“after my hands started bleeding”

03 May 2018 Leave a comment

by MisterMissLonelyhearts in Fiction, New Media Testament Tags: , , , , , , ,

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 11 of LONELYHEARTS 2016, my upcoming campy, surreal, coming-of-age dramedy novel, about a bipolar pansexual at the end of the world. (More succinctly: it’s about a troubled young man who starts college during this era of American politics.)

Before me lay my most precious secret, literally written in stone for anyone to see.

And I was amazed at my ability to decorate the table so easily; without any trace of the self-hating perfectionism that usually haunted me, especially when I was working on anything visual or creative like this, anything that was going to be judged by its appearance. Whenever I worked on posters, or presentations or art-projects for school, I was prone to fits of howling violence, wherein I’d snap rulers and pencils in-half, and throw whatever instruments I’d tried and failed to shatter; and I’d also rip up cardboard, paper–anything tearable, really–sometimes even after my hands started bleeding; and in my worst outbursts, I would stab walls and furniture with the edges of the things I’d broken, then scratch them against my skin, to distract myself from the much deeper pain of beholding the ugliness of the imperfect thing I was creating.

But no; none of that tonight. Tonight, I turned away from my creation feeling sure it was a masterpiece. Tonight, I would fall asleep certain, for the first time in my life, that the day that was ending was done; that I’d done something to make the world a better place. I’d carved my truth into reality. I’d made it complete by sharing it. Indeed, my truth was now so complete that, even if it were rejected, there was a part of me that could not be changed.

This is one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever written. I hope you find some beauty in it, too!

You can read more excerpts, and soon the first 5 chapters, here.

Love always,

your Mister

“first to dream of immortality”

25 Dec 2017 Leave a comment

by MisterMissLonelyhearts in Fiction, New Media Testament Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of LONELYHEARTS 2016, my upcoming campy, surrealish, dramedy novel about a bipolar pansexual at the end of the world. (More succinctly: about a troubled young man who starts college during this era of American politics.)

(In this scene: Miss Lonelyhearts tries to make things work with a man he met online, who looks a lot like his ex, “The Bow-Tie.”)

He poured me another glass of wine and asked about something he’d seen on my profile. The website prompted you to answer questions so it could calculate your compatibility with people. (Ours was 63%.) Once you answered a certain question, you could see everyone else’s answer to the same question. One question asked: ‘What is your main motivation in life? A.) Love; B.) Success; C.) Family,’ and I forget the last option. He’d seen that I chose ‘Love,’ and asked me why. I’d also seen that he chose ‘Success,’ but I wasn’t planning on saying anything about it.

I told him that I didn’t mean romantic love necessarily, that I meant it more as a spiritual force. I admitted it was something I didn’t have a clear idea of yet, then brandished my phone to look up some facts and build a case for myself:

‘It’s like Sinclair Lewis wrote: ‘[Love] is the morning and the evening star!’ Well . . . okay, so, he was paraphrasing Robert Ingersoll, who went on to say . . . ‘[Love] was the first to dream of immortality’ . . . So, yeah, I just don’t think I’ve ever really felt that before, ya know?’

Thankfully, he wasn’t listening. As soon as I stopped rambling, he informed me why he chose ‘Success.’ He’d been groomed to take over his father’s insurance firm, and was already an intern there. His answer implied that ‘Success’ had been chosen for him.

On the way back to the garage, we passed a man on the sidewalk who was likely homeless. He asked for money or food. My date continued walking a few paces away from me, but then noticed my arm was no longer holding his. He saw me give my leftovers to the homeless man, and immediately began screaming at me. His anger echoed and people stared. He bought that food for ME to enjoy, he yelled, ‘not some lazy fuck.’

‘GET A FUCKING JOB!’ he screamed at the man, who weakly offered the box back to us, which only made my date angrier. ‘LIKE WE’RE GONNA FUCKING EAT IT AFTER YOUUU TOUCHED IT!’

I managed to wrap myself around him from behind and calm him down. I kept repeating ‘I’m sorry, baby, it’s all my fault; I’m sorry, baby’ while kissing and rubbing him. At the time, I was oddly touched that he cared so much about it; but looking back, I think he was only so upset because I would’ve felt a stronger responsibility to sleep with him if I’d eaten the leftovers of what he bought. That’s also probably why he’d been so generous with the wine.

Read more excerpts (and soon, the first five chapters) here.

Love always,

real cover

your Mister

“the mess that’s America”

18 Dec 2017 Leave a comment

by MisterMissLonelyhearts in Fiction, New Media Testament Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Excerpt from Chapter 5 of LONELYHEARTS 2016, my upcoming campy, surrealish, coming-of-age dramedy novel about a bipolar pansexual at the end of the world.

Dead Eyes shrugged in response. He had no idea what would make him sad because he had no idea what would make him happy. His malaise was the product of a common and dangerous mixture: selfishness and self-unawareness.

‘I’m obsessed with the mess that’s America!’–another Marina & The Diamonds song was blaring from the car’s speakers–‘I’m obsessed with the mess that’s Amer-i-ca-a-a!’ I was so happy that Dead Eyes liked her music. She was one of my favorite artists, and he often heard me listening to her, so he’d built up a quick tolerance to (and eventual appreciation of) her work.

I was honestly so overjoyed just to be in the car with him. That was the first time he ever allowed it, since we were traveling a few hours away for the concert. There was no chance of seeing anyone we knew out there; plus, I think he was secretly taking the risk just because he’d grown to love Marina & The Diamonds’ music so much. He never specifically asked me to play it, but he’d stopped complaining whenever I played it around him; and that was HUGE.

I reached for his hand, like I imagined a wife would do if her husband was driving. He swatted my hand away the moment it touched him; I was finishing one of my annoying rambles when he swatted and interrupted me:

‘It’s not like I’m saying one is more TALENTED than the other or anything, because all that stuff’s subjective anyway. I’m just saying that I’m a little more attracted to Marina’s movement because SHE calls her fans ‘Diamonds,’ whereas Lady Gaga calls HER fans ‘Monsters.’ And I GET that both names are powerful images, and they’re both about being confident, and proud of what makes us different, but–I don’t know–the Diamond’s just a much more comforting image to me . . . It’s my birthstone, you know–’

That’s when he swatted me, and said:

‘I still don’t get why you’re dressed like that.’

Dead Eyes wasn’t happy that I was dressed as Marina; specifically, in the outfit she wore during the closing of the concert we were about to see. I actually just think he was upset that I was dressed femininely. I matched everything to her outfit as best I could, and I even got a convincing wig; but I couldn’t afford shoes as outrageous as hers, so I was wearing my faded sneakers. All night I’d been earnestly hoping that the rest of my outfit would make up for the ugliness and poverty of my feet. I looked down at my rugged shoes with the worn soles; and I sighed, remembering a variation of what I heard girls in my grade say all the time: ‘If you wanna check if a guy is gay, just look at his shoes. They always have nice shoes. A gay guy would KILL HIMSELF if he had to wear dirty straight-guy shoes.’

I tried to grab his hand again, this time more tenderly, but he yelled at me to stop bugging him. I wanted to play his wife in the car with him; I wanted to be a family. But we’d both been taught that when a man falls in love with a woman, he marries her; and we’d both also learned, from whispers and obscene jokes, that some men liked to have sex with other men, and those men could never marry.

I found myself praying, for the first time in my life. I was praying to nothing and no one in particular; I prayed for all the people who’d taught us; for everybody like them; and for all the people they’d ever taught: I prayed that none of them would ever stop learning.

But I guess it was enough for me that he and I were just going to a concert together. I wasn’t sure if I loved him, but he’d definitely become a habit of mine–just like Marina’s music. I couldn’t remember a single day when I didn’t listen to at least five Marina songs. I always told people: ‘Marina & The Diamonds is the closest thing that I have to religious beliefs,’ and that phrase still feels true today, even in memory.

When we walked into the venue, a group of rowdy people yelled at us from the mosh-pit: ‘MARINA! MARINA’S HERE, EVERYBODY! LOOK, MARINA’S HERE!’ But they were most likely just making fun of me for dressing up like her.

Read more excerpts (and soon, the first five chapters) here.

real cover

Be gentle; this is only a tentative cover.

Love always,

your Mister

“something he thought was happiness”

14 Dec 2017 Leave a comment

by MisterMissLonelyhearts in Fiction, New Media Testament Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Excerpt from Chapter 4 of LONELYHEARTS 2016, my upcoming campy, surrealish, coming-of-age dramedy novel about a bipolar pansexual at the end of the world.

(…in which we meet a character known as Dead Eyes, “so-called because of his almost-black brown eyes and vacant stare. I assumed it was because he was stoned all the time, which he was, but he hid it well. He had the same vacant stare even when sober. It was just his personality. People called him Dead Eyes as a term of endearment, though; not of ridicule. All the girls at school seemed to think it was sexy. And honestly, they were right. There was something about his way of looking right-through you that made you more desperate than ever to be noticed.”)

During our visits, he always poured himself a few small glasses of his parents’ scotch. Whenever he accidentally ingested a large amount, he would pour a little water into the bottle to raise the liquid level and make his thievery less obvious. His parents rarely spoke to each other anymore, and they slept in separate bedrooms; so if they noticed some scotch was gone, they would probably just assume the other drank it.

His parents’ lack of communication, with each other and with him, had become important pieces of something he thought was happiness. Whenever his parents left him alone, he would come alive by deadening himself. With booze, cigarettes, weed. He would usually offer me some–‘to loosen you up,’ he would say–but I would usually decline all but the occasional dainty sip of scotch. ‘Such a pussy,’ he would always laugh at me, and I would respond by giggling an ‘I know, I’m sorry’ before pulling him into a rough and wet kiss to distract from my uncoolness.

I often found myself distracting him with flirtation because we didn’t share a lot of interests or opinions. Even if we did, he probably wouldn’t have enjoyed discussing them. I said once that I thought his parents sleeping in separate rooms was oddly romantic; then I blushed and touched him, and I admitted that it reminded me of the type of togetherness he and I shared; I said, whenever I got married, I would need to have a separate bedroom / office of my own, where I could retire without waking my spouse on the nights I stayed up late.

He said it was ‘fucked up’ that I’d want separate bedrooms.

I asked him if he ever thought about being married someday, and he said it bummed him out to think about that. He said he’d need to marry a woman, so they probably wouldn’t have sex much because he wouldn’t ‘be that into it.’

I asked why he watched porn of women if they didn’t turn him on, and he said it was different with porn because he could almost imagine that it was a guy doing all the things the girl-on-screen was doing.

Plus, he said it’d be too hard to remember to delete his Internet browsing history every single time, like he’d need to do if he watched gay porn; just in case his parents ever snooped on his computer.

When he said that, I remembered a slogan that I’d seen every day on the door of my first-grade classroom; in big block letters, it read: EVERY CHILD IS A STORY WAITING TO BE TOLD. And then I thought about Dead Eyes’ parents, and how they treated him more like a letter they were writing: to distant relatives, to friends from college, to members of their church. He was somebody else’s letter instead of his own story, and I was sad for him. He ‘couldn’t’ be gay and still have parents, because that would disappoint them too much. Back when he joined the basketball team (instead of football, which his father played,) his parents’ reactions made it clear to him that such a disappointment was the biggest kind they could tolerate while still supporting him, emotionally et cetera.

I often wondered if his parents would’ve been proud to know that their son was addicted to the same scotch as they were.

Read more excerpts (and soon, the first five chapters) here.

real cover

Be gentle; this is only a tentative cover.

Love always,

your Mister

“sexual frustrations of other men”

11 Dec 2017 Leave a comment

by MisterMissLonelyhearts in Fiction, New Media Testament Tags: , , , , , , ,

Excerpt from Chapter 3 of LONELYHEARTS 2016, my upcoming campy, surrealish, coming-of-age dramedy novel about a bipolar pansexual at the end of the world.

It should come as no surprise that, after the news of my kiss with Father spread, people–especially other boys and men–began acting more strangely than usual around me. One of the strangest such moments occurred in the boys’ restroom with a boy I call The Lamb. (I forget his name now, but he was a football player whose platinum curls always struck me as lamb-like. Football wasn’t in season, and a half-year without practices had faded his autumnal tan. His fleece was white as snow; and everywhere his teammates went, he was sure to go.)

I was standing at the urinal, attempting to relieve myself. But my mind kept drifting to the thought of how barbaric urinals are; they provide almost no privacy for the private function they serve. The stream had just begun when The Lamb strolled in and sidled to the urinal next to me. He was taller than me, but he never seemed to look down on me; he was taller than most people, actually, yet he seemed to look up to everyone. My stream was dripping to a stop, but The Lamb’s hadn’t even started. He had only unzipped. I could feel his stiff uneasiness next to me but didn’t think anything of it.

I shifted to begin zipping and walking toward the sink, but he leaned down and pressed his face into mine; our lips met. It was sudden, but the moist warmth glued me firmly to the moment. I relaxed into his nervousness. I wrapped my arms around his body and pulled him into mine. Our manhoods touched, then his eyes shot open as he jumped backward. I saw a brief sun-like glimmer in his sky-blue eyes; I swore it was shining from the inside, even though I logically knew it must be the reflection of outside light against his eye. The sparkle almost made me believe in souls, but he quickly bowed his head in shame, zipped up, and scurried away without a word.

I stood there with my manhood exposed, inhaling and swallowing the truth that much of my life had been and would be shaped by the sexual frustrations of other men; this revelation tasted of sweetness but smelled of urine and disinfectant.

Read more excerpts (and soon, the first five chapters) here.

real cover

Be gentle; this is only a tentative cover.

Love always,

your Mister

my last drink

November 21, 2021
1492 days ago.

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