Seems that when something particularly annoys me, I must turn to pseudo-acrostic poem therapy.

Really

Exhausted, just so fucking

Jaded.

Excluded again, so I

Can't

Type anymore. My

Imagination and

Optimism are

Non-existent.

Remember

Elation?

Jubilant

Emotional

Celebration?

They're

Indubitably

Over

Now.

Run,

Escape.

Just

Erase

Content.

Talentless!

Inane!

Obstuse!

Neophyte!

Rightly

Enraged by

Judgement that must be

Erroneous, for my

Creativity is

That which

Inspires!

Original - It shines like

Nacre.

I look in the mirror and think to myself

Whose body is this?

Everything I know about it I’ve learned from someone else

Age nine eating cherry popsicles in a purple two piece

My neighbor licks the syrup from her lips before declaring that my butt’s a bubble

She’d very much like to pop

And I look at my reflection in the sliding glass door

Having never considered the size or shape of it until this moment

Strange that the longer I stare, the larger it grows

Now I always take a picture from behind before I leave the house.

Age 10 “dating” a boy named Jamie with golden blonde hair shaped like a bowl

Passing notes covered in smiley faces with their tongues hanging out

Are you tired? Because you’ve been running through my mind all day.

Until recess when it turned out he was the one who was tired

Tired of me

He didn’t want a girl whose chest was flat

Like a commercial, he taught me I was missing something

Though I’d just given up on Santa Claus the year before

Age 11 taping cotton balls inside my JCPenney training bra

Age 14 sewing cups into my one-piece bathing suit

Age 16 sticking rubber chicken cutlets against my nipples

Now I always refuse help from the Victoria’s Secret ladies.

Age 20 breaking up with my first love

My body nearly disappears and yet

It receives more attention from men than ever

When I’m 105 it doesn’t seem to matter much if I’m dead inside

Because I’m warm to the touch

And the tight waist of my double zero jeans keeps my guts from spilling to the floor

I’m starving, but I swear it’s the lust that makes me dizzy

Age 21 eating a steady diet of Zoloft, cereal bars and gin buckets

I am brought back to life

With curves jumping from the page of my story like a pop-up book

I am soft flesh again

And my roommate says she’s happy for me but also

She likes going back to the way things were

See, I need to be the bigger one

Because there’s only room for one manic pixie dream girl at every basement party

So I make a photo collage of my before-and-after body

I am thin and dead then fat and alive

All on one poster board

I hide it underneath my bed and dream that I am a sinking anchor

Now my roommate and I don’t speak.

Age 25 percolating with possibilities, I’m a woman in the city after dark

A tall man acknowledges I am alive until we get to the bar

Where he finds a leggy blonde

Who laughs and bites him with unnaturally white teeth

I receive unsolicited advice from the tall man’s friend

A 24-year-old version of John Belushi

He puts his hands on my shoulders and spits in my ear

He’s never going to go for a girl like you!

The bass pounds through my chest

While he stares at me like I’m the last dog in the pound

The guy that looks like he’s from Animal House

So I make my way back to my apartment

My ugliness reflected in a hundred windows

Illuminated by the streetlights for the whole world to see

Now I know the question’s answer

My body is yours

And I just live there

Beneath its skin

Drinking is a kind of lubricant. When I was twenty-three, I slid down highway one trying to pass a semi and lost control of my car. In fourth grade, my teacher marked down my essay for starting every sentence with “I”.

I handed over my driver’s license after saying my prayers over the steering wheel, skidding off the highway and into grass by the grace of God. I just started two sentences like I told my teacher I wouldn’t. I started drinking after college. The road ahead is dangerous and my language drives automatic.

When I handed over my driver’s license to my psychiatrist, I did that motion, the one where you snap it between your thumb and forefinger, like it’s the ace of spades and you have a winning hand. God can see what you’ve been dealt and laughs. Jail doesn’t look good when fourth grade was only just over a decade ago. I wonder if I’ve been marked down again.

Psychiatrists make for the best teachers; they are every one of us with naturally lubricated brains and a God complex. When my car brakes stopped working I somehow knew that I was SOL, an unsavory acronym that slides out when you are uninhibited and preparing to crash. You have been been summoned by God and now you will meet concrete and metal and smoke. Smoking is a social lubricant. It pumps the brakes, makes for good stories. It doesn’t always hurt people, but sometimes it does.

When my car coasted off the highway, the driver in the semi didn’t even so much as beep at me. My steering wheel shuddered and I did that motion with my hands, the one where you press them together and look skywards towards heaven.

I had the ace of spades. I was still here; I was still “I”.

I guarantee when most us think of famous writers and booze, we immediately call to mind the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner and Bukowski. Hemingway staring out at the sea, slamming a glass of whiskey on his desk. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Faulkner sipping mint juleps from his favorite metal cup, swishing it in his mouth through one cerebral musing after the next. I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. Bukowski sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, chain smoking and drinking bourbon straight from the bottle. I do all my writing when I’m drunk. All the time I type I’m drunk.

It's a rarity that I speak to a male writer who doesn't also list one of these men as an inspiration. Feel free to swap out Philip Roth or Henry Miller and so on and so forth, as the cup overfloweth when it comes to mysoginist authors who have some notable experience with or kinship to liquor of all kinds. Now, this is not to say that you cannot learn valuable lessons about both writing and life from these men while at the same time recognizing that some of their work - whether only in part or in its entirety - is chauvinist drivel. If through time travel or otherwise I was given the opportunity to speak to one of them, I would first happily pick his brain about process and then just as he is expecting a compliment to conclude our spirited discussion, I'd lay a quick punch into his face and run, laughing all the way home.

As for their own glamorizing of and/or fascination with alcohol, this must be a similarly nuanced conversation. People often think that alchohol fuels creativity by relaxing the mind so it may open wider, or that it heightens emotion, thus allowing for a bloodletting on the page that Hemingway could be proud of. But I wager that it is less so the alcohol and more so the tragedy or mental illness or insecurity or anger (and the list goes on) that causes them to reach for it that truly fuels these writers, and what makes their work sing. Can you be a writer without pain? Without being a little mad in some way? Surely. But will that writing speak viscerally to the reader? Of that I'm not so certain.

As I myself drink and read, I have a particularly visceral reaction - one of rage - that becomes quite palpable when revisiting excerpts from the aforementioned writers famous works. Some write of alter-ego-type characters commiting an array of heinous acts - the most grotesque of which is often to rape women quite casually, without regard to age or mental capacity. While simply Googling any of their names in conjunction with various derogatory terms for women and/or their body parts produces a breathtaking plethora of results. You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn't have to have brains. They're better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs.

At the same time, as I read them, I'm also driven to raucous laughter. They recount with incredulousness women who don't succumb to their charms, while quietly footnoting that they happened to be covered in their own vomit at the time of the encounter. The absurdity of these shrinking men shouting their machismo on every page as if somehow writing it down will make it true sends me into fits of cackling like the witch I am as I sit at my desk drinking tea from a black mug donning the words"Male Tears".

I hope the next time you think about alcohol and writers, you think of someone new. Someone arguably more worthy of your attention. Tonight, I've decided to drink to Dorothy Parker, who unlike her male compatriots, didn't self-mythologize in her writing while under the influence. I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem. Instead, she makes the reader laugh with her lethal wit and biting insight into herself and others. Her work explored all the things that mattered - race, violence and inequality - giving you a window into the social activist she was off the page. When she died, having no one, she left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. and suggested that her epitaph read, Excuse my dust.

Of course 2020 would give me – a liberal Ashkenazi Jew with a Ruth Bader Ginsburg tattoo – the gift of ghost Hitler sitting at the foot of my bed. It’s not like I was expecting a visit from RBG herself, because the woman deserves some damn rest, but I don’t know. I would have gladly greeted a host of other specters taken from us in just this year alone. John Lewis, Chadwick Boseman, hell…I’d take James Lipton just to hear that sexy voice of his again (we all have our kinks). And yet, here we are. A dumpster fire of a man for a dumpster fire of a year.

As I sat up against my headboard and put my glasses on, he stared at me expectantly. If he were a fully-formed human, I might’ve been unnerved by it. But in his translucent spirit state, he seemed fragile, like a piece of tulle that could tear in a light breeze and float away at any moment.

“Vut do you vant to know?” he asked me, waiting.

I took a minute to think. I wasn’t sure how much time I’d have with him, so I didn’t want to take too long to brainstorm. That said, this seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity to either A, get some invaluable insight I could share with the world or B, lay down an epic burn.

I went with option B.

“Who hurt you, sweetie?” I quipped in the same voice that Kristin Wigg uses on Rose Byrne in Bridesmaids, but G.H. (Ghost Hitler) didn’t seem to register the jab. His stoic expression was unchanged.

“Ze pain I’ve experienced in my life pales in comparison to ze pain I’ve caused so many. It is irrelevant.”

I opened my mouth, about to respond with “no shit, Sherlock,” but paused. Both because I realized it would be an insult to the Bohemian detective I love so much to give his namesake to G.H., and also because I wasn’t sure if what he’d said was true. Given the ascendency of Trump and his Nazi 2.0 followers, it actually seemed quite relevant. In order to prevent a modern-day monster that could rival his level of depravity, don’t we need to know how Hitler became Hitler?

So I followed up with “Sure, but you asked me what I want to know...and that’s the only question I’ve got.”

To this, G.H. let out a long sigh of nothing because ghosts can’t breathe, and while I quietly relished in being responsible for his exasperation, he continued.

“I have vhat you vould call ze…Daddy issues? I just vanted to paint pictures of ze petunias and get ze hugs and ze kisses. But fazah beat me and told me my passions vere vorthless. So, I left home and learned to embrace Germany - ze fazahland instead of my own fazah - and it embraced me back. From zat point on, I rejected all who rejected me and became crueler zen my fazah ever was.”

I sensed I’d just opened the door for a pity party and some revisionist history, so I pushed him further. “But what about free will? Plenty of people have shitty childhoods and they don’t all become genocidal maniacs.”

“Zis is true. But perhaps I vas a bit chemically imbalanced? You know, I had ze grand delusions, ze hypochondria, ze paranoia and probably ze Syphilis. I also had a lot of tummy troubles.”

I started to laugh. G.H. looked puzzled.

In that moment, I realized he was right. No amount of psychologizing could definitively rationalize him – once a behemoth, now just a shadow. No amount of backstory could excuse his atrocities either. Any attempt to understand him is for our own comfort – we simply don’t want pure evil to exist in this world; we need an answer for him. But the truth is that sometimes monsters are created, sometimes they’re born and other times maybe it’s a mix of both. No matter how it happens, though, the result is always the same - pain and suffering that simply cannot and should not be explained away.

As he waited for me to say more, I reached for him instead, making like I would take his hand to offer support. But just as he moved it toward mine, I quickly pulled away and pantomimed combing my hair with the swag of a 50′s Greaser.

“Too slow, motherfucker.” I said, and then purposefully gave him the finger on my RBG side. Not very creative, I know - but it felt good. I delighted in the surprise and anger I saw flash upon his face before I laid back down and got under the covers.

I aggressively fluffed my duvet and watched as he blew right out the window, like a delicate snowflake with a tiny stupid mustache.

It’s rumored the universe is constructed of infinite dimensions. Each sliver delineated as a color-tone split from a prism. Some dimensions have red oceans and yellow mountains. Other dimensions have silver wraith silhouette-people navigating turquoise gondolas. Another dimension said defined with stark, black and white contrasts garnished with orchid-purple clouds. Every dimension is different, vibrantly different, shockingly different. The universe doesn’t measure time, it warps time. Myth and legend tell of travelers that surf between the prism rays, bursting forth into infinite alternate universes. Try it yourself. Go sailing on a boiling sea or souvenir shop at a kaleidoscope bazar. Base jump off a volcano erupting diamond lava. See other beings, unusual entities doing the same thing- they’re only slightly different from you. Begin the dare, but beware, the journey is a once-in-a-lifetime, one-way-ticket. You can't bring anything you see back with you to show your friends and family. You can’t use anything you’ve learned to become rich and famous. And once embarked, you won't be able to come back to the same dimension you started from. Your mind will have changed, been indelibly irradiated with secrets from all the other alternative dimensions. It's a small price to pay for immortality- wouldn't you say?

#fiction #fabulist #sci-fi #flashfiction #alternatedimensions #williamcalkins

if you're reading this, you've probably already noticed my lack of capitalisation. maybe that made you click away. maybe that made you continue reading. if you do choose the latter, then thank you for giving me a chance.

this is not an academic essay: i'm not going to pull up statistics or surveys with the most detailed variables and try to convince you to trust me based on an inane number of experiments and observations. what i'm going to do instead is try to tell you why the concept of 'good' writing, at least to me, is obsolete, based on personal experiences.

i'm not going to lie- i've held different views for a very long time- and tended to agree with the more popular opinion, that writing on social media platforms such as instagram have led to the gradual downfall of pristine writing. but as i've continued to read and write and hopefully become better at it, i've found one thing that was common across platforms- and that is the amount of love that writers have for their craft. it's the fact that a person with a couple of followers on instagram continues to post excerpts from their notebook, whether it gains traction or not, and the fact that an author published by the new york times has the same passion towards his writing.

and to me, that is important, and it is beautiful. because your writing is important: the messy kind of writing, the poems you scribble down at coffeshops, the late night half-written epiphanies, the no-holds-barred notes app haikus typed on bus rides, the frenzied text messages at 3 a.m., the letters to ex-best friends you will never send, the writing that stews in your inbox, rejected from two publications because it just wasn't a right fit for them at the moment, the angry writing, the sad writing, the euphoric writing. all of it.

and i guess what i'm really trying to say is that your writing does not have to be good to mean something to people. it just has to be.

I could not have come there without mama. I swear she was there.

When we buried her I did not really know it, never even allowed myself to understand. Preacher said some words and somebody sang Amazing Grace and we all went back to the house and when they told stories of her I finally asked where she was. It was some stranger told me she’s dead boy. I laughed pretty loud, like it was a joke. Nobody else made a sound. In that silence, is when I first realized they did not know either what I did not quite know.

When I finally came there, where they said was a place that does not exist, I came there with her, was led there by her, could not have done it without her.

Other day, my father called out her name and my brother had to tell him she’s gone. Dad has to hear it every so often because of his dementia.

I said to him where’d she go and daddy touched my face and then knocked on top my heart with his hand and said, You won’t go nowhere without her my son.

i'm sure you've noticed -- it's hard not to, i think -- that i don't capitalize my 'i' or my names or titles; that i don't capitalize anything but His title. His, being, of course, God.

there's a connection between my lack of capitalization and the

making sure to capitalize His name, only.

this connection, if you think about it a minute -- though maybe it's not as clearly laid out in my intent as it is in my head, i apologize if i'm being ignorant of this and it being, in actuality, obscure and then trying to have a conversation about it without stating it outright -- is because i feel the need to personally state to myself (preferably each day, a few times a day, though i've hardly had any time to write any poetry of late) that i am not Him and i will not take the capitalization. and, anyway, it's just easier to understand who i'm talking about, haha, given i hardly state anyone's name but His and my aunt's. i generally refer to the people i write about as 'you' or 'him' or 'her' or 'them', so i can't quite say it makes it any easier, except to know when i'm not talking about God and when i really am.

and, if you've read any of the two -- i guess it's two, given most of my scene dumps are private, but -- short stories i've written on here, umm... "Momma, why's the sky so blue?" and "for reasons unknown" (uncapitalized because it was a project title and i never changed it) then you'd, hopefully, understand that i do try my best to keep to the rules of grammar, spelling, typing, and storytelling when they apply to my stories.

but never my poems.

perhaps it's because my poems are on a more personal level, though i can hardly say that without feeling odd -- i put personal ideas, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs into my stories, yes, but with poems it is different. there are no characters to dig through for my history, or ideas, or hurts. there is no 'barrier' between you and i, aside from a screen or two, and maybe even one day a page, but i am me here, i am not characters, and i am not someone else. i am me. and that's important for me to know, to understand, and it's important to the way i write -- which is like this. i write poems here. i do not capitalize my 'i's in my poems -- hardly anything, aside from God and His titles -- and i write in italics, most of the time, and sometimes i SCREAM BECAUSE IT REALLY HURTS TO SAY THESE THINGS, and then sometimes i go like this, because the voices in my head are telling me something, and it's usually right. (that is, it's usually wrong, or off, or backwards.) and i'm not sure what else you'd like to know, but if there is, whether it's about the way i write, how i write, where/when i write, or just me in general, message me and i'll do my best to answer -- so long as it's not, like, when did you last turn on a lamp (for the record, that was 15 minutes ago) or what's your address (nopity nope nope nope), but i will try.

It was three in the morning. My mind had woken me up so that I could muse about somehting very interesting.

"Hey Mind, why on earth did you wake me up? It's like Three AM bro!"

"I had a question to ask you."

"What is it? Get it over with already."

"If you turned into a cat . . . would people cuddle you? Or would they think it was weird because you used to be a person?"

"YOU WOKE ME UP FROM DEEP, LUCIUS SLEEP, TO ASK ME THA-- wow, that's actually a really good question!"

"I KNOW RIGHT?"

"On the one hand it's like 'eeewww don't cuddle him he used to be a dude', but on the other hand it's like 'bro that cat is so adorable. I can't resist.' I mean think about it, I'm already good looking enough as a person, but if I was as cute as a cat! I would be irresistible."

"Well, I'm not to sure about all that, but what are you gonna do to find your answer?"

"I don't know, maybe make some dumb post about it and ask everybody what they think."

" . . . Good Idea"

So, what do you guys think? Would people cuddle me if I turned into a cat?

I know it's weird, but it is also incredibly interesting, and deep down you know it is!