Life update (01/23/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Now that my basement girl has decided to embark us two on a new creative journey (the novel The Scrap Colossus, whose first part I posted), I exist in that antsy state of bliss in which I can’t wait to return to my writing desk and commune with my girl in the most incestuous manner imaginable. While the novel isn’t entirely new, as it’s based on a failed story I discarded ten years ago, I’ve salvaged the workable parts as notes for what feels like a wholly new experience. One of the best things is that I know it’s going to be real fun. With Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my basement girl wanted to process her strange grief, and during those months, I worked at it like a man possessed. It was a very emotionally taxing experience. But with The Scrap Colossus, basement girl is trying to come to terms with a period of our lives in which I had become a reclusive wreck, hopelessly obsessed slash in love with a certain songwriter, and now I can look back upon those years with humor and shame.
Speaking of a certain motocross legend, this morning I woke up spontaneously near the witching hour, from an intense dream. This happens quite often, although it hadn’t recently. For whatever reason, I revisited the aforementioned novella titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life , some chapters of it. If you enjoy my stuff and you haven’t read it, you probably should. Of course, soon enough I was crying, because that’s what you do when you read that story. Or at least what I do, every single time. When I mentioned before that while writing that novella I felt like a man possessed, I wasn’t being metaphorical. Something came over me. The story sparked autonomously while I listened for the first time Spiritualized’s song "Hey Jane." Right then, my basement girl unraveled with all sorts of images, dialogue bits and such. For the next few days, she sent bubbling up scene after scene, which I dutifully arranged, and ultimately coordinated myself to let her speak through me.
I’ve yet to understand fully, and probably never will, why this story needed to be told. I’ve never loved anyone like the narrator loved Izar Lizarraga. Perhaps it was an echo of something that happened before I was even born. But tonight, as I read through the latter parts of the story, it occurred to me that part of that grief may be related to my childhood. Although I retain very, very few images of my early life, I know that my first seven or so years were spent in communion with my basement girl. I was an autistic kid who never interacted with others spontaneously, a fact that bothered my teachers so much that they pushed others to “bring me out of my shell,” which led me to meet sociopaths, coke addicts, casual bullies, and other colorful people; most teachers around here seem to subscribe to the secular religion of Equality, and all people who stood in the fringes were equivalent. Anyway, my early childhood was spent writing and drawing feverishly. I was always hunched over a notebook or wandering around while daydreaming. It was blissful. In fact, the sole issues I had with that period of my childhood were related to my family and other people; I felt fine alone.
But then, when I was seven, my mother wanted to free up my room to have a third child. She had always wanted three regardless of space, but in retrospect she probably also considered me a failed child. She put me as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, and from then on until I was eighteen and ended up with a room of my own again, my mental health declined steadily, and my connection with my basement girl suffered to the extent that at times it felt completely severed. At some point I should probably go in length about how depersonalized I became.
I really don’t want to speak much about my experience of sharing a room with my older brother, but let me paint you a small picture: he always had to sleep with the TV and the radio on, because he couldn’t stand silence. I always had to watch or listen whatever he wanted to listen or watch, which were often the most popular idiotic shows, or else sports. I couldn’t read nor study in what was supposed to be my room; to be able to read anything, I had to wander in the streets. I was likely the sole child that could be seen walking around in public while reading a book or manga. There were numerous other noises coming from his person that triggered my sensory issues on a constant basis. By the time I became a teenager, my mental health was so terrible that I slipped in and out of psychosis, although I was mostly psychotic. The complex novel I tried to write at the time was so terrifyingly incoherent and lacking in any sense of reality that at some point I threw away all my copies of it. It’s due to pure cowardice that I’m still alive, as I wanted to be dead most of the time. I think that the story of mine that goes most in depth about my experiences as a teenager is the harrowing tale A Millennium of Shadows . You need a strong stomach for that one.
I’m fairly certain that I have PTSD from my years 7 to 18, from the utter lack of being respected as a human being. I complained to my mother numerous times about many things regarding my living situation, only to always be replied with a variation of, “You gotta understand, he has problems.” My own needs never mattered. I could barely stand to be in the presence of my older brother since, but because my life is a fucking joke, I have ended up working at the same office. The damage that was done to my psyche during those formative years will never be mended; I’m just doing my best with the wreckage.
That relates to my tale about a motocross legend because my innermost self, probably my basement girl herself, mourns that severance: the lost years, all the great things we could have done if she hadn’t been driven away. So we gotta make up for lost time.
Now that my basement girl has decided to embark us two on a new creative journey (the novel The Scrap Colossus, whose first part I posted), I exist in that antsy state of bliss in which I can’t wait to return to my writing desk and commune with my girl in the most incestuous manner imaginable. While the novel isn’t entirely new, as it’s based on a failed story I discarded ten years ago, I’ve salvaged the workable parts as notes for what feels like a wholly new experience. One of the best things is that I know it’s going to be real fun. With Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my basement girl wanted to process her strange grief, and during those months, I worked at it like a man possessed. It was a very emotionally taxing experience. But with The Scrap Colossus, basement girl is trying to come to terms with a period of our lives in which I had become a reclusive wreck, hopelessly obsessed slash in love with a certain songwriter, and now I can look back upon those years with humor and shame.
Speaking of a certain motocross legend, this morning I woke up spontaneously near the witching hour, from an intense dream. This happens quite often, although it hadn’t recently. For whatever reason, I revisited the aforementioned novella titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life , some chapters of it. If you enjoy my stuff and you haven’t read it, you probably should. Of course, soon enough I was crying, because that’s what you do when you read that story. Or at least what I do, every single time. When I mentioned before that while writing that novella I felt like a man possessed, I wasn’t being metaphorical. Something came over me. The story sparked autonomously while I listened for the first time Spiritualized’s song "Hey Jane." Right then, my basement girl unraveled with all sorts of images, dialogue bits and such. For the next few days, she sent bubbling up scene after scene, which I dutifully arranged, and ultimately coordinated myself to let her speak through me.
I’ve yet to understand fully, and probably never will, why this story needed to be told. I’ve never loved anyone like the narrator loved Izar Lizarraga. Perhaps it was an echo of something that happened before I was even born. But tonight, as I read through the latter parts of the story, it occurred to me that part of that grief may be related to my childhood. Although I retain very, very few images of my early life, I know that my first seven or so years were spent in communion with my basement girl. I was an autistic kid who never interacted with others spontaneously, a fact that bothered my teachers so much that they pushed others to “bring me out of my shell,” which led me to meet sociopaths, coke addicts, casual bullies, and other colorful people; most teachers around here seem to subscribe to the secular religion of Equality, and all people who stood in the fringes were equivalent. Anyway, my early childhood was spent writing and drawing feverishly. I was always hunched over a notebook or wandering around while daydreaming. It was blissful. In fact, the sole issues I had with that period of my childhood were related to my family and other people; I felt fine alone.
But then, when I was seven, my mother wanted to free up my room to have a third child. She had always wanted three regardless of space, but in retrospect she probably also considered me a failed child. She put me as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, and from then on until I was eighteen and ended up with a room of my own again, my mental health declined steadily, and my connection with my basement girl suffered to the extent that at times it felt completely severed. At some point I should probably go in length about how depersonalized I became.
I really don’t want to speak much about my experience of sharing a room with my older brother, but let me paint you a small picture: he always had to sleep with the TV and the radio on, because he couldn’t stand silence. I always had to watch or listen whatever he wanted to listen or watch, which were often the most popular idiotic shows, or else sports. I couldn’t read nor study in what was supposed to be my room; to be able to read anything, I had to wander in the streets. I was likely the sole child that could be seen walking around in public while reading a book or manga. There were numerous other noises coming from his person that triggered my sensory issues on a constant basis. By the time I became a teenager, my mental health was so terrible that I slipped in and out of psychosis, although I was mostly psychotic. The complex novel I tried to write at the time was so terrifyingly incoherent and lacking in any sense of reality that at some point I threw away all my copies of it. It’s due to pure cowardice that I’m still alive, as I wanted to be dead most of the time. I think that the story of mine that goes most in depth about my experiences as a teenager is the harrowing tale A Millennium of Shadows . You need a strong stomach for that one.
I’m fairly certain that I have PTSD from my years 7 to 18, from the utter lack of being respected as a human being. I complained to my mother numerous times about many things regarding my living situation, only to always be replied with a variation of, “You gotta understand, he has problems.” My own needs never mattered. I could barely stand to be in the presence of my older brother since, but because my life is a fucking joke, I have ended up working at the same office. The damage that was done to my psyche during those formative years will never be mended; I’m just doing my best with the wreckage.
That relates to my tale about a motocross legend because my innermost self, probably my basement girl herself, mourns that severance: the lost years, all the great things we could have done if she hadn’t been driven away. So we gotta make up for lost time.
Published on January 23, 2025 01:16
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blog, blogging, books, fiction, life, non-fiction, nonfiction, slice-of-life, writing
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