Evilhappy

i've been thinking about why i write, well, why i share everything i write online and in a larger sense why it's poetry and not just a blog or a diary

it's not something i ever had a satisfying answer for until now because i couldn't stop to be introspective long enough and explore my motives or myself. i had too many other people's interests and agendas to serve.

basically, briefly, it's just because there's no risk to writing something no one else can see.

what's interesting about me? what's so interesting that, if i write it in a little black notebook and leave it on the floor, my private thoughts, it means anything but litter?

i could fill up notebooks, fill up trashcans of notebooks this way and still not really express myself or say anything impactful. i found satisfaction comes from poetry because of the ambiguity and the stretching. the stretching meaning, metaphors and such. i can write you a poem or a story or whathaveyou about anything, and it's not about the aesthetic, jimmy woods is, in essence about my own experience with the unfortunate realities of adult relationships in your late 20s and 30s and depression and identity crisis manifesting in a certain type of male, it's just told in a vast web of intrigue, conspiracy theory, CIA mind control, 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and a splash of 70s noir. you can explore any character going through what you go through and then apply it to their life and their own people. i don't base any of my characters on anyone i know, these people all exist in my head. they talk to each other when i'm trying to get some peace and quiet. it's very frustrating. point is, what i write, why i write, it's like sending letters to a grave, yes. a lawyer taught me to say that to combat cross examination at a trial if i said something too controversial. which is unbelievably stifling to your private self-expression and creativity to have lawyers go through your fucking online poetry and tell you what's okay and what's not okay.

it's more than just a letter i need to send to no one.

i need the risk of it being seen and interpreted and understood or i won't be able to invest in it. it's sort of a reverse voyeurism, like i'm performing privately in the hopes someone i'm unaware of and will never know about, will get it. and if they don't it's a catch 22. i can live with it, because not knowing is key to the fantasy, the whole delusion runs off this. of course i get to dress it up in a more noble way and say it's all for the one troubled kid who's going through the same thing, and that's not entirely untrue, but it'd be an outright lie to say there is no selfish gain. of course there is. i just didn't know, i never had the time to know. since i was 19 i haven't had the chance to live my own life.

* edit

also i did write a stupid notebook diary and i stuck with it and recently have lost interest that's what prompted this.

though i did use it for similar insights, only much shorter entries because it's a small handwritten thing.

*edit 2

i'll put it like this,

it's like i have a projector in my head with a yellow light on

yellow light's nice, it gets old after a while, and once you've seen enough of it, it's pretty boring

i like to put a lens in front of it, turn the brightness up and down, sometimes just turn it off or flicker it, y'know, show myself something different.

so, if that doesn't sound insane to you, then cool.

if it does, well, maybe you're half right and cool too anyway.

peace.

representatives apropos of nothing, X Boulevard meets King Jr Drive

not that it matters where they stand, but at the corner

these two debate which path to take

ambiguous to the fact they are going forward ignorant and independent

free of harm to tongue wag, what they think or say, it'll never matter

they lack the foresight to understand they're speculating on more than a few blocks

because they're not from there and can't empathize for a second, those stupid crackers.

no, i want it to go more like this:

beneath the street signs, on the corner of X Blvd and King Jr Dr

what does your insightful sociopolitical debate matter?

what meaningful data can you two ignoramuses possibly gather?

which way to go, you can't know, you don't represent these issues;

you're just two white savior crackers.

i'm going to reach out from this pond and grab narcissus by the throat

drag his pretty ass through the looking glass

and shove these mushrooms so he shrinks

grows, explodes and feels small

whiplash-

blah can't write whatever the hell i'm tryna write.

The Little Black Book of Impossible Murders

I have a fantasy. Open on this: a lanky young man lives in a run down building in San Francisco in the mid or late 80’s. The exact time isn’t important, the exact economic state of the building and locale isn’t where the fixations lies, either. I hone in on him. His life and experiences, the people he deals with and how everything affects him. Everything. He lives in squalor. The walls are brown, stained with yellow streaks like ribbons of piss peeling the plaster off the inside of the room and with a matching old smell. The ceiling is water damaged from the salty air, there are rats and roaches, I don’t know if this is accurate to the climate and ecosystem of San Francisco, but it’s important to the setting that it takes place there for other reasons. It’s loosely important. This fantasy is an outline for the second part of three stories; the first one is about two thirds of the way finished.

Why this man, why San Francisco? 1984, I just decided.

He sits up in bed. His head is shaved to keep the bugs from crawling in his hair while he sleeps, and it saves him money on soap. He hasn’t slept, so much as he has laid there. His eyes burn and feel heavy inside their sockets, like weights pulling his skull forward. How many days has it been since he managed to sleep for even an hour? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t linger on the thought, he doesn’t really care. He’s not hungry, he’s not thirsty or even really eager or agitated. He’s just going through the motions now that he’s allowed to move freely in the daytime. It’s a gauntlet on your patience to wait through the early hours and then dawn and then a few more hours to a decent time to ‘wake up’ when you’ve been wide awake all along. He gets dressed slowly, pretending like he’s been asleep. It helps, like he’s shedding the sleep he didn’t get.

The walls are thin and he can hear every neighbor through them. There are four men downstairs who sell crack, steal, drink liquor and listen to loud music. They’re in a gang. One of them lives in the building with his parents, so three more of them are there frequently. Every time they see him they try to rob him, and in his mind, it’s like a game. He has nothing to steal and thinks it’s funny that they check on him for something. A watch, a chain, cash in his wallet, a buzzer, no. Nothing. Did they have buzzers in 1984?

Anyway. They flash guns in their waistbands, circle him, bark their variety of threatening insults and dance in their intimidating way. It’s all meant to be big and scary, to him it’s a show. They aren’t going to do anything, if they do, then they won’t get anything if he ever does have something to steal. So they perform for him, and he doesn’t even have to pay. They are barking, looking for a ball to chase and their master inevitably just walks out the door and slams it on their nose. They will sit and wait for him at home until he returns.

They don’t just ask him if he has anything and take his answer for it, obviously. These are stereotypical criminals and more background characters, supplemental to his story, really only there to give us core insight about him. They beat him up a little, not too much that it might send someone over the edge, but enough to remind him they’re in charge. They turn his pockets inside out and go through anything he’s carrying, making it clear that what’s his is theirs. He goes along with it playfully. He seems to view these men, physically imposing and armed, gang affiliated individuals as harmless buddies. More accurately to the specifics of his peculiar infliction, we will find he thinks of them as puppies and in a broader scope that he thinks of all people in some form or another in an uncanny perspective as dogs. Not that they are literally canines, but that he cannot connect with them on a meaningful level and to him they are subhuman. He has no genuine empathy. If you are a child and you lose your parents and he finds you crying, to him you are a shivering Chihuahua.

This is the facet of his personality that allows for the sociopathic behavior he will be engaged in. There’s a lot that goes into creating a mindset. Building a whole original identity from nothing, this scene of this man unable to recognize a clear threat to his well-being or take seriously the risks of agitating belligerent gangsters because he cannot perceive the threat- because to him they are not even people capable of being threatening, they are just dogs who get too playful when they’re excited- is the cornerstone of a darkness I have been obsessed with bringing to life. I am exercising great restraint to contain it for what I anticipate to be years and years, possibly a decade or more, to write it and bring it vividly to life in disturbing fashion worthy of its horrific evil. I only need patience and to be rid of the first part of this trilogy, to get rid of the predecessor to make way for new ideas. I must finish Woods before I can write The Little Black Book of Impossible Murders.

Let’s take it a step back. He’s only one third of the characters in the story. It’s intended to center around three different types of violent criminals with three different codes of morality or amorality. He’s the sociopath. The other two are the corrupt cop and the hitman.

In the past I wrote a character, this has just become about me again, hasn’t it?

I wrote a character who was half-black and half-Sicilian American with albinism, in other words he passed for white in a time when America was segregated. The issue of race wasn’t explored much more deeply than that, obviously it was about his problematic family and demonizing the mafia in stark contrast to glorifying them. The mafia is, in a more or less roundabout way often portrayed heroically, despite being what they are. I am an avid lover and student of American history in my own time and history in general and I happen to know a few things about the 20th century. All of this is a setup to say I feel I missed the mark with Arthur Irons back then. His story was muddied, he was split too much between too many different worlds and not focused enough. I didn’t give any time to the struggles he faced or the feelings he had as a black man, I didn’t feel like it was my place to write about it. Race is something extremely delicate and tricky to cover, it’s among the most sensitive subject matters I can think of.

That being said, I seek to portray a brutal and indifferent world of West Coast serial murder, police corruption and organized crime. Racism, anti-black and pro-black and anti-white agendas and heavily politicized agendas come heavily into play during the setting. In the 80’s and 90’s in America, on the West Coast, just off the top of my head right now at 8 in the morning, I’ve barely just woke up, we had: OJ Simpson, Rodney King, Reaganomics, Iran-Contra, the Rodney King Riots, Biggie and Tupac both burst onto the scene and were killed, and the NWA revolutionized music and split up, Eminem started rapping (though I guess he’s not really West Coast) we did get Snoop Dogg and Death Row and I could go on about the impact of hip hop and pop culture and in another corner we got Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Iron Maiden, hair metal and thrash and so on, but- there was the Rampart Scandal, there was rising unemployment, inflation, AIDs visibly killed people who were famous and on top of the world within 20 years, starting to Mike Tyson reigned and I think he got arrested and made a comeback though that’s more in general and not localized to the West Coast. Other more general things include Bill Clinton and Monika Lewinsky, the first time the World Trade Center got attacked, John Gotti, and a whole slew of serial killers and political and police stories and scandals to draw from. It’s a dark and rich time, like any decade in America. The Cold War ended, the drug trade- crack- skyrocketed for a time and the change in laws and violations of rights and ripe opportunities for corruption that were exploited- not to mention the tension of never knowing who’s spying on you and to what end, are those evil Russians out to get us today, tomorrow, it’s very easy to romanticize.

I want to write a half-black character and bring him to life in a decent way against- not the most intense- that was the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and 70’s and the deaths of MLK and Malcolm X and Fred Hampton when the director of the FBI was in opposition to the movement and had the resources to task an entire city to surveil an individual essentially just because he was scared. John Edgar Hoover was an evil man. Anyway, I want to bring this character to life in a decent and more importantly real way. I think, with Jimmy Woods, I’ve heard that he’s not a good person. He’s the protagonist of the story, it’s his life’s story, but he’s not a good person. He’s not a hero you root for. I didn’t set out to make people fall in love with him. I wanted him to be complicated, not good all the time, not inherently bad, but human. He makes mistakes and does the wrong things when he believes he should, he can even be convinced to do things that are sinister and evil if the world of the story influences him in that direction. You all can. Everyone in real life is the same way, you could be pushed over the course of your life from who you are today into a violent drug dealer in 20 years and don’t tell me you can predict the future and that it’ll never happen. I went to sit down and watch TV with my parents one evening and by the next morning I was homeless because a fertilizer plant that I never knew was 500 yards away from my home for 12 years blew up and destroyed half the town I grew up in. Anything can happen to you and you can become any version of yourself for any reason, all you need is time to grow into it.

Recently I started writing these… sort of theses about projects, something I should have, and I hope would have, done if I had been sober or more experienced or less self-absorbed and sad years ago when I started Woods. Essentially Woods is about Circumstances. That is what his thesis states. Woods is about Circumstances. It’s not about what he does and what happens and why, it’s about how the world creates an environment where someone like him can exist, thrive and continue to act freely. The effects that has on him and everything he’s responsible for, directly, indirectly, etc… it all plays out. I’m tired. I feel a heavy responsibility to handle the issue of writing a character of mixed race appropriately. No, I’m not going to say the N word, even in a fictional story where you may have Crips talking amongst themselves. I am a white man and I don’t feel comfortable writing that. I just sanitize the dialogue even if it hurts the credibility of the representation of such characters, I don’t care if it’s ethical to do so or not. That’s my personal principle on the matter.

Okay, well it’s 8:30 and we’ve really gone off the rails with this train of thought. It was supposed to be a rough draft of a sketch of a prologue scene that I wanted to outline an outline of, sort of a work in progress that I won’t be starting for years to come. Just something to explore. Instead, it’s just a boring journal clearing noisy thoughts about projects out of my head. Yawn.

I’m going to attempt to be a little more methodical and precise here. There’s 3 characters. 3 protagonists. 3 voices. I like to break these up into 9 parts, let’s say for now 3 parts per each character. It’s difficult to set anything in concrete just yet, this is anticipated to take years before we see anything from it. Once I am done with Woods, I’m going to write Claudio, and then I may come back around to this.

It’s important for me to state that I’m not just writing a half-black character to virtue signal or in some misguided liberal or veiled conservative attempt to say something. There are no politics behind the motivation of the creation of this character and at the same time, making him (the sex of the character is subject to change) is something that opens a lot of doors. In Jimmy’s story so far, I’ve found myself exploring a lot of things that I’ve struggled with in a fictional setting. It’s not uncommon, the self-insertion of a writer into their own novel. In my case, I hope I am less the character and more a tone or sense of observation, more ambiguous than direct in any form. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, I’m afraid I’m not objective enough to see it. The point of the race of this character is that he is a continuation of a character who is introduced in Woods. He’s the son of a man, I won’t reveal anything important here, and he has some important insight simply by his position relative to Jimmy Woods. Jimmy impacted his life via his actions in the first story, setting into motion a chain of events which carries over, his ethnicity is more just set dressing that adds flavor and gives me opportunities to discuss the complex political climate of the 80’s and 90’s from a unique perspective.

I failed Arthur Irons. He was albino and I never delved into that in any interesting way at all, really. When I did it was half-hearted. I feel like if I spend some serious time on it, I can make a compelling character of a similar vein. The Gangster Detective was a sort of stupid idea. It originally was about the Irish Mob in either New York or Boston in the 80’s, I think it was going to be based off Whitey Bulger’s Mob so Boston. I hadn’t developed as far with research back then and the idea that became the Self-Made Man Saga was in its conception. Anyway, Arthur was some other person, a young man with the terrible gift of an eidetic memory and he had a streetwise old brute for a mentor who taught him how to make his way in a life of crime, supporting his large family and yada yada yada. The thing being, he’s like a detective for criminals, a fixer. The role he takes on in the organization is one of the guy you call to find people, deal with complicated situations, get sensitive information, blackmail important people, or just follow someone around and break into their hotel and whack em. It was undercooked and I left it on the shelf somewhere. There’s things I did that I liked, and things I did that I didn’t like overall in those books. I’m not proud of em, and I feel more like they aren’t what they should have been.

What I took away from it is a method for building my settings. I perfected my formula for a methodical fictional history, built a toolset of resources necessary to research and develop/outline and create these stories. I took something from the previous stories before these ones, the rotating narrators, Arthur-Feyvel-Arthur-Feyvel which was in the iteration of Jimmy Woods before Jimmy-Evan-Jimmy-Evan and I felt pretty good about it. One blends well with another except at the endings mostly. The villains were forced, it was too much like a comic book and the conflicts were over the top and unnecessarily action driven. There were obscenely stupid shootouts and mass murders that just rolled on, it didn’t play as grounded in realism as it wanted to and felt like it took itself too seriously. I know what it takes to be a good writer and I know how to talk about good writing and what makes writing good, I can identify it, but in practice I am a bad writer. A Self-Made Man was bad writing. It had its moments, but it was bad.

I sought to remedy a lot of the problems, slow everything down to a grinding halt and remove the ridiculous fights, and now I find this current draft of my novel suffering from a new problem. I hit a wall every so often and start giving exposition, like recapping something that the reader has likely read 10 or 20 pages ago. For me it may be that those were 10 or 20 weeks ago, which is why I do this, and I know it will be fixed in editing. I’ve been considering leaving it in and releasing it when it’s done as an unabridged draft or something, just to see if I can meet the self-imposed deadline of November 2024. I have my doubts, presently. I think I will be done, but I don’t know.

The third character of the Little Black Book of Impossible Murders is the most developed plotline. He’s- well I’ll be coy. His story is what’s interesting about him. He owes a great debt to a fictional mobster on the East Coast, and that sends him to the West Coast. The namesake of the book and the premise comes from him having to commit 10 murders valued at 10 grand a piece to pay back what he owes or- well or else.

I knew who he had to be and what the story for him was when I found myself playing the scene over and over in my head.

He’s in a pressure cooker of an argument. He can’t afford his bills, the water’s shut off, the electricity cut out, he’s living paycheck to paycheck on welfare, he’s being evicted from his place and he’s in debt. He’s pawning things, sleeping on the stoop of the building he just got kicked out of, the immense stress of financial hardship has taken a visible toll on him. We see him on a night when he’s pushed over the edge by it coming from every angle, he owes everyone something that he doesn’t have. He has nothing to give anyone and they won’t leave him be. People either hate him, are disgusted by him for his lowly status, they view him as an inconvenience or an unfortunate casualty of an economic system which they want to speak on- but he gets no relief from talk. In this argument he is pushed over the edge, I haven’t settled exactly on what the inciting incident is, maybe he steals something to prove to a girlfriend that he can provide and he’s a big man, or whatever. Maybe he kills someone. It doesn’t matter. He gets on the wrong side of someone too powerful and is put in a nightmare scenario. I won’t go into details because I’m not going to outline it and decide what to write or give it away publicly if I do right now. The idea is still vague and very little is actually set in stone.

These 3 characters all have the same thing in common. The thesis of this story. Chances. If Woods was about Circumstances- The Little Black Book of Impossible Murders is about Chances. The chance to do the right thing, be redeemed for wreaking misery and havoc on others. Unjustly being granted endless second chances for no apparent reason other than random chaos and the chance to persevere, endure and survive despite no support and monumental unfair odds stacked against you. The self-insert of Woods is much about the absurd nature of dissonance and losing your identity as you navigate getting older and you see your friends change, your relationships are redefined and they end abruptly. It’s about addiction, hypocrisy, a system that is defined as being one way and taught and preached and drilled into your skull in church and school and government as that, but nothing like that at all. It is about history being sanitized and censored and controlled for the comfort of the people who are alive today, not the accuracy of representing the lessons of the past. How to fail your family, your nation, your career, your own dignity and your principles. It is about how to betray while believing yourself to be honorable and unshakable in your loyalty- heart, mind and soul. How to self-deceive on a level so thorough that you are not even aware who you are anymore or what you want or why- why you are the way you are, or why you want what you want in the first place. It’s about the Circumstances that allow for mind control. Depression. Addiction. Anxiety. Trauma. Spite. Corruption. Lust. Amorality. Avarice. Apathy. Among other things, these are the qualities of the cast of Woods.

Claudio is about Consequences. Enabling and unchecked power being dealt through an unbalanced and unfiltered rule. Magick, in stories usually has a law of conservation attached. If there’s a Wizard, he’s not just able to do God-mode things. I’m calling the story Claudio because I’m not married to the name, Why Do Wizards Wear Pointy Hats? Just yet. I also wasn’t so attached to some other things that I came up with when I was on more drugs, the meta-narration of cosmic gods is too silly. I decided to abandon it. I have a better idea about the whole multiverse thing I’ve been doing with the Megalopolis Tales. All in all, I think the canon for those are very muddy as I wrote a lot of them in periods of intense insomnia and intoxication. I’ll salvage it. Anyway, Claudio is a vehicle to tell a story about how when you’re on drugs and you party all the time and every time you go out you risk your life getting trashed- your friends don’t care about your life. They’re right there with you, holding the bottom of the bottle, helping you pick out strip clubs, hooking you up with drug dealers and roll your shit. They love you but not enough to meet at your place so you can sleep in your own bed, and they’re not gonna drive you home. Claudio is a Wizard who serves a tyrannical king. Geruss Tomb, a recycled name. Geruss is a barbarian who would have just landed on the coast he landed on and likely raided until he died some years later were it not for Claudio. Claudio grants him unnatural long life, elevates him to a seat of power and helps raise his empire until he is the right hand. All Claudio wants in return for making sure Geruss stays in power no matter what happens is to be left alone in his spire to read, and he does some evil things for that that I’ll get into. I’ve already started the outline for it, so I’m not going to give more away, it’s more interesting than I’ve put any effort to make it sound here. It’s a whole fantasy thing, not just a parallel. Alright, I’m tired. Uh, Rhonda Penn. There so I don’t forget.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I have a social conscience. I'm not controlled by politics or any agenda. My method to story telling is simple. I don't use any people I know as inspirations for anything. I talk about things I've felt, reapply those feelings to characters in such a way that they come about organically. Jimmy has haunted me for over half my life this way, he was a subconscious creation, he's an outlet. He's the misunderstood mentally ill loner, despite his best intentions you, the reader, cannot love him. By design he cannot be loved. Woods wants people but never has any. He wants to fit in, but either by his own standards or by (note the theme) Circumstances outside of his control, he can't. This is the point. The novel is about many things. I've said all of them concretely, differently, each time as if it's only about that thing. Freewill. Circumstances. Adult relationships. Mental illness. A vast conspiracy. It's very much what you take from it.

In the same way I'm not writing a half black character to attempt to scale the wall of diversity, I'm writing him because his mother was black and his father was white. He just exists. He could go on to be someone else in his next life, but only after he lives this one first, and if I am successful, he won't get to have another life. I hope my characters don't have more life than I give them once. I don't want more Woods.

tangled gold necklace

jump- out of the calm

grease pops in a pan and bites the palm

little devils that appear out of midair

as if the universe itself declared you belong to it now

finish later.

tangled gold necklace

jump- out of the calm

grease pops in a pan and bites the palm

little devils that appear out of midair

as if circumstances themselves declared you're theirs now

what has been begun that cannot be undone?

i will teach you what my father taught me,

the difference between a bellow, a shriek and a scream

how a dog lays at your doorstep to beg for forgiveness

with blood falling fresh from the indents of its teeth

how to lay face down in a pillow and smother your own dream

and how to survive a childhood in a trauma dump wasteland- i

internalized decades of therapy in a comatose state

to wake up and cling close to sufferer's hate

with genuine love in my heart for their future,

and systematic self-deception; sociopathic systemic oppression

repressing my own interests and protection,

i can lay like a dead fish beneath the fist still damp with my sweat

and still warm from the heat of my scalp, burning in its clutches

and after years of this, i can speak the magic words that open intentions

forgiveness, that brain chemical from which delusion rushes.

need to change the title and i think it's good to go.