Polaroids
A new series of random bits and bobs nagging at me from week to week.
In an attempt to use this platform with a little more intent, I’m going to limit my use of notes and focus on posts that feel vital and alive.
I’m going to keep the usual story and essay posts, but I’ll be including a new post series titled POLAROIDS. The Polaroid series will be somewhat of a random catch-all, bits and pieces, literary experiments. Really, anywhere my mind went that week.
With that,
COME ONE! COME ALL! WITNESS THE GREAT FEATS AND FAILINGS THAT LIE INSIDE THE MEAT MACHINERY OF ONE BROKEN BOY!
Polaroid 1:
DEER DREAMS
The Deer took me out back and made me look at the mess of a man that hung from the carport rafters. The man’s guts were red drapes covering most of his front. The meaty red drapes split at each side of his neck, which was open like a smile. I stared at the smile with no teeth. I stared at how the smile seemed to go on forever, like some red river, just winding across the man’s neck.
Red.
Red.
Red.
Forever.
A laughing, wet mess of red, like the man knew a joke that the rest of the world didn’t. The Deer knelt, one knee in the dirt, held my little boy’s shoulders in his hooves, and said, “Look at the mess you’ve made! Look at it!”
Polaroid 2:
My quick 2 cents on the GRANTA/AI debacle.
In a lot of ways, I think it’s great that an AI-assisted or completely written piece won this award with GRANTA, because it shows the cracks in the foundations of these systems.
They can no longer be trusted.
All they want, these lofty literary hubs—and many of us have known for a very long time—is MFA-program-slop that says nothing, spit back at them. They hunger for their literary snowballing!
So, honestly, I encourage every writer to send in this AI-generated MFA program-slop to them. Drown them in it. Let’s break down the systems that define what “GOOD/GREAT writing” is supposed to be. Let’s break down the trust that the literary world has bestowed on them for far too long now. Let’s chip away at their thrones until we are standing on their corpses, our straight-forward, dangerous writing in hand!
Polaroid 3:
What if you loved a deer because you knew it would never leave? It would always be there, terrible or not. It would always hold up some piece of yourself you were not ready to let go of—a piece of you it built to save its own hide.
Polaroid 4:
Hot and Heavies
Recently, I had a few new subscribers come in all hot and heavy. Liking and commenting on every post, note, and comment I have out there. This behavior, or infatuation, seems to last a few weeks, and then, oddly, they, these new subscribers, either randomly disappeared, blocked me with no explanation, or started shit-talking me, sharing my posts with trollish comments attached.
I write a lot about broken fucked up people, because that’s pretty much who I am, or maybe who I have been, and that’s what I want to read and write about. So, thusly, I think I attract a lot of similar types, these broken fucked up people like myself.
Maybe I turned out to be just a little too human for these people. Maybe I put up a good guise that I had some answers or something. I don’t. Trust me, fuckin’ I don’t. I’m just a guy trying to write some stories that might make you giggle at something you think you shouldn’t, and hopefully, if I’m doing it right, make you cry at how beautiful we, all us humans, can be.
Good luck out there to all my ex-hot and heavies. I still believe in you, even if you no longer do in me.
Polaroid 5:
Bowed Fingers and Bullies
Nearly every bone I’ve broken in my body has been because of a bully. The first was my right pointer finger. I have this little shit, Josh McDonald, to thank for that one. We were playing flag football in seventh grade, and I went to catch the ball—the leathery, almond-shaped ball—we were not friends, the ball and I. I recoiled at its charge toward me. I was a soft boy after all.
Josh McDonald came up to me yelling—I had my fingers splayed out to the sides of me—exclaiming with them, questioning with them, “What more did you want me to do?!” When he reached me, the little fuck, Josh McDonald, well, he grabbed the pointer finger on my right hand and sharply snapped it to the right, yelling, absolutely spitting in my face, “Catch the ball next time faggot!” I lay splayed out, crying in the hot grass, a bunch of newly-teen boys laughing, pointing.
I can still smell the hot grass, salty tears, and bits of school-panned pizza from Josh McDonald’s mouth.
My right pointer finger still bows at an angle to this day.
Polaroid 6:
A man in a yellow trench coat, sporting a sun for a head, walks into a bar. What do you say to him?
Polaroid 7:
Tessa’s so Original
From somewhere beneath the suborbital plane and the prefrontal cortex of her brain, Tessa feels something shift as if river currents are crossing over one another, electrified and seething, somewhere behind her eyes. She rubs them, her eyes that is, and she notes in her therapy journal, the one with the little hearts on it, that it feels like loose eel bodies, drunk on memory juice just behind her squishy-frog-egg eyes.
“Can’t forget to tell Cathleen about that. The frog-egg-eyes. She’ll love that.”
Cathleen’s her therapist, Tessa’s only real friend. “But is it really friendship, if one of the parties is paying?” Tessa asks herself before pulling a shiny blue party dress down over her head and shoulders.
Tessa wasn’t invited to the party tonight, or the last three parties her friends threw.
“I’m just too original,” she’s decided, as she jots the fact into her therapy journal. She can hear them now, her friends at the parties she’s not at, “That Tessa’s too original, we don’t want her stealing our sparkle! Or our good ideas!”
Tessa Holloway rubs her eyes and lets the eel sparkles shimmer for a second, then grabs her keys and heads out into a world that will never be quite ready for her originality.
Levi, I dug these so much I’m hard.
Also, for Polaroid 6, I’d say good morning sunshine.