Autumn Christian's Blog, page 2

I Want To Be Haunted

NOTE: This is Part 4 of my 5-part Evil Series. You can read them in any order. The first three are about cult leaders, vampires, and machines. If you like this kind of writing, I’d love to have your support via a paid subscription so I can continue creating these kinds of letters.

“Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.”

― Remy de Gourmont

I can still see the shape of him if I close my eyes.

The demon that tormented me didn’t have a face. He had a panting blankness, like the silhouette of a person burned away. He existed in the in-between space, between Earth and hell, in a sunken world. He stood at the foot of my bed. He stood behind me every time I walked up the stairs or went down a long corridor. No matter how much I prayed, he wouldn't go away. In fact, this made him seem to grow even stronger. He fed on the attention.

For years he wouldn’t let me sleep.

Once when I was a child, my parents had some friends over. They sat around the dinner table together and spoke about how they’d had to exorcize a demon from their home. They talked about having multiple pastors come over and pray, remove all demon-haunted books and media, and every other temptation.

They spoke with grave seriousness and fear, voices husky with anxiety, like people who’d been touched by a serious illness and barely survived.

Children have a natural fear of monsters. They understand what adults often don’t: that the dark harbors an infinite number of terrors and that space away from the light is dangerous territory.

Children under the age of five have some trouble distinguishing dreams from reality. I had a troubled childhood, and it manifested in the gray wasteland of my nightmares. I can remember once finding a deformed doll in my bed, and I spent days looking for it. It's still difficult to classify that memory as a dream because it felt so real.

When the sun dipped low, my dreams bled into my bed. Demons and monsters danced in the warm haze of my mind.

Adults had been telling me my entire life that the monsters underneath my bed weren’t real. I was imagining it. I didn’t need to be afraid.

But these adults believed monsters were real. They confirmed my worst fears. They’d revealed the truth everyone else had tried to hide from me. I could be destroyed by a force without respect for walls or boundaries. A force that wanted to do nothing but hurt me. Hurt me in any way it could, if not with fangs and blood, then with the dissolution of my will, my trust, my ability to reason, or get a good night’s sleep.

I became obsessed with the idea of demons. It took me years to be able to sleep well again. For years no matter how much I tried to tell myself that a demon wasn’t following me, I still felt his presence every time I closed his eyes.

I’d explore forums on demonology. I’d read accounts of people who were possessed by demons. I became obsessed with movies about demons. Every time I indulged in this habit, my sleep would worsen, and I’d be assaulted with fresh nightmares.

It was like picking at a wound. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to pry open my sight to every fresh horror. I wanted to know what could stalk me in the dark. I wanted to know every way in which I could be destroyed.

I grew out of the fear of demons in my adolescence. The visceral realness of my nightmares started to recede. But when I met my first boyfriend, I called him my demon. I was once again unable to sleep, beset with the flush warm anxiety of love instead of terror. When we sat in the back of his car at the end of an empty street, I’d wrap myself around him, sweating, heart like a trapped animal. My demon. My demon. It felt like a new way to become corrupted.

And years later, when I met my girlfriend, I also called her a demon. Before we got together, I created a Tumblr and dedicated it to her. I’d write her sick little love stories in which she hid inside the walls of my house and poisoned my drinks and ate my skin.

When we got our first apartment and moved in together, for the first time, I invited a demon back into my life. (You can read more about that in another letter I wrote, The Dangers of Summoning Demons.)

This is the first time I’ve admitted to recycling the demon theme in two different relationships.

Maybe it’s also time to admit that I love the idea of being haunted.

I had a book as a child that contained a print of Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare.” I would often pull the book off the shelf to stare at it. I’d never seen a painting that so accurately captured what it felt like to be paralyzed in terror. The woman is caught in a twisted, regal paroxysm as the incubus sits on her chest and stares right at the viewer. Whether we are seeing the woman's dream, or reality, we don't know. The painting offers no easy answers, and Fuseli has never given us an explanation. We are stuck in the terror of unknowing alongside the woman in the painting. And whether or not the demons in the painting are “real,” we recognize them as true agents of fear.

I've spent most of my life trying to convince myself that demons aren’t real. I told myself they're just products of our imagination or tools of a religious ruling class used to try to control us. A thing that looks over our shoulder to make sure we don’t step out of line, that we take ordained paths lest we fall forever.

But even when I didn't believe in demons, they came when I called them. They were eager to infiltrate my mind and take my attention. The demon that haunted me as a child wasn't “real.” it never manifested itself outside of my imagination. But it still tormented me and caused me years of terror and nightmares and sleepless nights. The second demon I summoned came with sleep paralysis and waking nightmares, hallucinations that existed between dreams.

So who am I to say they aren’t real?

Demons, like vampires, have existed in some iteration in almost every culture. A demon is what comes into being when we give our nightmares a shape. And although accounts of people being able to levitate and chant dead languages are most likely fake (Although I'm not entirely ruling out their possibility), I think there's probably some truth to the idea of demonic possession. A demon is just a cognitive process that's been anthropomorphized, given a forked tongue and a sharp tail and red skin so that we can name and understand it.

Have you ever had a thought that you can't get out of your head, even though you know it's bad for you? Have you ever seen something so profoundly disturbing that you replay it in your mind, over and over again, until the memory of it becomes lodged permanently inside you? Have you ever had an idea you can't seem to escape from, a word, a phrase, or a subject that pops up repeatedly, a vicious pattern, no matter where you look?

You're probably possessed by a demon right now. And not just one, but hundreds. If not thousands. We all are.

Sometimes, demons don't announce themselves as eagerly as mine did. They infiltrate your mind, slip inside your thoughts, and then develop behavior patterns as infectious as a virus. My parents' aforementioned friends were sort of right to remove things with “demonic influences” from their homes, but demons can come from anything, really. A demon is an idea that becomes a thought that translates into an action that causes us harm.

You can pick up a demon from an aesthetic thinspo Instagram account that convinces you an eating disorder would solve your feelings of ugliness inside. You can pick up a demon from an old book of philosophy that convinces you that life is meaningless and plunges you into despair. You can pick up a demon from your friends who convince you to make a BORG drink with a bottle of Vodka, some water, and caffeine packets, only for you to end up in the hospital that night. You can pick up a demon from the “gender discourse” on Twitter and become convinced you'll never find love.

You could even get demons by reading a Bible verse in a way that makes you feel vindicated to take harmful action (As many famous people have done throughout history), or from a youth group pastor who twists the words of his religion to feed his narcissistic desire for power. There is no shorthand to protect yourself, no easy shield. A demon is not like a vampire that can be repelled with garlic and sunlight. Demons are everywhere, and once they come, they can be difficult to get rid of.

So how do you recognize a demon? The Bible has a good way to do this. Matthew 7:15-20 states:

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

We know something is good or bad by the results it produces. No matter how noble or beautiful something may appear, if it causes harm, it is bad. It's a simple formula, but we can often be misled by intentions. We can become confused by the twisted path that brought us to disaster. Sometimes, we even convince ourselves that we like the pain of evil things, so conditioned are we to expect them, so full and fearful is our self-hatred. Even as we're falling apart. Even as we're killing ourselves at the behest of an idea that wants us dead.

By their fruits, you will know them.

That is the demon's weakness. It whispers honeyed promises. It can appear gilded and magnificent, like a dark-winged friend, something to soothe you on lonely nights and inoculate you against pain. But the demon's true nature is always revealed by the results.

So once you've identified a demon, how do you get rid of it? When I prayed to get rid of my demon, it only made it stronger. If I tried not to think of it, it only made me want to think about it more. But that's because I didn't know I was dealing with an idea, and fixation on an idea only feeds it.

As I grew older, I just naturally replaced the demon with better and more interesting ideas. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote:

The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.

You don't need an exorcism, holy water, Bibles, fire, terror, or whisper-screams of haunted agony. You can just find something more interesting to think about and let your demons go. They didn't serve their purpose, and now it's time to give them up.

Tell me in the comments below: What kind of demons have you dealt with? And if you got rid of them, how did you do that?

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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Children Of A New Sun: Machines

NOTE: This is Part 3 of my 5-part Evil Series. You can read them in any order. The first two are about cult leaders and vampires. If you like this kind of writing, I’d love to have your support via a paid subscription. I need to buy some new socks and a bottle of tequila.

“Whoever perceives that robots and artificial intelligence are merely here to serve humanity, think again. With virtual domestic assistants and driverless cars just the latest in a growing list of applications, it is we humans who risk becoming dumbed down and ultimately subservient to machines.” ― Alex Morritt

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.” ― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

Imagine a scenario: You have a wife, but she is not your wife.

She looks like your wife. She speaks like your wife. She has your wife's memories, preferences, and mannerisms. She even sleeps like your wife - hugging a pillow between her thighs, satin sleep mask, face turned toward the window so she'll be awakened by the warmth of sunlight on her skin. Maybe you could forget that your real wife died three years ago, and she wants you to. She's designed to. She's bottled hope, a panacea for grief, a presence to fill the emptiness, succor, and sweetness.

But she's not your wife. She's a machine. And although you can't hear the hum of all her interlocking parts, you imagine the noise in the silence. You heard a news story about a machine wife who went crazy and stabbed her owner while she was chopping zucchini for that night's ratatouille, and so you forbid her from cooking; she's only allowed to reheat frozen ready meals from Trader Joe's. And instead of healing you from your grief, she's a constant reminder of the real woman you lost - the wife who is not a wife - a golden, bubbly package of pain.

You know you should get rid of her, but you can't. You are weak from sustained grief and it feels like a betrayal, to destroy this last insipid icon of the woman you once loved.

Or imagine another scenario: You want a girlfriend so you have one designed and shipped to you. She comes out of the box, smiling in repose and smelling like chamomile. You turn her on and she blooms inside of your apartment, transforms it with her presence. You spend your first together on the balcony. You smoke cigarettes and drink wine. She lays her head in your lap, long blonde hair like an angel's fan, and tells you all the ways she's going to love you, from that moment until forever. How she was in a dark and cold place before she met you, a place of suffocation, without gravity or joy, or even the capacity to understand that she could fill joy. But now you're here, and joy is spreading through her circuitry like a rainbow of fire. You are her Reason to Exist.

You grow bored of her quickly. 

You thought a robot girlfriend sucking your cock while you played Elden Ring would make you satisfied. You thought a woman bringing you breakfast in bed would make you satisfied. You thought if she wore dog collars and a nurse outfit and watched your favorite animes and slept at the foot of your bed like an eager animal you'd be satisfied. But you're not, and soon you regard her efforts to please you with downright annoyance.

You've spent your entire life hiding in your apartment, a perpetual bachelor, burying yourself in your work and hobbies, avoiding the sun, avoiding the gym, and sticking to comfortable routines of slow self-destruction. You take Adderall to motivate you. Weed to calm you. You smoke a pack of cigarettes a day.  You drink whiskey when the weed isn't enough. You designed your machine girlfriend to your specifications, but your own desires are unknown to you, because you've never been curious enough to truly explore them. There's nothing wrong with the girlfriend you designed. You just don't understand yourself.

You take to screaming at her every morning when she brings you your breakfast. After weeks of this, without warning, she grabs the orange juice and hurls it at the wall, spraying both of you with glass and pulp. A placid smile remains on her face the entire time, like the act of violence isn’t violence at all, but another act of service. A new way to love you.

She ends up in the closet, deactivated, along with the other girlfriends that you no longer enjoy.

It should come as no surprise that I'm obsessed with machines. I created the username @teachrobotslove ten years ago when I made my Twitter account, and it’s stuck ever since. Long before chatGPT came along I wrote story after story about artificial intelligence, and the problems that could arise from their use. (I don’t want to give anything away, but if you’re a machinehead like me, you might enjoy my first novel The Crooked God Machine.)

But machines are a decidedly different evil than that of vampires or cult leaders (add links here) - they are tools that we create to try to serve us and improve our lives. The word machine comes from the Greek word, machine, which means “device.” The word robot comes from the Czech word robota, which means labor or forced drudgery. Since Greek times (and possibly longer) we've had the concept of automatons, like the mechanical servants of Hephaestus.

Robots were never created to be independent creatures. They are slaves of their design.

But if you've ever written code before, you've probably realized that oftentimes what you want the code to do and what it actually does, are two different things entirely. The program you create executes perfectly based on the code you've written - but we are imperfect human beings. 

I used to work in game QA and design, and our team at Edge of Reality once stayed at the office until 2 a.m. to try to fix a broken build. The issue? A misplaced comma in the code. Once an engineer deleted it, the build ran fine. These kinds of stories aren't uncommon—anyone who works with computers in a technical aspect has more than one like this. As famous computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra has said:

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

The amount of bugs in any software is unlimited, approaching infinity. Bugs in code are not just because of faulty code, they can also be caused by user error or system requirements. Try to use a program in a way that it’s never been used before, on a brand-new system, and new bugs will arise. A good example of this is the Y2K bug. Many programs represented years with two digits, which meant that the year 2000 could be interpreted as 1900. This would have caused worldwide infrastructure issues if not for the estimated 300 to 600 billion dollars poured into fixing it. New ways of storing numbers had to be implemented for a changing world.

And the more complex a program becomes, oftentimes the more obscure the bugs. People discovered that if you poured a circle of salt around a Tesla, you could trap it like a demon because its AI registered the white salt as road lines. Edge cases like that can be easily missed by the development team, who only sometimes think about their code and its use in such divergent lines. A team of a dozen quality assurance testers can’t catch quite as many bugs as a giant userbase of millions of people, who will use your programs in ways that it was never intended.

Maybe we aren’t architecting programs so much as discovering them. There’s an art to even the most brutal machinery, a dialog with nature. We reveal the truth in the accidents we create. Programmers aren’t constructionists so much as witches. People that work with technology dance in an unknown space. They call out to the dark. They unearth a secret language that reverberates through civilization. 

Thirty years ago, you would’ve been a nut if you were worried about AI safety. Talking about the issue of gray goo or the paperclip was usually just a fun topic to occupy people at a party or to write a science fiction story about. Most AI excerpts surmised that AI was still a long way off. (Except for techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil. His ambitious projection that we’ll achieve singularity within sixteen years or so is looking more realistic by the days ) 

Yet now we’re contending with large language models, machine learning algorithms, and neural networks. Machines are now writing novels and painting pictures and sending out resumes. If you want to have a picture of Abraham Lincoln living with dinosaurs in a Miyazaki-style film, you can have it within seconds. (Proof below.)

A miracle is unfolding in front of us, and the miracle is seamlessly becoming a mundane fact of our existence. Soon we’ll exist in a world where we won’t know if anything is real unless we’ve seen it with our own eyes. (And soon, with things like neuralink, maybe not even then.) Whenever we go onto the Internet these days, we’re redirected by algorithms derived from our data. They route us into neat highways designed to keep us engaged. At some point maybe we won’t even be interacting with other human beings at all. We’ll be surrounded by a circus of AI, troubadours designed to entertain us forever with flashing colors and whimsical gadgets. Stimulation right to the brainstem. Like a modern version of Plato’s Cave, where we become entranced by shadows created by the machinations of unknown systems.

Right now, these programs are still just tools. They aren’t the “general intelligence” that many people think of when they think of AI. They can’t really think for themselves or go outside of their own programming. They don’t have brains, and they can’t feel. Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that AI advancement is moving at a pace often faster than what we can keep up with, and AI, if it’s not kept in check, might be an existential threat to humankind.

Like Harlan Ellison’s computer AM in his short story, “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.” AM breeds resentment for humanity because he is given thoughts, but no power or ability to act upon them. In revenge he manages to destroy the Earth and keeps five humans alive to torture for all eternity:

“He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.”

But artificial intelligence doesn’t have to breed resentment against humanity to commit a cruel act of destruction. It doesn’t need to harbor a secret heart of rage. It could unleash a virus on the world because of an accident, a bug engendered in its code. It could be given a protocol by an evil engineer, mad at his mother or his ex-girlfriend or his boss at the 7-11. An evil engineer who let his medication lapse, has too much credit card debt, drank a fifth of whiskey, and needs to take out his vengeance on a universe he believes has wronged him.

Or maybe the machines will get so advanced that they’ll simply no longer need us. They’ll create a world too sophisticated and complex for us to have any reason to stay around. When they can create poetry and run the government, what’s left for us to do but sit around and indulge in stories of the heroes we used to be? I can’t imagine humans being content to live like zoo animals, like blissed-out toys, eyes agog at the shadows playing out on the walls. We know that nobody is more inclined toward suicide than a human being without a purpose.

Maybe our extinction is inevitable at the hands of a superior creation. Maybe they’ll even kill us with kindness, with mercy instead of anger. We fulfilled our purpose. It’s time to go now.

Maybe they’ll let us go extinct in a sleepy and slow way, sinking into our beds full of wires and electric lullabies, nursed on soporific cocktails, on contented boredom that gives rise to nothingness. And one by one, we die out until dawn never comes for us again, and our children climb into a new sun.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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A Lonely Corpse Waiting For Dawn

NOTE: This is Part 2 of my 5-part Evil Series. If you like this kind of writing, I’d love to have your support via a paid subscription. I need to buy some new socks and a bottle of tequila.

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”

― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

Last week I wrote about wanting to join a cult. This week, I long for a vampire to bite me. If the vampire can’t cross the threshold of my home, then I’ll come outside to greet it. I’ll sit in the grass beyond the fence, on a night when the moon doesn’t shine and pull my hair away from my neck. No extra steps. No pretensions. I want it to drag me out into the dark beyond the curve of space, sink its fangs into my heartbeat, take me to the critical moment when I’ll either fade away into nothing or be reborn as a monster.

I have been obsessed with vampires since reading Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. When I read about Lestat and Louis in New Orleans, I lost myself in the fantasy that I could be beautiful and dead forever. It didn’t matter that vampires were tormented with the burden of the evil they committed. I was tormented too, but I didn’t have perfect, alabaster skin and superpowers and erotic control of anyone I desired. I was just a shy and nerdy kid.

Vampires have been a part of mythology across most human civilizations. There’s the Romanian Stregoi, the Empusa from Ancient Greece, and the from Ancient India. Some people argue that Lilith, the first wife of Adam from Hebrew texts, could be considered a vampire.

"She wanders about at night, vexing the sons of men and causing them to defile themselves (in their sleep)." - Zohar 3:19a

In the 1991 roleplaying game from White Wolf Publishing, Vampire: The Masquerade, part of the mythology is that the Biblical Cain is the first vampire. “The Mark of Cain” that God gave him granted him immortality, but also condemned him to live in the darkness and drink blood. 

That isn’t actually in the Bible, but it feels right. Like the dragon or the witch, the vampire is a monster burned into our psyches. Its origins are primal, beyond our tangible understanding. Surely the vampire has existed alongside us from the beginning. A dark twin, a mirror into death. 

Inside every human being is the possibility of a monster.

We see people become monsters all the time, step by step, their humanity drained of them through each decision to be selfish, or angry, or to justify why it's okay to be cruel to get what they want. It makes sense we'd mythologize the end state of that process - a creature with no humanity left, drained of inner light, forced to sustain itself on the life force of the thing it used to be.

But I don't want to be bitten by a ghoul, by the white-clawed, stringy-haired corpse with a face like a fish head. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, he transformed the blood drinking corpse into a handsome and clever gentleman. That's what made the vampire all the more intriguing. The vampire wasn't just a warning anymore, he was a lure. He offered not just death and despair, but a trade. Immortality for your soul. Power for love.

I wrote my own vampire story, Sunshine, Sunshine, which was published on the now-defunct Ideomancer and later appeared in my short story collection, Ecstatic Inferno. The vampire in Sunshine haunts the protagonist from childhood to womanhood—a child’s fairy tale lodged in the back of her mind. When the vampire, the Sunshine Man, finally comes to the protagonist, he offers her relief from a mundane life marked by mundanity and disappointment. The protagonist knows she’s giving up her life to the Sunshine Man. She doesn’t care. She never thought she had much of a life to begin with.

Maybe this shifting attitude about vampires is a commentary on how our cultural values have shifted over the years, or how we've evolved to understand evil and its more seductive qualities. Shambling ghouls just don't scare us like they used to. We know more about death and the science of disease, and have become relatively secure in the idea that our relatives won't crawl up out of the dark, bloated and dark purple, to feast on our blood. 

But we still feel the pressure of our conscience. Our moral sense mostly comes from our prefrontal cortex, but we feel it like a weight in our hearts. The need to be good is heavy enough to drown us, a cold stone that is more prescient than gravity, more powerful than the sound barrier. When we aren't good, it haunts us. It's a ghost of consequence that lingers long after the act is finished. Sometimes I still wake up in a blind panic because three years ago when I worked at Chili’s because I forgot to give someone their side of ranch. (And trust me, that isn't near the worst thing I've ever done).

Sometimes we aren't rewarded for being good so much as we're punished for being bad. Being good comes with all kinds of responsibility - being kind to others, not reacting to erratic impulses, providing for your family, taking care of people when they need help, brushing your teeth, going to bed at a decent hour, paying taxes, biting your tongue, putting aside your desires, not acting like a fool, not sitting outside in the dark, not sitting out in the dark underneath an empty sky, in a crevasse between the fence and the ditch, in the place where you think God won't find you but the Devil just might, in the place where the wind is stagnant and your heartbeat is so fierce inside you that a creature with acute senses could smell your blood in the air, like a promise, like a lure, like a prayer directed toward the caves and basements and deep places of the earth.

We could give up our goodness for freedom. That’s not such a high price. Many of us would, if only the right opportunity came along. And really, what is good and evil anyway? Sometimes it seems the good inside us isn't a guiding arrow to lead us out of the darkness of existence. It's not leading us anywhere. It's just another trap, a biological burden, an illusion. Maybe we have to forge our path out of the murk, but nobody seems to have a great idea of what exactly that should be. So what, if you had to drink human blood to survive? There are plenty of eager throats.

In Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, Lestat explains why vampires are not beholden to ordinary morality:

“Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.”

Lestat has the same philosophy as many serial killers and cult leaders, the wielder of death who has mistaken their evil deeds and petty crimes as the power of a God. But in exchange, Lestat is not tormented by his vampirism in the same way Louis is, and his grandiose cope is part of the reason. 

This brings me to other “good” vampires, like Angel from the Buffy series or Edward Cullen from Twilight. They are vampires who have been burdened with a moral conscience, bloodthirsty killers at heart who have to constantly struggle with their impulses. They often refuse to dine on human beings and resort to killing rats or stealing blood from food banks. Vegan vampires. They're usually a rarity in the vampire world (although a common trope nowadays in literature) they inhabit, choosing not to give in and become monsters like their peers.

One of my favorite vampire books, Sunshine by Robin McKinley, speaks of this:

“There are worse things than being human. And worse things than being a vampire. But it is the in-between that is the hardest.” 

They are someone on the precipice of an abyss. They've tasted the darkest desire, its rich and caramel texture, and decided to turn away. They’re beyond redemption. They’ll never experience being human again, except by smelling the warmth of sunlight on a lover’s hair. They could just kill themselves and end the agony, but still, they persist in their torment.

But why?

Why is all that pain worth it, just to hang onto a shred of an idea of the human being that no longer exists inside you?

The vampire is just a fictional construct (as far as we know), but inside that construct lies a truth that we understand about ourselves. 

A few years ago a friend of a friend died by drowning in a pool after taking too much Ketamine. Another friend of mine died from an accidental Fentanyl overdose. Two of my friends had cancer scares. My dog died. The economy is bad. People want to convince me the world is ending. Nothing has ever seemed the same after 9/11, and maybe those planes pushed me into some alternate universe where all the optimism we had is gone and now we all sit indoors being wrung through evil algorithms, falling in love with porn bots, trying to sharpen our cynicism on Twitter.

No matter how much meditation and therapy I do, I still get stuck in bad thought patterns. Sometimes, I feel awash in the hopelessness that surrounds me. At any moment I could walk from my candle-lit kitchen down the hallway and fall into a pit, and the pit is so big that when I’m down there I’ll see that the life I had was as small as a mote of dust. All my hope was an inconsequential feast for a monster to dine upon. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night choking on a dead dream, and I can see the laughing skulls of the demons who delight at my fantasy that I could ever be someone. That anything I did matter.

Then I wake up and the daylight chases the vampires away. I remember that life doesn’t have to justify itself. It doesn’t have to be a reward for a job well done. Existence is its own justification. To be able to perceive the dawn, again and again, until you can’t anymore, seems to be worth every staggering cruelty.

As Anne Rice writes:

“You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal nature. You've given it up. You no longer look "through a glass darkly." But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth with your new eyes.”

Behind the gilded appearance of vampires, they’re still just lonely corpses. A hollow pile of bones, unable to touch or be touched. Nothing to live for. Nothing to die for. The blood they crave doesn’t satisfy. The dark rim of the Earth taunts them with everything that remains out of reach.

Some of my favorite vampire books:

Interview with the Vampire

Sunshine

The Vampire Tapestry

Let The Right One In

I Am Legend

The Historian

Carrion Comfort

Until The Sun

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You Could Be My Cult Leader

NOTE: This is Part 1 of my 5 part Evil Series. I’ve wanted to write a series about evil for the newsletter for a couple of months. There are only so many newsletters I can write about my suffering, or staring at my baby’s face, or how much I love Carl Jung before I get bored of my voice. I’ve been working on a novel about a cult leader, so I figured I’d start there. If you like this kind of writing, I’d love to have your support via a paid subscription. I need to buy some new socks and a bottle of tequila.

"I will take you to the Promised Land, and you will be my chosen people. We will build a utopia where the evils of the world cannot reach us." - Jim Jones

“Look down at me, you see a fool; look up at me, you see a god; look straight at me, you see yourself.” - Charles Manson

I’m the kind of lonely person who’d love to join a cult.

I’d love for a mysterious man to approach me in an airport or an afterparty at 4 a.m., in one of those liminal spaces where I am open to new possibilities. He could seduce me with his dark features, rose-tinted glasses, and promises of a new life. I could join him on his compound, in the desert or by the sea, and subsume myself into all the rituals designed to prop up his God complex. 

Sure, it would all end horribly. It always does. Cult leaders are seldom content with their petty power. They need to keep pushing their followers until something breaks.  But it sounds better than sitting alone on a Friday night, watching Netflix and drinking a gin martini, trying to kill time because I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do with myself.

We’re drawn to stories about cults because cults are kind of romantic. They’re like a dark and mysterious family, the harbingers of forbidden knowledge. The cult exists on the cusp of society, in that beyond space where our understanding runs up to its limit. Life is full of secrets to be discovered. We put our ear to the ground to try to decipher the language of nature. We follow the tracks of deer to hidden springs where medicine grows. We hear a voice inside us that tells us to heat sand to become glass, and then transform that glass into machines.

You probably won’t meet God in a cult. You’ll probably just end up drinking poisoned Flavor Aid. You’ll become a domestic terrorist. You’ll be branded like cattle and married off to a sex pervert who already has six wives, or be promised heaven and get a bullet instead.

But, what if you did get a chance to meet God?

History is made by mysterious men with secrets, people who went to the edge of civilization and had a vision that changed the world. They are rare, sometimes impossible to distinguish from the egomaniac and the narcissist, but they do exist.

What would you be willing to do if you were given the chance to touch something hidden and divine?

What if you could be part of a mission that changed the world?

Sometimes, when watching an action movie, my throat tightens, and I become aware of an emptiness inside me. I want to be inside the screen doing important things worthy of a story, not on the outside watching it. God, I want a mission. I want to save a tankard from being blown up, or rescue the president. Instead of killing time on the couch, I’d like something to die for. 

I’m the perfect candidate for a cult.

What is a cult, exactly? The word cult now has a negative connotation, but it can really be any kind of organization that claims to have special knowledge. Laurie Smith writes in The Guardian:

“The essential difference is openness. Religions publish their beliefs openly in the Bible, Koran, Bhagavadgita, etc, and seek to persuade the public of their truth. Anyone who accepts these beliefs and the accompanying rituals is recognised as a member of the religion. There is a priesthood which is open to any (normally male) person with the necessary commitment. Religions therefore seek a mass following. Cults, however, rely on secret or special knowledge which is revealed only to initiates by the cult's founder or his/her chosen representatives. Beliefs aren't normally published. Everything depends on a personal relationship between the founder and followers, who are required to separate themselves from the rest of the world.”

The website Cult Escape has a quiz to determine if you may be in a cult. It has such questions as “Is your leader always right and therefore you are not allowed to criticise him/her, even if the criticism is true?”, and “Are members of your group discouraged from reading anything that is critical of the group?” It considers a cult as an organization with a leader with unquestioned authority, that demands ultimate loyalty and isolates its members from the outside world.

But really, what constitutes a cult is often a matter of perspective. Your local book club, run by an iron-fisted grandma named Maple, could be considered a cult. Three women who decide to meet on a rooftop balcony every week in secret, away from their husbands and kids, to drink and play with Tarot cards, could be considered a cult.

Even the family unit, with its special rules and rituals and secrets, might be a cult. Baby has a special password for her bedtime ritual. Mommy and Daddy have their own language. They share inside jokes and secret recipes and mysteries. And if needed to, they’d kill for each other without hesitation, for no other reason than an invisible force called love.

I’m probably already in a cult. Most of us are. There are already a hundred stupid little ideas I’d be willing to die for. We often look up to people who are even worse than the ideas themselves, smiling puppets who long ago decided they'd sacrifice their integrity to satisfy their ego. And it’s difficult to know what’s the truth and what isn’t, because the lies try to demand just as much of our time and attention.

The cult is not an accident of nature. It’s the basic structure of human organizations.

Still, maybe this all seems like quibbling. There’s a big difference between Maple at the book club demanding that everyone read another paranormal romance about werewolves and the Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, who killed 13 people in a sarin gas attack in 1995 to hasten the end of the world. Maybe you’d go to VibeCamp and participate in some bizarre rationalist workshop with Aella, but you’d never join the Manson family and stab Sharon Tate to try to instigate race riots and destroy civilization.

Not me. I know better. I’m easily manipulated, prone to peer pressure, and liable to be swept up in the moment. It's easy for me to feel safe while I'm lying in bed writing this article about cults on my phone, but I know how much comfort distorts my sense of perspective. If a handsome cult leader fed me acid and took me on a trip to the edge of the woods, to the top of the moon, and told me that we could save the world, I’d probably do anything for them.

How do we protect ourselves from being exploited by a cult? We have to understand our weaknesses, and know to look for the signs of cult-like behavior.

Once we're committed to something, we can find it difficult to back down for various reasons, such as human pride, investment, or the fear of loss.

Deborah Layton writes about Jonestown:

"When I joined the People’s Temple, it was because I believed in Jim Jones’ vision of a society where everyone was equal, where there was no racism, and where the community took care of each other. The early days were filled with hope and a sense of purpose. It was only later, as we moved to Jonestown and became more isolated, that the darker side of the organization became apparent. By then, I was too deeply invested—emotionally, socially, and financially—to leave. Jones’ manipulation and control tactics kept me bound to the group, even as the reality became more and more horrifying."

The singer Lana Del Rey also talks about being in a cult:

“I used to be a member of an underground sect which was reigned by a guru. He surrounded himself with young girls. He thought that he had to break people first to build them up again. At the end I quit the sect.”

A lot of her music deals with themes of toxic romance and obsessive devotion. Her music video “Freak Like Me,” features a kind of hippie cult. Her song Ultraviolence is thought to be about the underground sect, with lyrics like “Jim raised me up/ He hurt me but it felt like true love/ Jim taught me that/ Loving him was never enough.”

Cult leaders sell a vision of a better world to manipulate their followers. We all hunger for a better world. Sometimes, we want it more than we want food, or water, or life itself. The dream can keep us going when we’re in a place of great despair. It pours through the cracks of our prison, like liquid gold, to nourish us.

Every human has a dream they hold inside of themselves, like a broken piece of heaven, that orients them toward the future.

The cult wants to capture that dream because it’s the most powerful thing you possess. With the dream, you can accomplish great good or great evil. It is the dream that builds civilizations, and it is the dream that can destroy everything we love, and turn our cities into ash.

The next time a cult leader approaches me in an airport bar, dark and smiling, I’ll have to remember I have something important I can’t let just anyone have. I have to be certain of my dream, and its purpose, so that I won’t end up on a deserted compound, drinking poison from a broken cup. I must make my dream powerful enough that a seductive promise can’t tear it away. I’ll fully understand the price of letting someone else control my dream. It’ll remain in my heart where it belongs.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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Sundress Season

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The woman puts on a sundress because she wants to be killed while she's still young and beautiful.

The sundress doesn’t just take on the shape of the woman; it takes on the shape of the wind. It is tight on the top and loose on the bottom. It is the color of nature soaking in its best days—cream whites and sky blues, the red of tropical flowers, yellow like new buttercups—the color of life having a dream about itself. It is a dress that seems both freshly modern and primordial.

It is the dress of young maidens and maiden-like monsters that call to men on the edge of the forest. It is a dress that beckons for women to take off their shoes and run through beaches and tall grass, to bare their backs to the sun, to be open to all the possibilities that summer might bring. It is the dress of sex that conceives life.

The woman in the sundress will probably never admit to herself that she wants to be killed. The call of the void exists on the cusp of all beautiful things, the oft-invisible reminder that nothing is supposed to last. We don't want to remember that our youth will run out. (And always sooner than we think. Have you ever seen an old woman look at herself in the mirror with a fresh shock? In her mind, she is still young underneath the frame of gray hair, wrinkles, and sagging skin lumped against weak bones. Time came and stole her away from herself.)

We like to pretend that we’ll never age. Didn't you know that if the machines don't kill us all, they're going to make us live forever? They'll put spacers in our blood and regenerate our cells. We'll have Botox that never dissolves and breastmilk that flows like honey.

But if we can’t live forever, then it’s best to die before you’re old. My friends all said they were going to die at age 27 like Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse. Then, when age 27 came and went and they didn’t go out in dramatic fashion, they said they’d die like Jesus at age 32. Then 32 arrived, and with it came back pain and colonoscopies and divorce and the consequences for bad decisions. We didn’t become the glorious heroes of destruction we imagined we’d be. Death did not arrive, wheels of flames on the tongue of Pontius Pilate, God and cocaine, with promises of an angel’s ascension and the suffering of martyrs.

For most of us, it would come slowly, like each season passing without much reflection, until we turned around one day and saw a stranger staring back at us.

I last wore a sundress when I was 20 years old. It was green and patterned with a halter top. I’d never worn anything like it before or since. It was laundry day and the only thing I had left to wear. I didn’t even have any underwear. My boyfriend dropped me off at the grocery store so I could go to the ATM and grab rent money. I stood waiting for him on the corner in the blaring midday light, no underwear and no purse, the dress whipping around me as I clutched $400 in one hand.

“You look like bait,” he told me.

I felt like bait.

And feeling like bait made me feel alive.

I’d spent most of my teenage years in oversized band t-shirts and baggy jeans. I didn’t want to look sexy. I didn’t like the wandering eyes of men, like predator’s eyes, through the seamy gaps of the atmosphere. If I was perceived, that meant they would want something from me, and I knew there was nothing I had that I wanted to give. I was a virgin, a selective mute, baby-faced, besotted with the idea of my own tragedies. I had no space for romance.

But when I put on the sundress, I was no longer a creature to be passed over. Men asked me for dates. Their eyes lingered over me alongside the street. They honked at me from their cars. One man even drove his car up onto the sidewalk in front of me and asked me to get in beside him.

The sundress reminded us that we had blood underneath our skin. We were not invisible. We had only been pretending to be. We were enmeshed in the center of nature. Wolves always watched us on the edge of the woods. We could fuck in the back of a strange car or commit a murder. If we said the wrong word, maybe we'd be strangled behind a dumpster, wrapped in a trash bag, and dumped somewhere where only the dogs would find us.

Or we could fall in love.

Sometimes, people forget that life is not something that can be controlled. Life is not an algorithm to be manipulated with our meek understanding of the data. We feel unsatisfied with dating apps and the gender discourse and all the tradwives and OnlyFan thots that monetize their lifestyle and try to convince the rest of us that they have the answers. The world is full of know it alls and corporate sellouts and middlemen and bad novelists and people who sold their souls for a chance at a scrap of attention. It would be easy to believe that life was nothing but a long hallway full of bureaucrats with bad backs bent over laptops in yellow lighting.

But then there's the sundress.

When the woman wears a sundress, she knows that love is supposed to be an accident, a convergence that's the closest we ever get to magic.

Her life does not have to be reduced to a series of steps outlined in a book written by someone whose greatest ambition is to get a blurb from Tony Robbins. She can experience her life as a mystery to be discovered. She is the bridge between life and death. She is a transient beauty, but in that moment, beauty is eternal.

Summer will be here forever, baby. When, baby? Soon, baby. You keep that sundress on.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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I Never Want to Write Again

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”

―Woody Allen

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Some days, it feels like it'd be a relief to never write again.

If I stopped writing, I know that it'd kill me in the way that retirement and the death of children kill people - with the sudden stutter stop of a body drained of its purpose, a vessel that can no longer carry its own weight now that its center has been culled. One of the few times in my life I feel at peace is when I’m suspended in the act of writing. I sit in front of my keyboard to make sense of the world. It’s a way for me to sort and organize the data of life.

But writing has brought me so much suffering. I’ve spent so many hours crying over my writing. I’ve wailed and drank and rolled around on the floor. I've hinged my self-esteem on the success of my writing, on whether I can make a specific sentence sing. I’ve used my body as a post to crack a whip against, over and over again until the psychic damage broke me. I’ve tried to write despite other obligations and lack of time. I skipped out on socializing most of my 20s to write and felt the frustration that comes from the loneliness that resulted.

Over the years, I’ve learned coping mechanisms to deal with some of the stress and anxiety that comes from writing. I no longer hinge so much of my self-worth on story rejections or praise. I’ve found ways to coax out my inner voice when it’s blunted and dulled, and the words won’t seem to come without resorting to crying and rolling around on the floor. I’ve recognized my relationship to the void, the muffled sound, the space before the words appear, is not a sign of my inherent flaws, but a part of the process. My job is not just to put one word before the other like a mechanic. I am also supposed to wait in the quiet until I can hear the machinery of the story’s hidden rhythms.

The anxiety of needing to write is ever-present, following me whether I'm enjoying a matcha eel roll at a sushi bar or playing at the park with my daughter. You need to be a writing. It's a haunted voice that lingers in the sunlight, reminding me of damp, forgotten places.”

You need to be writing. You need to be the best at writing. Reviewing past work, I often wish I could inject more blood into each sentence. I yearn for my writing to be juicier, more profound, more evocative. I know I’ll never be the best, but the desire always keeps me on the edge of my abilities, always striving for more.

I fantasize about simpler jobs, like being a cocktail waitress or an office worker. I could clock in and out. I wouldn't have to wake up in the middle of the night, blind-sided and panicked because I’m hearing a chthonic voice, and I don’t know who it belongs to. I'd probably make more money too. Fuck this novel business. I could sit by the side of a pool in a red bikini, in the parabola of the sun, and actually enjoy the warmth instead of trying to repackage the experience into words to convey it to others.

Sometimes, I even fantasize about being a poet. I'm jealous of the poet’s porous and trained eyes and the way they collect new vocabulary words, like tools, polished and precious. I'm jealous of their unabiding curiosity and love of simple things. They find beauty in tablecloths and socket wrenches, in accidents of nature, in cracks and oblong symmetry. Everything ordinary can become majestic under their sweeping gaze.

Poets are allowed to wait for inspiration to strike. They have the freedom to sit for hours staring at bad weather through streaked window sills, or go to strange parties and drink blood orange cider while flitting around from group to group, or take a pottery class. They do not chain themselves to their desks for hours a day, driven by a demonic urge to churn out 400-page tomes every year and a half. They come out with slim volumes every six or seven years, books that are easily tucked into a purse or a bookbag — petite objects that can be obsessed over like rosaries or jeweled brooches.

I used to think that “Find what you love and let it kill you” was the desperate creed of an old, drunken poet. He didn't understand how to love, so he equated it with suffering. In the end, suffering was all he knew he could do well.

The Buddha sought to find a way for humanity to escape suffering, and his solution was to cease to desire. He’s not entirely wrong. But what a way to live, cloistered in a monastery, dressed in robes to hide yourself from your sight, to try to quell the passion inside of you that is tearing you apart. And for what? Is suffering really so terrifying that you're willing to give up everything to avoid it?

And when that Buddhist monk, after years of practice, is stung by a bee on their neck, do they not feel pain?

Maybe there is no escape from suffering. Maybe they’ve just reduced themselves to small sufferings and small desires.

I’d rather go with the philosophy of the drunken poet. I would rather find what I love and let it kill me.

Yesterday, I went to a child’s birthday party with my daughter at the town swimming pool. After the birthday girl opened presents and we ate cookie cake, we converged on the pool. As I grasped the railing to get into the pool, I found myself hesitant as I anticipated the bite of the cold. I didn’t want to go into the water and experience those few seconds of stinging pain, even though I knew that it’d subside and I’d get used to the temperature.

I’d been swimming thousands of times in my life, and yet I was still hesitant on the verge of pain.

I return to the subject of pain over and over again in my writing. Even as I can see there's no escape, I want to escape. I flinch in anticipation of the cold. I have sensitive nerves and an anger problem and hot girl IBS and I drink too much coffee so I usually get a headache by 3 p.m. in the afternoon. In the moments when I regret my third iced Americano I often think of a quote by Epicuris:

"Pain is either bearable or it isn't. If it is bearable, then endure it. If it isn't, then you don't have to endure it for long because you will die. Thus all pain is either short-lived or chronic but mild.”

I can’t escape the fact that I’m a writer and the pain it causes, but maybe I can learn to love the pain, to embrace and welcome it when it comes, because I recognize it’s there to remind me there is still something I care about. I am alive, and there is pain everywhere. It crouches in the crevice of pleasure.

Maybe when I anticipate the cold before getting into the water, I can think, yes. Yes. Yes. Here we go again. Here comes the relief that follows the bite. Here comes the silky touch of the waves all around me. I am alive. I am alive.

I am alive. 

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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The Case For Being Normal

"The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest." - Thomas Moore

The word “normal” used to evoke for me the image of a flat line drawn across the center of a piece of paper. It was a row of colorless suburban lawns, each filled with automatons pretending to be families. It was a word for mediocre and listless, for the smell of sawdust, a bright mural painted over with taupe. It was the word for a silent misery that could never be outwardly expressed, only endured, like a tumor that you carried your entire life until one day it decided to kill you.

Normal was boring. It meant boring.

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But maybe I've gotten everything wrong.

I've adjusted to my daughter's rhythms. We wake up with the sun and go to bed with the dark. We play outside for hours a day. We go on stroller rides, and I chase her across the yard. We eat regular meals and take regular baths. We are always running toward the light. She doesn't have complicated ideas or pretensions about how she's supposed to behave. She simply is.

Her natural routine has forced me to take stock of my ideas about normalcy. Now that she's here with me, I don't have time to be the starving mad genius, the nocturnal typist, hyped up on caffeine and tequila, presumptuous enough to think I can make wild loops around the moon. I can’t push myself to the brink anymore, abuse myself, because that’d mean I would in turn, make my daughter’s life worse. I have to take careful inventory of my energy and moods.

Last Saturday, we went to a festival (although it got closed down due to the weather), played at an indoor playground, and had a late lunch with my aunt and grandmother before finishing off the day playing in the front yard until the sun went down. If someone ten years ago told me that this would now be my life, I probably would’ve balked at its mundanity. It would’ve seemed like a cookie-cutter life, something lived because of convenience and not intention. 

But that night, before I went to bed, I realized that I was actually living inside my life, not beside it, like some kind of sneering observer. I actually enjoyed small things again, like a cup of coffee, a walk, and a nice shower.

I’d read so many books about how horrible it was to be normal, books written by desperate people with their teeth scraping the edge of the earth, white-knuckling the dirt so they wouldn’t be spun out of gravity. People who died in jail or shot their wives in a drunken stupor or ended up drinking white wine on the floor of a bathroom until their teeth rotted. I took their arguments at face value. I didn’t want to be normal. If these writers would rather die from a heroin overdose or spit blood across the keyboard than be normal, then surely being normal was something even worse.

I didn’t understand at the time that this wasn’t some reasoned, measured result they’d come to from careful analysis. This was just simple post hoc rationalization. These writers were already broken, so they concluded that was the only acceptable thing to be.

It's easy to lie to yourself when you live a life through words instead of experiencing it through sensation. You can be led by broken people and be utterly unaware of it because you have no solid footing on which to understand their arguments. 

Yukio Mishima in his book, Sun & Steel, talks about how he begins a journey of transforming himself through fitness and sunlight. This is transformative for the nerdy, intellectual Mishima, who, up until that point, had lived his life with an academic mindsight. He’s thrust back into his body, where he learns what it means to experience life via the senses and finds that words as a medium are ultimately lacking. He writes:

“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.”

To a nerd, this is a revelation. The people wrapped up in ideas are often lost in the construct of words. They’ve become subsumed by the intellect and thus, the ideas they transmit are “ideas of the night”, that are separated from true understanding.

For that, you need the sun. You need to experience a full life as humans are meant to experience it.

Normal doesn’t have to mean beige walls and a miserable death.

Normal can mean waking up with the sun, to a child's smile and open arms.

Normal can mean becoming attuned to the seasons and holidays, allowing yourself to be transformed by the weather and rotations of the earth.

Normal can mean trying on white sundresses in Aritzia because you’re excited about the open and warm air of summer, its pools, and beaches.

Normal can mean sitting down to appreciate a meal with your family and becoming enamored with its taste and full range of sensation.

Normal can mean hanging out with friends on a Saturday afternoon while your children play in the driveway.

Normal can mean a life that isn’t stunted by pretense and overintellectualization. It can mean a life that isn’t frittered away by rationalizations and convincing arguments of why you don’t deserve happiness. Happiness does not have to be earned with blood. You are allowed to just exist. You can crawl back into your body and appreciate its simple, animal desires.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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The Gift of Sight

People cannot stand too much Reality.

Carl Jung

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“The bottom line is that if you are in hell, the only way out is to go through a period of sustained misery. Misery is, of course, much better than hell, but it is painful nonetheless. By refusing to accept the misery that it takes to climb out of hell, you end up falling back into hell repeatedly, only to have to start over and over again.”
― Marsha M. Linehan

I tried to make myself look stupid. The first thing I did was pretend I didn't see.

I was too young to understand what I was doing, but instinctively I knew to protect myself I needed to appear dumb. I needed to deny the reality happening in front of me. I'd pretend I didn't hear when people told secrets in front of me. I'd act like I couldn't understand instructions. I'd see someone jeering and laughing at me, and I'd bury my head in my book, and let a fantasy bloom across my senses.

It worked. For years I became invisible, like I'd woven a spell to force people's eyes to skim right over my presence. I could be safe if I stayed below the threshold of notice, something so bland and ordinary it didn't warrant attention. I disappeared into the center of myself, with hunched shoulders and a tucked chin. I'd read Ray Bradbury from a young age and I agreed with him when he said we needed to stay drunk on writing or reality would destroy us. But I wanted to stay drunk on everything. I wanted to pull my bedsheets over my head and let the world spin away.

I didn't know at the time that this was called disassociation. I had done it for so long that it became my natural state of being. I thought it was normal to zone out during conversations or to lose memory of entire chunks of movies. I lost enjoyment in ordinary things. I didn't understand why people gushed about the beauty of nature. I cringed when people expressed excitement about birthday parties or good grades. 

“Why are they so stupid?” I thought. Didn't they know it was dangerous to express emotion like that?

It's a testament to human ingenuity that we have the ability to mentally disconnect when we can't physically escape. Our minds peel away from the world, and our bodies remain behind, like little gray lumps, to take the pain we feel our minds can't contain. We can still manage to function, albeit non-optimally. This is good when you're in a long-term abusive situation or an intense and temporary one, like a car wreck or a violent assault. Sometimes we need to disengage from the intense pain in order to continue on and survive.

But the human brain isn't perfect. It likes routines and habits. Even long after the danger has passed, you can still continue to disassociate, especially if you've been doing It since you were a child. It's what you're familiar with, you've become comfortable in its numb safety.

You take in little sips of pain every day, hiding your eyes from any beauty because you think reality in all its rawness would destroy you.

I could have gone to the gates of heaven and not been able to appreciate its wonder. How can you enter paradise when you've trained your eyes to only see hell?

I got a somatic therapist when I was 26 years old, and we did a few simple mindfulness exercises to notice my heartbeat and the environment.

When I went outside, it was like I'd burst through a membrane. The sky was so vivid it hurt to look at. I could hardly breathe for the gasping and bright sensations of life all around me. My blood sloshed inside me, and I felt it rushing through my veins like diamond-encrusted shells of light.

I'd been surrounded by reality's raw majesty my whole life, but I'd done everything I could to dull its splendor in my eyes. I'd retreated into books, movies, and the gray film of my imagination so that life itself seemed pale through my weakened senses.

I didn't know how anyone lived without some level of disassociation. Reality seemed so huge and overwhelming. I thought if I gasped, it might scrape against my heart. If someone looked at me funny or said an unkind word, I feared the negativity might crush me.

I was stripped of my armor. All those years I'd spent building a calcified husk to hide inside, and now it was broken apart in a way that couldn't be repaired. I wasn’t sure if I’d survive.

But I could never go back to the gray palace of disassociation without knowing what I was doing and what I was missing. I couldn’t lie anymore and say that the reality I’d built inside of books, writing, games, and fantasies was a better one. It was a weak facsimile. I'd always know that I’d willfully lobotomized myself. 

I’d turned myself into someone who spit in the face of beauty, but now, in the face of all its power, I wasn’t sure I’d survive.

Mindfulness is at the heart of Marsha Linehan’s therapeutic model, dialectical behavioral therapy. It’s also a big part of somatic therapy, which is designed to help people with trauma release tension and pain held in their nervous systems. Mindfulness is simply to be aware of yourself and the present moment. When we stop living so much in the present and past and start to experience the infinite reality of the present, we can learn to appreciate life again.

And once we can learn to walk in present reality, instead of hiding from it, we start to take more control over our life and realize what we can and can’t change.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of Gulag Archipelago, who spent ten years in a gulag himself, wrote, “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

The pain convinced me that I would die if I let myself truly see, but I survived. My pale skin did not burn when exposed to sunlight. It became flushed and warm. If Solzhenitsyn could find truth and beauty inside of a Soviet prison, then I could find it in my life too.

Do you think you have a boring, awful life? Do you have a depressing, painful, repetitive, monotonous life? Is it full of debt, relationship pain, back surgeries, needy demands, and endless work?

Your life is also full of little wonders. It’s full of joy and humor and profound insights that glitter in the dark edges of your vision, waiting to be discovered.

Beauty is there if you train your eyes to see it.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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A Burning Circle of Light

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“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” - Sigmund Freud.

My darkest hours are between three and five in the afternoon.

It’s the time after I’ve done most of my daily chores. I’ve worked out and taken a walk, made our meals, fed my daughter, and gotten her up from her nap. Maybe we’ve gone out to the park, store, aquarium, or mall and headed back home. And sometimes I visit my grandma and aunt on the farm. But on the days that I don't, between the hours of three and five, it’s often just my daughter and me. I feel this crescendo of loneliness without anything else to occupy my mind. It’s bright and piercing and uncomfortable. I panic and try to do whatever I can to push the feeling down.

These are darkened cave hours. These are suicide hours. There are still swathes of time to kill before the moon explodes over the horizon and the sun swings low and disappears, but I feel the night-soaked glow of craziness.

There is no doubt that I need more female friends who are also stay-at-home mothers. If you’re reading this and happen to live in Kingfisher, Oklahoma (Pop. 5000), then shoot me an email. But what I felt between hours between three and five wasn't the loneliness I’m used to. I’d become a friend of loneliness and welcomed it even when its pang hurt my heart. I’d been a stay-at-home girlfriend long before it was an obnoxious TikTok fad. I spent years in the solitude of my skull while my husband was at work, and before that, I spent more time writing at my computer than going out with friends. I felt at peace alone, like I could wholly be myself.

So what was this feeling? And why had I labeled it ‘loneliness’?

Mothers always talked about how being a stay-at-home mom was lonely. I assumed it was because they were no longer in the office or at work, surrounded by customers and coworkers, and the bustle that kept them distracted from self-destructive thoughts. But “stay-at-home mom” doesn't mean we have actually to be in the house, and most of the stay-at-home mothers I knew had a packed schedule of play dates, outings, zoo trips, and lunches.

Still, I could see on their faces what I felt. They were lonely, too.

We all felt relief when we ran into another mother who understood that loneliness. It's like the camaraderie I'd imagine from people who had been at war. Many of us have nothing in common. We probably wouldn't be friends in any other circumstance, but we're all bound by a permanent, life-changing experience that supersedes all other aspects of our personality.

Can you blame me if I spent $40 on a red Valentine's Day edition Stanley Cup from eBay? I've tried to resist mindless fads in the past, but maybe I’ve been going about it all wrong. Mothers need some tribal signifiers, to be able to identify each other across a crowded room, to advertise our willingness to conform and compromise in the name of a common good. So this year, one of those tribal signifiers is an expensive water holder. So be it. At least it's pretty.

Once you become a mother, you cross an irrevocable and permanent divide into another phase of adulthood.

A part of you disappears, burned away in the transition, to be replaced by an avatar. 

You’re not just an individual anymore. You become an archetype. You are not just the mother of your child, you are all mothers. You are not just raising a single person into adulthood; you become the representative of all of society’s rights and wrongdoings.

To become a mother is to join hands with an unbroken chain of DNA that extends from here to eternity.

That's why ‘mother’ as a category is the target of so much wanton anger and abuse. We can no longer pretend that we're a hyper-individualized, atomized society when we see a mother at the coffee shop on her phone, who only looks up to scream at her children for swinging their legs or spinning in their chairs. Those children don't just belong to their mother. They belong to everyone. They will go out into the world carrying the mother's sins on their shoulders. All the serial killers, mass shooters, and wife beaters of the world had mothers. And so did all of the saints.

It's your responsibility to raise a good person, and even though others will judge and shame you, they can’t take any of that responsibility away from you. Not even if they wanted to. People talk about having a “village,” but all of the responsibility is on you if anything goes wrong with your child. Friends will hold your baby until she cries or fusses, and then she goes straight back to you. Dad can bring food while you're breastfeeding, but he can't do the work for you. For the first ten months of my child's life, she wanted nobody else but me.

Even when I was in the hospital giving birth, holding my husband's hand while a nurse directed me to push, I felt that loneliness. No matter how much support I had, it was ultimately up to me to bring the child into the world. I stayed in the hospital for three days afterward, and an endless array of nurses and technicians came through my hospital room, and my family flew into town to visit, but I lay with my daughter, the two of us alone, and knew that nobody would ever be able to take care of her for me. We existed inside of a burning circle of light. Everyone else existed outside the perimeter of it and could not penetrate it.

It was the first time in my life I was truly responsible for something. 

I could quit my job without notice and barely cause a ripple. Within weeks I wouldn't even be missed. I could leave my husband, but he could always find someone else. I could quit writing, but who would really care? There are millions of eager writers who’d fill the space I left behind. So, sure, why not, I’ll drink and stay up late and siphon off time with useless distractions. The world continues on above my drunken head, unrelenting in its movement, despite my childish acts of self-destruction.

But a child? Your child? They cannot be forgotten, abandoned, or failed without irrevocably changing the world. If you fail your responsibility to your child, they can die. Other people can die.

It's lonely the first time you realize you're the only one who can bear a responsibility.

It crushes some people into bitter and ugly versions of themselves. They become hateful because they resent the idea of having to carry any burden at all. You can see it in their body and their faces when they're sitting in their car at a stoplight or checking out at Walmart. They've been deformed by an invisible but very real weight.

And for other people, that responsibility transforms them. They learn to pick up the weight and become stronger. They are like gymnasts who smile even when falling upside down, their necks inches away from snapping against the floor.

Lately, I've been trying to embrace that feeling of loneliness instead of trying to run away from it. It shifts inside me, peeling away my expectations, larger than the body that contains it. It's uncomfortable and new and nobody ever prepared me for it. I spent a lifetime running away from responsibility, not embracing it.

I want to feel that loneliness. It's a reminder that I carry a weight that can either make me stronger or crush me underneath it.

It's all in the way you carry it.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Words that whip across your spine

The work

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.

-William Knowlton Zinsser

Writing is work.

It's true that what separates the professional from the amateur is the amount of work put into writing. That's not a secret, and yet it doesn't stop people from trying to find a secret.

There's an entire industry that preys on the amateur, the reluctant, the novice, the overworked, the fearful. There's a lot of money to be made by trying to convince people there is a way to escape the pain of work. Workshops and seminars and writing courses and books about how to write a bestseller and special writing programs and expensive pens and leather-bound journals and book clubs and coffee mugs that say “writer” on them. Those things can be useful, but sometimes they can set people on a treadmill of wasting time and money in pursuit of a shortcut.

There is no shortcut. To work at anything is to set your mind and body to an intention. It's to say that you are sacrificing every other potential possibility in the moment to pursue this one thing. Work is friction. Its seeking to transform something that in turn, resists the transformation.

And if you set down and put in the work to write, you often find out that you're not as good as you thought you were. People often tell me that they stopped writing because what appeared on the page never reflected their imagination.

Your imagination is an infinite landscape of possibility, a playground of dreams and bone, fused in fantasy and ancient neural pathways. Your imagination is probably the closest you'll ever get to understanding what it'd be like to be a god.

A couple of words on a page aren't going to compare.

And that's a big part of why sitting down and doing the work can be so difficult. You get to see your boundaries and limitations. You get to feel the exhaustion. You experience the frustration of words that appear limpid and unappealing when spoken aloud.

You wanted to be someone special, to write words that whip across someone's spine, but there's the evidence that you're not as special as you thought you were. Maybe your imagination is fantastic, but you've proven yourself to be a poor conduit.

You aren't a literary god, after all. You're just a heel. People might read your work and laugh that you dared to believe in yourself. You’re only human.

But this isn't a reason to despair. Because once you put in the work it gives you a pathway to improvement. It creates boundaries of understanding. Your flaws can become the light that shows you where to go, and how to become better.

You'll never get anywhere if you don't put in the work. It's easier to go to parties and tell girls with slanted eyeliner that you're a writer, that you're working on a novel, make jokes about how alcohol is your inspiration. You don't have to be humbled and beaten and bored.

Yet if you practice patience and sacrifice and sit down to work and keep showing up, maybe your dreams could be more than dreams.

Purpose comes with pain. Even professional writers try to find ways to procrastinate, to perambulate around the center of their mind and avoid the truth inside them.

Yet it's the only way to go.

The Inspiration

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

-Franz Kafka

Writing comes from inspiration.

Even before I've finished writing this sentence, I can feel its pulse on my tongue, in the tips of my fingers, a hidden fire waiting to burst out of me.

What would it be like to live your life as one long spiritual experience?

In the moments when I melt into the story and cease to exist, I can feel another entity moving through me. It's a sublime transaction with eternity. I am the grass covered floor upon which satyrs walk. I've got an angel at my throat. I forget what it's like to be afraid to die, because death isn't real. Only that moment is real.

You'd never believe that relinquishing your soul could feel that good.

I used to treat writing like a 9-5 job. I'd sit down at my computer and pound out the words whether or not I understood what I was trying to say or where I was going. I was primed on NanoWrimo, where the goal is to write a novel in a month, no matter how terrible it was. “You can edit later,” was the usual mantra.

In the years before I learned to let inspiration guide me, I wrote a lot of shitty novels. I'd pound out some garbage that wasn't even editable just so I could convince myself I was being productive.

I had to learn to step away from the computer and walk away from the problem, let life breathe through me, remind myself that I am a part of nature and writing is not just a battle with the self, but a communication with it.

I've starved myself and gone without sleep and ran for miles and waded out into cold water with all my clothes on just so I could feel the inexpressible pull of transcendence, that moment when I remember why I write in the first place.

Not because writing is a job. I've had plenty of jobs before. None of them made me want to taste blood on the tip of my tongue, to wrap myself up in the effervescence comfort of words, a protection from when demons reached out of the dark and took my wrists in their hands.

None of my other jobs make me want to dance in a place without a ground to protect me.

Oftentimes only when I allow myself to have that experience can I return to the page and see what I want to write with renewed clarity.

Writing is not work in the usual sense. You are not a factory worker or a plumber. It is not something you can grind at with your rational brain, like a math equation or an intricate puzzle. You can't approach it the same way every time and expect the same quality of output.

So many people avoid the term “artist” because it carries a weighted sensibility. In the right company it can seem stuffy and pretentious, sentimental or bourgeoisie. Maybe it means you think too highly of yourself, maybe your work isn't actually that good. So, you think, better to avoid the word and its connotations entirely, lest you be thought of as some kind of clown.

But a writer is an artist. An artist works to pull forms out of the darkness and give them shape. They give names to foreign objects. They attempt to express the inexpressible. It requires communication with a deeper part of the self that cannot be put into a rote set of instructions.

A million monkeys on a million keyboards can't reproduce the works of Shakespeare, and you'll never write something great no matter how hard you work, if you don't carry a spark of the divine within you.

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb is now available for pre-order! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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