“I wish I had tried living just a little more selfishly.” - Asa Mitaka, Chainsaw Man, chapter 98

In a departure from my usual writing, I am going to write about something that makes me happy. This piece is multi-purpose. Reason 1: I am willing to go on the record that I had an idyllic village childhood where I could play with cows and be at the mercy of being known by the hundred other people who populated the village. It’s better to get it in writing, because when I become rich and famous (inevitable) I can’t backtrack in my memoir and give myself a Dickensian past that my readers can slurp up to make themselves feel better. Reason 2: what if I develop dementia (inevitable) or amnesia and I am unable to remember any details of my childhood? I’ve already got a horrendous memory because my brain is so occupied with other things (movie trivia, the grades of everyone I know, ideas for sketches) that one day I’m going to end up forgetting large chunks of my childhood, so I should write it down. Reason 3: I’ve been in a slump for two months, I am not writing anything more than neurotic tweets about Jeff Buckley and Eric Cartman AI voice covers, I am pretending my life isn’t crumbling to dust in my hands, I went to see Inhaler live in November - I just had to mention that. So, please, join me as I reminisce about my childhood, god knows I need someone the company.

How I remember houses

Barely anyone in my immediate family has moved house, I think it’s pretty ironic because the further out you go in the family have ended up everywhere from Canada to Barbados to Australiaa. My uncle and his kids - my cousins - have moved house the most. I’ve experienced all of them, I remember the houses that even my cousins don’t but the further back we go, the harder it is to remember them. I don’t remember the flat that my dad used to live in where he would play Resident Evil in the dark and I only vaguely remember the house of my mum’s friend before they moved because I can still feel the fabric of her dark red couch on my hands and the light of the living room window shining down on my face.

The house is strange. The rooms were huge with no furniture. The living room felt twice the size to four year old me. The TV playing the Christmas episode of Doctor Who seemed to warp and stretch away from me. The giant L-shaped cream couch felt massive to me. The walls were grey. There was a small window above the couch that made it look like we were in a basement flat from Parasite. The stairs made a weird noise when you walked down them. They were a slippery dark wood with a strip of carpet to stop drunk relatives and small children from rocketing down them. They were weird infinity stairs with a metal pole attached to the underside. The poles would rattle under your feet and they always made me think I was on a rope bridge from I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! The kitchen was downstairs and the walls were a chic dark blue. I remember drinking a lot of orange juice in that kitchen and playing with the border collie called Sam that was curtailed to the kitchen and the garden.

Looking back through photo albums, I found that I was entirely wrong about my uncle’s first house. There were no tiny windows that you couldn’t see out of, I was just short. The room wasn’t a massive all-consuming space, I was just small. Thinking about my uncle’s first house conjures images of an un-rendered video game, nothing but flat coloured polygons in the suggestion of a house. Or that I’m walking through a liminal space. That’s what I remember, or desperately try to, even though I had only been there four times in my life before they moved. I used to remember it more vividly but now I only remember it as I’ve written it here.

Sink baths and Irn Bru floats

My time was split between my house and my grandparents. I witnessed the changing decor over the years, the TV upgrades, and complete re-doing of the bathroom in 2011 or 2012 that got rid of the painfully 60s-style wood panel bath and replaced it with a shower with tiles that would sparkle in the sunlight. The only room I remember never changing was mine, since it was also the guest bedroom. The bedroom that used to belong to my mother and my auntie when they were growing up. The walls were always covered with powder blue wallpaper, that is now peeling at the edges and exposing the wall underneath because of an accident when moving a bed frame.

Then there was the kitchen that hasn’t changed much since it was first installed in the 70s. There was a fresh paint job at some point and I remember when the cooker was replaced but the cupboards and floor and the art hanging on the walls have been the same since I was a baby. The sink hasn’t changed either because the cold tap is still so stiff you need a tea towel to twist it properly, especially on cold days. The counters are the same and somehow they’ve stayed the same laminated shade of bone for the past twenty four years, no matter how many times I’ve spilled something or vomited on them as an infant.

When I was a toddler, my gran used to bathe me in the sink, never on Sunday because that was when I needed to get a proper bath before the week ahead. I used to love sink baths because I didn’t need to wash myself. A sink bath was more or less an excuse to sit and waste water. There was never enough water for me to do enough damage to the kitchen floors, it was mostly washing up liquid with an inch of water to me to fill up cups with. That sink bath protocol, every bath I would fill up a plastic champagne flute to prepare for a party. I would wave out the kitchen windows at my imaginary lady guests to my soiree - Jean, Irene, Mrs Something - and my gran would fill in the blanks with her own vast, expansive knowledge of what it meant to be an adult woman. I would use these skills during her weekly knitting bees, a gathering for women with biscuits and tea and, oddly enough, no knitting. I remember not enjoying the knitting bees because my gran would turn the TV off for an hour or two and I couldn’t watch my medical dramas. The best part of the knitting bee was to be doted on and given biscuits by my gran and her friends and asked about school and listen to them talk about things I never really understood, sometimes I would be given Irn Bru.

One of the things I wasn’t allowed under any circumstances was Irn Bru, a particularly neurotic surgeon my mother used to work with called it “gut rot” and would throw it out if he found someone drinking it, and it was the forbidden nectar for the vast majority of my childhood. During Christmas my primary school would hand out tiny styrofoam cups filled with room temperature orange liquid that had been sitting under the teacher’s desk. I would hold it up under my nose to feel the bubbles against my skin.

The only other time I was allowed Irn Bru was with my grandfather. It was a secret, only to be drank when I stayed with my grandparents, but only when my gran was out and it was just me and my grandfather. The routine would start simply, we would be wasting time sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of The Sweeney or a late night game show. It was slow and methodical, we would move from the living room into the kitchen. In this family, Irn Bru was primarily bought in glass bottles that could be returned to the nearest corner shop for money when you had collected enough, they would sit on the floor next to the blue ice cooler than I always liked to stick my face in because of the smell.

My grandparents made it their life goal to give me sweets. It was my gran that gave me chocolate buttons for the first time and that was it. I had chocolate buttons, pieces of Galaxy kept in a metal biscuit tin because I watched an advert of a chic woman savouring the chocolate and that was the only way I would eat it. I loved them all but Irn Bru floats were my favourite. I can’t remember the last time I had one, they changed the recipe to Irn Bru years ago so they never tasted the same after a while.

The house in Comrie

My grandfather had one sister, older by a number of years that I never managed to figure out and found it rude to ask, who I rarely saw because she lived so far away for most of my childhood. My aunt worked as secretary for a steel company and briefly for an Italian company that imported marble. Adept at shorthand and went to a semi-local high school that is now known for being quite prestigious. When she lived in South Africa she didn’t work, not out of choice I’m sure.

My uncle was an engineer, apparently a very good one because he was a CEO of something to do with engineering, and his job had taken them all around the world. They are the only people in my family that have ever been to Japan (which for a 10 year old weeb like me was a big deal) and they spent years living out in South Africa during the tail end of apartheid and what came after. It was explained to me that my uncle John was sent over there to teach the African population to bridge the disparity gap between them and white South Africans. Their lives in South Africa were long before my time, but its presence still lingers in my grandparent’s house. A miniature nguni shield made from cowhide lives in the airing cupboard where we kept the towels and a wool tapestry hanging up in my grandparent’s bedroom.

The house in Comrie was old, so old that it still had what I assume was a servants passage, that all the children and subsequent grandchildren would ride down on a towel and a washing basket. The house was always strange, not alien, but more like a ghost. The further you went up the stairs the more uneasy I felt. The decorations became sparser, the walls felt like they were tilting towards me and there were only two rooms if I remember correctly. The spare bedroom and a second bathroom if memory serves. The kitchen was trendy, to me, a 60s ski lodge style with a large wooden counter that I would lean my skinny child arms on when my aunt was talking, the kitchen had a door to the bedroom, which led to the servants passage, which led down to the a groovy corridor that housed my uncle’s study. There was always a mass of papers in his study, on the floor, in the cabinets, on his desk. Though he had long since retired it seemed like the entire bottom level of the house was dedicated to the culmination of all his life’s work.

The three rooms I frequented in the house in Comrie were the living room, the dining room and the bathroom. Mostly because they seemed to be the only ones that didn’t plunge me into some deep primal fear that I was in the wrong reality. The living room was warm, there were tawny brown leather sofas and an armchair that was reserved solely for my uncle, or me when he wasn’t looking. There was a bowl full of decorative eggs made out of various polished minerals and rocks and one made of wood. My favourite was a strawberry pink swirled one that I liked to put in a basket and pretend was my baby. The memories of South Africa are more prominent in Comrie, the metal decoration that doesn’t look like anything special until you shine a light on it and it projects shadowy figures engaging in a ritual dance on the ceiling. This was also the only room with a TV. Oh, how I would pour over the two kids channels that I couldn’t get at home because I didn’t get have Sky like all of my other friends at primary. I was disappointed that I couldn’t watch Disney, which is what the normal, cool girls at primary school watched, but I would watch Cartoon Network and it’s strange, off-kilter shows with vigour with my uncle. We would watch Ruby Gloom together and he would compare me to Wednesday Addams.

My aunt always called my grandfather by his full name and it used to annoy me because I never realised they were siblings until I saw a photo of them together; and thinking back I can’t believe I never put two and two together because they look identical and their hair turned snowy white quite early on. My uncle did the same but it never bothered me, partially because we were so close. Our birthdays were one day apart so I always thought we were meant to be best friends.

At the time, my dream was to go to fashion school despite my aversion to bootcut jeans and wearing most fabrics. My uncle crafted an image of myself that would linger in the back of my head for years: me as a twenty-something on the steps of Glasgow School of Art wearing a pink blazer and leather boots with orange ribbons tied in my hair and carrying a large portfolio. I thought about that image of myself for years until I had willed a version of it into reality, not the best version, but I think if my uncle were to see me walking around the streets of Edinburgh in a beret and reading Joan Didion he might be proud.

I have one of his letters taped to my wall.

‘I hope you are enjoying school—not long now until the Easter Holidays when perhaps we’ll see you here at Comrie. You must come and 1) Feed the ducks and 2) See the Earthquake House.

Thank you once again

Love,

Uncle John

The most vivid memory I have of my trips to Comrie was when my uncle threw my ice cream in the river. You might think it cruel, to throw a child’s ice cream in a river and tell her that the fish needed it more than her, but I think it’s funny. At. least I think it’s funny now. The sheer absurdity of the situation makes me laugh now, but at the time I was devastated. Raspberry ripple, two scoops in a big cone almost as big as my head and I was eagerly biting it with my teeth because I liked seeing the marks they made and my baby teeth somehow weren’t as sensitive as they are now. We were walking towards a small white cabin that could have been a cafe, my uncle and I walked ahead while my aunt and mother were chatting behind us. I don’t remember how it happened but one minute I was smearing ice cream all over my little face and the next I was watching it float down the river and under a bridge. I cried and protested only to be met with mirthful laughter.

Some time after my grandmother died in 2013 we were all pouring through family photos; photos of events that were so far removed from me that they may as well be fictional. There were snapshots of the house in South Africa, the view of the pool from the living room window, my uncle John standing with my auntie where she couldn’t have been older than me at the time. There was one photo that my mother showed me of a sepia-toned grainy family gathering and she said:

‘Everyone in that photo is dead now.’

Going to America

The first time I went to America was when I was seven. Before then, I had enjoyed the occasional trip to Europe or down to England for Centre Parcs and the two years in a row that we went down to North Berwick to stay in other people’s houses and watch Wimbledon. America was the golden ticket, the promise land that only existed on TV, Americans weren’t even real to me, they were like unicorns that I had always wanted to see in the flesh, but what would an American be doing in a village with just more than 1,000 in it? My mother and I were going to embark on our strenuous journey to the promised land on the 26th of June 2009. It was all set in stone, we would go to Florida so I could go to Disneyland Orlando and stay with family friends for a brief period.

We left for Florida the day after Michael Jackson died.

Every TV channel the night before we left, in the airport and in America itself was dedicated to documenting every moment of the King of Pop’s life and the theories about his death. In those two weeks we spent in Florida I listened to more Michael Jackson than I ever have in my entire life. I was subjected to play after play of Billie Jean and Man in the Mirror. Interviews with the family, then his doctor, then expose style content about his kids, the youngest being only three days younger than me. It wasn’t the welcome reception I was waiting for in the promise land. Discussions about the Jackson 5, it’s black it’s white, hoo! it’s black, it’s white, what pills was he taking? Top twenty Michael Jackson music videos with commentary, it’s thriller thriller night, he hung his son out of a window and now I function on the assumption that his actual name is Blanket.

That was the weirdest part about America, its ability to tear into the lives of other people like they were meat off the bone. It was kind of admirable. Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t know anywhere else that was so dedicated to its celebrities. I knew Hollywood, I developed a tender lust for Ian Curtis at a young age, I wasn’t dumb but to actually see the celebrity worship in real time, the dedication to combing through ever Maybe it’s because I was young but I walked around America believing Americans weren’t real. They were a simulacrum of real people (the morose population of the UK) I never encountered so many people who were openly friendly. It unnerved me. While the people of Scotland would stare and not give away if they were enjoying your presence or not, the Americans would shout their joy at being alive right in your face. I was mesmerised by their exuberance, how they were so eager to compliment total strangers or even just blurt out their inner monologue.

We had a waiter in the Pizza Hut we went to for dinner who I just thought was gay but my mother would then later tell me that he was just on a lot of speed.

I treated the Americans in Florida as more of a spectacle than Disneyland. I barely remember all the rides I cried on but I do vividly remember hearing an old woman with a southern accent say ‘your mama’s Pluto’ in reference to our entrance cards. It felt like a religious experience. I was more entranced by the Americans on the propellor boat that we took to go see alligators than the actual alligators. I remember the woman at the pool who told me to get out with a wagging finger and took my towels from me because there was a hurricane approaching but not the beaches. Well, I do remember the beach. I remember losing one of my prized jelly shoes in the ocean and begging a stranger to wade into the sea to fetch it for me or call on a dolphin to get it like a provincial village princess.

Going backwards

That brings us to the end of my little trip down memory lane. The truth is, there could be multiple inconsistencies with what I have written that isn’t directly about me because almost everyone involved is dead and I will never be able to get the scoop from them. Many such cases.

I still hold the childish belief in the back of my head that the things around me will be as timeless and fresh as they are now. That my family will still be there for me to interview when I should have done it sooner when they were still around. I do this a lot, I start to become fixated on things that are already dead, I only started reading Didion two days before she died and developed an appreciation for Michael Jackson after he could no longer make music. I believed everyone and everything, especially things closest to me, were immortal and unshakeable.

I’ve been writing this post for a while, almost two years now, and I still haven’t been able to articulate what I want to say. I have written about my childhood, the soft and tender memories that I have cherished for years and the ones I would rather forget entirely. A childhood I wish for every child in this world. I think back to my great uncle’s vision for me and how little I’ve lived up to it, I can feel myself becoming more shallow and less introspective and I feel deeply miserable all the time. I’m twenty four now but I feel like my life isn’t where I thought it would be; I work a job that I hate in a town that’s shrinking around me while I watch my friends live through Instagram stories. I shouldn’t complain, I did choose this but I look back on my life and my expectations and wonder why I didn't have the hunger to live my life until now, now that I’m becoming trapped in a life that I don’t want. I still want to be that girl that wears a pink blazer and carries her portfolio. But I could be so many things, I’ve only realised recently that I have all the time in the world to figure it out. I could be one of those woo-woo faux-Buddhist white women that does massage and is obsessed with snow leopards, I could travel the world with just a backpack, I could do whatever I want. I’m sure that’s what my uncle would want, for me to pursue that version of myself to the ends of the earth until it doesn’t matter what I’m chasing anymore. But for now, I’ll revel in childhood for just a little bit longer.

“I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to.” - Fleabag, Fleabag

I was born under the year of the horse and it always annoyed me because horses aren’t cute and tiny like my favourite animal, the rabbit. 2002 was the year of the water horse characterised by its gentleness and emotional fluctuations. Conversely, 2026 is the year of the fire horse. The last year of the fire horse was in 1966, during China’s cultural revolution. I don’t put much thought into it but this year is supposed to symbolise a great deal of energy and fundamental change. So, I decided to write something to help maximise your feng shui for the coming year. Enjoy!

So here’s the skinny: pick a subject to research to death throughout the year it doesn’t matter what it is as long as its niche. I spent years chasing the mystery of Huntington, Nevada and it lead me to creating my favourite essay which I’ve never been able to top. In an age of hyper-consumption and algorithms, the most radical thing you can do is fully immerse yourself in what you love and let it consume you, just for a little bit. Fuck the noise learn about quipu or Beanie Babies or how to cultivate lotus flowers. Carry a notebook but only use it for Knausgaard-esque observations about everyday life, the more detail you can squeeze in about the condensation on your iced coffee cup the better.

Don’t wear makeup except bright glittery eyeshadow. Or wear semi-transparent jumpers with coloured bras underneath. It’s 2026 and the world is constantly teetering on the precipice of total destruction so, fuck it dog life’s a risk who cares if you wear pink glitter on a Tuesday morning. Wear something skanky while going to the shops ESPECIALLY if you live in a small town. For the (three) men in the audience, I implore you to ignore the siren’s call that is looksmaxxing and just invest in a vintage jacket so you can feel like a cowboy. It’s the year of the horse after all. Everyone should be wearing skin scents that are only detectable when you’re right up close to another person. It’s very intimate. I’m characterising the year of the horse as a time to slow down, burrow into your obsessions and be a little bit skanky and freaky. 1966 was the start of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, so perhaps sixty years later the highly anticipated Woke 2™️will be a libertine-esque cultural movement with me at the helm. Love thy neighbour. Quite literally.

Working in a post office has made me cherish letter writing. Fuck texts and DMs, send your friend a letter and post it to their address. It doesn’t matter what it’s about as long as it’s handwritten and with intention. I have letters from friends and family stuck on my walls and sometimes I catch myself rereading them over and over when I feel down. It’s fun! Life is short so why not buy a stamp?

reading material

I’ve been slacking on reading the past year because I fried my brain with the short-form content so this year I’m really going to try and finish at least one book a month. I prefer sappy, romantic and detail-heavy texts right now. I’m reading The Romance of The Rose by Guillaume de Lorris currently and I don’t really understand the medieval euphemisms but it’s so beautifully descriptive it makes my heart flutter. Read autofiction from polarising people and then read the non-fiction accounts and see who’s actually telling the truth. I’m a firm supporter of brainrot in the arts, we can’t build a true picture of the world if we don’t engage with it at its most stupid and debased. So, I’ve been really into bawdy but salient lit-mags On the Rag and Piss. I love reading something that makes me grind my teeth in frustration that I didn’t write it first.

quickies

I’m already out of ideas and I’m not fake-spiritual enough to keep going so here’s some little things to do and watch this year. Watch 100 Meters by Kenji Iwaisawa but don’t feel inspired to join a running club. Use public transport more. Ask someone to give you a massage, you probably need it. Revisit your preteen obsession and write about why you were so obsessed with it. Write write write whenever you feel the need to stave off the inevitable Gen Z dementia epidemic. Don’t listen to your fucking Co—Star it’s OUT TO GET YOU. My parting message is: astrology and zodiacs are kind of bullshit and you probably shouldn’t let a girl tell you what to do. But if you are into that, maybe try out a BDSM dynamic this year, freak.

Love you and bye, Sophie.

Listen you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a girl who would not take it anymore, a girl who stood up against…the clothes in Stradivarius…having to get trains at 7:30 in the morning…ebooks not being available when it clearly says ‘available’ in the online library…being left on read…public toilets that stink of cold shit-

But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve started pondering religion again because it’s too cold to do anything else of value and its ascetic autumn. I think about it a lot when I’m waiting on public transport, maybe it’s a long forgotten instinct from having to ride the boat through the river styx during a previous reincarnation. My pondering has brought me back t the time in my life when I was almost about to get baptised with my best friend so we could get sick as hell baptismal names and to alleviate the guilt that comes with being a nineteen year old girl. This bitch thinks she’s Raskolnikov!!

[Enter, ME, in my coat and my little bakers boy hat that makes me look like a Maoist, my hands trembling as I hold onto a puny looking cigarette and smelling like sadness and vomited up spirits] : God denies entrance to heaven to the billionaire…and the common writer.

It’s early morning, two and a half hours before my lecture actually starts. My fingers are too stiff and cold to type properly so don’t be an asshole about my typos, and I'm sitting in a building that’s only a few months older than me and three days younger than one of my friends. It says so right above the entrance - this building is a Libra guys! Its birthday was yesterday! That means we’re compatible since I’m an Aquarius, now I just need to find a Gemini building and I’ll be unstoppable!

Since I am pursuing an autumn of self-discipline, I’m growing out my nails. I’m wearing nail polish to fend off the overwhelming urge to hurt myself and chew my nails until they’re stubs that can’t even open cans. It’s a symptom of writing a really good essay. So I’ve probably been handing in garbage since the start of my masters degree. No. I kid, I kid - legally I have to say that if any future employers are retroactively reading this. When I’m not channeling the spirit of Joan Didion into my meagre essays, I’ve been occupying my time with BBWs (big bottles of wine) and reading Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. This dude was off the shits. Saying cunt THAT much? This dude was ave-vaging five ‘cunt’s per page - what a guy!!! He’s like me, he says cunt a lot and I say cunt a lot it’s almost like I’m his reincarnation - but honestly I could be Oppenheimer;s reincarnation since his death date and my birth date are the same. But I digress. I used to think Henry Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe, but that’s Arthur Miller. And, honestly, I don’t think Henry would have been that good an upgrade for her.

Short intermission while writer goes to her lecture

Back in the Libra building. I’m sitting on a chair that reclines too much listening to three different tables conversations at once. I can’t fix the seat and every time I lean back I feel like I’m in therapy and some spectral shill of Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday is about to ask me ‘how does that make you feel’ and I won’t say anything. I get paranoid when I think people can see my computer screen so I resign myself to sitting in corners or just doing fuck all on my laptop when I’m in public - total killer for my artistic spirit.

Time is passing slowly because I’ve got a three hour break, a genuinely horrendous creation that I think was invented to torture my psyche and leave me with too much free time to ponder all the dumb shit that occupies my deteriorating attention span. But soup brain is free time, the writing exercise that is supposed to be done in one day, unedited and totally nonsensical- an excerpt of what goes through my twisted perspective which would make most simply go insane. Where does my free time leave me? Grouchy, annoyed, preoccupied with Greenland sharks that can live up to 500 years old, Gojo from Jujustu Kaisen, what I’m going be for halloween but what could possibly top my 2021 costume of slutty Morrissey? Exactly!

WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO FOR THREE HOURS???

I’m listening to Talking Heads and thinking about having a cheeky cigarette [i don’t smoke] and having fun and talking and reclining and having a grand old time with my three hours!

What you gonna do when you get out of jail? I’m gonna have some fun! What do you consider fun?

FUN! NATURAL FUN!

Bye!

Run to bus stop. Almost get the wrong bus. Sit at the back of the bus so the three other passengers can’t see contents of phone. Everyone is watching. They can see the screen, no they can’t, yes they can. Get off bus a stop early. Walk behind a man who smells like the aftershave every boy in high school would wear. He was a red heart keyring on his bag. Wonder if he’ll fall in love. Watch train leave station. Fuck. Missed the train. Consider running across the platform to make it to the train. Remember the girl who lost her ear playing on electrified train tracks. Stay put. Sit and wait for next train. Not ideal, but less stops, less chance of someone having to sit next to me. Wait at next train platform for fifteen minutes. Play on phone. Get suspicious of man standing in the corner. Looks like an old drawing from summer study day in fourth year. Suspicious suspicious suspicious. Everyone is watching again. Hot business man gets on train to London Euston. Marriage material. Think about life after masters degree. Stop thinking about life after masters degree. Get on train. Sit in seat. Don’t care if it’s reserved, Jesus be thy witness. Want to fall asleep on the train. Briefly get horny. Goes away after passing Carluke. Want to play with phone again but too paranoid. Watch the businessman in seat diagonally down work on his laptop, Hate his earbuds. He puts on video to listen to while he works. Take out book. Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. Relate to Sean. And to Lauren. And to Paul. Know me? No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other. You’re never gonna know me. Lauren gets knocked up, consider pregnancy, feel no maternal instinct, wonder what it would be like to be a father instead. Get depressed Train stops.

Think about banger ending passage to latest piece of writing, realise it makes me sound anorexic but like it anyway. Think about pottery. Check phone for messages. One from mum. Reply with one word. Stumble at train doors and wait for Prince Charming to offer his hand. No such luck. Walk to university. Traffic lights button seems broke but it isn’t. Thank god. Think about another excerpt for piece of writing that should be written down, there is nothing but time. ‘I want a husband like Dick Grayson (only exists on paper, sometimes in my own head) or one where I am someone else.’ Think about the fig monologue from The Bell Jar. Reel at the idea of eating a fig. Picture a life with a husband and children. Plot scheme to win husband before second graduation. Consider potential neuroses. It has to be autism, it’s definitely autism. Or BPD, who else has moods like you. Has to be BPD because you want everyone to treat you like a child. Lies. Not lies. Wonder what putting your hand in a brain feels like. Feel sensation on the top of skull. Relax slightly. Pack of Mayfair, yeah man thanks. Listen to Morrissey, and I’mmmmm throwing my armmmmsssss arouuuuund PAAAAAAARISSSS, headphones cut out on one side to listen to k-pop instead. Get annoyed at cyclists. Wish they would die. Think about the Nightwing comics in the back of the work storeroom. Pass by tattoo parlour. Never get a tattoo somewhere that will show when you’re wearing a wedding dress. Well I’m never getting married so ram that!

Think about solipsism via Fiona Apple lyrics. Get to uni. Don’t recognise anyone. Wonder why. Remember it’s a postgrad. Consider death again. Hold back vomit. Buy invigorating smoothie. Don’t feel invigorated. Thoughts running low. Wonder why everyone looks they are also born in 2002 - realise they probably are. Stop thinking. Put Radiohead on loop.

Careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole)

Keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall)
Favours f

or favours

Fitter Happier plays seven times in a row according to Last.fm. It’s loud in the atrium. Look out window to look for friends, realise this is postgrad, keep looking out the window. Get paranoid that someone is looking at words on laptop screen, realise no one cares. Someone recognise me. Someone recognise me. LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME SEE ME.HOLD ME.LET ME CRY.I THINK I’M TURNING INTO MY WORST NIGHTMARE.HOLD ME IN YOUR ARMS. DONT THINK ILL OF ME. READ MY THOUGHTS. SUBSCRIBE TO MY SUBSTACK.

Deep breath.

Drink invigorating smoothie. Yuck. Check label. Kiwi, cucumber, apple, matcha & flax seeds with vitamins. Brain starts functioning. It passes. It always passes. Breathe deep and smile at text messages from friends. All is well. Class starts in forty minutes and I’m not dying and I have a talent for writing. I have hope. I believe in love and the dew on the grass and the feeling of someone’s skin on mine. Listen to upbeat music, keep thinking about love. Everyone is everyone. It’s all our first shot at life too. Think about a poem by Mitch Albom. Man alone chimes the hour. Realise I’ve misinterpreted it when I look up the rest of the poem. As I lean back in the new couches the university installed during my brief absence, I try to ground myself in the reality of everyone else. Today will be a good day, and I’ll do my best. I promise I’ll write something more palatable soon.

I’m just a girl after all.

The tale of Valentino is something out of one of his movies. Moving to New York at age 18 after years of being pampered and indulged by his mother, Valentino found himself down on his luck and blowing through his inheritance money. He worked odd jobs as a dishwasher, a shoe shiner and then a taxi dancer where he would find success in the arms of rich and lonely women. He charmed a Chilean heiress and supported her through her unhappy marriage and subsequent divorce where he appeared in court to testify that her husband was unfaithful, because back then you needed irrefutable evidence that a spouse was abusive, unfaithful or impotent in order to get a divorce. Alas, the irresistible Valentino, was the victim of a plot created by the scorned ex-husband and was arrested on vice charges that could never be proven. After his brief stint in jail and his friend murdering her husband, Valentino fled New York with a travelling musical and found himself on the west coast, Hollywood territory.

Valentino was, in many ways, the first well documented cases of the female gaze. He was something the average American woman he never seen before, he was seductive and passionate, sporting a cheshire cat grin and magically expressive eyebrows. To explain it simply: the way Twitter feels about Timothée Chalamet and BTS, is how America felt about Valentino. He was a taste of forbidden fruit, in a world ravaged by World War I where men were returning from war shell-shocked and cold and women were reluctantly returning to the home. Women needed something to sink their teeth into that made their blood hot and their cheeks flush. Who else crept onto the stage but a fresh-faced, tanned and devilish Valentino. Whenever he appeared on screen he made every man around him fade into white noise. Men hated him, especially Richard Dorgan, he hated him so much he managed to anger Emily W. Leider (who wrote a biography about Valentino) and she was incensed to comment on the hypocrisy of how men viewed him and his on-screen seductions:

“What really made Dorgan's blood boil was Valentino's beauty and allure. It was okay for Theda Bara, the raven-haired, racoon-eyed screen vamp whose name was supposed to be an anagram for "Arab death" ..., to assume exaggerated serpentine poses and be vaunted as the incarnation of libido run amuck. It was not okay if the vamp happened to be a gorgeous, erotically devastating foreign-born male.”

Valentino’s movies, admittedly, aren’t very good, but that comes with a brand of cinema that relies entirely on your leading man being handsome. They’re a product of the time and anyone who said they actually liked The Sheik and its sequel was probably too mystified by Valentino to form a coherent opinion. His roles as the grinning seductive villain and fetishised “exotic” lover catapulted him into stardom. I never saw the appeal of those roles, my favourite version of Valentino was in A Society Sensation wherein he played a bumbling idiot playboy who needed to be saved by main heroine three times. It was one of his rare lighter, sweeter roles where you could almost feel yourself falling for him, the man behind the “latin lover”, if there ever was one.

Valentino was only ten years older than me when he died, and for years I had been functioning on the less harrowing assumption that he died age 34. Just so I could distance myself from it, so I could forget that my own 31 is rapidly approaching. But that is the dream of the artist, I suppose, to die early so you never live long enough to disappoint people. He felt that too in a way, at some point Valentino felt like he was becoming unrecognisable to himself that he was just another amorphous, faceless “Vaselino” without charm or character. Hell, Valentino didn’t live long enough to transition to ‘talkies’ like his silent film compatriots such as Gary Cooper or Harold Lloyd. There is only one recording of Valentino’s voice, he sounds exactly like you would expect, masculine and warm.

Rudolph Valentino was a star. He burned like a supernova and fizzled out just as soon as he had crawled into the world and public consciousness. He was a star, a seductor, a trinket that women could project their fantasies onto but he was, above all, young. His acting career lasted a mere 9 years at most and those who knew him intimately said he was more like a careless boy than a “latin lover.” He was an enigma - a man adored by women but had a string of failed relationships.

Valentino managed to carve out a legacy that would find itself painted on the walls of Hollywood High and immortalised in a Queen song (Be your Valentino, just for you) in a mere 31 years on this earth. He lived a life that so many of us would envy, adored by thousands, swimming in riches and jewels and pursuing a craft that he loved so deeply. One would have expected Valentino to die like he lived: in a glittering frenzy that couldn’t be ignored, not in a hospital bed from a rare condition mimicking an appendicitis: a perforated peptic ulcer which presents as abdominal pain in the right lower quadrant, it’s called valentino’s syndrome now.

Valentino’s funeral was attended by 100,000 people, there would have been more if his fans hadn’t started killing themselves in a fit of hysteria when the news broke. His funeral was his final performance as the “latin lover”, an event driven by circumstance and flowers and guards allegedly sent by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but was always shrouded in mystery. Valentino’s girlfriend at the time, Pola Negri, fainted several times in front of the press and his coffin. Though I suppose that was what he wanted, Valentino would have never wanted to die an old man. He would rather die a spectacle than grow old and be forgotten.

Life is what we make of it. I have tried to ignore this for so long, that my awkward ugly duckling years will finally end and then life will all make sense. But that’s simply not true. Your youth isn’t something you see appearing over the horizon like a cowboy in a spaghetti western, it’s right now, it’s not waiting for you. It’s happening as you speak, as you read this, as you lie in bed at night staring at the ceiling wondering if your choices up until now were the correct ones. Youth is the uncontrollable laughter over the dinner table, it’s careening down the streets of Edinburgh in the midnight rain, it’s holding hands and promising to never let go when you’re so drunk that emotions start to come naturally. Even the ugly moments that you wish you could forget that become more vivid each passing day: that’s the beauty of life. Life will pass by sooner than you could ever imagine, one day you’re starting your first day of primary then before you know it you’re facing your laptop looking at a dissertation and you’ll wonder why you’ve forgotten the face of your best friend from when you were six.

31 years isn’t that long, it’s nothing in the face of the gargantuan universe. After the Big Bang it took over 380,000 years for the universe to cool down enough for light to begin to form. At least Valentino was famous enough to create his own, still-burning light in the darkness 97 years after he died. Valentino made the most of his brief existence on earth. But have you? Have I? If you’re familiar with my writing you might notice that I ask questions, it’s because I want to pad out my work and I wonder if someone will answer them, God or one of my subscribers maybe. Would Valentino answer them and give me some advice? Probably not, he’s been dead for almost 100 years. But the most sage advice I can pass on for anyone that wonders about their place in the world are from Rudolph Valentino himself:

“Don't pull down the blinds. I feel fine. I want the sunlight to greet me!”

Every night I stay in Edinburgh something goes wrong, either I lose something or I start falling apart like paper in water the minute alcohol enters my body. The city I love so much, that I would be lost without, chews me up and spits me out like I’m a foreign virus, or a transplanted organ. I’m a chimera. I am being rejected and forced out of the place I call home. Perhaps it’s just a karmic cycle, perhaps its divine punishment for being a writer, or a chronic liar or too fantastical.

Though Edinburgh is just as bad as me, I think. We’re both cultivating a socially acceptable version of quirky, but our core problems seep out like black mould in between damp wallpaper. Being creative in this city is a virtue, you need to be able to say something of substance in a city at the beck and call of tourists with massive suitcases that stop in the middle of the street. I need to be creative and esoteric and have a multitude of things to say, I attend the arts and creative industries campus for Christ’s sake. Maybe if Jesus was here he would have something enlightening to tell me. But I’ve used up all my minutes asking him for ideas for my next short story.

I’m twenty one now. Practically got one foot in the grave if we’re going by 27 club rules which I hope to join at some point. My career as a writer is floundering because I’m too prideful to give the readers - of which there is not many - a bite of the putrid dramedy that is my life. I doubt it would make for good autofiction anyway. Dead relative’s junk sitting in my room. The family dog whose death I still blame myself for. My failed relationships. My brief love affair with “Catholicism”. It’s all falling down around me like a town high street because I’m afraid if I’m too honest people will look at me like a dead deer on the side of the road - pitying but disgusted at my entrails on display.  

I sit in my dad’s bathroom reading Dead Stars and squeezing at spots on my chin because I know there’s something under there I just need to push harder to get it out. He’s watching TikToks repurposed as Facebook reels where an AI version of Ghostface reads out stories from subreddits - or whatever would end up on Facebook. God, life is a stage. I should have thought things through better before I decided to pursue academia and one of the most honest professions on the planet (journalism) without knowing myself. I can’t review movies because they’re too personal to me and I think anything I had to pay to see is a masterpiece and I’d bat for directors before the publication itself. What else? Inverted triangle, the five w’s, the rule of three, are all fine and dandy until I need to say something real, until I need to let the reader in. But I could just go tabloid, I can pretend and go through the motions of grovelling to rich people who aren’t in my line of sight, and writing 500 words and a couple of links to tweets about celebrity weight gain or royal babies or the NHS crumbling until my brain atrophies and gives me frontotemporal dementia at age 24, and the readers of said publication call me an ugly useless bitch and wish death on me on Twitter. Anything is preferable to being real.

Maybe it’s just my location, that must be why I’m depressed and jaded. Maybe the American dream would love what I have to say. I think of La La Land because of a conversation I had with a friend about Ryan Gosling and how charming he looks when he’s been beaten up in his movies. Him as Sebastian was always my favourite role of his. I wish I was born in closer proximity to Hollywood and my parents had belief systems they picked up from MTV and the pages of zines created by vegan meth heads that permeated my entire life and made me weird enough for a daytime TV show. I wish my parents had compromised their morals and put me into acting or science (something normal) instead of letting me pursue being a voyeur of human suffering. But being a writer suits me, I’m on the outside looking in, the frigid woman-girl with the staring problem, too crude to be a socially desirable freak and too over-composed to be a voice of the outcasts. The people need someone like me! I tell myself in a haze as I scribble down a short story idea about a journalist hiring a male escort to fake an interview for her - work with what you know. I’m raw and a dry wit and have enough social dysfunction to make myself relatable to dirtbag left fans! I’m raving now.

I COULD BE A SATIRIST IF YOU GAVE ME A CHANCE!

That is the plight of the writer, especially now. Everything has already been written now we’re being fed a mush of therapy-talk careerist self-help novellas written by women who are too far removed from reality to feel empathy, or crypto-fascist men twittering away about whatever they are currently morally opposed to. Nothing is real. But I try so hard to be, I won’t let myself censor my awful qualities, I won’t sugarcoat and make myself more digestible I want people to feel ill when they chew me up and fight to swallow me down. Being a writer is tragic, we’re in charge of adding to the expansive simulacrum but we’re all too busy being senseless trauma-whores in love with our own tragic genius to make anything. But that’s our charm more than anything, there’s a vulnerability to writers, whether it’s hidden ten layers of dramatic irony and wordplay it’s there and it is beautifully grotesque. It’s a snotty child begging for someone to play with at nursery, for someone to give them a gold star sticker, for someone to tell us we’re doing the right thing and that we should keep going. I should push myself more, write erotica, cast people in my play, make something that isn’t just my own relentless whining and crying. Maybe that’s all we’re good for, being miserable. At least it’s a cheap form of torture, your magnum opus could only cost as much as the Pukka Pad you write it in.

I’m sitting in the car with my dad. The Smiths are playing, Unloveable, and as we drive down the road back to my sleepy village he breaks the silence that was brewing between us as Morrissey warbles.

“People’s most creative years are between eighteen and thirty.”

Yep, you’re sure telling me. The Smiths were barely in their 20s when they released This Charming Man. Even now, at the horrific twenty one, I’m feeling myself wane and desperately lapping up any piece of unique dialogue or noteworthy event in my life to turn it into my art, like a histrionic suckerfish or - heaven forbid - Perez Hilton. I can see it clearly, the older I get the more desperate I’ll become to make something stick in the minds of the collective consciousness. I’ll rip myself open and dig around for every trauma, every repressed memory, every iota of hurt and vomit it back up for the masses to choke down like they’re my baby birds. Cover myself in fake blood and recite poetry about girl-death, scream from the rooftops for someone to look at me, fade into obscurity because people don’t like women when their honesty is disgusting and male. Just keep going until I’ve offered every cell up to the world and promote it like a barred-out Avon representative on my Twitter account or Instagram story. Push push push. Push until you’re all wrung out and the only thing left for you is to get high on your own supply and forget what you were doing all of this for. Write without soul because you sold it to pay for podcast mic.

Maybe I’m just upset because there’s something dead inside me. That the death inside me wants something great as well, it wants to try a little while longer. It wants the final montage of La La Land where Mia and Sebastian are happy and married with a baby boy. It wants the photo of Alain Delon lying on the floor from L’Insoumis that ended up as the Queen is Dead album cover. It wants the streets of Edinburgh that I ran down drunk and revelling in my own youth - I can see the city in the glass of my eye, as Inhaler like to say. It wants to create something magnetic and shocking. I need to accept the dead part of me, let it guide me like a ghost on my shoulder, live with it and let it float up until it sits behind my eyes and keeps me tough and cold to rejection. I’m going to need it.

“After eighteen it’s downhill.”

God help us all, even the writers.

Near Dark directed by Kathryn Bigelow was released in 1987, two years after the peak of the AIDs crisis, to mixed reviews and box office sales that didn’t make up for its 5 million budget. It was originally supposed to be a standard neo-western but at the behest of her producers, Bigelow had to add a contemporary twist since westerns were deeply unpopular at the time. Enter, the vampires. Following in the footsteps of 1977’s Martin, Near Dark uses vamps to tell a tale of sex, addiction, and patriarchal violence. Unlike Martin, directed by the late George A. Romero, the roving band of hillbilly vampires explore the themes of masculinity in a more violent, nuanced way than we could understand at the time.

Men be horny

Near Dark’s entire plot happens because the main character is uncontrollably, criminally horny. Caleb Colton (played by Adrien Pasdar) meets the magnetic Mae (Jenny Wright) and is drawn to her world-weary charm and her tendency to wax about the stars and the passage of time. Caleb wants to have sex with Mae and when he can’t he throws a tantrum. He won’t take her home (despite her hysteric pleading) unless she kisses him. What he doesn’t know that he has put Mae in a life-or-death situation as she is going to burn to death when the sun rises. She relents and kisses Caleb but not before biting him and turning him into one of the undead, because despite his creepiness she does like him and his cutely dopish, farmboy charm. Apparently.

After Caleb is turned, he is swiftly kidnapped by Mae’s family of nomadic vampires. He wakes to find himself doted on by Mae and bullied by the fellow vamps: Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen) the confederate, Homer (Joshua John Miller) the eternal child, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein) the matriarch and Severen (Bill Paxton), the designated eye candy. The gun-toting, wise-cracking Severen made it big on tumblr, so much so that he eclipses every character in his presence and every Letterboxd review mentions how cool and sexy he is.

We first meet Severen when the main character Caleb does. He gleefully greets the freshly turned Caleb with a ‘Howdy, I’m gonna separate your head from your shoulders, hope you don’t mind none.’ and continues to antagonise the rancher for his inability to kill people and drink their blood for the majority of the movie. Severen is a lone wolf, the only member of the Hooker clan who doesn’t have (or attempt to have) a companion. He loves being a vampire, he loves tormenting humans and taking what he wants because who is going to stop him? He’s invincible.

The appeal of Severen, ultimately, is because he’s cool. He’s so fucking cool. So cool that he appears on every promotional poster despite being a tertiary antagonist. He combines the gun-twirling cowboy swagger of John Wayne, 80s rocker threads and the latent homoeroticism of the cast of Top Gun to create one unforgettable guy. He struts around from scene to scene with malevolent glee that would be cartoonish if he wasn’t played perfectly by the late Bill Paxton - part of Severen’s appeal is because he was played caddish and kooky and that he was, colloquially speaking, slutted out. Severen for the majority of the movie is wearing a sweaty, blood-soaked wife-beater that clings to him while he’s moseying around and causing chaos. Everyone - from viewer to side character - is charmed by Severen’s antics, that’s what makes him so deadly.

Which brings us to the rest of the Hooker clan’s virile vamp-bros. The men of Near Dark take centre stage and are the objects of desire despite being the ones who objectify and harass. Jesse and Severen strut around in thin shirts while the beautiful Caleb is whiney and lies shirtless and groaning on a table post blood transfusion. They are often sweaty and centimetres away from each other’s faces in every scene, Caleb’s burgeoning bromance with Severen is one of the plot points outside of the central romance. Speaking of, Sev is constantly preening, being the only main character to ever change outfits during the 95-minute run, and seducing anyone that comes across him with his Texan charm and wicked personality. First, it’s two girls in a car who he plans to kill and eat, and then the man in the bar who he also kills and eats, after dropping the infamous euphemism:

“I hate ‘em when they ain’t been shaved.”

A win for bisexuals everywhere! Severen and Caleb carry the brunt of the queer subtext, with the pair clinging onto each other during the bar scene and Severen licks blood off Caleb’s mouth, swapping blood with another man is something that I could only imagine was much more shocking during the height of the AIDS crisis.

The blood-as-addiction metaphors don’t stop there. Caleb whines and moans in pleasure after drinking Mae’s blood in one of the only true moments of eroticism in the movie. Which is only emphasised when his feeding is supercut by shots of an oil rig rhythmically thrusting while he clings onto his vampire girlfriend for dear life. Then, she pushes him away, he’s taking too much from her and it’s starting to hurt. Caleb’s horiness is the reason he’s in this mess: he wouldn’t take no for an answer when Mae wanted to go home, too scared to fend for himself and has to rely on Mae and now he’s consuming her. She begs him to stand on his own two feet because his selfishness is starting to hurt them both, but he just grins, sated and pleasured. Caleb is an addict to outsiders. When he escapes the Hooker clan after he’s turned, he is accosted by a police officer with a bandaged hand who accuses him of being a junkie and checks to see if he’s high. Caleb follows the mans bloodied hand around while he’s slouched back and starving. He’s a slave to his addictions: first it’s Mae, then it’s blood.

Jesse and Homer (Lil’ Boner) are more subtle in their lust. Homer’s ire for Caleb is because he’s stolen Mae from him, even though he’s in the body of a little boy he has the lustful feelings of a grown man and no outlet, but he will find one and will do anything to keep it in his grasp. Jesse Hooker, the head of the clan, is desperately trying to live in the confederate past and is unwilling to change his beliefs in a rapidly growing world and instead is escaping the future by living outside of it. He, much like Severen, gets off on the violence they inflict on innocent people, his lust is his masculinity. He feels up a woman before Diamondback kills her, he subjugates every around him who isn’t his hypermasculine buddy Sev, he wants to keep his family the way it is and doesn’t take kindly to Mae going against him - threatening his masculinity. The men of Near Dark are animals, they’re controlled by their anger and penchant for violence and subjugation so they can feel in control and the people they take this out on are usually on the fringes of society themselves, women, children, people of colour, or even men of a lesser caliber. Caleb is tortured by male vampires until he proves himself and is welcomed into their boy’s club. The entire movie is a giant pissing contest disguised as a love story.

The ladies

Mae and Diamondback and aren’t the horny ones. Unlike Dracula’s brides, these ladies are cool-headed and detached from the bullshit of the men around them, but are still complicit in their dangerous, lusty feelings. They’re the voices of reason and usually savvier than their male counterparts, Diamondback is the first to intervene when Homer brings a little girl called Sarah (Caleb’s sister) and orders Jesse and Severen to go to her hotel room and kill her father to cover their tracks. Diamondback isn’t protecting Sarah (quite the opposite) she’s just letting her pseudo-son’s feelings of lust run wild because family comes first, and Homer deserves a companion since Caleb swooped in and stole Mae from him - it’s only fair.

Mae serves as her foil, she’s fantastical and rebellious by going against her family to dote on her dumb and pretty new boyfriend. She totally dominates him, they go wherever she wants, until he saves the clan he is at her mercy because she’s the only one that isn’t out to kill him. Mae is the one in the driver’s seat until Caleb earns his stripes and exerts control over her.

One could argue that Mae and Diamondback being sexless is because they’re underdeveloped, there is merit to this, but Bigelow isn’t that type of gal. She’s too careful and observant, and she’s always had a penchant for muscle-head dudebros who are a critique of the world they revel in. Severen’s overwhelming masculinity gets him killed because he can’t stand losing to Caleb, Homer is so obsessed with having a girl to keep him company that he burns in the sun trying to cling to her, and Jesse dies in the sun with Diamondback because they can’t fight a losing cultural battle anymore, they need to pass the baton to the younger generation. The women of Near Dark pay the price for the men’s ornery decisions because Bigelow understands the consequences of violent masculinity.

The father

I’ve always hated the ending of Near Dark. After such a dark and smoky romp, the last thing I wanted to see was Caleb’s boring family. After Caleb abandons the vampires and returns home, his father gives him a blood transfusion which makes him human for some reason. He is cured of vampirism and returns to normal polite society. But he can’t live without Mae.

Don’t forget that the vampires aren’t the only men in this story. Try as the Hooker clan might, they’re nothing compared to the crushing will of the father, their offbeat, queer lifestyle is destroyed and those deemed good enough to be brought back into society are done so by force. Caleb and Mae are freed from the thumb of Jesse only to be subjugated by Mr. Colton, who gives the pair a blood transfusion and makes them human again. For Caleb this was a net win, despite being lured into a life of murder and steamy vampire sex, he was reluctant to become a killer. The status-quo has been reinstated and he should forget about Mae and live a normal life. But he can’t. The men’s entitlement to the girls of Near Dark once again causes them problems as Sarah is kidnapped by the Hooker clan as retribution, sending Caleb - now a real, human man - out into the night to face off against the evil vampires. Caleb’s humanity prevails and he is rewarded for it, he gets everything: the girl, the family, the normal serene life.

But for Mae, it is framed as an ambiguous. Every time Mae is onscreen, she revels in being a vampire. She spins around under the stars and prophesises about the future that she is going to witness. Well, not now, because she’s human. Mae’s manic-pixie strangeness has been leading up to this, she wanted to live a nomadic, eternal life with her boyfriend only for him to betray her and sentence her to a much shorter, much more boring existence. Mae is constantly betrayed by Caleb and now he has robbed her of such a large part of herself and her agency, and Bigelow knows this because the ending of Near Dark is bleak and underwhelming. There is no shot of Caleb and Mae in the future, living a happy, nuclear rancher life, instead they embrace silently and there is a fade to the credits. I’ve always hated the ending of Near Dark but now I understand that you can’t tell a story about masculinity and white America's illusion of safety and control without an ending where the status-quo is returned. Jesse, who clings to the past where he was on top, is dead but it just makes way for the consuming will of the conventional lifestyle to come down on our protagonists.

In Near Dark it doesn’t matter if you live on the fringes of society like the Hookers or are a pillar of the community like the Coltons, violent masculinity dominates in the same way and hurts the same people. It controls and frightens and hurts people and sucks them dry. The men, living and undead, that Bigelow created are the perfect vectors to tell a story about what happens when the violent men of westerns are metaphorically and physically unstoppable. But I still hate that ending, Severen was too sexy to die.

Recently, I have found myself hunched over my laptop in a wide-eyed trance watching video after video about ghost towns in the good old US of A. These middle-aged outdoorsmen have snared my heart and my attention, I just can’t get enough of their adventures. Paradise in Kentucky, Centralia in Pennsylvania and Elkmore in Montana are just some of the towns that have piqued my interest over the past few days. What I would give to travel around in a Dodge D/W 1981 with someone in the driver’s seat, my cowboy boot clad feet on the dashboard as I give out directions and fiddle with the radio.

However, I can’t just pack up and shuttle around the Midwest looking for rotting bygones of the gold rush era, mainly because I can’t drive and the petrol prices are astronomical these days. Of course, I could just trek into the highlands and try and find a shell of a Celtic community because the last real ghost town, Polphail, was demolished in 2016. I wouldn’t feel anything for them anyway, the ghost towns of the UK feel like a natural consequence of thousands of years of untainted history, the ghost towns of the USA - as it exists now - are a testament to a country built on a pipe dream.

I’ve always had a reverence for the Great American Plains. I blame it on all the westerns my grandfather liked to half-watch in the afternoon when I was a child so it’s probably why American ghost towns scratch an itch inside me. Their allure is that they aren’t abandoned because of a catastrophic man-made event like in Pripyat or losing the war against the elements like Craco in Italy. No, most of these American ghost towns formed because people just packed up and never came back, discarded like toys and never picked up again. The structures they left are frozen in a time of economic prosperity. They fell just as quickly as they rose. It seems strange to dedicate so much time to ghost towns in states that I have never visited, in a country I do not live in, but I was inspired by Joan Didion’s essay At the Dam - so indulge me -and let me tell you about my own Hoover Dam.

My fixation began three years ago while reading In Cold Blood, a Christmas gift from my mother to help me understand the fundamentals of journalism that wasn’t boring as fuck. The town is only mentioned once in the entire book and its inclusion is so miniscule I thought I had made it up entirely. Perry Edward Smith, one of the Clutter Family killers, is from a ghost town in Nevada. It’s called Huntington which lies in the Huntington Valley in Elko County and is now just a collection of derelict sundried wooden houses, carts and the shell of a ranch. Perry described Huntington sparingly:

‘I was born Perry Edward Smith Oct 27 1928 in Huntington, Elko County, Nevada, which is situated way out in the boondocks, so to speak.’

That was all I had to go on, one sentence in one singular page of a book, it was a lost cause to try and find out anything more. I should have laid it to rest. But over the years Huntington has had an almost hypnotic pull on me, maybe because I’m an aquarius or because I thought it was poetic that a man whose life was so permeated with death hailed from a ghost town.

The county Huntington resides, Elko, is most known for gold. Almost all the gold in Nevada, and the United States in general, comes from the area. Boasting a total population of 53,702 at its last census and a total area of 44,560 square kilometres, Elko County is home to eighteen unincorporated communities and eleven ghost towns of which Huntington is one. Huntington was originally known for its post office, which opened in 1873 and went through a series of closures and reopenings until it was abandoned in 1931, allegedly named after Lott Huntington who discovered a spring in the area in 1859. Perry Edward Smith is the only notable resident.

There is only one notable building in Huntington and it’s called Sherman Station which was owned by Valentine and Sophie Wahlter and their twelve children. Built in 1875 when the Huntington valley was just beginning to be settled, the station functioned as the post office, a general shop and a freight line between Elko, Eureka and Tuscarora during the mining boom. Due to Sophie’s untimely passing in an accident in 1885, Valentine would take it upon himself to rebuild their quaint little home into the largest log cabin Nevada had ever seen. Though it didn’t last, the station shut down after the mining boom died down and the Wahlter family packed up their things and left the valley. The station was moved to Elko in the late 90s, it doesn’t exist in Huntington anymore.

Huntington falls west of the Ruby Mountains, the east of the mountains falls the Ruby Basin that was traversed by the Donner Party - the more I research about Huntington, the more it becomes associated with death. Apart from all of that, Huntington is almost entirely lost to time. Except to me, and the person that went out there to take photos of it. Trying to find anything about the town is impossible, not that there is much to know in the first place. In my deep dive, I struck gold with The Nevada State Writers project, compiled in 1941 and contains information about every town in every county in Nevada. Huntington has maybe three lines of text dedicated to it but it didn’t matter to me, it was new information: the town had a population of 54 at the time of the project’s publication, it’s located in the South of Elko near the intersection of Eureka and White Pine counties and that was it. That was everything. The fixation of Huntington had to come to an end.

At a certain point, with most things, there is nothing left to learn. I had exhausted every resource to piece together the history of my ghost town, for what? Nothing could ever come of it. Huntington wouldn’t magically be revived by these words and I’ve prescribed too much importance to a town that no longer exists.

Apparently it takes three generations for you to be forgotten. But what about me? I’ve dedicated however many hundred words to a ghost town that produced one murderer, a post office and a population that never exceeded 101. Would Huntington live on through this? Through you? You know about it now, dare I say more than the average person living in Nevada. Even if you choose to disregard all of this the idea of Huntington will still linger, at least in the tiniest corner of your brain, you know it exists and that is enough to sate me, to give me some peace of mind. If even one person knows about its existence I have done what I set out to do. Which was to remember, or memorialise or whatever the fuck this is, literary journalism? Putting my degree to use? Fuck it.

It seems stupid to devote this much time and energy to a town that no one lives in, to be consumed by what has faded from the minds of the majority and forcing it onto the minds of the minority. One day I’m going to go to Huntington. I won’t forget about it, I don’t care how old I’ll be when my dreams finally come to fruition. I am going to trek through the valley and stand in the middle of whatever is left of that town and I will be deliriously happy. The deep nagging feeling inside me that I feel when I’ve been a bitch on purpose or when I go back to close a gate will finally dissipate - I’ll be free! No longer controlled by my compulsion to chase the long forgotten and revel in the past and instead face the future I am so desperately afraid of. I think that’s why I immerse myself so much in ghost towns, I want to become like them. To live outside of time, forever in stasis like I’m a half dissected cow in a Damien Hirst exhibit, never moving forward, never blossoming or opening up to the glory of the future and its offerings. Time is my greatest nemesis.

Huntington is still there. It will never go away and as much as I want to revel in the past, it will still be waiting there for me. I don’t need to be struck by the image of the sun shining on every ridge of dried wood that’s been discarded in the wilderness or the buzz of insects at night. The years will pass and Huntington will not disappear, but I will be different.

I promise.

Insomnia became a staple of my life after I started university, my brain was on overdrive almost all the time to the point that I would often wake up before my alarms for the early train. It all came to a head the Saturday I had to go to an exhibition for an assignment. I slept an hour before my alarm went off. I walked around the exhibition in a daze, I could barely focus on what was happening around me because quite honestly I did not care. My eyes burned and my mind was clouded with irritability that I forgot I was standing in fucking Kelvingrove, a place I had loved dearly ever since I was a child. 

I write this now at 5 o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 15th of September. I have been trying to sleep since 11 and I must get on a train to go to university in two hours. Please excuse any of the mistakes I make, I’m very tired. My alarm is set to go off at six fifteen but I fear I will have no need for it. I could easily get started with my day now but I don’t want to wake up the house with my bashing around, so instead I will document everything I have conjured up while trying to sleep today. 

It is 2am, usually my brain starts to shut down around this time so I patiently wait for oblivion but it does not come. Fine. I guess I can help it along and think of something to get absorbed in. My thoughts drift to New York due to a resurgence of my love for American Horror Story: Hotel - even though it is set in LA. What do I love most about New York? The architecture. Think about the buildings you saw in New York, the streets when it rained and how quiet it was, wasn’t that incredible?

The train of thought morphs - otters faces made out of Art Deco metalwork and the clasps of aeroplane seatbelts everyone around me is marvelling at the creatures and you know what - I can see it! I see the otters! The metal abominations spring to life as a drag my fingers down the welded fur of their golden bellies, they make a dull tinkling sound that reminds me of matte metal handrails, the kind that they had in my old high school and new age shopping centres - it feels nice. The otters do not feel the same they begin snapping at me, their eyes are so large and shaking cartoonishly around in their heads and I cast away that train of thought, it’s much too energetic. 

Fred Astaire enters my late night thoughts, I’m not entirely sure why I’ve never watched any of his movies and I can only see a whisper of his face - has he always had such a large nose or am I thinking of someone else? It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t look like Fred, he’ here - tap dancing all over my brain. It’s 3am now and I think of Cary Grant, the black of his hair in Suspicion and I try to imagine myself diving into that blackness. The darkness that blossoms behind my eyelids is warping black and navy like a lava lamp and I can feel my eyes moving against my pillow because it’s pressed so hard into my face. I try swimming into the darkest spot of that Cary Grant black further and further until I hit vantablack because then I can finally burrow into sleep. This method does not work because whenever I think of Cary Grant I hear his voice it keeps me awake. Time to pee again, I think. 

The witching hour is a time for self reflection. The most pressing questions are being answered right now in my messy bedroom, the council of intellectual heavyweights I discuss with are a malformed Djungelskog, a jellycat rabbit and a build a bear rabbit I’ve had since I was seven. The topic of discussion, as always, circles back to me and my life decisions and whether or not it was a good idea to throw myself into academia at seventeen when I had no direction in my life. We discuss how I bottle things up until I explode, how I cry when I think of being called ‘small chips’, how I’m paranoid and often afraid, I won’t elaborate because I feel like I’m veering towards being earnest. When I started writing this I had delusions of grandeur, that my lack of sleep would transform me into Hildegard von Bingen and my madness would become art, but now I have just upset myself. Too much talk about life, I can feel myself waking up again.

I decide at 4am I should change my sleeping position, I lie flat on my back with my hands crossed over me like I’m Dracula and I pretend the reason my throat hurts is because I’m thirsty for blood. I’m ill, it you haven’t guessed, which I assume is the reason for my insomnia. It doesn’t help and I think it has actually made the situation worse. I take my retainer out and toss and turn until I finally lay still under my white sheets like an ailing little orphan from a Dostoevsky novel. I consider over the counter methods of getting to sleep: Piriteze, Benadryl, paracetamol and a cocktail of lavender and Horlicks but that wouldn’t help me now.  I need to be suffocated by something until my breathing stills and my brain clouds itself in a silky haze. I press my face deeper into my flattened pillows so my breath gets trapped in my nose. 

I imagine myself swimming through the carpet of my childhood bedroom (before we had to get rid of it because I painted it) the scratchy violet wool surrounds me and I feel like I am moving towards peace and comfort and for those few seconds of being suffocated by carpet I feel like I am finally drifting off to sleep. 

Unfortunately, there were other ideas in store for me. The carpet is ripped away from me and I now standing in the middle of my room, topless.  I need to pee again.

That brings us to the present. I have given up on sleep but that means I also have nothing to do and no one to talk to. There is a ringing in my ear that I must ignore or I’ll panic. I decide I must take an off day tomorrow to recuperate because I cannot stand another night of staring at my ceiling. I scroll through my friend’s letterboxd diaries and flirt briefly with the idea of deleting my Letterboxd account after finding out other people have watched Gregory Peck movies. 

I have slept a total of 45 minutes. That day I came back home from university and watched Fight Club too tired to hold myself back from murmuring ‘wow, he’s just like me’ under my breath when Edward Norton was on screen.

The second bout of insomnia happens not even a week later. I think it might be from caffeine but I really don’t need this today. I have an important day ahead of me, though part of me would be happier if I just called in sick because being sleep deprived is a valid reason right? How can I be at my best when I have been sleeping properly for two weeks straight? Exactly.

At 3am molasses covers me and I fade into a dream that feels me more like a waking nightmare. It feels strange, I can feel my dry eyes burning in my head. The dream is strange, I’m wandering around the gardens of the tenement near my grandparent’s house, or it’s the gardens of a block of flats near some seaside town I visited with my mother when I was eight. The sky is dark but the sun still lights up the grass and casts shadows, it doesn’t make sense but I have a print of Magritte’s The Empire of Light in my room that faces my bed, I must have taken inspiration. Back to the dream. I am walking around in a daze outside to get to my car, a girl I saw on TikTok plays the role of my friend and coworker she, much like myself, is burnt out and whining about the kids (we’re teachers, somehow) and I lament about tired and lonely, she doesn’t ask me why.

I get to my car, a white Fiat 500-esque stout little clown car that I need to fold myself up to get into, and put my hands on the wheel and look out at the road that is materialising like spray foam. I can’t drive by the way and I realise this in my dream. I don’t have time to think of the logistics when a couple approaches my car and they look like Tom and Summer. God, this must mean something to dream analysts. I roll down the window to hear what they want to say to me because why else would they be so close to my car? The couple don’t acknowledge me, the girl pushes her boyfriend against the backseat window and they discuss The Smiths or the weather or how they need go home and bask in each other’s presence. I am still hunched over in the driver’s seat, completely alone in the world I created. And I’m bitter, oh so bitter.

The car starts and I speed away back home, driving this fake car comes naturally to me even though I’ve only had one driving lesson. It feels freeing to drive through the streets that are an amalgamation of paintings and my commute home. The streetlights turn to liquid and flow behind my car and the sky starts to bubble like melted sugar ahead of me. My head hurts, it hurts so much right in the centre of my brain I can feel it, the little sea urchin, pulsing over and over while I drive with no plans of stopping. I don’t know where I’m going but I know I am asleep and that’s all that matters.

My alarm goes off at 6:15am. I am exhausted.

I had three hours of sleep that day and I cried in the corridor of my university about how unhappy I am. Public humiliation has always come so naturally to me. The day ends without fanfare and I am advised to take the day off tomorrow. I don’t. The following day, I was rapt with the delusional glee that only comes with hitting a breaking point, I believed I could do anything, I was beautiful and intelligent and I was so unhappy my brain would give me a free pass to fall asleep that night to escape it all. And I did, I slept for 9 hours that night after a double feature of Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Minions: Rise of Gru.

Who knows what the following weeks will hold.

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The Bible Belt

The heat attracted flies. Or the flies attracted heat, she wasn’t so sure anymore in her old age. Neither bothered her though. She vaguely remembered a giant buzzing fly crawling on her misty left eye for over a minute before she realised and waved it away with her ratty lace fan her granddaughter bought her one Christmas. She couldn’t remember which. She had a routine now that could not be shaken, every day from the moment she woke up she would sit on her porch and stare at the horizon. Waiting. The jumpy TV would play in the background but the fuzzy picture and voices of the telemarketers would never reach her ears on any conscious level. Come on down this Saturday for a free…you WILL. BE.SMITED…call now for 15% off your…expecting hurricane weather. The blue of the sky was burned into the back of her eyelids now from all the days she stared out into the vast horizon. The house around her was falling apart day by day, her husband and children had long since left her and all her magazine subscriptions were slowly piling up at the front door.

Flies and cigarette butts were collecting in her glass of sweet tea. Some had floated to the bottom, harpooned by cigarette butts that had soaked up the liquid. The newer flies were still skirting on top, their wings were wet with sugar water and crawling up the sides of the glass only to slip back in and become suffocated by the sludgy tea and ash concoction. Her nose twitched but it had since gone numb to the constant smell of shit from the broken toilet and the acrid burn of piss that had soaked into every fabric of the house. Her oldest had stopped visiting as much since the toilet broke down, she waved off his pleading to call the plumber and after that she never saw him again. Or maybe she did but she couldn’t remember.

This was her destiny. The pastor at the church had told her so, he clasped her hands fiercely and prophesied that Armageddon was coming and he and his flock needed to be prepared. The pastor had a vision of God’s army of heavenly creatures came marching over the sloping hill that separated the town from the rest of the godless civilization. This hill, the Mount Zion of Arkansas, was the last barrier between the local church and eternal salvation so only the most trusted could be left to watch the hill for days on end.

All the years she spent wasting away on her rocking chair staring out at the horizon would be worth it. She didn’t need her family or her bi-weekly trips to the grocery store, she didn’t even need her friends at church because they know how important her mission is. Her husband and her other two children had long since abandoned her for the degeneracy of the city. The oldest lingered in town like a wayward spirit and she rarely entering the rotting cave her mother resided in - no, her oldest was a son and the youngest was the daughter she was sure. Her memory was getting fuzzier as she passed the days staring at the hill and the sky, every memory was slowly getting displaced by cloud patterns and the dead grass.

Six months into her mission she had a moment of clarity. While sitting in her rickety old chair as her spine was slowly buckling under her hunched over posture she felt something pierce her brain - whether that be the holy spirit or a pinched blood vessel she couldn’t tell - something so powerful that I made her shoot up from her chair and hold her head to the cool glass of the window. This couldn’t be how she lived out the rest of her days, she was calcifying in that rocking chair for who? For God? For the pastor? For herself? How many years or even months did she have left? She heaved herself up again only for her back to seize and force her back down towards the chair. She stared out at the horizon again and sent silent, pleading prayers for God to grant her the power to stand back up and walk away from the decay and stench she had thrown herself into. It was strange, she felt closer to God in these moments that she ever had in the six months of her mission. Her knees were failing to support her now, she could feel them creaking like rusty door hinges but she needed to move all it took was one step forward and she would be free. Falling forward onto the step would be preferable to letting her body flop back because she knew that if she sat down in that chair again she would never get back up.

The commune with God ended as her back made contact with the taut material of her rocking chair. The pain in her head and back relieved itself. It could have been her body failing but she chose to believe it was divine intervention. Her life was already over, so what more did she have to lose? The only thing she needed to do now was sit and wait for God’s army.

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A documentation of dreams

I have had multiple periods in my life where I couldn’t sleep and when I finally could conk out I would have the most vivid, bizarre dreams. I have forgotten most of them but some I remember so clearly that I often think they actually happened. Here are three of them.

The night before I started my first year of university I had a dream I was wandering around behind the dentists I used to visit when I was a child until it went private and I was fucked back to the NHS. The day is uneventful, nothing falls out of the sky and horror movie villains don’t pop out of nowhere to kill me, which they would normally do when I have stress dreams. But I’m still nervous and I don’t know why. I wander around the back of the streets I’ve known for years but it suddenly felt foreign and strange. The ground feels spongy against my feet and just walking around makes my stomach lurch. My heart is beating rapidly now and I have the urge to brush back my hair. I’m both in my body and a passive observer now. I brush my hand against my head and instead of feeling hair I feel and see my fingers slipping into a cavity in my head and pressing around in my brain that looks like a mass of taught muscle and tendons rather than a normal brain. After I pull my fingers out I wake up in a hot sweat and I can’t calm myself down until I get to the train station.

The second dream was a collection of scenes that were the consequences of going ot bed at 3am. The first scene I was at a concert going to see Weezer. For some ungodly reason. I was watching from the front row of the balcony. There is a slight lapse in events where everything muddled together, I look out at the stage again and Weezer is now performing with the cast of Succession. I can vividly picture Cousin Greg next to Rivers Cuomo, he (Greg) is wearing lime green sunglasses and a klein blue feather boa for some reason. Nobody really knows why because he is the only one dressing up. Roman and Shiv are the only ones who are having some form of fun, Roman has a glass of champagne and Shiv is dancing (exercising her demons). Her dance alerts the person next to me who makes a snide comment about her finally having fun. I turn and it’s Kendall Roy and then I wake up.

The third is the weirdest. I had recently rewatched Warm Bodies which influenced my sleeping brain more than I would care to admit. The dream starts in a holiday bungalow, the location is an odd mix between Ribby Hall and the Lake District both places I spent some of the best years of my childhood. I’m there with my high school friend group and, though fragmented, we have as much fun as we can as a bunch of (now) twenty-somethings can have in a holiday home. My friend group aside from one is trapped in time while I have aged but thinking about it makes me too depressed for words. All is quite banal until there’s a scream and the continuity of the dream gets quite fuzzy, as most dreams do. I wake up on the floor of the caravan, two of my friends are screaming that zombies have invaded that caravan park and they’re going to eat us if we don’t get out. Whatever. I vividly remember looking out the window and seeing a frayed, grey-skinned zombie in a white sundress stumbling towards the bungalow but she is yet to see us.

This is where the dream gets weird and if I continue to write about it it will no doubt follow me for the rest of my writing career. But it’s funny. As my friends and I are figuring out how to escape the worst long weekend getaway of our lives, a zombie bursts through the paper thin caravan door and all logic ceases to exist. The zombie falls on me and instead of ripping my face off he professes his undying love for me and makes it his mission as one of the living dead to grant me safe passage through the caravan park and I delude myself into thinking I can cure him. The dream skips a bit and the army is coming to pick us up but only at a checkpoint, which I thought was awful counter-productive but who trusts the army these days, with friends and zombie white knight in tow we make it to the checkpoint (the high school used in the B-roll of every early 2000s teen drama b-roll) and rejoice. My friend and I then have a discussion about the danger of giving a zombie laxatives, I argued that it was absolutely fine while my friend was a firm believer in its issues his argument was plainly: what if their dead organs don’t know when to stop and they effectively crap out their digestive system by accident.

As you can see, I ask the biggest questions when I am unconscious, all the more reason for me to sleep my days away.

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Big Phallicite: my war against the porn industry

I hate porn. A bold statement shared by ideologically polarising groups like radical feminists and the hyper religious. I should stop myself before I sound like a prudent, conversative old fart because I’m not. I don’t hate porn because it’s breaking down the sanctity of marriage or because people are making money off of taking it up the ass. I hate it because the consumption of it hurts people. There is nothing positive about peeking through an 11-inch window (6 inches if you’re using a phone) to watch two strangers fuck in the most dynamically lit studio apartment bedroom in the world like a peeping tom. There is nothing positive about being a twelve year old having your entire perception of love and sex be shaped by *BIG DICK MAKES SECRETARY SQUIIIRTTT* in an industry where women are treated like objects in depraved sexual fantasies where their consent is either non-existent or given with the fanatical excitement of a cartoon character. Because everyone knows if there’s consent then it’s not bad, right? There is nothing positive about having a section dedicated to “barely legal” where fresh faced teenagers (or twenty somethings with dewy blush and fake freckles) are paraded around in outfits that make them look like preteens and talk in a SoCal toddler drawl. It’s gross and I won’t hide my distaste for “porn addicts” because what an embarrassing vice to have. Injecting meth into ones neck seems like a more noble addiction than porn, at least meth gets you a show on AMC.

Despite my aversion of the consumers of porn, porn stars will always have my sympathy. Porn stars, especially the women of the industry, live in the precarious position of being an object of desire for millions without any respect. Hell, just look up the abuses they face on set, usually these acts of violence are unplanned and for the added pleasure of the viewer. This isn’t even touching on the most vulnerable group of women in the industry, transwomen are often objects of fetishisation while not be treated like living, breathing people. The industry hones in on vulnerable women (often POC and trans) so the viewer can satisfy their very specific preferences, these women aren’t often treated as people but instead a vector for the viewers pleasure. (Cut at risk of sounding like a hateful misandrist)

This isn’t to say there is more ethical forms of porn. Realistically, watching homemade missionary with romantic mood lighting is leagues better than the monstrosities conjured up in the dank, moist writers room at Brazzers. Written erotica is often the most agreed upon porn of ethical porn because the only person involved is the writer furiously masturbating in their one bedroom - I’m kidding of course, I don’t want to offend any future colleagues or guest writers on Euphoria. In all seriousness, I don’t find written erotica offensive because it never crosses my mind. Though, it can fall into the same traps as filmed porn i.e horrendous sexual violence and getting the consumer addicted. But as long as real people aren’t involved, I can’t find it in myself to be disgusted by it. (Cut due to losing my train of thought - will be elaborated on while soapboxing next to the evangelicals in Buchanan street)

No matter how often you cite sources and anecdotes of sex workers abused by the porn industry their will always be ignorant people wailing about the freedoms porn offers, like the ability to have erectile dysfunction at seventeen because of watching too much hardcore porn in ones youth or the ability to manipulate fresh faced eighteen year old girls into joining the industry via the mirage of money and glamour without showing any of the dangers of entering the industry. Sure, we can gab on and on about how the only people who hate porn are stuck in their ways old people and religious zealots.

(Cut and will be elaborated on into a proper essay)

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guide to summer

okay. here’s the vibe for the coming summer months: denim on denim bonus points for wearing dungarees, threading daisies and kitschy ribbons through chlorine fried hair because swimming is back in, walking through cul de sacs in the evening when the sun is just beginning to set, slamming back diet coke in glasses with mostly melted ice, bake pastries using fresh fruits and powdered sugar. the most special part of summer is the freedom so you can spend your days spiralling into madness in a flower field instead of your bedroom with no ventilation. the goal for summer is to either be your best self or begin your imminent self destruction.

(Cut due to depression which is unfortunate because I think this would have been very sweet)

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God looks like an embryo

Being religious is something that has never occured to me. My parents were progressive enough to teach me morals without talks about Jesus and the eternal resting place of my soul, the success of this is largely debatable considering my chosen career of writer. Because we all know writers are in commune with the devil. My father was raised Catholic, my mother was raised with some unnamed flavour of Christianity (not Catholicism) until she discovered the Church of Big Country. Their aversion to organised religion coupled with adults not willing to talk biblical lore with a four year old meant I started school with no idea who Joseph was or what hell was outside of where the cast of sex and the city told their boyfriends to go. 

Due to my godless upbringing, I was behind in the surprisingly religious banter of my peers who, in my eyes, were more devout than the pope himself. The Bible? You know who Mary is? There’s another Mary? You’ve got to be kidding!  My unholiness was so noticeable that when I was chosen as Mary in the school nativity it caused ripples in my primary one class, because how could a heathen like me ever embody Mary when there were other girls who could do so much more with the role - hell, I wasn’t even baptised. The allure of religion coupled with being a social outcast was so strong that I forced my mother to send me to brownies and then, regrettably, was disappointed in how many church services we had to attend for things I cared little about.

I like to think the beginnings of my evil genius started in a back room at my local church. I was in a room with the highest authority in my nine year old life (brown owl) and three other girls whom were more religious than me. For some reason, boredom or my obvious lack of biblical knowledge, we were asked to describe our interpretation of god to the others. Brown Owl started with the typical depiction of an old (white) man with a long beard and the aura of kindness. The other girls answered more or less the same because what else was god supposed to be if not the unattainable kind-to-all white man? Well, my genius rejected such notions of god as a person. God was an entity without a human form because why would he, the supposed creator of all, bother with looking appealing to us? I described him as a ball of light with no discernible features and instead was a giant spinning embryo in the sky. You can imagine my avant-garde interpretation of god didn’t go down well, blame it on the godless upbringing or my dormant sexual ambiguity.

Even though I find myself above the conventions of modern organised religion, I do have some form of faith. I consider myself agnostic and wear a cross so wayward evangelicals leave me alone when I traipse up and down the streets. My faith starts and ends with reverence for the Virgin Mary because one of the only religious rules I care about is the fear of premarital sex - but in this economy what girl isn’t? Aside from that, I indulge in a number of religious rituals including but not limited to: listening to Johnny Cash, self-hatred, the sin of sloth and not eating for long periods of time until I reach enlightenment. Sin is something say to avoid doing things I am averse to like answering the phone on weekends or eating shellfish. Hell is where I am going and Gabriel is the name of my future son. That’s all my Abrahamic bases covered I think. Why follow one religion when you can follow them all?

(Cut because this is in going in my future memoirs and you’ll need to pay to read the rest ha ha ha)

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So, those were my unfinished projects and by the reception of this piece, they may stay unfinished. These are just a small amount of my drafts because, like many writers, I hate writing. I hate publishing anything about myself without dying of embarrassment. I feel like I cannot publish anything without having to justify every detail to every reader (however many that may be) until they understand my thought process and nothing is left up to interpretation. I work over jokes until any kind of charm they had disappears for the sake of making it clear to the reader - journalism instinct I guess. My style is often disjointed, self-centred and steeped in the neuroticism only found in turbulent young women, I would continue the joke but I have unfortunately lost my train of thought as I so often do. Well, it’s a start at relieving my writers block. Bye!