relevancy is the sauce of youth

i wish i was different, i wish i could just go upstairs and watch american idol or whatever the fuck similar show is on upstairs that they are watching and i could sit with my mom and dad and sister laughing about everything and getting frustrated with judges and then i wish that i could talk to my sister about the jodi picault books she reads or my mother about the pinterest recipes or my dad about i don’t know something. but im down here in the cold little basement, listening to them laughing and eating popcorn and being happy and they think that im just sleeping or sick or they know im lying and im down here being isolated, when i should be home and here and familial because it is rare, so rare now to be with my family like this, but we just assume natural roles and i am the little fucking outcast kid who was weird and they dont like me because i criticize everything they are interested in because they are only ONLY ever interested in things that are super, super popular- LIKE american idol, two and a half men, NCIS, the girl with the dragon tattoo, the hunger games. and ive tried and ive sat with them through shit after popular shit and they have never tried with me, never looked or probed or tried to extend themselves into a world beyond the one they share with a shallow millions. AHHHHHHH im so alone and i think that it might be fun to kill myself and then i think that’d be silly and then maybe i don’t because they would keep watching and reading and listening to shit and i would just be dead which is probably what they secretly wish because they call me less than my sister, and they talk to me less and they give me less at christmas and really, really what they know and what i know is that i am not one of them and i am alone and i am supposed to feel like this at every family gathering

me: yeah, i wrote a book.

99% of people i tell: really what’s it about?

me: uh, like, it’s about this guy and girl and they have like, a complicated relationship, uh, it’s sort of about like- their interactions with the world, i don’t know, it’s hard to explain. it’s like, it’s about love but maybe more about perversion and lust as being greater than love…fuck, just..ignore me. 

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novel was written over a period of 8 months and then spent 4-6 months on ‘deep-editing’, written mostly in coffee shops around eastern canada (quebec, new brunswick, nova scotia) a particularly key section was written near the laurentians after a period of intense depression, introspection and rye. 

novel balances 3 narratives in 3 tenses: an obsessive bulimic on the verge of a drug relapse, a recent college grad with seminal perversions, a ‘sexless, blind, nameless cripple’ with a convenient lack of memory. 

bulimic is first person present, college grad is 3rd person omniscient, sexless thing is 1st person past

lili/frank/rapunzel

book comes in at around 45,000 words

key terms- drugs, sex, joylessness, vomit, bulimia, washing machine, adderall, dahl, lazuli, pills, action figures, piles, imaginary people, condensation, playgrounds, beer, cavity, anhedonia, cheating, cocker spaniel, the coast, cat food, vegetarian food, dust, itadakimitsu, melted barbies, carpet, 1-2-3, almost

book explores the relationship between frank and lili, their subjective thoughts/actions, the way they are in a relationship that nourishes both their sanity and universal isolation. about how i felt when i finished university and it is about the importance of keeping secrets from yourself in order to cope or comply with the world. 

while writing- read a lot of blake butler, osho, tao te ching, dennis cooper, robertson davies. listened to julian lynch nearly every day, watched mad men, synecdoche new york, kenny vs. spenny, ate and drank, visited html giant, DC blog, pop serial, faceook, mariel clayton. stared obsessively at mariel clayton art, exercised obsessively, camped, swam, biked, hiked, drove, yoga’d, consumed boxes and boxes of honey nut cheerios, smoked, cried and self-loathed. 

this is the book.