the q&a page

q: where did you get the inspiration for "bonnie's" character? what's the craziest thing you've ever done? are you writing any other books anytime soon? do you have a secret racist past we need to know about?

a: "bonnie" was inspired by a real-life girl i knew who actually did stab her boyfriend. truly a match made in hell. she looked like marilyn manson in the face but she was always dressed like sematary from the neck down. me and my friends would often joke that she was the "angel of death" because she took it upon herself to date all the worst guys in town just to torture them in various ways. she often told me that when she grew up she wanted to be a snuff star, and i guess mps was my way of fulfilling her wish. she was indeed a natural ginger. there was a picture of her taped to her fridge of her as a little girl with flaming auburn locks grinning while holding a gigantic rifle.

i will not say what the craziest thing i've ever done was because i saw someone get cancelled for admitting to the exact same thing. so instead i'll just say the time when i drank an entire bottle of delsym and fought nettspend on the astral plane.

yes. there are currently two major ideas floating around inside my brain. the first one: fragmented, experimental rashomon-style retelling of a rather infamous book. i won't spoil it and tell you which book it is but i'll give you a hint. it's mentioned in the "shrines to deaf gods" section. i think i'm going to call the second one enter the chickenheart: life and death of the corazón del pollo. it will also include reworkings of multiple different stories: god's light..., and potentially my other early short story vacation home, as well as a well-known creepypasta.

to be completely blunt with you, i spent a significant chunk of my adolescence on 4chan wallowing in self-hatred and while i don't recall posting anything particularly racist i know i probably posted many nasty, offensive things which people will probably dig up in the future. this is my apology in advance. i'm sure an individual even younger and more vulnerable than i was read one of my rants at some point. and i'm certain that those words are permanently tattoed across the inside of their brain the same way so many different posts from so many horrible sites are permanently tattooed across the inside of mine. i don't like thinking about these things.

q: what are all of ur socials?

a: this is probably kind of an annoying answer but i honestly don't like giving out all of my socials, especially on my tik tok page. my tik tok audience is not the same as my twitter audience which is not the same as my youtube audience which is not the same as my tumblr audience. i operate under the assumption that if my other accounts are meant to find you, they will. but if you truly want to know you can dm me.

q: why is the shaman plastick?

a: i'm assuming that the person who commented this was joking but i will answer this as if it's a serious question. "plastic shaman" is a term used within the native american community to refer to white people who pose as medicine men and sell snake oil remedies. the titular "shaman" does not represent any specific character, he's more like an egregore. he is a fake, a fraud, a scammer, a false prophet. he weaves an illusory web and he is in the business of selling dreams. the whole book is about people pretending to be something that they are not.

q: which art form makes you feel the most realized indulging in it?

a: that's a tough one. i like poetry because you can express these concepts and ideas that are nearly impossible to describe through utilizing abstract imagery. obviously i'm into all sorts of music and i was a musician operating under the moniker "finally happy" before i started writing, but i find that with music it's extremely difficult to actually create what i'm envisioning in my head, especially when you're working with other musicians who might have conflicting tastes. i honestly think my ep hatred from when i was 13 is the best thing i've ever recorded, even though a lot of people thought it was godawful. someone described it as a "jandek/silencer ripoff", which is entirely accurate. i think that i captured something really specific with it that i haven't been able to replicate ever since. i've never been good at drawing, which is why i collage together images into mutant hybrid creatures and abuse the threshold tool. i like sculpture. i'm a big fan of greer lankton. my indie fragrance brand was named after the main character from perfume: the story of a murderer. i think a great perfumer can trap a memory inside a bottle.

q: if there was a cure for autism would you take it?

a: good question. being autistic is quite possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and i've had some pretty fucked up experiences. every terrible thing i have ever gone through was worsened or indirectly caused by my autism in some way. it causes me more pain and suffering on a day-to-day basis than anything else, undeniably. i will not sugarcoat the reality of my experience to sound more "uplifting" or pc. but i also have no idea what my life would've looked like if i was not autistic. maybe i just would've gone through something different, just as bad or even worse, but without the ability to express what i was experiencing through art or music or writing. i never would've started my youtube channel, for one thing. i may feel alone often but hundreds of people across the world have told me that my videos helped them and i'm proud of that. i think we all have our own cross to bear, and we each pop out of the womb with a unique crucifix tailored just for us. i believe that at some point in a past life i chose the karmic lessons and struggles i would have to go through in the next.

q: what's something you've wanted to dip your toes in/create but haven't yet?

a: i want to make a nu metal album. or a sludge metal album. or maybe even an easy listening/yacht rock album. but like a depressive suicidal yacht rock (DSYR) album in the style of lewis baloue.

q: if you could pick 5 wishes, obv no wishing for more wishes, what would they be? also not exactly a question, but i'd be curious to know more about the real vincent.

a: i think more than anything i wish i was a cyborg. in one of my earliest stories, vacation home, i expressed a desire to be like "mr/mrs potato head", with various interchangeable parts and pieces. i want my body and mind to be kind of like a soundboard, with all of these dials and switches so i could adjust various aspects of my being to my liking or turn them off completely - personality traits, certain memories and the effects these experiences had on me, my physical appearance, etc. obviously i wish i could go back in time, too. who doesn't.

i'm hesitant to reveal too much info about the real vincent tursyn because i know he does check my website from time to time and i have corresponded with him on a number of occasions since we broke up. so i will not elaborate on which parts of "the truth about vincent tursyn" are, in fact, the truth about vincent tursyn. but he was someone who i had a very tumultuous relationship with at one point. whenever i've written about him (and he has appeared in one of my short stories before - such a small love, which was an in-depth look at the character who inspired elijah), i always feel compelled to mention his huge dark eyes, which shifted colors in the sun. you could really "get lost in them" - not in the sense of swimming in the vast ocean but in the sense of falling into a black hole. when i met him he looked like a young aviv geffen with mascara practically dripping down his face. he drove me absolute insane for a while, in every sense of the term. he was a small man full of large secrets. maybe he's changed now. there's no way of really knowing.

obviously, his family didn't actually come from kazakhstan. one underlying theme throughout mps that i haven't seen anyone pick up on yet is the complexities of jewish-american identity (especially in the modern age) and the collective neurotic/psychotic state that all jews seem to operate under at all times. it's like the world's most fucked up woody allen film. it's something i plan to expand on further and more explicitly in enter the chickenheart.

i've really tasted the rainbow. i think i've dated (or at the very least had a weird, sexually charged relationship of some sort with) a person of every gender identity and/or sexual orientation. gay guys, straight guys, straight girls, bisexuals of both genders, lesbians. i haven't written a lot about the women that i've dated throughout my life (at least not stories i've published), although they were all interesting figures in their own right. i think it's because women love turning their ex-boyfriends into their own personal lolcows. i'm sure that all of my ex-girlfriends are sitting around in a circle right now passing a joint and a copy of mps around and cackling. and honestly if i were them i would too.

q: what is your birth time, date and year in utc?

a: i've attached my western placidus chart here. hid the birth data because i have an irrational fear that someone on the internet will use it to put a spell on me. i'm an 8th house cancer sun, 1st house sag moon and pluto, scorpio rising. gemini venus. leo stellium with mercury in the 8th house. 12th house scorpio jupiter. very spooky stuff, if you know what you're looking at. in vedic astrology i'm a gemini. i always thought geminis were massively overhated. they're not two-faced, they're just bipolar. libras are what people think geminis are. i've always had a soft spot for geminis, even the really gemini-ish ones. azealia banks and kanye and the like. if trump wasn't trump i feel like we would get along. in another life he would've made a great drag queen. believe it or not, he's actually a distant relative of mine according to 23andme. or at least someone who shares the exact same name as him is. in a weird way it makes sense. we're both antichrist-type figures.

q: why/how do you have such a strong connection with spirituality?

a: honestly, i discovered wicca when i was like 8 because i had just read the harry potter series. it kind of just spiralled from there. i got bored of wicca and decided it was hippie-dippie bullshit. ended up cycling through almost every religion or spiritual path to ever exist. at various points in my life i considered myself a christian (of the gnostic variety as well as the more traditional variety), a satan worshipper, a zen buddhist, a thelemite, a kemeticist, the list goes on. i haven't been a muslim. yet. i have a friend who considers herself to be a sufi muslim and it's fascinating. she said she converted because she was at a punk show once and she saw a vision of jannah within the moshpit.

i used to go to this pagan convention called pantheacon every year until it shut down. it fucking rocked. every room in the hotel was occupied by a different group of pagans. there was this one group who worshipped dionysus and they would get wasted and have these crazy orgies every night. you could hear them from down the hall. i was like 13 and i wandered inside their room. they had this huge bowl of party favors (dungeons and dragons-inspired bpal scents) and i stole like half of them. i joined the radical faeries. the whole thing eventually got shut down because of multiple controversies. there was a michfest-esque issue where a group of dianic wiccans were insisting that they would only let "womyn-born-womyn" into their coven. the native american speaker they brought in to talk about shamanism harbored homophobic beliefs and people were conflicted about it. some thought it was racist to criticize him and other thought he should be kicked out for the homophobia stuff. it was a real life portlandia episode and i miss it every day.

q: have you ever read thomas ligotti?

a: i have actually not, but the conspiracy against the human race has been on my goodreads wishlist for quite a while. my dad kept telling me to read it. he said it was "right up my alley."

q: where did your video on antizionism vs antisemitism on youtube go?

a: i deleted it because i didn't want being jewish to be a big part of my youtube persona. i already suffer from enough maladies and forms of neurosis that people regularly torment me for. i'm also probably not well-educated enough to talk about the whole issue as much as i do.

q: what are your thoughts on camille paglia? you really remind me of her. to be clear: by this i mean you're both sad pagan lesbian reppers who wish they were gay men. you're obviously not a chauvinist like her.

a: well. don't know how to feel about this one. i think she's funny and there are some topics i agree with her on but i find it difficult to take her seriously as a person or as a writer. i have a real disdain for most of her fanbase. nasty wannarexic "dissident right" hipsters from dimes square. the end of the adam algiz chapter in mps lampoons anna and dasha from red scare. i'll admit i've belly laughed at a few howling mutant tweets before but these people are just insanely cynical and irony-poisoned to the point where it's repulsive even to me.

i think she has a point about some of the cancel culture stuff. a lot of these things are just not as black and white as people make them out to be. i'm a pervert for nuance.

i once heard someone say that there's a "rainbow of rape", and while it's a grotesque turn of phrase i think it's true. there's a whole spectrum of creepiness with aziz ansari on one end and jimmy savile on the other. while you shouldn't aspire to be any of these guys, all these situations should be treated as what they are - individual cases. this applies to everything else people get cancelled for as well. racism, homo/transphobia, sexism (although i haven't seen many people get cancelled for making sexist remarks - after all, it is the oldest form of discrimination and it is so deeply embedded in our society that we often can't even recognize it when it's right in front of us). there's saying a slur on twitter in 2012 and then there's burning a cross on your neighbor's front lawn.

there have been times where people were indeed being very creepy towards me. there are times where i have accused someone of creepiness when they probably did not intend to be creepy or realize that they were being creepy. i'm sure there have been times where i myself have unintentionally come across as creepy. creepy creepy creeps. creeping around. creeping here and creeping there. creeping everywhere.

i do think she's a huge misogynist. not even sure if "internalized misogyny" is the right term. she really is a gay man trapped in a woman's body, but not the kind of gay guy who has a lot of young straight female friends. she's a strict old gay. her ideas about gender and sexuality are interesting but her fixation on historical pederasty (which is something that a lot of otherwise respectable academics share with her for some reason - foucault and germaine greer, to name a few) is unsettling and nambla-ish.

q: what are your thoughts on the idea that the majority of transgender people identify within that category because society doesn't accept nonconformity when it comes to the stringent gender binary? do you think that being trans is a product of socialization and greater conditioning or is it an innate, ontological sense that exists indepently of lived experience?

a: these are great questions - ones that i've been trying to find the answer to for years, to no avail. like with a lot of radfem talking points, i think there's some truth to the idea that there are a lot of trans people who identify that way because society does not accept feminine men and masculine women, but i also think the way that they act as if these concepts apply to everyone lacks nuance. they have a tendency to disregard cultural context. for instance, forced transition is used as a form of conversion therapy and homophobic violence in certain areas of the world (especially towards feminine men). gay men are not accepted unless they get sex reassignment surgery. but you could make an argument that it's harder to be a trans woman in america than it is to be a feminine cisgender gay man. you are more likely to be attacked, murdered, forced into prostitution by your circumstances, etc. if you don't have insurance, transitioning is very expensive. so it heavily depends.

i definitely think that there are a lot of people who think that being "bad" at performing your assigned gender role means you're supposed to be a different gender. if you are a guy who isn't a total douchebag, you feel out of place and unmasculine. if you're a woman who isn't extremely male-centered, you feel the same way. i'd never accuse someone of being a "transtrender" or anything like that to their face. but i have met a lot of people who would probably just be slightly weird cishet men and women had they not psyopped themselves into thinking that taking on a new identity would be the answer to all their problems. note that i say they psyopped themselves. for some people i think they just want to be someone else and they mistake that for being transgender. perhaps in a different era these sort of people would just be goths or punks or something. dorian corey's monologue from paris is burning is eternally relevant.

in all likelihood, i don't think it's something that can be solely attributed to either nature or nurture. to believe that people can be "born this way" (or born with any gender identity at all, regardless of whether it aligns with their assigned sex or not) is to believe that people have gendered souls. i don't believe that souls have a gender, but i do believe in past lives. there's something to be said about the way that so many different cultures throughout history have had gender non-conforming shamans of some sort. the enaree, the machi weye, the manang bali, etc. the kybalion goes into depth about the illusion of duality as it pertains to gender.

q: do you still feel like a somewhat repressed trans man? what is your favourite scent? what do you think is the most important cultural contribution someone has made on the internet (good or bad)? what book that you read in middle school impacted you the most?

a: to put it simply: yes. it's funny - i guess i'm "openly closeted." the gender dysphoria comes in waves. but when it's bad, it's bad. like really fucking hard. recently writing has dredged up a lot of old memories for me. when i look at my reflection it's hard to not reach for the scissors and just start hacking off my hair a lot of the time. i still struggle to recognize myself in the mirror. for a while i got really into radical feminism as a cope but i think that if you are person who has had gender dysphoria from a very young age (real gender dysphoria, not pseudo-gender dysphoria caused by abuse or internalized homophobia/misogyny) it doesn't really help, honestly. i saw this post today titled "real quote from my therapist's notes." it said "patient shared that she tried to kill herself by hanging a few months ago, thought that no one would ever see her as male." i've tried to explain why i decided to detransition so many times in so many different ways but that sentence really sums it up. i couldn't write something more poetic if i tried.

i'm kind of like a significantly crazier jeremy fragrance. even the story of mps is shockingly similar to how jeremy described his life - "okay, so there was the rape chapter. before that, i had the boy band gay chapter. and before that, i had just the average life. nothing special. i mean, yeah, my father beat me actually. and my brother too, my brother is 4 years older so my father beat my brother more than me." i really love the scent of petrichor, gasoline, wet stone, burning leaves, clove cigarettes, incense (especially nag champa), leather. i have a fragrance by alkemia called st louis cemetery #1, which i'm quite fond of. it's supposed to capture the smell of the famous graveyard in new orleans. they also have one called hex.1984 by whisper sisters, named after the bowie song. pluto by andromeda's curse. all of the strange south's fragrances are insanely creative. 300 years is supposed to smell like "candle wax shrouded in dust, chilled earth, and brittle black fur", and somehow it does. it makes me think of stephen king's story "the cat from hell" - speaking of things i read in middle school. a few on my wishlist - female christ, the decay of the angel (insert yukio mishima soyjak image), be very afraid (i wish this brand did a crash-inspired perfume), inexcusable evil, and obviously the entire PZB collection by nocturne alchemy.

honestly, chris chan's entire existence. there's so much to say. i don't even know where to start. bigger than jesus.

it's hard to pick just one. i lot of the time i would just go into my dad's room and pick out whatever looked the most scandalizing. if we're talking about books that really influenced my writing style, i read bukowski's women around that age. they made me read the house on mango street in class and a lot of parts in that book are permanently burned into my brain. particularly the "red clowns" chapter and the character of sally. my transvestite uncle is missing by rane arroyo, which i consider my favorite poem of all time to this day, although i also read howl around the same time. i think i discovered blood and guts in high school by kathy acker when i was around 13 or so. i just picked it up because the name was edgy, but acker became one of my favorite authors. girl, interrupted. i started house of leaves but never finished it.

as for books that influenced me and the way that i think in a more general sense: for some reason i decided that running with scissors was an instruction manual and that everything that preteen augusten burroughs did in that book was super based and cool. i really saw myself in ender from ender's game and i was shocked when i found out about orson scott card's views. timothy leary: a biography. the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian - god, i loved that book. it was my DOAWK. crowley's 777. i am j, a very edgy and gritty kind of ya novel about a young transgender man who falls in love with this ballerina who's also a cutter. i was obsessed with tonya hurley's ghostgirl series for a while, particularly the character of scarlet kensington. i was introduced to a fuckton of great music through those books. dresden dolls, suicide, the cult, the plasmatics, strawberry switchblade, new york dolls, the damned, killing joke, etc. i think i stole a mother's reckoning from somewhere and it was the first book to ever make me cry. i read way more graphic novels and comics than actual books. seductive summer by justin hall comes to mind. if i recall correctly it starts out with him jerking it in an empty movie theater and it's absolutely heartbreaking. i was never really into manga or anime but i was a huge junji ito fan. i loved a lot of goth/punk oriented comic strips and graphic novels. love and rockets, wet moon. a well-meaning family friend gave me a couple of neil gaiman comics as well as the original james o'barr graphic novel of the crow. if you've ever read the graphic novel, you'll know that's basically equivalent to the one scene in sentimental values where the kid gets a dvd of irréversible as a present. when my girlfriend of 3 weeks broke up with me i shut myself in my room and reread the part where eric draven carves a picture of the cat in the hat into his arm at least a dozen times.

q: what are your tips for ppl looking into writing?

a: read, obviously. don't just read things by people with experiences and worldviews that align with yours. write, even if it's shit. keep writing. even if no one reads it and no one likes it. live. don't spend half of your life locked away in a dark room like i did. take a train out into the city and go to the club. run away from your house and live in a tent with a homeless woman for a night and bring an apple for her. do something worthy of getting locked up in a mental hospital for. take so many drugs you get sick of taking drugs and stop taking drugs and wait for the crippling brain fog to go away so you can write a million stories about taking drugs in a sober state of mind.

"your life is your life. don't let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can't beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous. the gods wait to delight in you." one of my favorite bukowski poems.

q: have you heard of the new game metamorphosis?

a: i have not, but if i'm looking at the right thing this seems really interesting. love the artwork.

q: what are your thoughts on/experience with the true crime community (if you haven't already talked about this)? i may be wrong but i think you mentioned you had been in it as a teen and so was i. also, what is a movie you watched recently that has really stuck with you?

a: i was never the type to have a shrine to serial killers and school shooters in my room but i certainly had a morbid, unhealthy fixation on that type of stuff growing up. i was a really maladjusted kid in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons. people constantly projected this idea that i was a "ticking time bomb" onto me and i think that when people tell you that you are something (sick, broken, dangerous, unfixable, etc) enough times eventually you start to believe it too.

i'm not really angry about being bullied growing up anymore because my bullies were also kids and they didn't have any understanding of the types of things that might make a kid act the way i did. but i am angry at how the adults in my life - the people who were supposed to pick up on the signs and protect me - treated me. teachers and other authority figures treated me like a disease that needed to be quarantined lest i infect the other kids. nobody ever questioned the "why" behind my behavior. the few times i did actually make a friend, i was immediately banned from seeing them because their parents decided i was a bad influence.

as with a lot of other internet communities consisting of disturbed young people (pro-ana, looksmaxxing/incel stuff, etc) i don't think the kids in the true crime community are "evil." they are fucked up, lonely kids. people will go to insane lengths to feel understood. when you're young it's hard to understand the impact that your actions really have, or the impact of other people's actions. it's very easy to see these killers and their victims as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts instead of human beings because that's exactly what the media makes them out to be.

i think nowadays i'm more fascinated by true crime cases that have a political element to them, or where the killer is more morally grey. chris dorner, aileen wuornos, etc. out of all the mass shootings i've read about i think the red lake shooting is one of the most interesting, complex, overlooked, and profoundly depressing cases.

i just finished watching clean, shaven and it was fantastic. a very realistic character study of a schizophrenic man. sparse, minimalistic, and bleak. despite how grim it was i was honestly kind of distracted by how beautiful peter greene was in this film. very cillian murphy-esque in a way. he looks perpetually haunted, like that one tweet about how the guy has the kind of sadness in his eyes that you only see in eastern european gay porn. obsession was really good. speaking of true crime stuff, the performances in mass were all great and heartbreaking.

q: have you ever played pathological? i feel like you'd fuck with it. and disco elysium.

a: if you're going to ask me whether i've played a certain video game, the answer is generally going to be no. i probably should, though. i think they count as a perfectly valid form of art which doesn't get the respect it deserves. the only video games i can remember playing off the top of my head are the silent hill series and class of '09 (a lot of people wouldn't admit to that, but i will). a lot of the character designs in silent hill are inspired by hans bellmer, who is one of my favorite visual artists and a fascinating character in his own right. i want to write more about him in the shrines section of this site, particularly the autogynephilic element of his work. the real life "ashleigh sheran" said that mps was the "class of '09 novel." i've always wanted to play the cat lady, yume nikki (side note - i believe the musician uboa named herself after something in this game, and she sent me a lovely supportive message regarding my music when i was younger), fear and hunger (love the creative character designs, especially the francis bacon references), and the story of kamikuishiki village.

q: will you read all for the game?

a: i had to look this up because i had no idea what it was and honestly my feelings on this can be best summed up by the image below.

q: do you believe in a god?

a: maybe it's a bit cringey but i think that my beliefs about this stuff can still be summed up by the first short story i ever wrote:

if you ask any religious person why they still believe in god, knowing that innocent people suffer while the crimes of murderers and rapists go unpunished, they’ll tell you that nothing happens without a reason. i have to agree, but i don’t believe this for the same reason that they do. i think that man was created and put on this earth to struggle with god, that’s his sole purpose. but it’s a one-sided quarrel. i don’t think god actively chooses to hurt people. he just doesn’t care. he’s as useless as a sports mascot, a purely symbolic subject of idolatry, nothing more. to pray to god is to attempt to have a conversation with the automatic voice message emitted by an answering machine after whoever you’re calling doesn’t pick up the phone. nobody gets through to him.

you can’t go searching for god. he has to find you. if you only pray to him when you know you’ve fucked up, he’ll dismiss you as a spiritual beggar. in your darkest moments, you will be too distracted by your own suffering to even think of asking for his assistance, and that is when he will step in. but if you try to listen for him, the same way you would press your ear to a conch shell hoping to hear the ocean’s roar, you’ll never hear the voice of god. you’ll look up to the endless miles of blue sky and you’ll see nothing.

q: do you regret going on t? do you ever think of going on t again?

a: no, mainly because it didn't cause many permanent physical changes in the first place. i was on a lower dose. my voice is pretty deep but it's always been that way. i have complicated feelings about my voice in particular. i've been insulted for it more frequently than anything else but it's also very attention-grabbing and unique. it's a standout feature in the same way steve buscemi's eyes are a standout future. he wouldn't be who he is without them.

i do think about it often. but i don't want to masculinize so much that i would be unable to ever pass as a woman again if i decided to stop again. i really wish that i was more muscular and if i really wanted to i could probably get on some kind of research steroid that only targets muscle growth and start working out again but i'm too lazy for all that.

q: have you read b.r. yeager's work? amygdalatropolis or negative space, i see a lot of parallels between his and your work.

a: he rocks. i'm actually mutuals with him on instagram and i was starstruck when he followed me back. a true kindred spirit.