Forgive Me Mother, For I Have Blogged
My mom found my blog a few weeks ago.
“It’s a very very surrealist blog,” I explained, when she texted me about it. “Faked. Fiction. Made it all up.”
“Uh-huh, sure,” she said.
I’d sent her my stories from the past two months. My blog was linked in the writer’s bio and she clicked the link, naturally, and went from there.
If you want to read those stories too, here they are, largely taken from my blog:
- This Is Water — Muumuu House, January 2, 2024
- Nobody told me about Sisyphus until just now — Back Patio, February 9, 2024
- Wedding/Divorce — Blue Arrangements, February 13, 2024
If you’re my mom, Hello Mother. How Are You Doing Today?
Lonely at the Top
Now people are in my DMs. They want to know where I came from. How I’m getting published. I lean across the counter at breakfast with The Chad.
“This guy’s asking how to get published.”
“Tell him to be more talented.”
Eggs Gone Wild
The Chad gets something called The Hobo and I order eggs Florentine. A yolk slides off its biscuit when the server sets down the plate. “Oh no!” she says. “I’m so sorry the egg did that!”
Claudio Monteverdi (Reprise)
Later that night, we’re pulling up to the gas station.
“What’s that sound?” I ask.
“The opera. They crank it up at night to keep away the homeless.”
“Huh. Why do they do that?”
“Because it works.”
Commuter Economy, Pt. I
Homeless or not, there’s a man on the bus with an “Anything helps” sign, folded and tucked under his arm. I hadn’t considered those guys have to make a commute.
Commuter Economy, Pt. II
On the train, they’re checking fares again. The employee pulls up to my seat in his blue and yellow vest and visor and asks me if I knew I needed to pay to get on.
“Mm? Didn’t know.”
“Unless you’re 18 or under,” he says.
“I’m 18.”
“Sure, we’ll go with that.”
Jorts!
At the gym, I spot a pair of jean shorts pressing 40s in the squat rack. I jot down the following observations in my phone:
there are men in jorts at the gym 🤩🤩🤩
hahaha cackling over the concept of jorts rn
like: hold on babe lemme change into my jorts
babe where the FUCK are my jorts
That’s as good as my notes get these days.
Rejected once? Shame on me. Rejected twice? Quit forever!
I’m actually hoping to retire from this whole writing business. It’s not very lucrative anyway. And by “very” I mean “at all.”
An editor offered to pay me for a submission a couple weeks ago, but when I sent my story, he said it didn’t make any sense.
“You have this coke dealer thing at the beginning, and then the writing prompts, and then the coke dealer thing at the end… It doesn’t cohere.”
I explained that they were all writing prompts—including the parts with the coke dealer at the art museum—and never heard back. Then I showed my coworker.
“Does this make sense?”
She read it and said, “Yeah. It’s funny. You’re making fun of writing prompts.”
But I wasn’t. I love writing prompts. I use them all the time.
Apology for John
The Chad didn’t like my post from last month. He said the writing was fine but he had some qualms with the content itself.
“You make yourself look just bad enough that you can get away with making everyone else look worse.”
That was a good point, I thought. That was pretty spot-on.
I started blogging so I could get back into writing fiction. I needed something easy to write while I got in the habit of doing it, and recording my life made the most sense. I didn’t have to think something up. I wrote about my day.
Then I got more into it. I added some flair. Fictional elements. It got a little further from what a “typical blog” might convey, but it wasn’t outright fiction either. And that worked well. I’m proud of a lot of what I’ve written. And it did get me back into writing fiction. But now that I’ve been doing that again, the blog has felt like an obstacle.
Obviously, nobody who’s subscribed to me is really like “where’s urban germ???” but I felt some sort of obligation to keep posting, even when I was trying to work on other writing, or simply didn’t want to be honest about how bad my life was/is going to 500+ people. I know most of them aren’t reading it, but it’ll be in their inboxes forever haha. And I’ll know.
It probably doesn’t seem like it, but these posts take a long time. Like way longer than I’d like to admit. And when I feel uninspired, most of that time is spent rounding up random scenes I recorded from the past month, and editing away the emotion with technical moves and jokes and—as The Chad pointed out—making other people look worse, so I don’t have to tell the full truth.
Fiction feels the opposite. I like fiction because I can be honest without revealing anything about myself directly. I can work through experiences—anxieties, emotions, conflicts—I don’t understand, without relating it to something specific in my life.
Substack has done a lot for me. I’ve read good writing, and I’ve made friends, which I never expected going into it. But it can be frustrating. And obnoxious. And good writers keep dropping off because of it (RIP Pop Shit if the rumors are true).
Obviously, you should write for yourself, but it sucks to work hard on something and not get the response you want. I think everyone recognizes that. And I think everyone also recognizes how much grifting and fake enthusiasm is involved in trying to get a response at all. I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. I’m trying to stop doing it. If I compliment anyone going forward it’s TRUE and REAL because MOST OF YOU SUCK (<3)
Even this feels obnoxious haha. Like, “making a statement.” Like I’m somebody haha.
LIKE I’M ANYBODY AT ALL HAHAHA
WHO IS THIS FOR WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE ANYWAY?????????
I thought about starting paid posts again. Then I’d at least feel that I got something tangible for the amount of time it took me. But of course, most people don’t pay, and nobody asked me to write to begin with, so I go back and forth on it all. We’ll see. It felt kind of embarrassing the first time.
BEING ALIVE IS SO EMBARRASSING HAHA
Paid or not, nothing’s really gonna change except that I’m apologizing for my last post while keeping it up. Like I said, I don’t dislike the writing I’ve done here, even in that last one, I only wish I wouldn’t do it just because I felt like I should.
And I’m letting you all know, for the record, that while the things I write are usually true, it should be obvious, I hope, that the way that I tell them is quite clearly edited.
THIS IS A VERY VERY SURREALIST BLOG. FAKED. FICTION. MADE IT ALL UP.
I’ll continue to write here when the moment strikes me, or when I’ve collected enough weird and dumb anecdotes that I can turn into something. Sometimes that will be often, sometimes not. Otherwise, I don’t really have a plan.
No Plan Except
I want to work less, write more. I want to write a novel, but that seems ridiculous. I want to write less, read more. I want to read and not write at all. I want more money. I want a car. I want to move far away. I want to be a writing professor to a small class of bright and promising undergraduates in a small town—I wish you could still do that. I want to direct a movie. Jetset. Make six figures. Learn Spanish and guitar. I don’t know what I want. Well no, I do. I want money. But not bad enough to do something different. And until I want something different, I can’t say what I’m doing. I don’t know what happens now.
It’s a long drive when you’re going nowhere
I’ve been asking The Chad to take detours on the way to his place. Sometimes we go slow down the block of bars and restaurants in White Center. Sometimes he loops us through the industrial district, past the weed dispensaries and waste disposals, past the cement factory and back. Sometimes he just circles around and around the 7/11 until I’m satisfied. One night, he took us along the string of roads that surround the water. I liked that one best. The water was so flat and black. I imagined if we turned off the main road we could drive onto it and across it, all through the night, never reaching the lights on the other side, never coming home in the morning.
they don't want you to know this but it was me. i killed pop shit. just to feel something
Your fighting the good fight. Keep smashing it.