Gone feral

I love milestones. I’m sure there was something I meant to talk about. Probably the weather? Probably that there’s some dumbfuck this very moment saying, “How ‘bout that global warming” and we’re not supposed to scream “You absolute shitstain, this is fucking global warming. You’re fucking living it. Jesus Christ. When the fucking ice caps melt, the polar…” We could scream it I guess. But facts don’t matter when whatever chucklefuck they watch on fox news made the “How ‘bout that global warming” joke last night and their neighbor said it too and so did everyone they know on facebook which is how you get everyone saying “I don’t know anyone who…” because they don’t understand the fucking algorithm is fucking designed to confirm their dipshittery, whatever their dipshittery.

Don’t start thinking you’re any better. It works on the left too. Ask anyone under the age of 25 if the holocaust really happened. You go on any social media site and they’ll tell you to not engage with rage bait. Engagement is how disinformation spreads. You dunk on the bad post, now every who follows you sees the bad post. But it spreads when you’re not looking too.

Let’s try something new. I’ll put the bulk of the post up here. I’ll lock the shittalking to paid subscribers. Cool? Awesome.

What were we going to talk about. I made a milestone. Ten thousand subscribers. Howdy. Holy shit. I really didn’t expect this little newsletter to grow like it did. Thank you. Truly.

I’m still in a cabin. Alright let’s quit the bullshit. This is a shed. It’s a fucking garden shed that someone turned into a cabin. I’m honestly impressed. I’ve looked at the sheds outside home depot and thought, yeah that could work. And it can. But maybe add some goddamn insulation. Maybe a door that fits so I don’t have to stuff towels in the gaps to keep the wind from whistling through it. Yesterday, the cabin-shed never made it above 52 degrees. I live in long johns now. This morning it was warm enough that I caught myself walking around in long johns and a bathrobe. Sexy shit.

The temp didn’t go above freezing for several days. A few days, it hovered in the single digits. I didn’t walk Woody those days. I let him out and he’d do a couple zoomies because he thinks he’s a husky and then bolt back inside because he’s also a pitbull.

I didn’t miss walking him. We’ve stopped walking to town anyway. The walk to town is a zig zag through a little neighborhood where every yard has a dog or three and none of them are fucking happy to see a dog walking by. I don’t blame them. Woody walks down the middle of the street like he’s chanting whatever the dog version is of “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..”

I know it’s how it is out here. We thought we were real animal lovers because our dog had a heat lamp in his house and we’d let him in the garage when a tornado came through. I haven’t seen many heat lamps. Didn’t hear as many dogs barking through the night when it was well below zero. But I heard enough. I’d say it’s fucking torture to listen to but I’m not the one freezing to death.

This is going to be a really fucking fun book. I can tell you that much. Inspiring is what they’ll say.

We take the farm road now, away from town. Still a couple dogs. But they’ve got a barn, or something. Maybe. I don’t fucking know. I can’t steal any dogs. I can’t steal every dog anyway. And it’s everywhere out here. Just how it is. That I fucking hate how it is doesn’t mean shit.

Let’s gossip. It’ll be fun. Here’s a picture of Woody, who sleeps next to a heater. I’ll drop an old post I’ve unlocked underneath him. And the rest will be paywalled. There’s gotta be some benefit to paying for his snacks.

I avoided commenting on someone for years now. Call yourself a cult expert and call the Harvard extension school Harvard and call ghostwriters unnamed co-authors. Who gives a shit. Branding works. It’s easy to look successful on social media. And you can amass a lot of followers by posting rage bait. But they mute you pretty quick because no one signed up to be fucking lectured all the goddamn time. If you want to fake it, there’s the formula. Depends on your endgame I guess.

I’ve been happy to keep my gossip restricted to DMs when I get the occasional “okay what the fuck” from another author. I’ve been telling her family and other survivors it’s best to just ignore her. But I don’t know. She’s still fucking going. And now she’s hurting people I love.

I don’t know her, for the record. I met her once. I was walking into a book event held at the club owned by an ex I don’t think I’d seen since the breakup. We’re friends now but that was always going to be an awkward hug. I had to get Woody to his sitter who was inside. I was trying to not throw up again until I got to a bathroom. It happens.

I’m not great at public events. Intense stage fright. Add to it that this even was in DC and there’s a solid chance I’m going to see a few people I’d rather forget. So all this was happening when she tried to talk to me about her book. I said something like, hey can we do this after.

I got through the event alright if we ignore the flop sweat and bad jokes and that someone was fucking knitting in the front row. I never remember these things anyway. I black out or dissociate, who knows. All I can remember from that event is someone was aggressively knitting in the front row. All I could hear was the clack and scrape of knitting needles. We’re all lucky no one ended up with a fucking knitting needle jammed in their eye.

She approached me after the event. Turns out she was the one knitting. So we weren’t off to a great start. I think I told her to go through my agents or publicist. I don’t know. Public events aren’t a place to ask me for things. I’m just trying to get through it without forgetting words or sweating on someone or throwing up again.

Then I didn’t blurb the thing. I was nice as shit about it too. A lot of hey I really respect what you’re doing but we’re doing different things. I’m sorry. I get a lot of requests. They take me forever to do so I don’t do many. (This is true. Each blurb, at least a week of my life. I suck at them.) I get all the cult books. I try to focus on writers.

There was pushback. It wasn’t ghostwritten. She just had someone(s) rewrite it for her. She’d send them her stories and they send back their versions and they’d found all these words for emotions she didn’t know she had. And she was like yes, exactly. It was really amazing. A book is a product. Wouldn’t you want the best product out there? It’s how you launch your brand.

I said we’re doing different things. Good luck. And I got blocked everywhere. Godspeed.

I don’t think blurbs matter much. But goddamn. If I’m going to spend a week reading a book and writing a blurb for it, you better have fucking written the goddamn thing. And if blurbs matter at all, you’re goddamn right I’m going to save mine for those who wrote the thing.

I get that it’s probably hard to understand in a time when people proudly use AI to write shit for them. But this is a craft to some of us. It’s our art. We fucking care about it. We care about the words and the cadence and the sound of every letter. We care about sentences and where to make you pause, or stop. This is fucking work. You think it’s easy? That you read these words and hear them in my voice and if you meet me in person I sound the same? I fucking learned to talk like this so that I could write like this. Then I had to fucking learn how to write like this.

I vary the sentence length and the word length to fit in those sentences. I build a cadence. A rhythm. A beat. I hear it in my head as I type it out and I read it again to make sure it’s right. The cadence is what keeps you going, the next word, the next graph. I didn’t say paragraph there because it didn’t fit the cadence. Would’ve broke.

I weave in side details and backstories so you’re never caught in a two page wikipedia listing. I make the details interesting or funny or whatever the fuck I need in that space to set the tone or break it. I throw in details so you can see just enough that you’ll fill in the blanks. I trust your memory more than mine. What does an apple look like. Who gives a shit. I just need you to know it was mush. I didn’t say “mushy” though that’s the correct word because it wasn’t the right word. And you wonder why we’re all fucking insane.

They want us to think it doesn’t matter what we do. That it’s not worth anything. But AI will never gut you with a line. Maybe once it has arms. But it still won’t make you laugh unless we give it a gun. And ghostwriters… Goddamn. Some of us have to make a living. A lot of people have a story and they can’t tell it. Britney comes to mind. She needed to tell that story. She did. We needed to read it. So someone had to write it down and sound like her, just enough. It’s a skill for sure but it’s not hers. But then Britney’s not telling me there’s no difference, that anyone can do it.

It matters. It matters that people can’t even tell the goddamn difference. It matters that we’re supposed to pretend it’s the same thing. It’s not. Not everyone can fucking do this. Not everyone wants to. Who would. It’s why everyone wants to tell you they have a book they’re working on. “Working on.” Very few will ever finish. It’s hard. It’s really goddamn hard. I’ve done it once and it’s still shocking how hard it is. It fucking matters that you want us to go along with this lie that’s fucking killing our dream.

So yeah I get a little riled up about assholes pretending we’re the same. But I didn’t say any of that. I said sorry and best of luck or whatever the fuck. And I kept it to myself because who needs to hear it, honestly.

I do talk shit. I talk shit for fun. And I talk shit when people want to talk shit because she does things like calling a vet who fucking wrote an op-ed about his sexual assault a rape apologist. I talk shit when she announces she was one of the first women in combat, to the complete surprise of women who served in combat while she was in her tweens. And I talk a lot of shit when she calls innocent people all sorts of vile things, and when they push back, she calls them cult defenders.

We’ve all met the type. It’s best to just ignore them. You learn that eventually. Usually. Sometimes they cross a line and you say something. I haven’t had to since I left twitter. Kind of forgot about her. I’m friends with some of her family. And I’m in some survivor groups that I don’t check anymore. I hear things because I’m obviously the one they’ll reach out to when they need to scream. But those things are of the personal variety and my job is mostly to listen. And occasionally call her a cunt.

She’s recently learned that posting weird ass takes spreads a lot faster than a picture of a puppy. Gets people riled up. Gets people engaged. Works every time. If you’re into that sort of thing. And I don’t fucking care if she calls the boy scouts a cult or the NFL a cult or starts her own fucking cult. Whatever.

I have no fucking interest in being your designated cult take person. I just wanted to be a writer. That I had a weird story was something I thought I had to use as sort of a last ditch effort to get here. Turns out I didn’t need it after all. And I would like to talk about anything else. It’s frustrating as shit that I’m trying to write a goddamn book right now and I don’t know how to tell some stories without that back story. How much do I need to put in there? Do I have to explain why I was in Chile when my dad got me a dog? I need to talk to my editor.

But if you’re wondering why I, a person who forgets to do my drugs because I hid them from a landlord, a person who’s been somewhat critical of AA in the past because it does have some problems, if you’re wondering why I’m suddenly defending AA. It’s because goddamn. I have some personal experience with addicts. I’ve alluded to it here and here. But I don’t want to say more. I’m not an expert on addiction. But neither is she. For fuck’s sake, can we stop pretending otherwise? For what? Your goddamn brand? Fuck your brand. Find a new shtick because pretending to be a writer sure as fuck isn’t it.

Anyway. Now you have the backstory of what happened on threads yesterday. The blowback should be a hoot.