Demolished Thoughts: Unfinished writing, Charli XCX, and other things
Writing is hard. It’s something I find myself thinking about constantly. Even though I don’t actually publish much, I think about things in terms of how I would write about them. Unfortunately, a confluence of mental illness, a technically-still-undiagnosed-but-suggested-by-two-separate-therapists developmental disorder, and general life business means I don’t get to put my thoughts to paper (or in this case, Content Management System) very much.
There is a lot I wish I could write, but I don’t have it in me to grind and pitch pieces anywhere and it’s hard to justify the use of my free time on writing. Lately I’ve felt more down about it than usual. Writing is a craft, after all, and I’ve just left this particular muscle—the only creative one I felt I had my entire life—to atrophy. Even sitting down to write this has been a months-long process of wondering what to say, or how to say it, or if I have anything interesting to even say at all. If you are reading this, thank you for your patience. If you aren’t, I don’t blame you because reading about writing kind of sucks and this is something painfully indulgent that I don’t even enjoy writing. But there is something I’ve wanted to write, or at least thought about writing for a long time. Never got around to it, but I wanted to share the idea, at least, and what I would have written about.
On Houses and Horror
I moved back in with my parents in September. It’s kind of embarrassing but I lost my job in November of 2022 (my own fault, due to burn out and inability to even fake caring about the work I was doing), and as I’m sure you know, the job market is currently in a miserable state. After almost a year of applying to jobs that led to nowhere, I opted to go back to school to earn an Associate’s degree as a Speech-Language Pathology Assistant.
Still, despite having a plan for the future, moving back home at 31 isn’t exactly a proud moment for me, and the past nine or so months have been pretty tense and fraught for many reasons. The tension and anxiety of being back in my childhood home got me thinking about the suburban home as a site of horror. This isn’t anything new. American slashers have thoroughly mined this territory since John Carpenter’s Halloween almost 50 years ago, if not earlier. Personally, though, this was a discomfort that was new to me and got me thinking about how horror and nostalgia intertwine.
I think the thing that got me thinking about this first was Power Pak’s excellent video thoroughly covering MyHouse.WAD, a player-created level from the seminal video game Doom that is dizzying in its massive sprawl and depth. At first glance it’s a work of “liminal space horror” inspired by books like House of Leaves or film projects like The Backrooms, but ends up telling a haunting story about loss and how it warps memories of a space.
From there, I got to thinking about another horror video game about the terror of the home: Kitty Horrorshow’s 2016 game Anatomy. Similar to MyHouse.WAD, Anatomy plays from a first-person perspective where the player explores a house, but instead of being infested with demons, the house is conspicuously empty. But you aren’t alone. Anatomy proposes that the house itself is alive, but long abandoned. As it is left to decay, it grows resentful. The feelings of the house are expressed through an answering machine that ponders the condition of the house and the place the house has in the American imaginary. I am not doing it justice, but the thought of Anatomy terrifies me. Errant Signal’s video on it has not left my mind since it was first posted seven years ago.
Finally, I was thinking a lot about Skinamarink, the endlessly memed, divisive, ultra-low budget horror film from 2022, highly influenced by the type of online horror filmmaking more recently dubbed “analog horror.” It’s another piece of horror fiction that takes place in a house. It features two children trapped in their home as the rooms shift into a nightmare of impossible spaces. It reminds me of the terror that comes with walking around an empty house alone in the wee hours of the night, feeling like something is waiting for you around every corner. It’s the horror of turning an intimately familiar space into something completely unknown.
I wanted to write something that would synthesize all of these things. Being back in my childhood home made these things resonate deeply with me that I could not stop thinking about them. I would wake up in the same room I slept in every day up through high school and feel nothing but dread. The anxiety of recreating the home dynamics of my childhood was so overbearing I locked myself in my room for days on end.
But the thing is I have not played either MyHouse.WAD and Anatomy, and I’ve only watched about 30 minutes of Skinamarink. It’s a little embarrassing to have this but they are all things that I meant to get around to, but for one reason or another, it just never happened. I even bought a copy of Anatomy off of itch.io that’s still in a compressed folder. And I’m disappointed because it really felt like an Idea that I really wanted to realize. But I think sometimes you just have to accept when an idea is just going to remain an idea, and you just don’t have the time or energy, or your motivation just didn’t strike at the right moment, to really capture its execution. But I felt I had to write the idea down somewhere, so here it is, being sent off to pasture. Maybe I’ll revisit it some day but I’ve given up on it for now. Ideas are cheap, after all, and it’s best not to be too precious about them.
“I’m on TV talking like it’s just you and me.”
Like a lot of insufferably online people, I listened to the most recent Charli XCX album, brat, recently. I’m not the most devoted Charli fan (I like how i’m feeling now a lot, I was much cooler on Charli), but this one really resonated with me. I’m annoyed at myself for this, but I couldn’t help but think of it as dance music for introverts. Despite her devotion to making sweaty club bangers, Charli XCX’s album affecting and self-reflexive in a way that a lot of pop music, not to mention music in general, hasn’t been for me lately.
For obvious reasons, I don’t like talking about Kanye West a lot, but one of my favorite lyrics of all-time is “I’m on TV talking like it’s just you and me,” from his 2007 song Can’t Tell Me Nothing. To me, it just perfectly encapsulates the function of pop music: created for mass consumption but to express a deeply individualized intimacy between the artist and audience. This is what brat feels like to me. It put me in a headspace I mostly found myself in high school, listening to music, feeling like it was all made about me, specifically, which is kind of funny for an album that’s about going to clubs and doing coke and being friends with SOPHIE (R.I.P.) and A.G. Cook. But all of that is undercut with a knowing self-consciousness that feels so relatable. It’s like that meme about being the guy in the corner at a party. I wish more music made me feel this way. I wish people stopped making nu-disco.
Recommendations
Apart from the Charli album, I’ve mostly been listening to a lot of hardcore lately. Most specifically, just the same three bands: Scowl, End It, and Gel. I don’t have much to say about them that wouldn’t be self-evident by just listening to their music (which should be easy because their albums are anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes). But it’s cathartic to listen to angry music when there is so much in the world to be angry about. To be unambiguous, I am primarily talking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine by Israel. Most recently, Scowl was one of several bands who dropped out of Download Fest in solidarity with boycotting Barclays, which funds arms manufacturers that sell to the IDF (correct me if I have any of this wrong). Give them a listen. They write really brief, catchy punk songs that are like if the Misfits had a harder edge to them, and if Glenn Danzig had interests beyond being an anti-vax bonehead and watching old Vincent Price movies.
The semester as just ended for me and despite 2024 being an extremely chaotic year so far, I’ve been doing well academically. Now that summer is in full swing I’m hoping to use the free time to do more.
I want to write more. I want to start making music. There is so much I want to do and even though most days I still feel burned out and exhausted, I’m trying my best. Sorry this is so scattered. Writing these days feels more like exorcising my brain than anything else.
I hope the rest of this year is better and you’ll hear from me more often. I’m looking forward to a lot.