As a student, writing is about expression. As a professional, writing is about control. But as a newly liberated craftsman, recently unschooled and sporadically jobbed, writing is about power. And at that stage little is more important than exerting that power. Where exactly that confidence originates varies from person to person. For me it came from the feeling of being out from under the scrutiny of extremely un-writerly adult supervision once and for all. I could run amok; I could despoil the world as I saw fit; despoil it, that is, through the sorcery of language. Such is how I can explain, a decade and a half later, the feeling of writing the essays that made up Biopsy. Each sentence was a power chord, angular and gnarly though they were, often reaching a Carlylean cadence despite being some years away from actually reading him. It is also why they are, upon reading them a decade and a half later, fucking exhausting.
Youth craves excess in all things; or, failing that, whatever is close at hand. For me, no paragraph was girthy enough, with some taking up an entire page column. A sentence was not fit for a period until it was overstuffed with adjectives and segmented by clauses within clauses. Content was whatever came to mind, no matter how mordantly, silly, or unintelligibly they ended up on the page. If you hadn’t known better—and indeed a pretty wide swath of the population did not—you’d think the zine was produced in a fit of derangement. It wasn’t quite the calling card I thought it would be. I realize now that reintroduce these essays in their fullest orchid-like bloom would be a crime against literary decency, and are best served in Sapphic fragments. That is what you will find below, as representative of my much-abused early promise as they are of my mostly conquered faults: my mangled, but by no means less potent or distinct, prose orchids.
Issue one (winter 2008)
One may ask, “But I thought the right-wing agenda was based on conformity and therefore mainstream?” And leftism isn’t? I’m not denying that conservatives have an all-encompassing agenda to influence the American way, what do you think the ‘80s were? Political agendas in all forms aren’t really political agendas once they reach any sort of sweeping influence in major policy. Ideals have no place in rule or law. Government is too clinical and power is too personal. Any leader who identifies him/herself with a set ideal … are in fact misleading the public. Since the major fault of democracy is to treat millions of individuals with millions of subjective truths as one, these officials cherry-pick issues to maintain influence regardless of whether they complement or oppose each other. There’s nothing written that conservatives have to bend over backwards for their leaders. Given the gross debt, wasteful decision-making, and actual corruption that all serve as fat, rotting albatrosses for the Republican Party, it’s no surprise that some conservatives are nauseated by major politicians’ association with the term. —“Right Makes Might”
Issue two (fall 2008)
The glut of exhibitionism is unique in that it not only ruins the delightful pathology of voyeurs of all stripes, but it’s simply a strain on decent society altogether. Do voyeurs do the same? … Voyeurs do what they do for reasons too extensive to list, but the voyeur wants nothing more than to be on the margin of society, to be invisible, a fly on the wall, or to enact a solipsistic fantasy of some sort in which he, in watching people, is some sort of alien figure above those he watches. … By contrast, the exhibitionist is a scoundrel. They feed on attention, air their privacy in full view. Some people have had the dubious but nonetheless sharp sense to package their lives and pathology in ways in which they can profit by them. A new fold of society supposedly based on openness has now fallen into the compulsion of oversharing. To add more shame to that, the oversharing is not offensive, but tedious. —“Private Perverts”
It’s important to know that, when being a murder victim, there is just as much work needed from you as there is from the killer. You’ll have to make it worth his/her while. This is the key to making the best of an otherwise not-so-desirable situation that became unavoidable very quickly. Know the killer’s needs. Does he want your to suffer? Then be sure to play up the suffering. Squirm and scream like one of Harry Harlow’s caged monkeys. Do you know the fellow and are in the way of a specific agenda? Just let him do everything and you’ll be dead in no time. … As it goes with love-based relationships, so it goes with hate-based relationships: there’s always need to have someone to take it lying down when someone gives it on top. Or on the side. Or reaching around. Or even in midair. —“Murder is What You Make of It”
Issue three (fall 2010)
To write a sentence is a feat of no lasting significance, until we evolve to the point that we can project images from our minds onto any surface it is required of all people who wish not to remain silent to use words. Words in themselves are as effective as a single pin when used to puncture an elephant's heart. Words are made more effective when one is exacerbated by them. Though one knows writing is a debtor's gamble, so is everything else that involves reaching out to others. The best writers are the worst communicators, crossing off resort after resort until one is left with two final resorts of writing or arson. While good writers bide their time until the taboo of the setting of fires on the property of others is lifted, they replicate the sublimity of the flame in the sentence. —“The Greatest Words for Worthless People”
The variations proposed here may imply the need for a revolution of considerable magnitude. I don't see it that way. Whatever revolution one thinks will have to happen has happened several times over, each pounding and frothing to shore, wave after wave, each generation having less control than the previous ones in what they’ve inherited. These realizations of the new logic—or whatever you want to call it—will no doubt usher in times of darkness in America not seen since the Reconstruction, but there is no need to fret on account of that. Humans take pride in being able to possess pretty much anything and this is a darkness of their own making, it's theirs for however long they can tolerate or until nature itself puts a stop to it. —“Moonwalking Towards Gomorrah”
Being interesting, however, is not simply the padding of one's biography; after one masters the art of exaggerating personal details, it is only proper that all else should follow in line. When not discussing impersonal topics like sports or politics, a conversation can veer off into a trading off of episodic anecdotes and narratives of everyday life with fluidic ease and the most agile liar must be prepared to wax exotically on even the dullest trifles life throws at him at any given moment. Examples are boundless; styles are just as plentiful. A good liar channels his shadow personality, often created through hopes of coolness previously thought to be delusions. This fantasy persona is like one's average, public persona but stranger, perhaps with a mild mental disorder that makes one say things out loud that one should, out of courtesy, be thinking instead …. From there one should read any and all published pieces or hear any and all spoken word records in order to further hone this now very much overt persona. —“How to Exist”
Simple sophistry will hardly do when making the transition from man to toilet. As with any massive undertaking or paradigm shift, there is required in those who endure no modest amount of psychological strain nor a lack of commitment. One must come to a juncture in one's life in which the aspirations driving one to move and shake from the moment of birth have dissipated to God knows where, and that one is hard pressed to even fake the appearance of concern as to where they went. We are talking of a transition that requires one to see, feel, and experience human contact in ways only previously foreseeable in hidden videotapes, only in this case the sheer numbness that overcomes those who perform such acts is not veiled behind blind emotion, but in the open and very much unambiguous. —“Waste-Eating for Fun and Profit”
Issue four (winter 2013)
I was brought into this world and, at least in part, raised at the hands and by the intuition of a mother. I know this to be a near-certainty. I remember little of my childhood but what I can recall is that in any given situation there was likely a mother present—if not my own then certainly someone else’s. I recall encountering mothers in many capacities actually. Though they may not have been doing any concrete parenting at the time I was interacting with them, there are always traces of motherly residue on their persons, left unclean from the morning and waiting to be layered over by more residue in the evening. The faint glow is to the mother what the mere secretion is to the father, the son, the daughter, and the lover. They are machines of passion and grace, and wisdom so subtle it jolts us even in the follies of our dreams. No matter how repugnant we become, my generation and even those before it will never forget our fortune of being born in an era of the glowing mother, and we will remember it fondly. And it is best that we should, as soon enough experience and fortune will deplete, leaving memory to comfort us when the mother who glows is eclipsed by the mother who seethes. —“And the Brides Skip Darkly Forward”
The criminal himself naturally benefits little from this form of execution, but I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t prefer this form over any other. It’s at least far more constitutional. Public hangings are more in keeping with the Eighth Amendment as it is neither as cruel as the gas chamber nor as unusual as the electric chair. Rather than die in the seclusion of an execution chamber the guilty will die in the open air with little preparation and procedure and just as little suffering. Though it’s not technically freedom it might feel like freedom, being able to spend one’s last moments of confinement, let alone life, being able to breathe and to see the sky (assuming he is not masked). It’s almost peaceful, so peaceful in fact that there might be some people willing to give anything to feel that freedom themselves. They might even kill somebody. —“A Gallows in Every Prison, a Noose in Every Tree”
The doctrine of the Atomic Faith will disregard strategic terms and ideas such as “deterrence” or “mutually assured destruction.” A savior cannot be drawn by policy, nor would anyone believe that something so good would be an omen for the end of all things. There is, in fact, no end times in bomb worship. The bomb restores order and reverses descent. With its flash, its heat and its hellish storm cloud the bomb is the corrective to which all citizens of the world adhere. Americans will be eager to send evangelical missions across the globe in hopes of gaining converts. People outside of America who worship the bomb are people who at the same time kowtow to America’s primacy in the world order which can never be undone. Many are threatened by the staggering amount of countries that have gone nuclear since the Cold War, or are intent on doing so. A person of true faith would not balk at such a thing. Rather he or she would accept it as a tribute to the original bomb and to America’s part in creating it. —“The Plutonium Calf”