Let's All Have a Sleepover and Put Things Down Each Other's Pants in the Middle of the Night

It would be fun to have a sleepover. I haven’t had a sleepover in maybe more than five years. That's not true. What is true is I’m afraid of travel. I like sleeping. I’m happy. I’m nothing.

I think it would be funny to write a story using derivations of just one simile, comparing everything to fish or the moon or a unicycle or a vasectomy. Just, the whole story would be someone existing and thinking and relating every experience to that one simile. I want to write a story like that.

Has that happened yet? Probably. People write stories all the time about things utilizing various techniques to achieve particular aesthetic and emotional effects. Still, I think it would be funny. I’d write it under a pseudonym. With a pseudonym, I maybe wouldn’t feel so lonely when I masturbate.

I can’t remember the last time I ignored something. If I did ignore something, I’m ignoring that I ignored it. That’s so 'meta'. Lots of people go places and fall asleep. Then they get up for work in the morning, go to work and show each other their vasectomies.

Stop me on the street and ask my name. Please—I’m begging you. I have a name. My name is 'Ask me something else'. Relate all my answers to your favorite 'vasectomy' analogy.

I’m alive—that’s so 'meta'. You’re alive, too, so I’m the 'meta' version of your life. I’m the one who’s alone. Stop copying me.

We all have our own particular nostalgias, which doesn’t mean anything. There’s nothing unique about the fact that we all have our own particular nostalgias. You will always be what you remember.

So many things we regret doing to other people that other people don’t even remember. We try to apologize, but other people say, "For what?" Other people will always be what they forget about us.

I think I’d be more popular if everyone liked me. The more popular you are, the more people are already inclined to like you. People are so boring and unoriginal. (How many people have already said that about people?)

People don’t like me. Real original, people. No one likes me. Why should anyone else? I’m sometimes happy I’m not popular. A lot, I look at people out in the world having fun with each other and think, 'Assholes'.

Has no one polled how many Christians have purchased and are playing the new Mortal Kombat? Video games rated 'mature' often seem geared toward the complete opposite demographic.

Earlier I pumped the soap dispenser in the supermarket bathroom and it came all over my hand. I wish I’d filmed it. It was pretty intense, the way the thick white foam burst all over my palm, dripped between my fingers—some got on my pants. It was probably the most sanitary public orgasm I’ve ever caused.

Don’t touch me.

Necessary Fiction Gets a Tattoo

"Tattoo," an excerpt from an unpublished novel called CHILDREN, appears today in Necessary Fiction. Thanks to Steve Himmer for running it this week...

Two Stories in the Spring 2011 Issue of Hot Metal Bridge

The spring issue of Hot Metal Bridge is live, and it includes two stories I wrote, "A New Amnesia" and "Smoke." Thanks to Rachel Mangini for asking me to send something to her. Also included in this issue are wonderful works by J.A. Tyler, Nicelle Davis, Jen Gann, and many others. There’s also an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lydia Davis.

David Backer Reviews 'Watering the Fires'

Fiction Daily editor David Backer reviewed my 2009 political poetry collection, Watering the Fires. His thoughts here are much appreciated, and capture much of what I hoped to accomplish with the political poetry I’ve written over the years (mostly during the Bush administration).

This echap (as well as Gargling Cinderblocks, and poems published in other places) is only a small sample of a full-length collection called How Much the Jaw Weighs that will most likely never be published (as David points out in his review). This fact alone seems, to me, to validate many of the poems confronting socio-politics and complacency in America.

I feel like I've got a lot to say about this subject, but I really don't feel like saying it right now. I feel complacent. I haven't written anything as overtly political as these poems in some time, and feel I probably won't again. For that reason, I have a good feeling of nostalgia thinking back on writing them, and still of course identify with my intentions.

I would very much like to see How Much the Jaw Weighs published someday, but I have no idea where to send it. I've sent it to a few places here and there over the years, but nothing. I fear David Backer is absolutely right when he writes that political poetry is something no one should write anymore because it will never be published. David asks:

Is that the way it is? Are writers trying to make a living by their writing more than they’re trying to make life by their writing? When I went to the AWP I was shocked at how much it felt like a trade fair. A job search. A place to sell widgets. William Pitt, at that very panel on political poetry, sat behind a Marriott fold-out table with an awkward floral print tablecloth and spoke into a microphone, just as I’m sure any number of military-industrial leaders have.

Am I being unreasonable? Don’t we have an obligation as artist-citizens of the most offensive cultural empire this side of the 20th century to use our talents to point beautiful, un-ignorable fingers at the various interests bent on consuming life on earth to death?

The answer to these questions is probably yes. And “Watering the Fires” is an excellent occasion to ask them again.

Thank you, David...

Amber Sparks Reviews 'Snowing Fireflies' and 'Of Creatures' @ Vouched

Big thanks to Amber Sparks, who this week gave the most humbling and flattering review of both my chapbook, Snowing Fireflies, and my poetry collection, Of Creatures, at Vouched Books. In my excitement, I failed to read the author of the post, and assumed Christopher Newgent had written it (being as he is the founder of Vouched Books), and emailed him to say thanks. He responded, informing me that Amber Sparks had in fact written it, and I felt like the silliest person in the world (which isn’t much different from how I feel all the time). So, to Amber, I both apologize and thank you again. Here’s my favorite part of the review:

"I felt like a balloon bumping against a table. Beeny’s work is so breathtakingly fragile, so strangely sad and examining of flaws, so retrospective and yet so flash-on-brilliant in its insights."

What is 'The World'? / The Potty-Monster is Afraid of the Toilet

Looking through jobs, I think of all the things I could’ve done with my life. All the things I never did and never will do. I feel like a child who once had all these dreams, all at once now in retrospect, a child who became a bigger child who never really learned anything.

I scroll down the listings on all the job sites. I see things that look interesting, some things I think I’m ‘too good’ for, other things I know I’m not at all qualified for.

I scroll the listings and think, “Yeah, I could be a neurosurgeon. An engineer. I could teach biochemistry.” Or, I could have, years ago, before considering the possibility that years later I’d be sitting at a computer, desperately looking for things to do to survive. 

And what does that mean? Survive? To be ‘financially stable’? Is that all? How can having money be the only way to ‘survive’ in the world? What is ‘the world’?

I can’t stop watching the original Predator movie. I want to write an essay on its ‘relevance’. How it’s so mythic in scale. In Predator 2, Danny Glover calls the Predator "pussy-face." More and more I feel I relate things that happen in real life to books or movies. Quotes from books and movies pop into my head in place of anything original I might have to say on the subject. My life seems to exist in between art forms. I’m thinking of going through all my rejections from the past 10 years and posting them online. They would need their own website. I’m thinking of donating plasma for money.

Ken Sparling is quickly becoming my favorite author. I’ve read three of his books and I want to read more. I’m at a loss for how to get people to read my stuff. It feels impossible. As if I make no sound. My daughter won’t stop saying “The Potty-Monster is afraid of the toilet.” I miss being a family with her and her mom. She’s seven.

I’m thirty. It’s time I post something on Facebook and wait for someone to like it. Factory Sleep Shoppe is following me on Twitter because I tweeted something about skydiving onto a mattress. Last week I tweeted something about my third eye being a malfunctioning breast implant, and some breast enhancement place started following me. I need new glasses. The arm is being held on by a band-aid, and one of the little plastic nose-guard pieces fell off last week. I’m writing a classical piano piece. When I’m finished it will be fifteen minutes long. I will play it alone, to myself.

I have all these pictures I want to take but they’d all involve me. There’s that Jeffrey McDaniel line: “I’m a narcissist trapped in the third-person.” I like that. Is it possible for something to not make a sound? Is the possibility that some things don’t make a sound the reason we don’t listen to them? Are we not listening to some things simply because they might not make a sound?

'Milk Like a Melted Ghost' Published / Interview @ Dogzplot

My novella, Milk Like a Melted Ghost, has been published by Thumbscrews Press (thanks again to Daniel Casebeer…), and can now be read online for free. You can find it on Goodreads, along with other books of mine. If you like it, or something else, please be sure to give it a star or two.

Also, Barry Graham recently interviewed me, and it went live today at Dogzplot's blog. We discuss my chapbook Snowing Fireflies, surrealism, the laws of physics, religion, hip-hop, childhood, getting your heart broken, OCD, and some other personal things.