Ugly Boys

Last October, I had a magical writing experience. Something erupted from me with an urgency I hadn't felt in a long time. I followed through on it, carving away day after day until I felt the piece was the faceted jewel I wanted it to be. I named this essay "Ugly Boys" and am very happy to have found it a home at X-Ray Literary Magazine, a place I've wanted to publish for a while.

On the one hand, I'm an exhibitionist and I think this may be the best thing I've ever written. On the other hand, I have truly never felt so vulnerable as I do sharing this piece.

Here's that link again: Ugly Boys by Daniel Isaiah Elder

A note on the writing of the thing

In late October, a couple weeks after the events portrayed in the final sections of this essay, I decided to embark on a solo mushroom trip for the first time in many months. My partner and I had just begun looking at houses together, my 40th birthday was on the distant horizon, and I wanted to touch my roots, ground myself, look around my apartment and take stock of where I was and the new world into which I'd soon be moving as we merged our lives.

I drank some psychedelic tea. I danced, I cried, and then at one point I put on a Bill Callahan record and decided to just sit and listen to the stories he tells in his songs.

About halfway through the first track on his excellent album Ytilaer, I looked at my coffeetable and saw the book I was currently re-reading: Cormac McCarthy's The Road. (R.I.P.!) The mushrooms were hitting hard, and all of a sudden, my mind rippled with the emotions of that novel's bleak world. A great and terrible fear stitched through me. I thought about nuclear weapons. I thought about Putin. I imagined my sisters on the Eastern seaboard wiped out in a nuclear holocaust.

I tried to breathe through the fear, but it became overwhelming, all-consuming. I found myself on my laptop, desperate for distraction. Where did I turn? I hate to say it was Twitter dot com. As I scrolled through the endless noise, it occurred to me that this was how I often dealt with difficult emotions, by turning to the internet. And following that thought came a voice that rang inside me like the clearest, loudest bell. It said: the only thing that's going to save you right now is writing.

So I listened. I closed everything except my word processor. I was thinking about a conversation about beauty and ugliness and gender that I'd had with three very lovely people during an intense recent weekend. Words flowed out of me. I wrote for two hours straight, and I didn't just feel good about what I was writing, I felt mostly doubtless. I was writing these stabby little sentences, the kind I admire in the writings of Rios de la Luz and Sarah Manguso and Kate Zambreno. Sentences like shivs. And though I've been trying to push away from writing in fragments, these seemed to really serve the story I was trying to tell.

The next day, I opened the document, dreading it. The writing I do in the midst of a psychedelic experience is rarely salvageable or usable. But what I found was promising and beautiful and true. And I realized that to take the essay to completion, I'd have to write straight through to that weekend that had just recently passed.

I'm really proud of what I ended up with. And grateful to the editors at X-Ray for appreciating it. And grateful to my partner and friends who read early drafts of this essay and gave me two of the most generous gifts they could give: their insight and their consent.

I remain,

Daniel Isaiah Elder

P.S. My 40th birthday has come and gone and it's been lovely so far——and so has cohabiting with my partner and her kids. Here's to a decade of exploring all sorts of new space.