a really simple way to add some continuity. In order for me to do that with my book, it was just a cosmetic change. I already had that stuff written. That was something that clicked for me as I was going along. I was like, “Well, I’ve got a couple characters that are mentioned by name and since the family stuff comes up over and over again, I’ll give them all the same name and it gives it a little bit of continuity.” But it’s a cosmetic change. I just repeat people’s names a couple times and I love the effect. It’s like a trick.DM: When did you know you had a cohesive collection? Was that the original goal?KC: I just put my balls in my hands and prayed. I didn’t have an editor on it. I had Carina and my friend Séamus Spencer give me some basic notes. I think when I figured out when I was going to have recurring characters and names, I was like, “This can work.” Before, I was putting the manuscript together because I knew I was definitely going to put it out with my friend’s press. My friend Jen Iskow is the one who runs Ghost Palace Press. She’s a designer and visual artist mostly… Oh, oh my god [talking about the homerun just hit on TV]. And he caught it in his hat! This bullpen guy, when guys hit homeruns into the bullpen, he’s caught about four of them in his hat. This is a momentum shift that we’re seeing happening on TV right now. They have not been scoring like this in two months... Sorry. I don’t even remember what I was talking about… I knew I was going to do the book. I went through about maybe three years worth of whatever I had and I found the stuff that seemed like it was somewhere in the same ballpark, as far as tone and the shape. It ended up being more prose than anything. I knew I had a cohesive thing because I said, “This is about as cohesive as it’s going to get.” Because we had already planned the party to release it and it’s got to go to press at some point. I need some kind of external pressure to finish something like that. I’m kind of bad about letting go of it. DM: In addition to writing poetry, you make music under the name Wizard Clipp. What got you into playing music?KC: I started playing guitar when I was ten. We had my mom’s old Epiphone laying around. I really loved music at a young age, so I naturally wanted to play around with the guitar. I kind of half-played it all through high school. The guitar is something I’ve never really been good at. Playing five-string banjo is my main thing. I started playing the banjo when I was twenty, living in Elkins. There are a lot of old-time musicians there. I found a really good banjo player to take lessons with. The banjo just made a little more sense for me. Something about the tuning and picking was something my brain could grab a hold of.DM: Everyone loved hearing you play at Ham’s House. We need more Kevin Chessers.KC: A lot of the people I know who are musicians first—almost all of them do a little bit of writing. Maybe not so much the other way around.DM: I’ve seen on Instagram that you’re doing Tarot decks. KC: Not yet. I’ve got a Tarot installation up.DM: And you’re possibly coming out with a Halloween chapbook?KC: We’ll see. I’ve been sort of restless on social media lately just trying to get somebody to gas me up. I’m going to try to put together a reading up here in early November, and my friend Cole Fiscus—who I’m going to do the reading with—he’s going to try to get a chapbook out. And I thought, “Man, I wonder if I should try to slap together a little chapbook.” I was fucking around with those little haunted house haikus and I thought, “I bet I could write a bunch of these.” I did a haiku chapbook one time.DM: Is it important that you always have a project to work on?KC: It’s helpful if I have an idea of a finished product that I’m working towards, but I don’t always get it done. That’s not always a bad thing. That’s the thing that’s cool about living in this town. It has made me a little more focused and constructive because of getting encouragement from people here. Knowing people who have got spaces where you can hang some art on the wall or put on a show... And they’re approachable people who will be like, “Yeah, sure.” It has made it so that I’ve gotten more constructive with finishing stuff. But generally speaking, I feel I’ve always been a little aimless with it. I like doing it and just kind of scratching away at it all the time because it comprises ninety percent of my interests. If I don’t have a project I’m working toward, it doesn’t necessarily keep me from working on stuff. Sometimes I like it better if I don’t have a project.DM: What are you reading right now?KC: I brought these in from my bedroom. [Gestures to a stack of books on the coffee table: a Richard Brautigan anthology which includes Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, and So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away; Small Moods by Shane Kowalski; and Nature, Man and Woman by Alan W. Watts.] I really love all of this [talking about the Richard Brautigan anthology]. I’m almost done with it. I liked it better than the three-pack that has Trout Fishing in America… My friend turned me onto Shane Kowalski. It’s really good. [Picks up Alan Watts book.] I love Taoism and Chinese philosophy so I’m reading this Alan Watts book. DM: What’s next for you?KC: I think we’re going to try to get tarot decks printed. I drew all the cards on 5x7 pieces of mat board. There’s seventy-eight of them. It’s this big wall installation. Earlier this year, I was playing a lot of music and I was feeling like I was getting enough material together to do another record. But I don’t have the money for it. So, right now, I’ve been writing a lot, just trying to build up the biggest heap of poems that I can get. Just trying to generate so I can do another book and maybe send it out to presses with a little wider distribution. I don’t know if that’s worth it or not, but if I came up with a manuscript that I was excited about—especially because I’ve got a better idea of what I want to do in the future—it would be cool to get it further out into the world. But historically I’m kind of bad at that. I love finishing projects and putting a bow on them and polishing them and getting them how I want them. Once they’re out in the world, though, my interest in them really drops off precipitously. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Or maybe not. Poets can relate to that. Maybe musicians can’t. Musicians have to maintain some enthusiasm for their material because performing is so essential to being a musician, whereas being a writer, performing is more of a minor part. You could much more easily write a book and disavow it, but if you’re a musician, you can’t get up on stage and be like, “This stuff sucks.” I’m hoping to have another draft of a manuscript next year. And then I want to see if I can screw up my courage enough to send it out to a bunch of places. They’re all just shots in the dark… which is frustrating. But that’s also what I like about it. I think I like the fact that it’s such a fucking headache. It’s a headache when I’m sitting down to try and focus and then it’s a headache to send out the submissions. And then it’s a headache to try and go back and revise what I’ve written.DM: That should be the title of this interview: Kevin Chesser has a Headache.KC: I actually suffer from chronic headaches… [Now, looking at the game on TV] Corbin Burnes is about to strike you out. Yeah, and that guy’s shaking his head. He just roasted you, you fucking idiot, and you just stood there looking at it. Order Relief of My Symptoms:Ghost Palace PressAmazon(Or send Kevin a DM).

3 MICRO PIECES by Amy DeBellis

December 2, 2024

Yakutsk

Temperature dropping like a dive off a cliff. My lungs full of winter air, clear and sharp as ice. After the airplane and its stale box of other people’s exhalations, each breath is like mainlining oxygen. When I rub my lips together their skin is as dry as the snow beneath my boots. The salt of this morning still furs my tongue. My hands tremble brittle in my coat pockets, and my fingers rub the edge of a ticket, a mint, an obsolete coin. In only a few moments I will put my memories behind me and walk into the taiga. Try to forget your face and its smiling cruelty, the soft malice that always comes with power. Try to forget how you uploaded your consciousness into the cloud and cheated death, how you turned the ouroboros from a snake to a mute circle, a faceless loop: a splotch of ringworm, a spreading bulls-eye rash, a scrawled zero. Try not to wonder, a hundred years after I am dead, how much of this forest too will be gone.The wall of trees yawns before me. No fresh green breast here, no—here is a frozen emerald heart, holding within it no ability to nurture but only to embalm, to write my body like a stone carving, immersing it gemlike in years of snow. I step forward and the trees swallow me. They are tall and green and endless, speaking of everything I have forgotten how to say to you.

Wake

Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky. My mother’s body is as white and long-stemmed as a lily, a flower in its velvet casing. I’m drenched in black like I’m trying to melt into the shadows around the walls. Like I’m trying to camouflage myself from every distant relative—their exhalations sour with coffee, their smiles oily with false sympathy. I think of the last time I saw my mother smile: at the sea, the last place we traveled together. Inside my head I say Mother. The word flutters, dark and silent, on my tongue. I remember the green endlessness of the ocean, how we lay back on the sand and let the sun bleach the water from our bodies. Brine and salt in my mouth. The waves rising, cresting, falling. Time a noose around our necks.

Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill

Ringing in my ears like the seconds after an explosion, except it’s constant and unending, shrill as silver, and there was no explosion. Only days, soft and slow. I try to stand and my body fails me. A collection of diagnoses accumulates like a layer of filth on my skin: mast cell activation, dysmenorrhea, chronic urticaria. I try to stand and my body fails me. Craniocervical instability, hyperacusis, photophobia. My windows are shuttered; the layer on my skin is permanent. Postural orthostatic tachycardia, myalgic encephalomyelitis. The words of my diagnoses grow longer and longer until they might not even be real anymore, just syllables contorting themselves into agonized, impossibly labyrinthine shapes. My body keeps failing me forever, an endless loop of standing up and crashing back down again. My legs grow thin and brittle like matchwood. The ringing in my ears now more like a screaming. Lying in the soundless dark, I picture everyone who’s ever doubted me crowded around my bedside. I imagine them emptied of all the Have you tried and I don’t think and Are you sure, their throats cleared of all words, their esophaguses silent and moist. I imagine seeds sinking into the damp flesh there, weeds sprouting from their mouths, finally blooming into bright fistfuls of flowers: a perfect copy of the garden outside my window, the garden I can no longer see.

LOST HAM OF VIRGINIA by Joseph Young

November 29, 2024

That’s a dog, he said, thumbing a pink eyebrow.No, she answered, that’s a bear.Muzzle’s too long.That’s how they come around here.The creature climbed the far hill, cleaving the dew grass in two halves. It got to the door and pushed in, a clattering of end tables.Bears don’t act that way, he said.Dogs who act that way get taken off.He grabbed her by a hip, turned her around. Her nose was burnt so he kissed it.Like aloe jelly, she said. She pressed his dimple. Bzzt, she said.The bear or dog came out again, a ham in its plastic among its teeth. The dog got to the hill, stumbled, the ham set loose and tumbling down. The bear watched it roll until it hit the creek, a little plosh.Dog’s going to be unhappy, he said.Bear’s going to be pissed, she said.He pressed against her. Thighs, groin, stomach.Everything about you, she said.All about you, he answered.The bear, the dog, was rolling in the creek. It howled. Another world of pleasure in its sound.

EVIL, EVIL, EVIL: CHRIS KELSO’S ‘THE DREGS TRILOGY’ by Matthew Kinlin

November 26, 2024

“They say you can hide from Blackcap if you burn all your dreams.”- Alfie McPherson, Ritual America Chris Kelso’s The Dregs Trilogy (Black Shuck Books, 2020) is a triptych of novellas: Shrapnel Apartments, Unger House Radicals, Ritual America; where each part deepens and troubles its sibling. The book moves backwards and forwards through time and space, from the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a backwoods area near Winnipeg, to Louisiana and a number of other locations; some terrestrial, others interdimensional. Kelso’s trilogy revolves around a series of ritualistic killings. These murders appear to contain their own psychogeography and initially gravitate towards a televised realm called Shrapnel Apartments, inspired by a snuff-movie-cum-art-movement known as Ultra-Realism, before rippling outwards through its grainy unknowable corridors. The victims of these murders are given a voice and often describe their own execution in direct, deadpan fashion. The central victim that is returned to is a young girl called Florence Coffey. Her suffering is recurring and endless. The bodies of these ritualistic killings are delivered to an entity that links the many strands and subplots of the book. The name of this entity is Blackcap. Assisted by another being known as King Misery, their multitudinous appetites flow and feed upon human consciousness. Kelso’s trilogy evokes a watercolour painting called Hands of Fire from American artist, hospital janitor and recluse, Henry Darger, which shows a group of young girls waking from their beds at night. Frightened, they look up as two enormous orange hands descend from the ceiling. Darger’s mythical world-view presents his children of Abbieannia, or the Vivian Girls, fighting against evil Glandelinian overlords, but the hopeful youths are often slain in battle or brutally tortured. Darger is mentioned once in Kelso’s trilogy, in the central novella Unger House Radicals. This story revolves around a young filmmaker Vincent Bittacker who, after falling in love with a serial killer called Brandon Swarthy, moves into the Louisiana house of child murderer Otto Spengler. Unger House becomes a neo-Nazi fort for their burgeoning homosexual relationship and exploration of the artistic practice known as Ultra-Realism: the act of committing murder on film, cinéma vérité taken to its furthest limits. Their initiation into Ultra-Realism involves the killing of a girl known as Janice. Kelso later writes, “The Glandelinian race sought inspiration from Darger’s text and set out to be the scourge of Abbieannia.” Here we have an inversion of Darger’s myth where the radicals of Unger House identify with the monstrous Glandelinian race. Bittacker and Swarthy devour a thousand sources and realign them to intensify their brutality and fascism, extermination dressed up as avant garde. After the murder of Janice, “The sky has a milky hue. Vince realises that he can no longer appreciate the beauty in anything except violence…” He then compares the image of Janice’s half-dissected body with Andy Warhol’s five-hour film Sleep. Warhol is filming his lover John Giorno, “We can see up his nostrils, see the triangular mound of philtrum and septum.” Like a fly crawling across a corpse, the image on the screen offers both a source of voyeuristic pleasure and physical revulsion. Bittacker responds with, “I hate this movie. I hate all Warhol’s movies. Why do I do this to myself?” Why do these men commit unspeakable acts? There’s an ambiguity to their Glandelinian philosophy. As Sartre writes of Genet, his thugs invent an artistry to their savagery: “The criminal dances his crime as the ballerina dances the dagger step.” At first, Bittacker and Swarthy seem to delight in the irony of their position: their so-called Ultra-Realism is deeply performative. They even go on to pronounce, “We wanted to make Unger House the new Grand Guignol.” Evil has become simply vaudeville, a ghostly cabaret of sexual pathology. As Sartre writes, “It is Evil which is a ballet. We now see the matter more clearly: if the world of Evil is only a play of appearances and conventions, it depends on the consciousness of the spectator who contemplates it.” Bittacker and Swarthy have invented an audience for their Nazi snuff pantomime but it soon implodes into jealousy, paranoia and mental collapse.Throughout The Dregs Trilogy, its many killers feed on the mythology of Otto Spengler and a white power, misogynistic band known as King Misery, named after a murderous and malevolent being. However, their voraciousness finds its apex in the cosmic entity of hyperstition called Blackcap. Who is Blackcap? Blackcap is no one and everywhere. Dr Wilson describes him as: “A nocturnal, bat-winged monster exiled to the stars. Appearing as a gelatinous mass extruding razored tentacles to some, and as an itinerant showman to others.” Dr Baker offers, “He looks sort of like a jellyfish. Three-lobed burning eye all flared.” Blackcap weaves his way through all three sections of the book. There is no escape. One of his victims, Lydia Pittmann, explains, “I soon came to realise that if you reject the philosophy of Blackcap and his gang then you wind up here. In the demi-plane.” Orange hands descending from the ceiling. Blackcap is interdimensional and swims through the nightmares of all his accomplices and victims. In Male Fantasies 2: Psychoanalysing the White Terror, Klaus Theweleit writes that the fascist male sees the general population as hybrid, unclean and often animal: “It has a thousand legs, a thousand heads, it can generate a thousand degrees of heat. It can metamorphose into a single creature, many-limbed: rat, snake, dragon.” Blackcap is like an octopus inside the brain. Its fluid nature is feminine and multiple, or as Theweleit conceives, “the belly of the erotic woman menstruating or ‘ruptured’ in childbirth: the Hydra, the head of the Medusa, the Gorgon.” Theweleit argues the fascist male’s central fear is one of disintegration so, “his role is the builder of dams, as killer, exterminator.” Is Blackcap an alien entity from outer space or an unconscious projection? Murderer Beau Carson tells us, “Blackcap doesn’t come from the sky, or the woods for that matter. He comes from somewhere else, down there. In the aquatic arena of the gods.”Lydia Pittmann is one of Blackcap’s many victims from Amber Acre and taken to a place known as Shrapnel Apartments, overseen by homicidal landlords. Prior to the suicide of William L. Bentley, we learn, “When I left for Shrapnel Apartments, I took Florence with me,” where, “I have a decent-sized fridge, two bathrooms, a shower and a WC. My apartment had direct access to the balcony and a view of the abyss and surrounding blackness.” Throughout the whole of The Dregs Trilogy, Florence Coffey is the victim obsessively returned to again and again. Similar to Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, Florence’s body becomes a recurring site of interdimensional torture and abuse. Like one of Darger’s girls, she is running amongst the Glandelinians and Blengigomeneans: gigantic winged beings that can take part-human form. A disturbing feature of Kelso’s work is the inclusion of autopsy reports, similar in style to Warhol’s clinical filming of his dreaming subjects. A report states, “Ms. Florence Coffey was a 13-year-old white female who was reportedly found by law enforcement in a bathtub and unresponsive.” We then learn, “Her arms, a portion of sternum, heart, and left lobe of liver were found wrapped in a plastic bag in a laundry basket.” What makes these episodes even more disorientating is that we also hear from the victims during their own autopsies. Florence explains, “Everything you’ve heard about autopsy dreams are true. And the roughness of the doctor working on you.” The thousand-year-old Tibetan text Bardo Thödol, translated as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, states that after death the human soul occupies an intermediate space between death and rebirth. Following her brutal killing and dismemberment, Florence floats in limbo in the post-mortem state of Bardo. Her suffering is multiplied and glorified in the hearts of Blackcap’s followers, ad infinitum.Dr Baker explains further the endless appetites of Blackcap, devouring, “children, unmarried women and people who have died of leprosy or snake bites... These people are set afloat down the Ganges, where the tribesman from the Aghori Babas retrieve their corpses and ritually consume them. This is Ritual America and our sacraments can be equally barbaric.” We have the meeting of barbarism with the holy. Atrocity serves a higher god that resides inversely in the bowels. In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes, “The holy mystery of sacrificial death is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god.” They are cleansed and connected to Blackcap in their consumption. Florence Coffey is the totemic animal of Blackcap that must be ritualistically slaughtered and eaten again and again to reinforce their fascist hygiene and their holy bond. They are so clean in her blood and sorrow. They feel much stronger. As William Blake, a visionary that complements Darger’s dichotomous worldview, writes, “Evil is the active springing from Energy.” The madmen of The Dregs feed and renew themselves on Vivian Girls but this energy soon fades away, the spilling blood of Florence is short-lived. Bataille writes that the goal of Sade was, “enumerating to the point of exhaustion the possibilities of destroying human beings, of destroying them and enjoying the thought of their death and suffering.” The energy of Evil soon gives way to boredom. Bittacker glamorises his sadism with Aryan mysticism but it quickly falls into childish games of delusion and misery. A Darger painting of a horned red dragon looming over a pile of dead children. As one character drily remarks, “People always feel the need to conjure up these ugly spirits as a way of rationalising the bad things that happen in the world and the awful things human beings do to each other.”

ZOO DRINKING IN AMERICA by Avee Chaudhuri

November 25, 2024

Dutta placed a map of the zoo on the wall and reviewed the group’s itinerary. First they would shotgun beers in the parking lot, then visit the reptile house. There, they would shoot rum (hip flask left pocket) and handle the sloughed snake skin on display very delicately so everyone else would think they were respectable patrons of the Lincoln Children’s Zoo. Next they would watch the giant apes and pull bourbon (right pocket). It was rumored that the lowland gorillas were in a lustful and shameless mood of late. At this point they would purchase concessions to reduce the irritation to their stomach lining because of the booze. Usual fare, cheeseburgers, hotdogs and Coca Cola. The latter would be used to mix double rum and cokes before taking in the majesty of the large African mammals, the giraffe, elephant, rhino and hippopotamus (latin for “river horse” Dutta explained smugly). A single shot of blended scotch would be sufficient before mounting the camels and riding naked across the Sinai. But at least another double rum and coke, if not a treble, would be necessary to steel oneself for gator wrestling in front of a crowd of whooping sorority members from Oxford, Mississippi. It would reek of clove cigarettes. And finally, on a quieter note, the four of them would end their day beside the tiger enclosure at the far end of the zoo. Perhaps at this juncture a magnum of champagne would be produced from the large, intangible folds of a Burberry overcoat. A tiger had once spared Dutta’s father decades ago when he was a boy in Darjeeling. It’s a story Dutta Senior told often.

DEAR PHONE MAN by Karris Rae

November 22, 2024

Hello. I am Roy Whitaker. I have mailed you before, or maybe not you but someone else at your office, because my phone has been disconnected. I think this is because you think I am dead, but I am not dead, so I would like you to please reconnect my phone. I am waiting on a call from my daughter and if I have no phone I will never get it. And I would shimmy up that pole and see if I could reattach it myself only I am pretty old anymore and I do not have a little neighbor boy or young man or really anyone to help me. So you can see why I am stressed.I have mailed your office every week for two months and still every day my mailbox is empty. You have probably noticed that I have not been paying my bill. I refuse to pay for something I do not have, which is a working phone. How could it be so hard to find my house when it is the only one even around. I am waiting here with my toolkit and if you tell me ahead of time I will make sun tea.Maybe if I tell you why this is so important, you will make sure it gets done. See, there are these five girls in my house. Wait no, I will start with the rooms so when I get to the girls you can imagine them each looking the way they do. So to start, my house has six rooms. A living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a porch (which is not really a room only it is screened in and I think anywhere bugs can not go is a room), a kitchen (which also has a dining table) and another bedroom. I do not need two bedrooms, but it was already there, so now that is where the phone lives. All the other rooms have a girl, and they all kind of look like my daughter, only I guess she is an adult now and the girls in my house are different ages. I do not really know I do not know when they got here but one day when I came in from knocking icicles off the front porch light there she was, sitting at the dining table. About gave me a heart attack! She looked cold and tiny, and I did not have any coats her size, so I wrapped her up in a blanket, and in the summer, I take it off. The kitchen girl is probably my favorite one. Her head is down, like she is praying before dinner, even though she never eats. I peeked under her hair once at her face and not to be rude, because I know she can not help looking like that, but I will never do that again. But I like her because when she is praying like that, I think about how lucky I am to have a full pantry, which we did not always have, plus that even if my phone is disconnected (which, it is) at least they did not come to take the whole phone when they thought I died. Which, I did not.And just so you know, I did not take these girls away from places they should be. I have tried to give them food and ask them, would they like to go home? But they never move or talk or eat, or nothing. It is okay that they are here. There are all kinds of animals in those woods and I would not want them out fighting coyotes and bobcats for sleeping places. There are even black bears. Only, I wish that they would talk to me because no one else is here, and even if my daughter is trying to call me she can not because my phone is disconnected. But you can tell I am alive because alive men are the ones who write letters. So, that is the kitchen and dining girl. The porch girl is the youngest. She has a face like the other one, and her, I kind of wish she would move because she is on my porch swing so I am afraid to use it, because if I swing too hard maybe she will slide right off. I sit beside her on the swing (not swinging) and we watch the sunset together. It is like when my daughter would come home for the summer every year. She was such a little thing back then and had so much energy, good Lord, but she would settle down in the evening to say good night to the sun. And then it was back to bouncing off the walls. But when she was all quiet looking at the sun I could see the beautiful grown woman I am sure she became. Actually maybe, this one is my favorite. I hope you are still reading, sir, because I have not forgotten about you. It is just important that you know about the girls so when I tell you what the phone is doing to them, you will understand why we have to make it stop. And that means reconnecting my phone, and fixing this whole not-dead kerfuffle.The girl in my bedroom gives me the heebie-jeebies. I feel bad about this, so when you do come here to fix the phone please do not tell her. First of all there is the way she looks, which, as I have said, the way these girls look is not my favorite. But probably cats were creepy to the first people they lived with, too. Staring, and such. Which is what this girl does, sitting there in the rocking chair that looks right at my bed. It was hard to get used to and this is why I leave the light on when I sleep now. Which means you have one less excuse about finding my house, because even if you got really lost and showed up way after dark, you would see the light on. You must not have tried very hard.There is one thing I like about the girl in my room, which is, she is the only one that moves (usually, but I will get to that). She rocks back and forth so the chair creaks. Sometimes she touches the chair with her nails and it makes quiet noises like tck tck tck. I always liked sleeping while someone else knits a hat or nurses her baby or takes notes for night school after her husband goes to bed. Anyway, long as I face the other way and keep the light on, I sleep way better now that the girl is there. And if anyone ever breaks in and tries to kill me or some such, she will scare the bejesus out of them. There are two more, yet. And I know that some people would think it is weird that I am just an old lonely man with all these little girls in my house, but I like to see it as, if a stray cat came and had her babies on my porch I would suddenly have a lot of cats. I did not pick it, and even I tried to just leave them there, but then my daughter named the babiest one Pretzel and once the darn thing is named, it is too late to put it back. I even tried not to name the girls, calling them the bedroom girl and such, but then that became her name before I knew it. My own father told me “Whitaker” means wheat field. I guess a lot of names are plain like that, Pretzel (because she twists all up to lick her rear), Bedroom Girl, Whitaker (wheat field), and Hope.Actually right now I am sitting beside the girl in the living room. This girl is mostly just quiet and keeps me company while I work on important things like this letter. She is the quietest child I ever heard of, and she does not distract me, or ask questions about nothing like normal children do. The last book she read was Jane Eyre. Or, she was looking at it and when I walked through the house at night for a glass of water or something, usually because I did not want the bedroom girl looking at me anymore, it would remind me to turn the page. When the books are out of pages I get a different one for her. These are not my books, I mean, I guess I own them now, but I did not buy them. They are all women’s books, like Jane Eyre and Little Women and Wuthering Heights. Sometimes when I have a few glasses (my mother always said find what you love and let it kill you, I love Scotch) I read to the living room girl. I do not know if she likes it or even hears. Sometimes I come to a sentence or something that feels like I have read it before, even though I have not, and I hear it in my wife’s voice. Then I stop reading for the day. Then there is the one in the bathroom. I did not leave her last because I like her less, but she is kind of hard to put into words and I had to think. The reason for that is, she is only inside the mirror. Or maybe she is outside it but also invisible, but I am a little nervous to touch the place where she is standing. I do not touch any of them if I can help it. That one must not be wearing shoes, because when I drip water on the floor it pools around in the shape of small, naked feet. Like a footprint but the opposite. Her feet are shaped the same as mine, with a high, girly arch that is not good for playing sports. She is lucky she is a girl. I maybe am not lucky for that, though, because her being a girl is why I have to wrap a towel all around myself before I take my pants off in there. It is also uncomfortable to hold the towel up while I am having my time on the toilet so she does not see anything shameful. As a man, I am sure you understand. Or maybe this is the first time I’ve thought you’re maybe the receptionist? In which case, I am sorry for bothering a lady with details like that. Please give this letter to the phone man and he will know what to do.Anyway, I started putting a towel down on the floor when I step out of the shower, so no more puddles, which means no more footprints. The ladies, my daughter and my wife (now ex-wife, I guess), complained about that forl so many years, and I only changed once they were both gone. It is funny how that works sometimes. The bad thing is that she never gets any older, but I do. When she stands behind me it is like a side by side comparison of our faces and wrinkles, or no wrinkles, depending. And her with not a lot of other things on her face either, eyes and so forth. Me, I never thought I would have so many. Wrinkles, I mean, not eyes. I always thought I would die sometime in my twenties, which I guess is why I made the decisions I did. And here I am, so many years later, and I never stopped making decisions the way I do. And now it is too late to change.See, this is why you have to fix the phone, sooner than later. Some people I am sure have months to sit around with their thumbs up their behinds, waiting for the future. And maybe I am wrong today about dying tomorrow, but I am running out of days to be wrong. Me and my daughter, we have not talked in a while and I just want to know is she okay, is she married, does she hate me. And then when I die for real you can have my phone and anything else you want, I do not care. Only I do not know what you would do with the girls because a school would maybe not know what to do with them. I guess I had better be not-dead for as long as I can.Unless you would be willing to take them home with you? Would you do that for a tired old man? They do not need much, but I can not stand the thought of them here all alone after the Lord calls my name. Especially as the critters and plants all creep into the house, and you people cut my electricity and water too. That girl in the bedroom sitting alone in the dark for who knows how long, making little tck noises for no one. No one around to even see the bathroom girl, who otherwise kind of is not anywhere. Maybe I think too much of myself, but I feel like they need me as much as I need them. Anyway, just consider about it. But I have not even gotten to the part where I explain how the girls and the telephone are all part of one big thing. What I mean by that is, I think the girls like when the telephone rings, and they do not like it when it doesn’t. The telephone has to ring every once in a while or else they get restless and start moving around, which is fine, only I would be lying if I said it doesn’t make me nervous. As I said, after her brothers and sisters all ran away I used to have a little cat named Pretzel (this is before she got eaten by coyotes) and she was such a smart cat, she knew when it was dinnertime. She followed me around until I thought oh no! I forgot to feed Pretzel, and when I did she would go back to mostly ignoring me. But like in that way of ignoring that actually means love. Poor thing, I never should have put her out that night she got eaten, only I was so mad at Hope for throwing out half her dinner again, like I wasn’t busting my rump to put food on the table. Another bad decision.But when the telephone does not ring for a while, the girls follow me like Pretzel used to, wanting something, only real slow. So slow I can not really tell they’re moving, only when I leave a room and come back, I realize they’ve moved a whole bunch back to their normal spots. And it is very hard to read their faces, because they do not look like mine and yours (probably, I can not see you), but I am pretty sure the look on their faces is not happy. Usually this is when I get a call from a telemarketer, or those awful phone banking people, and it puts them in their places for a while. But no such luck these days. Please do not say you won’t take them now. I am sure that you, a Phone Man, probably have a better phone than anyone else. You probably get calls all the time from your friends and ex-wife and daughter. Actually, my girls might be happier with you, and if I was a better man I would beg you to please take them now. But as I said, I have always made bad decisions.I have to say, the worst one for the moving is the bathroom girl. These days I shower with the curtain open, even with the water going all everywhere. Else when I open my eyes from washing my hair, I see the shapes of little fingertips poking into the curtain. And then I rip it back, wham! There is her reflection of her standing on the other side, reaching for where I was not two seconds ago, not in the corner where she belongs at. At least when there is water everywhere (and I do not bother with the towel on the floor anymore), I can see the not-footprints coming to me. Somehow that makes me feel better. It means she is not just in the mirror, so I do not have to worry about seeing her behind me upside-down in my spoon when I stir my coffee. I will be honest and say that I have not been washing myself as much as I should, but after all, there is no one around to offend their nose. To be clear I do not think she would do anything bad even if she did get her fingers around that curtain but it is hard to explain, I do not want her to touch me. The way her little fingers curl is like when you are so angry that there aren’t any real thoughts in your head, just noise. I know how that goes. Please Lord let her not touch me.These last few days I have not been sure where to sleep. Usually the bedroom is a good place, but now that the girl in there is moving, I can not fall asleep. It is like she gets up out of the chair in slow motion. It puts her in positions other people can not hold for so long. I dragged a chair over beside her so I could try to match her, and maybe it is because she has young legs, but I can not do what she does, hovering with my legs bent for hours. And the whole time it is tck tck tck with her nails only when she’s out of the chair they are making that noise against each other, not wood. Sometimes I dream that she is making that noise against my teeth.So when the tcking gets too close I take my pillow and my blanket and I go to the living room. I do not really know what the living room girl wants me to do when she gets like this because she keeps standing up and the book falls out of her lap. But she stares down into her empty hands like the book is still there. It makes me wonder if she ever wanted the book at all, or if there has always been something on her hands only she can see. So she shuffles toward me with her head down and her fingers spread as if asking what have I done, and meanwhile I am just trying to sleep. I know when it is time to go back to the bedroom when I hear her feet slide through dust. My ex-wife would say I should vacuum more, but she never trusted that I have reasons for the things I do.And the thing of it is, and it is hard to tell, but I think that the girls are getting faster. The tcking and sliding noises come a little earlier every night. I had to move from my bed to the couch and from the couch to the bed again last night. I will probably have to from now on. Whatever room I am in, there she comes, all wanting something except what? I already let them stay under my roof out of the cold and away from the animals. I even gave the one books. What else could they want from me?Are you starting to understand the pickle I am in? This whole time I have to keep moving from room to room. I never fall all the way asleep so I can hear when they get too close. I do not shower for very long either, and when the weather is nice sometimes I go outside and use the hose instead. But hose water is so cold, and I know there is no one around to watch, but I do not like being naked outside and my feet all muddy, especially when the cold has shrunk me all up (if you know what I mean). It is just not the best situation. And I keep feeling like maybe this is the day I die (not from the girls who I am sure would never hurt me but maybe their skin feels like a dead thing’s and I never liked that), all before I ever hear Hope’s grown-up voice. I know that your phone office probably did not realize all of this when you disconnected my phone line. And maybe still you are thinking oh, he should just leave, but I can not leave, because this is the only phone number my daughter ever had for me. I can not leave and I can not die because if I do, I will never tell her that I did not mean to mess everything up with my bad little decisions every day.Thank you for reading my letter. I know it is probably longer than most of the letters you have to read, but if I may, it is also your job. I hope this will convince you that I need help and that your company are the ones to do it, because as I have said, this situation is not the best. And thank you for taking the girls to your house after I am gone. They will be going to a good home.I hate to ask, but could you do one more thing for me? It is a very little job, but it is everything to me. Please, if something happens, please tell my daughter that I am sorry I was not a part of her life for so long. I would like to say so much more but I do not want the message to be so long you forget the most important parts. I will put out some sun tea today so it is ready when you get here. I also have cards.Sincerely,Roy Whitaker

ON THE NOSTALGIA OF DRIED APRICOTS AND OTHER GARBAGE by Jeanann Verlee

November 21, 2024

I am 41. Standing at the Formica counter of a roach-friendly Queens apartment five lifetimes ago, I crumble gorgonzola over flatbread dough, then stud it with gems of diced dried apricot and fresh thyme—ready for the oven. The man I chose to wed is miles away in the next room weighing down the couch as he wrestles his way through another hangover, offering some caustic rebuke of my failures.Today I failed to provide the right sports drink, so I’m fucking stupid and goddamn selfish. Wordless, I return to the grocery, buy two six-packs of whatever he prefers. Something pink, as I recall. Sugar-free. I slam the sweating bottles on the coffee table directly between his mottled red eyes and the Rick and Morty marathon he’s prioritized for the day. Now I am a fucking child. He’s right, I suppose. Passive aggression is a reflex for any child raised by drunks. Back in the kitchen, I mash the now-stale apricot cheese mix into the dough, a silent rage. I crush it to a pulp until it oozes between my fingers, staining my cuticles blue. Garbage. Everything is garbage.He shuns me for the rest of the afternoon. I take myself out for a late brunch and mimosa. Daydream my blissful exit (simple: never return). Later, I whisper back to walk the dog because he won’t and I’m expected to and there’s no reason for the dog to suffer. Garbage. Everything.The man I chose to wed ignores me with ferocity. Shuns me through the night into late morning. Orders breakfast delivery from our favorite diner, offers me none. I walk the dog. Pick at a plate of crackers. Tackle a bag of laundry.When he’s ready to forgive, he finds me in another room sorting his socks. No further mention of my wretchedness. He grunts his way into me without a word. I am absolved, so I stay. Never again mistaking the wrong sports drink. Never again attempting gorgonzola-apricot flatbread.I let him steal tiny bits of me like this for years.

THREE WORKS by Myles Zavelo

November 20, 2024

My First Cousin Once Removed: Regarding Your Inquiry1. Sure.2. She’s still young, I guess.3. She paints and wishes and likes fancy things.4. Never believes me.5. Teases me mercilessly.6. Canned foods repulse her.7. Pretends she can’t stand me.8. Can't orgasm to save her life.9. Makes everything about herself.10. Suffers from excessive jealousy.11. Doesn’t have a family anymore.12. Acts like she has no choice.13. Knows how to seem extremely polite.14. Has consistently failed to make a dent.15. Always mad and sad and never the same.16. Loves Gatorade (almost every popular flavor).17. Wants a destination wedding — wants elegant wedding moments...18. Growing up, she bullied her younger siblings sadistically.19. Grabbed her mother’s genitals once at the breakfast table.20. Got grounded for six weeks after that.21. Then set a small fire in her father’s study.22. The mother: a successful homemaker who made sure to feel good about herself always.23. The father: a closeted bisexual businessman who thrived in 1980s Manhattan.24. I’ll get to my first cousin once removed’s terrible grief in just a moment.25. She used to have a sense of humor.26. She needed to get a life.27. I needed to get a life, too.28. Want to French kiss her again.29. Want to ejaculate on her face again.30. So sorry that I said that.31. Just really wish I could have sex with her one more time.32. But certainly you don’t want to hear about my mess.33. And now I’ll never get to her terrible, terrible grief.34. We used to get together every now and then.35. Rebecca.

***

CilantroMy ex-wife, she hated cilantro.My father and brother, they hate it too.My mother and I, we love cilantro, we put it in fucking everything.My father, brother, and ex-wife say it tastes like soap.But my mother and I: we severely disagree with them.We raise our voices at them, we wish cardiac arrest on them.Because they are useless freaks with legitimate genetic conditions.And when it comes to useless freaks with legitimate genetic conditions, we must force the worst possible outcomes.Love against hate, good against evil—my mother and I burn alive.

***

What Mom Said This Afternoon About My Emaciated FatherDo you know what it’s like to be married to a man whose bottom is smaller than my face!?Then she pressed PAUSE.What a cautious sip of HOT tea on her part...!In the meantime, my father poured himself a stiff, skinny drink.And? What? When water changes? In the COLD afternoon? What an unholy letdown.Then again, life lets you down like this all the time.Have I neglected to mention the rocks in her throat?Then she pressed PLAY.Will you just look at your Daddy’s little disappearing bottom!

MY HEART BELONGS IN AN EMPTY BIG MAC CONTAINER BURIED BENEATH THE OCEAN FLOOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH HOMELESS by Rebecca Gransden

November 19, 2024

Have you ever found yourself adrift, without a clue on how you got there? The blue whale is the largest mammal to have existed on our planet. A small person can fit inside a blue whale heart. In My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor (Clash Books, 2024) Homeless contemplates the messiness of a heart ready to overspill with sadness, a sadness drawn from fathomless wells, deep and lightless as the bottom of the sea. How many fast food containers have already made it to that desolate ocean floor? I spoke with Homeless about the novel. Rebecca Gransden: The novel opens with the memorable scene of a trio of characters in an orange boat adrift in what appears to be the middle of a wide ocean. When did this cast of characters occur to you? Did they and the scenario appear simultaneously or did aspects arise over time?Homeless: It occurred to me very early on. Probably one of the first ideas I had. The image of Daniel (the main character), the sad-looking blue whale & the empty Big Mac container floating in the ocean, lost. Everything was gradually built off that. That kind of sad, hopeless tableau.RG: “Your heart... you want to bury it, right?”Daniel nods.“Beneath the ocean floor?”Daniel nods again.“Okay. And I’m going to help you do that. Well, I mean we. We’re going to help you do that. Me and the sad-looking blue whales back home.” Daniel, the focus of the book, is a character beset by profound troubles. In many ways the book can be viewed as a quest, one taken by Daniel, whether he’s a totally willing participant or not. Did you have a plan for Daniel upon undertaking the novel, and if so, to what degree did you end up adhering to the plan?H: All I knew at the beginning was Daniel was going to be stranded in the ocean & that he was going to use this ultimate misfortune as an opportunity to really examine himself & his choices. The places he “goes” while lost, the things he sees, those were inspired by his past with the sad-looking blue whales, as well as his tumultuous relationship with his ex-girlfriend. RG: My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor. Daniel experiences his own moment of creative inspiration with the book’s title. How did the sentence reveal itself to you, and when did you know it should be the title of the book?H: The title came to me from a song. “The Samurai Code” by Motion City Soundtrack. The lyric was My heart belongs beneath the ocean floor. I remember hearing it for the first time &, like the sappy fat ass I am, immediately thinking, My heart belongs in an Empty Big Mac container buried beneath the ocean floor. That one line was it. It set up a ton for what the book would eventually become—the concept of Daniel lost in the ocean, his mission, the sad-looking blue whales who stalk him. So much came from that one line. Once I knew it’d be his mantra, there was really nothing else the book could be titled.RG: The book is set into parts, with its main threads separated into chapters with recurring titles. What led you to pursue this structure?H: For a book about depression, I wanted people to get a glimpse of what it’s like for people who have to deal with it. Only then did I think readers would kind of understand why Daniel is making such an absurd & drastic choice. I wanted readers to see how it affected his self-esteem. His relationships. So I decided to give some background as to how depression can insidiously work. How it alters your way of thinking. I think—I hope—it makes his journey more justified in a way.RG: The role of McDonald’s is important to Daniel. Throughout the book he views it as a special place, one of respite and comfort. One particular McDonald’s is regarded by him with near ecstatic reverence. What made you select McDonald’s to play this part in the book?H: About half of this book was written in a McDonald’s in Bridgeport, CT. Daniel’s safe place is essentially my safe place. The people who eat there, the slightly chaotic ambiance at times, the dirty tables, the trips there with my father when I was younger. It all feels like home to me, so I feel comfortable working there. When I’m in McDonald’s, it’s like I’m with “my people.” Lower class working stiffs just like me, trying to get a cheap, albeit highly unhealthy, meal. There’s a silent camaraderie there.RG: Daniel is painfully aware of how he is perceived by others. The novel repeatedly makes reference to a look Daniel has possessed for most, if not all, of his life. How do you describe this look and what does it say about Daniel’s interaction with the world?H: Daniel’s “look” in the book is a despondent face he’s not usually aware he’s wearing. It’s the neutral face of a person worn down by years of depression. A co-worker once told me I had a “red light face,” meaning a kind of disgruntled, “keep away from me” look, haha. When you’re depressed, you’re drained, both physically & mentally. So it’s kind of instinctual. You’re going through a lot & you need to protect your energy, what little you have, so you keep people at distance maybe. For their benefit & for yours. It’s an accidental coping mechanism. One that keeps you sane but also, unfortunately at times, pushes people away even when you don’t mean to.RG: They controlled Daniel, the sad-looking blue whales, and as much as it killed him to admit it, although over the years he had gotten used to doing so (not that that made it sting any less), the sad-looking blue whales dictated almost everything he did.Central to the book is Daniel’s relationship to the sad-looking blue whales that accompany him through life. He is caught in a shifting power dynamic, with his interactions moving through a spectrum of emotions and tensions. How do you view the sad-looking blue whales?H: The sad-looking blue whales are depression. Sometimes—a lot of the time—it can feel like depression runs the show. It keeps you from doing things you want to do, it helps you remain stuck in bad patterns. You want more than anything to be “normal,” but you have this really strong outside force constantly fucking with you & your good intentions, your attempts to change. This malevolent energy that drains your battery without your consent, that’s the sad-looking blue whales.RG: But often, scrolling through social media sites and reading posts or status updates, or messaging back and forth with strangers online, Daniel would find that the vast majority of people out there felt scared and hopeless and alone just like him. People, most people, including Daniel, led coddled easy lives. They lived in warm houses with indoor plumbing and went to grocery stores filled with food they didn't have to harvest or kill. If they got sick, modern medicine was usually able to cure it, and if not, at the very least put up a fight. And yet, somehow, everyone was still unhappy or stressed or, most of the time, both. Twenty-one centuries of technological evolution and things had become so much easier yet no one was any happier. But the expectancy to be happy had become greater, and when people couldn’t live up to it, when they couldn’t be as happy as the world and its technology demanded them to, it was damn near fucking lethal. It was no wonder sad-looking blue whales ran the world, although now it made more sense than ever to Daniel why they did.The book reflects a generational ennui, an ambiance difficult to articulate. Daniel’s self-awareness only seems to amplify the acuteness of his difficulties. Has the writing of the book brought any insights to you on this era’s specific challenges?H: I think it just made me more aware that our focus & priorities are askew. Technology seems to be speeding everything up when it seems, to me, more people (myself included) need to be slowing down. The pace of life for a lot of people seems to be accelerating to a breakneck speed, where we’re just focused on destination after destination, goal after goal, without ever appreciating where we currently are. Normally, when Daniel chills out in the book & visits “his McDonald’s,” what happens? The sad-looking blue whales leave him alone. He’s at peace. He’s allowed to just be.RG: Daniel is struggling to write. Are there parallels between Daniel’s experience within the book and your own time writing it? How much, if at all, is your past writerly life reflected in the novel?H: I gave up on this book a third of the way through. Then a kind word from a writer I greatly admire about another book I’d written made me believe in myself enough to maybe give this book another go. I think I used to put too much pressure on my writing in general. How much I did. How good it was. How important it was. Now I’m at a peaceful place where I just do my best & don’t stress over my output. I just show up somewhat consistently & the rest is out of my hands. And with this newer, more laid back approach, I also do get stuck a lot less, creatively speaking.RG: If the sad-looking blue whales can be viewed as a symbolic manifestation of Daniel’s depression, outside of the novel are there animals that represent other emotions or states for you?H: Cats represent nirvana for me. The transcendent state. Not the kick ass band. RG: Flipping through censored page after censored page, Daniel comes across nothing even remotely happy. Nothing hopeful or lighthearted. Just more of the same heartbreak, anxiety, shame, dread and self-hate. Daniel’s heart begins racing. He can feel it panicking as a wave of heat that begins in his head quickly sweeps throughout the entirety of his body, a sensation that instantly forces him to begin sweating, and all of a sudden, it’s like Daniel’s right back outside underneath the blistering sun. What is the role of hope in the book?H: Hope is there. In bits & pieces. Because when you’re depressed that feels like all the hope you’re allowed. Just miserly shards of it. In a way that’s all you need though. Just some kind of small hold to hang onto. So in that way it’s important. I wanted the book, as heavy as the topic was, to still be hopeful & light hearted. I wanted anyone who finishes it to have just that, a shred of hope. If not more.RG: At one point in the book a Basquiat artwork is transformed into a sail for the boat. A theme you address is the nature of art, here raising the question of whether there needs to be a ‘living’ or kinetic component to art in opposition to the emphasis on preservation in a type of hermetically sealed, stagnant state. Later, Daniel exhibits mixed feelings on the matter of sharing his writing with the world. Have you arrived at any conclusions regarding art, or have any new questions arisen on the matter, either inside or outside of your experience writing My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor?H: I think if anything, this book just reaffirmed to me that art is a necessary compulsion. A way for creative people to grow & learn. Some people just have to create, for better & for worse. The thing people can get caught up in, which I still get caught up in, is how your work is received, how many people have read it, & letting the commercial aspect of art taint or ruin this passion you have. Or worse, you begin to devalue yourself or what you created because it doesn’t sell. When I think the more healthy approach is just doing it because you love it, sharing it if you want to, & then wiping your hands clean of whatever those results may be. Because, again, art for many people is a compulsion & they’re going to do it & keep doing it regardless of acclaim or glory, so why let a lack of those things ruin doing something you love, something you need.RG: Could you explain the significance of the concept of appreciation, to Daniel and to the novel as a whole? What do you appreciate about the book?H: There’s always something to appreciate. No matter how shitty things are. The thing you’re appreciating can be big or small, from past, present or future, it doesn’t matter. It’s the act of appreciating that’s important. Finding something good & focusing on it until the crushing fist of sadness lightens its force. The opportunity is always there & readily available. A kind of short cut through a shitty neighborhood that gets you someplace safer. What I appreciate about the book is that it tackles a heavy topic such a depression with levity & humor. I wanted to write a book about depression that wasn’t depressing to read, & I think I did that.RG: Have you ever seen a lightning bug? H: I’m lucky enough to have two beautiful sons. So yes.