From Metamorphosis by Barrett Nash · Volume 2: A Case Study on Consciousness · Book 1: Youth · Part Two of Three.
Content note: Volume 2 is an unretouched record of a real life and includes candid accounts of depression, self-harm and suicidal thinking.
# Book 1 — Youth · Part 2
*Barrett’s UBC-era journals, spring 2006 – fall 2006. Documentary text: kept verbatim (spelling and all), cut, or redacted only. Source: `source/vol2-reflowed.txt`, entries beginning at lines 3240–6100. Curation ledger: `editorial/youth-part2-report.md`.*
> [INTERSTITIAL — draft for Barrett’s voice]
> Second term, first year. I was eighteen, living in residence at UBC, and I filled a document the way other people bite their nails — poems at 2 a.m., mostly never shown to anyone. Except when they were, which is its own story.
i am going to fucking radiohead in fucking amsterdam. wow
—
why fear death
stare it down
make it run in fright
endless sleep starts tomorrow
why put it off
with lackluster floating
on a long river
devoid of any scenery
just one view of a vista
sparkling in every direction
and may my short river ride end
so much peace
so much life
in the blink of an eye
—
im a happy person
in an unhappy world
thank god for fake smiles
> [INTERSTITIAL — draft for Barrett’s voice]
> That spring the journal grew an audience of one. Jenn was back in Nanaimo, a year behind me, and we wrote each other the kind of emails you can only write to someone you never have to face at breakfast. I’ve kept one of hers, because mine make no sense without it.
## April 2, 2006
kurt wanted a list of music, thought it was a telling journal entry
i left out fun stuff cus i got to tired im not an emo. which is a noun
so im stuck between deciding to do econ or writing an essay
needless to say, its a perfect time to have your non musical friend pretentiously tell you about bands.
dahg
i’ll generify this with fake genres
post rock: godspeed! you black emperor, mogwai, sigur ros, ulrich shnauss, zero 7, a silver mt zion, mum, m83, Amina, the album leaf, boards of Canada, explosions in the sky, out hud
basically, they’re all epic anti pop. they all start off with a sample or two and just layer it up and layer it up, theres diversity thouh, godspeeds apocaliptic, BoC is just fucking evil, M83 is emo, the album leaf is hooka music. the emphasis is not on the vocals. I’d try like herod by mogwai and roygbiv as less accessible, maybe moya by godspeed and twenty two fourteen by album leaf to see if
you like it at all.
hooka music. chill dahg chill.
some post rock works like album leaf and sigur ros, but the remix of silent alarm by bloc party(compliments is the best), cat powers (metal heart, good woman, the greatest to try), antony and the johnsons has the guy with the best voice ive ever heard(try for today i am a bay), aqualung, belle orchestre (side project of napolean dynamite guy from arcade fire), ben kweller (try in other words),
homogenic era bjork, broken social scene (try anthem of a 17yo girl or ibi dream of pavement), clap your hands say yeah, the dears, DNTEL (side project of the dj from the postal service. this is namedropping gold, theres a superpitcher remix of one of their songs with DCFC singer singing, you mention like half the indie world. Only better name dropping song is a massive attack remix of rabbit in
your headlights which is UNKLE ft dj shadow with thom yorke on vocals. that, is prentious) massive attack, portishead (jazzy deep beats for this and massive attack, same as dj shadows you cant go home again), eels, elliot (song in the air is great), elliot smith (twilight, angeles, everything reminds me of her, theres too many, hes god), ryan adams (magnolia mountain), iron and wine (he has so
many, my favourite is cinders and smoke, a lot of people like sea and rhythym, he made lo fi), imogen heap and frou frou (same girl), jeff buckley, jem (OC ruined her, she was on it, that bitch), obviously you know death cab for cutie, postal service, fuck you oc, the shins (st simon, new slang, caring is creepy, jenny lewis and rilo kiley (fuck feminism, i dont like her but N. does and yound
girls with guitars is her genre of choice), the knife (their new cd is amazing, the captain is the best, its really experimental), the organ, of montreal (tim wish you were born a girl is my fave, these two are reallyu indie), mazzy star (pedro the lion does an amazing version of fade into you), neutral milk hotel (a lot of people on campus worship him, he is good, not worship worthy. try oh
comely and king of carrot flowers pt 1), pinback (fortress), radiohead (motion picture soundtrack, they are god, experiment with them, everybody has a radiohead song they can fall in love with, most electic band ive ever heard in terms of evolution. you can’t start being pretentious until you like radiohead or have had your tast evolve above radiohead), sage francis (undergroud rap, try sea
lions, hes good, garrett could live off him), decemberists (odalisque, on the bus mall), sufjan stevens (he wants to have one cd for every american state. hes on two. he is absolutely one of the best song writers ive ever heard, try casimir pulasaki days and jacksonville), trembling blue stars, UNKLE,
ya, i could do more genres but im tired and i have little faith on you even reading all this. its more for you then me, information overload on your point. theres about 15 different genres in all, with artists ranging from solo to 10 members not including orchests, coming from maybe 10 countries. its eclectic, try some stuff, if you like something tell me itll make me happy, if not, i enjoyed
writing this. it felt good to do. i tried to do artists i thought ud never heard of and i didn’t do really narrow ones who i dont think are amazing. all these people i really like. try some and enjoy.
—
## April 3, 2006
Maybe twenty minutes ago I came close to just smashing my mirror. When I was reading your email, I felt like ripping my drawer out of my Ikea desk and watch so much useless shit flutter to the ground. I didn’t, but I want to. My tonight was spent in these japanese gardens smoking a cuban with a bottle of wine talking about why capitalism has failed. Fucking university elitist ass holes who change
nothing perhaps, but the undeniable fact of capitalism failure is indisbutable and worse still its demise is impossible far off. I dont want to talk about whats wrong with this system that blankets every facet of the diamond that is life, but more how to make do. You’re an intelligent person and that is a miserable fact in a society that craves specialization and mass stupidity. Engineers aren’t
smart, business tycoons aren’t smart, profs aren’t smart, they’re specialized into a hole, the narrow laser lighting impossibly bright a meaningless part of a room when a light bulb could illuminate the universe. We are being pushed to this unsatisfying lifestyle and we can feel it and it is a terrible ghastly monstrous pain. Sometimes I write poetry, to express myself, if it can be called
poetry, last night I wrote “…let me break myself. broken is better then empty, and empty is better then not fulfilling being full.” that is the tragedy we suffer. of wasted potential. of dreams to bright for a drear world stuck in montony. Life isnt fair, its not us, its not everybody else, its society as a whole. we have no one to blame, we stuck ourselves in this hole with our petty desires
and our petty desires consumed our souls. there is no purpose to any of us living, when most people go to sleep, they should ask what did they do today. the highest value today is making somebody else a lot of money, yourself a lot of money, so that you can buy more useless shit to insulate yourself from a world of ever lessening reality. this is rambling, there is a point. there is a way to be
happy, i dont know if it works for anyone or everyone, all I know is that I am a happy person. i suffer flashes of impossible melancholy, sometimes when I’m driving I just wonder what if i dont break. what a way to end with in the soft embrace of my favourite song cradled on a sunny day into a thoughtless abyss. I will never do that though.
I used to want to be a lawyer. Bring home lots of money, live in a mansion on a hill, have a beautiful wife to give me a hug and drive my perfect kids to school, and when she drops them off tell them their daddy loves them. Everybody has dreams like that. We were lied to, that doesn’t exist, the kids are lost in technology and peer pressure, the wife wants to get a job and leave the kids alone
and I’m bored with this perfect family. This is the american dream, the back bone of capitalism, and its a lie. Its not a happy lifestyle. If you got into tv what would you do? would that make you any happier then you have the potential to be right now? if you got a record deal and could perform in front of millions would you be living a better life then if you sat on a corner and there was one
person who just couldn’t stop listening to you. we’re taught to dream big. we can be astronauts. a woman president. the bigger the dream, the more chance of failure. we’re taught not to give up, but what we’re not taught is that those people who achieve dreams are just regular people. celebrities get tired of autographs. the rich are in the rat race of not being rich enough, competing against the
jones’s with a bigger jet. we have to change the way we dream, dream for satisfaction, for the moment. the moment, the present. what a beautiful idea, and it doesn’t exist anymore. We live in our memories, thinking of what a wonderous time, and build a million different futures. The present is spent on a couch watching a tv while we put living off since we’ve outlined out dreams. I think most
people die unhappy, and even worse, they’re so isolated from what life could be they don’t even know it. work hard in school to get a good job. get a good job to buy a house. work like a dog at work to pay off the house, raise the kids, put money into retirement. maybe when we’re 80 we can reap the benefits of our dreams cus we put them off. look at the chinese, they’re the wonder of the modern
world, growing at an unprecedented rate that is caring everyone. why? because their workers are willing to work 99% of the time to drive their new car in front of their neighbors. to put their kids in furs.
dont think about the future. dont think about the past. live in this second and be happy. if u’re not happy now, who gives a fuck about the future. its just a later now, why can’t they both be moments of joy. people make fun of me because i can’t remember anything, they pity me for it. i pity them for living in remembrence while every second i live is fresh, the best second of my life till the
next one. a life of just existing, sitting and staring at a wall, is a joyful life. i dont have a future planned, i dont want to be a politician anymore, i dont want to be a lawyer, follow in daddys footsteps. i want to be a person im proud of right this second and hope i can be just as happy with myself in the next second. dont worry about getting into tv, worry about what you’re doing right
now. get off the computer and just walk and walk and it will be the most enjoyable experience you’ve had in months. dont put your dreams off, grab them now while they are fresh. maybe you can’t change the world, maybe thats not a noble idea even, who are we to say what the world should look like. instead we have to live our lives as bastions of inspiration that there is still romance in this
rotting husk of empty hearts and robot minds. Your nightmare is going to bed at 8pm with some fat beerguzzling curtis B. on your couch, mine is working in a cubicle from 9-5. neither nightmare has to approach. if you don’t like university quit it. i agree, university is pointless in giving us a stable future. i think u’re at university for the same reason as me though, to open the power of a
mind, explode the lie of ignorance is bliss by understanding it is not knowledge that frees us but the perception of the world that knowledge allows us to perceive. do your goals now. my goal is knowledge and i love it, i have no false hope of me getting some job from this, and if i do, it will change with time as all things morph with this one continuam (except this run on sentence). i think it
is the most heart renching statement i have ever hearf of you saying you’ll get your masters and chat with mr C. in dover with some nitwit teenagers who still believe buying an ipod will make them a better person. get your masters for the sake of the beauty that comes with the task, not for some meaningless end result. you haven’t undergone the road of education yet, how can you plan where
it ends. take the forks as they come at you and always take the brightest one. I’m joing the army reserves, going to ghana, and doing a term of school. this is a lifestyle that prepares me for nothing but is what i want to do with my life. im saying this poorly, its a rather abstract idea to what is likely the ultimate cliche: live your dreams! oh the OC. rather, not live your dreams, but make
your dreams what your life is, make driving to school a thing of joy, working at the dollar store something you would do even if you weren’t being paid. raise your perceptions above the destitution of your surrounding and you’ll raise your surroundings into something you love. there has never been a time of life i haven’t enjoyed, i just say what must be must be and make the best of it. make the
best of it because you have the best; if only you knew it.
on love
what a dangerous topic. what is love, its a means to an end, we fuck like rabbits to make kids to further the human race. its an instinct we’ve out evolved like so many others and our minds our playing catchup. i can’t give you advice on love, every girl ive kissed ive been drunk and regretted. i think love exists but we can’t possibly know what it is at this time. maybe my most real relationship
was with you to because there was no prententions, or maybe it was all pretention without saying there was no pretention. we didn’t wear the masks that are pushed on those in love because it was a joke but it wasn’t. maybe you dont want to fall in love with curtis B., but i have no ambition in falling in love with somebody for flesh alone. i want somebody to just cradle while i read a book
and feel perfectly at ease at, somebody who can share my perception but never let me figure them out. or so i think. its so hard to know the truth, we turn on the radio and love is some epic ballad, heart wrenching. my heart will go on. its a beautiful thing, tragedy, we all want it. make me jack dawson what a life. but its not a life to live, its a life to dream about, these stories in movies,
in song, these myths, are the worste things because they can’t be reconciled to a world living off shallow mediums and uneducated flatulence. i dont know. i cant help you. id say marry me, but i wouldnt make you happy. we’re two big magnets that dont want to be chained by anyone elses ambitions and theory. dont settle for less then perfection. dont do the platinum blond, youre a beauty as a
raven, so dark that you suck up all the light in a room and radiate it around you. its not about finding mr right, its about recognizing him and really instill in yourself what you want. maybe you should just find somebody to cradle you while you read a book.
on nothing at all.
this has been a meandering pointless lesson in uselessness, but as im sure you know, writing is as much for the writer as the reader. knowing this is for an audience only announce truths to myself i shy away from when its my own persona in question. its a hard world because we make it a hardworld. the best advice i think i am capable of is just take pleasure in everything at life, and if you’re
not enjoying it, can’t enjoy it, dont do it. life has a future, prepare for it, but what is the point if the now is lost. its not good advice, its cliched, but we spout golden knowledge to each other all day and never apreciate its true meaning. people say don’t sweat the small stuff while racing home to catch the preview for next weeks desperate housewives. people say education is good while
they go by uneducated in 99 percent of what life really is. there is so much life and it is so easy to grasp. your nothing is watch a moon be swollowed into the mountains, why can’t every second be like that? how many people saw that same moon without an ounce of feeling? how many things are you looking at that you’re missing so much point of. just live and live and you’ll find that tomorrow
you’re still alive and happy for it.
bee
PS i just read a book for school called extremely loud and incredibly close. id read it, its about how an enlightened thinker reconciled the horrible existence of enlightenment into a joyful life. dont read anything online about it, just read it.
—
From: “jenn n.” [email redacted]
To: [email redacted]
Subject: I’m happy Bee.
Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2006 18:32:07 -0700
>Dearest Barrett Robert Nash,
>I apologize for my increasingly emo msn names. I hold my bangs
>partly responsible. But the truth is, I have come to many
>realizations recently, they are as follows:
>
>ON LIFE
>I always possessed a belief that I, was ‘different’. That somehow, I
>would succeed in all my goals and dreams. However, school has
>confronted me with a contradiction. Knowledge can be liberating and
>limiting, simultaneously. I crave knowledge, I love to learn, but
>what I’m being taught, is that my ambitions are farfetched, and I
>will most likely conform to the average gray area. My plan, is to
>earn my masters and become an english professor. Is that it? In 30
>years will I be sitting in a lunchroom with equivalents to Mr.
>C.? I can’t stand the thought. There is so much I want to be
>and do, and, like a typical libra, I’m highly indesicive. Some days
>I want to be a writer, others, I want to be on tv, then I change to
>wanting to play my own music; it is constantly in a state of
>evolvement. The reality is, for the next 50 consecutive years of my
>life, I will go to a monotonous job, just to earn money to keep
>afloat. If I’m lucky, I will buy a shiny SUV to make my neighbours
>jealous. I will frequently attend insignificant dinner parties, I’ll
>date, I’ll settle down, I’ll have some kids, I’ll raise those kids,
>sex will become a chore, I’ll put away for RRSP’s and a college
>fund, I’ll find a weekly show to become addicted to, and I’ll start
>going to bed at 8’oclock. Is that the result of all my aspirations
>and hard work? Reality depresses me.
>
>ON LOVE
>How is it that love is a constant, yet it is the most unreliable
>source I have come across? Is it bad to admit the most rewarding
>relationship I’ve been in was our mock one? Perhaps it was because
>there was no genuine committment, and therefore no chance of loss.
>Only after breaking up did I realise how much of my life was
>affected by him. I am currently in the process of sterilizing my
>world, and trying to find myself again. The truth is, I’m in denial.
>I’ve always professed that I would remain unattached, and never grow
>dependant on someone. But I did, and that scared me. And now it’s
>over, and I’m left hurting. The worst thing is I’m completely
>unattracted to people who want me back. I am fueled by constantly
>feeling I have to prove myself and earn the other person’s love, and
>it’s best if that’s an impossible achievement. As soon as my
>feelings are reciprocated, I grow bored. Maybe I’m doomed to spend
>my life with someone like Curtis B., as he epitomizes a man who
>can never be claimed, and in return, never wants to claim me.
>
>ON NOTHING AT ALL
>Last night I sat in the dark, and watched the moon descend. I did
>that for two hours. At one point it looked like it would crash into
>the earth, and I didn’t care. I used to fear death, but now I’m more
>intrigued by it. I sometimes have the urge to swerve into oncoming
>traffic. The fact that I have control over my own death, and
>deciding when my life ends is fascinating to me. I’m trying to
>decide whether essence precedes existence, or vice versa. Are we put
>on this earth, with no expectations, and the choices and ethics we
>bestow in ourselves define us? Or is everything predetermined, and
>we come here to materialize our decided destiny. I read a
>philosopher who claimed that God was dead, and we are his murderers.
>We just dont know it yet. What if there’s nothing more than this?
>I’ve always admired the carpe diem, ‘live everyday as it’s your
>last’ idea, but I’ve always told myself, I’ll just do that tomorrow.
>I wish I could bring myself to do and say everything I want to. What
>holds us back? I already regret so many missed opportunties, how
>many more times will I be inactive to my instincs?
>
>ON ENDING EMAILS
>Nothing groundbreaking here, its just over. Respond, I want to hear
>your thoughts.
>
>-J.
>
>ps-I want to dye my bangs platinum blond, and the rest of my hair
>black. Good or bad idea?
>
>_________________________________________________________________
—
## April 18, 2006
oh jenn
i hate email for its lack of interaction but love it since nobody meddles by interacting; i completely see why some supposed psychopaths resort to conversing with themselves: there is no better more thoughtful audience. in the absence of being seen as retarded or some other fucking unoriginal cruelly effective slur, i’ll refrain from talking to myself and use email. yipee. so i have an exam
today, haven’t started studying, went to the beach and burnt my notes while the sun sank and my little posse found me hilarious. then came back and rather then studying the notes i saved for being vital i made fake ids. there are so many ironies in life.
theres this quote “i was overwhelmed by the weight of all the lives i’m not living,” i think thats a fair summation of the lack of joy so many people experience in every day life: the dilemma of how do you know if you’re living the best life possible. maurys an escape, a means of saying at least my life isn’t that miserable. everywhere we look though, we are bombarded by the opposite side, a
hercules and his madonna deeply in love on every billboard, a lifestyle that crams more then most people will live in their life in a single half hour, novels that present magical worlds that taste so real that half a life can be spent day dreaming of tromping around a fantasy land. life is drab, dreary, and dismal, since no matter who you are, your life is a failure in comparison to the ideal
life presented to us in our media saturated lifestyles. while im writing this email theres a pop up of a gorgeous angel holding a penis sized phone telling me shes mine on lava life. apparently, we’re missing out.
whenever we get that which we supposedly want its never what we wanted. a car isn’t the expression of freedom that lifts you from your parents strangle hold since theres still nowhere to go. an ipod wont make you popular. wearing versace wont make you rich. the only feel these things gives me is a sense of selling out, that the 50 dollars i just spent on pitch black earphones must be able to be
spent in a more fulfilling way. there must be a way to fulfill life, to live it to its potential. that point can’t be reached, ever, we’re competing with the jones’s where everytime we better one neighbor we move into a more exclusive neighborhood with jones’s we need more of everything just to seem adequate.
you’re making 8 dollars an hour and feel that theres some mean trick being played on you, im living off a hundred dollars a month and am trying to save money. i get by, since i dont want an ipod anymore, i made the choice between having no money and time to spend the attributes the world still exhibits or having a job and disposable income. last week i just went on mass transit in a vain attempt
to study economics and ended up at the top of a dam, water rushing below my feet, a valley spreading infiniitely at my feet, mountains filtering a gorgeous sun and an ocean of trees giving me the pure oxygen i need to sustain my euphoria at such a sight. it was one of the most satisfying experiences ive ever had, there was no cost, only pleasure. maybe the hobos bet right, whats having the option
to eat steak to being able to live in stanley park? we laugh at the bag lady, her shopping cart is pitiful, but she is freer then we can ever hope to achieve. maybe we have to laugh at her, its either that or hate her for having a heaven we can’t hope to attain.
tory and i went for an easter dinner last night with family. small talk is an insight into the unsatisfying lifestyle that will darken most of our lives. tory making knowledgable well informed utterly meaningless points on why broke back mountain didnt get best picture at the oscars. my god who gives a faint flying fuck. we’re sitting in a eight hundred thousand dollar house, pulled up in my dads
mercedes, wearing brand name clothes and for gods sake eating an organic turkey, and we’re reduced to small talk that reeks of filler. this is the epitome of wealth: being able to luxeriate in meandering meaningless irrelevent activities. between having the option to work a lifetime to own a horse or work a lifetime on a horse my choice is easy, obvious and clear. whats the point of this, im
lost, there is one.
as maybe you know, tory can be a bit of a bitch when hes preening, so he was asking me polite as you please where i think my arts degree will get me. i told him hopefully happiness, and he smirked and i lashed out, asking him where will his commerce degree get him. his reply: a disposable income. i told him take his shallow life. maybe i was just mad, but torys was right, disposable income is the
dream. its how we measure ourselves. it is so meaningless. i worry for tory, i dont think hes preparing himself for an existence of merit, an existence that has no point beyonds a disposable income. i read this book where there was a faux letter from steven hawking, it was in prose striking me with its relevence, with the last three lines something like:
i wish i made something for lives to depend on
you ask what happens if you cant stop inventing,
what happens if you’re not inventing at all
we arent inventing at all, we’re having nothing depend on us. and you’re getting all emo from it(yeah i used the word emo, the kids use it, it works, lalallalalallalalala breaking pace of email). please dont give a fuck if you’re not a good driver, don’t give a fuck if you’re on msn with a glass of rum, don’t give a fuck if you can’t keep up to troy B. enlightened banter. what does any of
that mean? what depends on any of that? nothing is invented from that. my exam tomorrow i have to write about reductionism and holism, which i didnt know what it was before today so ill risk demeaning you by giving you a basic definition. holism is seeing the world as a whole, one giant organic beast, while reductionism is putting everything in boxes. its not a bird, its a crow, its not a crow,
its a corvus cox, etc. this is how i think most people see life, in a massively magnified reductionist lens, like zooming in a microscope onto a piece of lint and it is the focus, while if they were a little zoomed out they could see an entire universe of opportunity and pleasure awaiting them. please please zoom out, please be happy, i so want you to be happy because it is so easy to attain but
just a little bit easier to fail to grasp; if theres anything ive learned of human nature its that we take the easy route. dont take the easy route, grab a perception of happiness and view the world as it is: perfect. there is no life better then the one you are living right now, this second, this moment. its not a trick, its the reality, there is more pleasure in the act of breathing then every
movie ever made and think of how much more you are doing then merely breathing.
b
> [INTERSTITIAL — draft for Barrett’s voice]
> Exams ended and the year folded up underneath me. Everything in this stretch was written in the two weeks it took to say goodbye to a residence room.
## April 21
a journal entry in my journal, how ironic. i guess its gotta end sooner or later, my journals coming to a close, another stage of life gone. i converted my room into a bar. sums it up.
—
we’ll never all be togethor again
we’ll never laugh at anything as easily
as at a girls disfigured gait
or a mans massive girth
our times were easy
and blessed
we change
we grow
the last kiss of childhood
was spent in a basement
thank-you
for making my toes curl
and making memories
to be forgotton today
and remembered forever
love can only be pure
for what is gone
—
scent is the best sense
purity can’t be seen
its floating everywhere
for our last days togethor
the sun is at its height
there are no shadows
to blacken our landscape
so take a sniff
and remember what can’t last
its over now
yet it existed
and we laughed
and we lived life
and i can smell
the thinning beauty
of a dying caterpiller
stuck in its cacoon.
—
11 words to 40000. ive written a lot. exactly 40000 words.
—
just looking at you
i can tell i could talk to you forever
never need anybody else
anybody more beautiful
anybody smarter
you’re the missing half
of the whole thats been hollowed out
i wittled myself away
but you fill me
i can be
exist again
how pleasant
where pleasant means
everything
and i love you
id propose
just here looking at you
but you havent looked at me yet
and you walked off the bus
and i never will ever see you again
never
never
never is along time
hide who you are
hide who you want to be
what you like
the worlds stacked against you
there is a world stacked against me
what a life to have to shoulder
with so many other liers
—
ubc is over
this part of my life is over, i loved every second of it. but its over. so much has changed. i think i became better bigger smarter. maybe. but so much changed. people change. people become unhappy. the air of innocence is gone. childhood is gone. this is life, and whatever we make out of it. i hope i make something good out of it, but not everybody will, what a tragedy. there is nothing as bad
as watching a stagnant friend. im still in love and im still stupid. maybe one day. at the start of the year i said there was no rush, and there is no rush. i want it now. goodbye
—
## moving day April 27, 2006
bags are packed and im waiting for the father and a van. goodbyes have been said or will be said soon. i guess it was hard, who knows what zoe wants, S. didnt know, and of course guys make everything casual. ya. see you in a few years dahg HAHAHA. well i guess thats the truth. theres so much pressure still, i wonder if this is life, the waiting between changes. ill hande it, i have to, i dont
have a choice, i hate being choiceless but i dont hate anything. i hope i aced my exams. i hope i get into the army. i hope i go to ghana. i hope i get into gage. i hope i find love. and peace. happiness. ultimately though, thats all there is, just hope, no certainty. right now, this second, things are good. so ill hope, but ill enjoy this moment, this is the change im living breathing.
b
—
go to sleep and go pack why do people tell me they love me the day after i move away.
—
this is going to start with an apology and end with an apology. im sorry for sending you this, i sincerely am; i have no right to, who are you to have to hear my problems and even more who are you to know my problems. thats spiteful, im sorry. everybody has to talk to someone and that someone always seems to be me, but i have no one to vent to, im a different person to everyperson i meet but im
never me. maybe im more me with you since i know you more through a computer then through real actual interaction. im sorry for all those emails ive sent you before to, they’re awkward, emotion is an awkward thing, ecspecially when it is reprehenisbly transmitted. im sorry for this email, im sorry for every email ive ever sent you, im sorry for any email i will ever send you, im even sorry for
being so pitfully sorry. nobody is confident, everybody feels the same shames, the same fears, the same pains, confident people are just better actors. i need to talk.
maybe i just had the hardest conversation of my life. maybe i moved today and while im quietly vegging away checking minute facts about nothing this beautiful girl who went to ubc told me she thinks shes in love with me; that im the only person whose ever made her feel. just feel. not feel something, thats all she said, feel. you can imagine i had a million witticisms but instead i bit the bullet
and actually talked to her. its not her i need help with, shes gone, going to australia. more why would she tell me the day after i moved away. why would A. and jenn tell me the day after i moved away. its not them, its the way i treat them, they consciously try to bring it to a head before i go. i juggle, i play naivete with business and pseudo-philosophy. i keep them away. why the fuck do i
push every girl i like away. so why should you know, you must, ive thought you were someone to love when i first got to know you over a year ago, but you have a boyfriend so thats a rock wall. but if you didnt have tim id still push you away, we probably wouldnt be friends and i desperately want to know why. oh the coherence is losing, maybe i wont send this and do both of us a scared nicety.
lets start fresh.
what should i do to actually have something with anybody whose a somebody to me. thats a dead serious question to me. i was in bed with this girl a while ago, and she wanted to have sex, and the only thing i could rather drunkenly tell her is that whenever i get far i think of god. somehow i made that sound romantic or somebullshit since whats romanticism but the person whose receiving the words
perceiving them in a romantic manner, but she talked to me for a long time, thinking i was saving myself since the bible tells me to or something. all i could tell her then was i used to be religious, it wracked my subvert emotions, maybe you remember when i wore a cross everywhere on my left wrist, even if you never saw it im sure u could hear torys judgements on that. well i lied to her just
like i lied by using the symbol of a cross, it wasnt the christian god i cared about, it was the realization that there is forces out of my control. i stopped wearing the cross the day after bowser. i told the girl because god is watching, but i meant because theres more to you then you’ve given me and i want to know you before i know you. god is a force out of my control, i believe in a higher
power because i see creation and its perfection. i know nothing more then that. but i cant comprehend the randomities of an odds infused life like mine is going through the slot machine of divesting myself emotionally into someone ive known for what, months? how long does it take to know someone, youd have to be someone to know them and then how many people actually know themselves. but i want to
know people, i like to play things safe, but its not a safe world. so maam, what do i do? im not an idiot, but im not cut out for being human i guess. i dont want a million girl friends, whats the satisfaction when each one takes a piece of me. maybe i still believe in love being like a thunderbolt, that ill just see a girl and know this is it, propose now. maybe i dont know anything. not a
thing. at anything.
you’re the only person i know who can actually have the potential to say anything back. which is ironic since i really dont know you at all, maybe thats why though, when the explorers first found america they drew their own maps. i havent gotten to know you at all, so i havent taken the first step towards an impossible task and havent felt the frustration. i have a lot of friends but no friends.
i have to act for them all, im not trying to cry my sorrow, im pretty sure we’re always all acting. i dont know who i want to act in front of you yet though, if i say the witty sarcasms, the crude racial slurs, the thoughtless intellectual, the loveable goof, and 6 billions more disguises for six billion more people. before clay hardens it can take any shape, shapes that wouldn’t last in the
furnace. so be the person i want you to be this second, cut through all this ramblings of a tired confused teenager in love with his own voice and please tell me of a way i can cut through a million mental blocks and walls and have a way to make a difference, a way to make somebody feel for a lifetime. i want love.
now for the ending apology, as promised. a genuine apology is a rarity, there are so many apologies sprouting from so many misdemeanors that an apology is worthless just as a flake of gold is worthless in a barrel of sand. that doesnt mean that the gold is any less valuable; i am so so so sorry for sending you this. what right do i have to put my weight on you when you undoubtadly have your own
mountain on your back. everybody feels the same amount, its just in how we hide it, i guess im not a very good actor. if you get to here and theres a rotten taste playing on your tongue, delete this. if you’ve decided im to personal with a stranger then delete this and dont talk to me, what a world where we can put a person out of existence by deleting him from msn. if you ignore the
contradictions and tangents and see not an answer, since the question is impossibe but maybe a way to live, to come to terms, tell me. im polarized but i dont see a way to the golden mean. if you want to help but can’t, dont feel bad, or angry at me please, after all, i did apologizw :). who knows, maybe you feel just as fucked up as i do.
last thing, ive sent you some weird emails, and theres a rather bleak suggestion of who i am resonating through them. that residue of bleakness and everything is in a pit is not me, im a happy person. i could spend a day watching a flower bloom and count it as the best day ever lived by anyone in the world. its just i dont supress happiness or satisfaction, it bounds from me in every smile i give
to a stranger, every word i give to someone i love (but not love), every door i open for an elderly woman. i dont like to go to what doesnt make me happy, does anyone? but maybe im weak and have to get it out and i get it out to you. and im sorry for that.
b
ps. id delete this no matter what, i come off as a rather pitiful person, and i dont think you’d want it known to anyone you’re literally close to that i write like this to you. i cant imagine tim dreaming of me killing him is exactly a promising statement in how he subconsciously perceives me. why stoke a fire that shouldnt be lit.
> [INTERSTITIAL — draft for Barrett’s voice]
> Home to Nanaimo, then Europe with my brother — three weeks, ten cities, one cancelled Radiohead show. I wrote on trains, mostly in fragments, and I could already feel myself forgetting it while it happened.
today i officially moved away from vancouver. rez is moved out of, the ferry was boarded, im back in nanaimo, home is now actually a home. it was good, leaving, painful but good. its raining cherry blossoms where i walked and it was painful to watch, knowing that nanaimo doesnt have these, that it will be months and months and maybe never until i can be cascaded by endless individually perfumed
flowers again. i will never be in my rez room again, it wont be my rez room anymore, its not mine, like vanier isnt mine, im not a first year student anymore, im nota a second year. im not employed but i work. im a nothing in the middle of everything and its nice and its oh so hard. its painful. my friends are gone and who is left? my family is different since i am different, i want them to be
the gods i dreamed of years ago, even months ago. i want to be the worlds worst person, so that i can look up to everybody else. instead of blabbering about balance, where is the balance in pain and stupidity mixed with obesity and ignorance. that is not happiness. it takes knowledge to grasp the beauty in every shadow, like tasting a fine wine can be missed by those unused to the delicate
flavor, the world is being missed, none are attuned to its romance. stab the earth and call it beauti. there is nothing to compete with a tree, an ocean, a mountain, a person. nothing. put a tree in the center of manhattan over any statue, it will not disappoint. i hate the tree lovers, but they are right. they just dont take a step back, the trees are being cut down for them, no matter who we
are. a vegan doesnt eat meat but she kills animals. hypocrites.
—
and summer started this is from europe not about europe.
If I were to burn every fire to a shallow ash, there would still not be light enough to hide these ghouls. Horror sunders every bleak bellow of hope. Why does the devil caress? Where the sun burns the soul is flayed and where the water laps like acid against unsullied flesh there is a shrieking hedious abysmal wretch. Maybe millenia after the end of man, trees bludgeoning his foul wonders, there
will be the soft sing song of an elegant jay with no engine to blare past its bleat. When the liquid of our culture leeches softly through the cracks of our foul bowl, humanity laying gasping for an unanswewered breath, unchanged the wheel shall revolve back to beauty, Adam’s finger nails snapped to spouting fountains blood torn from futile feats to delve out of the thin pit he dug. There was
once a way out, before the murder of innocents rests on his conscience like a brand. May it burn every nightmare. Now let the carnivore eat her young to feed the fetus, and all fly to hades; her husk is horrible but necessary: a lesson, a testament, to what to much of trying to hart epitomizes. Let us be the example to the universe—there is nothing to gain from taking everything in existence.
She stands silent, alone. A sea of marble a cold ocean encasing her; combining with the endless silent depths of her eyes to make a statue out of flesh and living tissie out of dead stone. There is a beautiful scene here. Something to witness and remember, a second as my train blows lonely past. A memory I can share with no one is a memory that dies. She exists a world apart, a creature of my
mind no one might lighten back. I miss all my memories. The ones I’ve forgotton and the friends who have forgotton them. I miss so much, the tilt togethor of our heads, at a movie, the closest we’ve been to a kiss. The silent sobbing of a best friend disowning me, knowing its only my fault yet still I punch the cold pink stucco till blood sluices down to my wrist; angry at you for not forgiving
me one last time. The crude joke that introduced us, false pretences carrying to this day, we still don’t know each other, and I took an ounce of your innocence; I should be flayed. Chasing her in my car the day I move away and the day she says she loves me. Under a slide, my brothers friends, off limits but here they are pressed against me. Peeing on the side of the house, so new in the world a
decade and a halfs friendship blossoming. Being pushed into a thorny bush, tears rushing at the indignity of being powerless while my mouth delivers where my hands failed, I run from the angry. Having a sour drink, perched high on my bed, the pretence of studing long forgotton as we suck the last ounce of this soon to be splintered friendship. Sitting high atop the planetarium, a tropical forest
lit below us, a starry night serving as a ceiling, and my blossoming birth town; I said I could die this very night, 17 rings on my trunk, and have no regrets—there is only so much living one can expect out of a life, I reached it that night, that moment. Driving faster then I want, watching you breeze past me like a bird past a tree, I was scared for you: running ret lights, still I sped up, and
won; we laughed, still laugh about it, I was so frightened you mother fucker. We missed the bus stop screamed at each other over the mistake; we were best friends. At the center of thebridge, pinned as bikers blitz past, a sea plane gliding by just out of reach, how inspiring, how awe full. Out of a tunnel for just a second, luminous sunlight floods the drab cabin, a picturesque little beach
being buffeted by battling waves an inch away, back into the tunnel. How many memories make a man, and how many must be lost to kill him? Inertia all that carries most empty husks through repetition towards a grave, the endless dreams of fogotton days.
Florence was beautiful.
And where do the angels live when heavean is burned down? Maybe I don’t believe in hell, but I believe in Fire. As long as there is light and pain and heat over nothing this is still heaven. Save me from nothing. Please. please.
Maybe the day won’t break. No sunshine to tell the rooster that the day has begun, a blue moon the only light kissing the pale skins of kissing lovers wishing to see a world of colour. To kiss next to roses a pale shade of pink only visualised by girls dreaming of a sweet summer. Maybe the day won’t break, maybe the sunshine has been sucked out of our very blood.
When did I become a spark in the lightning? A piece of flashfire blinding the darkness the setting it ablaze. An inferno purifying by by stripping living flesh to a maggoty white bone. Pure is pure but pure is empty. Pure is a void, and I have made it. Nullified the sactity of sacrilegeous by minutely analyzing them: god doesnt exist, he is a chemical craveing.
I forgot the last time I cried, what a tragedy.
I’m so tired of talking to everyone else since everyone else isn’t you. I want to drown you in my rhetoric,flood your senses with my sense. Convert you into me, so I can fall in love.
Marry me tonight when we know nothing of each other or the world. Maybe we’ll be confused or scared but we won’t be alone. Let me gently touch the tip of every finger, count every hair on your head. Be my inspiration, my madonna. My true tale that you are alive with a beating heart, and since I exist to someone so fantastically real as you, I must be.
Attention please, don’t go beyon the yellow lines. (maybe coming from rome?)
that noise ive already forgtton in the monaco train station.
What an abject way out. Your peace for the dead when their breath isn’t out.Like angels playing harps in a rising sea of black acid. Sweet music still being made, muted by screams of pain as flesh melts into liquid. The horror is not in the agony but that each quivering second is the best second left—it is all made worse by time. Still the harps are played. Death does not come at once. Must the
stomach die to kill? Must the heart? The brain? One can live in a coma but die awake. A glance outside shows angelels with their harps writing in acid. Detrimental repetition has melted the mind to a paste worms could dismante no more. Greed and self loathing, loving. Has burnt the sould in a gray sallow ash. Only skin remains and this is no harbringer of life. Might it quickly catch to its
neutured cousin, end the dread existence of purgatory.Give me death, give me life, but never both.
Maybe I was scared. So much was changing so fast. Is changing so fast. Like a caterpillar in his caccon, unsure if his fate is to fly as a butterfly or perish in the cold breath of winter. Stuck immobile, there is still a plethora of of wodrously plausible options. If only I could stay lost in my dreams. Only one route can be take, in a life, how mundane. Why not let the day be a dream, and wake
up into sleep, where one night I can be a romantic hero saving my love from a fiendish tyrant, the next night be the billionair philanthropist who stops genocide. Why must I live in a world structured to structure my unstructured mind? My must everything be boxed off, emotion is not some rectangular brick! It is the sinuous river following its own route.Cutting what needs to be cut, but distinct
from every other river on earth.There is nothing that makes the desert sparse. Silent rivers flooding just out underground out of sight, and sunrises sorrowfully dominating absolutely. If you wish emptiness glance at a house encroached in the trench of suburbia. An unstoppable army. What a world to see, millenia built upon the back of millenia quanumed the metamophism of this rock into a one in a
trillion oasis. What luck to be in this spark of time to mark its downfall. Destruction has its own aspect of beauty.
it was a good try, miracles, but no one believed them. we asked god to prove himself, then analyze the chained reactions that allowed the wonder. How disparate the lack of perception: the chemical reaction is the miracle. Call fluke the wonders of the breathing forest, the rising as it sinks geography and a millions millions millions example of perfection. Math states perfection is only possible
theoretically, but here we are, living and conscious.
—
now I’ve always thought of myself as a nice guy, but im pretty close to head butting you (yes you), since somehow all my bragging about how I’m going to Europe has been paid back by people actually wanting to know how europe was. or at least everyone is very polite and pretends to be interested, but frankly, I always find peoples trip stories boring (no, not yours, yours was interesting (really,
it was, theres no sarcasm (hug?))) so I feel bad telling people mine. but apparently I’m supposed to say something, and here I have a bit of time (sorry for leaving your party xander, we’d come over, but its dark out, my cars breaks are giving off a smell of burnt small animal and I’m a less then good driver, a bad combo(does this go to xander?))(i use way to many brackets, its style, people work
to use brackets, i had a lecture on it, really). where was i, oh yes, i have a bit of time, i mean of course im usually busy, i mean friends and long emotional walks on the beach and making sure my hair swoops to the left, but now I have time, so heres the brief story of europe told with no lies so now instead of asking me how europe was you can be like oh, i read your email, want to get a
slurpee. so first off yes, europe was good. its all still there, everything smells like shit, ive probably told you that, its been my token answer to how europe was, seems like the most efficient way of not boring people. im your monkey. ummm, what else, i dont get how i should do this, so you have to suffer. you can skip this part, but if you actually got to here, congrats, and might as well
carry on, since apparently you too have a lot of spare time; try swooping your hair, its a great time killer. pout more too. so we did like everything, if there was a sight, we saw it, except david, cus there was a line up, and frankly, i saw this copy in vegas and i cant imagine the real one is worth 10 euros and a three hour wait when ive seen the vegas one. in fact, if you can only afford one
place to go to, go to vegas, they have every place, the venetian was better then venice. venice gets boring fast btw, maybe go for like 3 hours, we saw the canals, i got hit by a pidgeon, then we spent maybe a trimester of pregnancy riding up and down on these non gondala boats for free since we refused to pay for them; being cheap was a common theme for the entire tripe, i brought back a
chocolate bar for my mom (a milka, top of the top of the top of the line) and this rock that just fell off the colloseum. good timing, really really really good timing. shitty made building anywase, like, i saw the movie gladiator, and i figured they filmed it at the real thing, but guess not: the real things all crumbly. culture was not a strong point on the trip, sure we saw everything, the
louvre, the ufizi, the chocolate musuem, the van gogh musuem, but what the fuck do i know about art, so if ive seen it in a book i go wow, tory, that ones great, i mean the lighting, its genius, if its not in a book it gets a two second glance and a walk past since theres zero bragging cred. causes havoc if you dont recognize one though, i mean, do you know what the school of athens is? i sure as
hell walked past it more amazed at how some pope decided he wanted forty kilometres of hallways. maybe this is why catholics have no money now genius. or the pedophilia. anywase, yeah, culture, we did the stuff, but we did it our way, which was good, enjoyable and when im fifty and smart i can go back and go hey tory, the lighting its genius and actually know what im talking about since my
mothers fifty and she knows everything. anywase, this is rambling and starting to bore you (yeah starting, come on, we’re having fun here, this is a blast, an insight into barrett, what a good looking person actually thinks, take notes, maybe you to can gain that cheek structure so fine its been used to grate cheese) err umm, starting to bore you so heres the summary:
1. Europe smells terrible, like a mixture of diarhea, salt, and some type of body odour. not BO, something deeper.
2. You get tired of being dirty, all i wanted was to be clean and in nice clothes. i dont know how people go for months i was ready to come home at 21 days, you guys who went for a few months what the fuck, dont bring lice back to my country.
B2) if you go to lyndsay B. (who is a nice, beautiful, gracious host, whose house has no working light bulbs and is carpeted with a nice inch layer of body hair) dont have a shower, have one before, have one after. please.
B3) Kristing is also nice beautiful and gracious, and her showers are nice.
3. shit i keep getting side tracked. oh we saw everything but thats boring to talk about. like you really want a monologue of yeah, i saw the effiel tower (thats how the french spell it) it was tall, and monaco was rich and florence had good gelato. fuck thats boring. so assume we did all the shit in the travel book and it was good and if you’ve already been in europe chances are we had more fun
with it then you cus frankly we’re fun people.
4. radiohead was cancelled and i cried but amsterdam makes up for it, go there, marry me and go there. raise my children, i love you.
5. and thats about it, it was a good trip. honestly, bad smells and stuff aside, i loved it, everything worked out and everything was fun. and the weather was great and my happiness is usually directly proportional to sunlight.
ok, i feel content that you know completely comprehensively everything that occurred, I’m in town by the by, and I think I might have the rest of June off, so if you want to do something yeah, that’d be chill. And ummmm, hmmmm, now we need more small talk when we actually meet, the safe topic of europe is gone, school was long enough ago that its in the past, can’t talk, ummmmm, hmmmmm, the new
small talk conversation is about how tanned we are, and how its only the beginning of june but, wow, we’ll be black as a black person by the end of summer and you wont be able to recognize me and id love to put a shape on my body while i tan and make a body tatoo (not that i tan).
b
> [INTERSTITIAL — draft for Barrett’s voice]
> The end of that summer is the hardest part of this book for me to reread. I was drinking when I wrote, trying to write a book about not being able to write a book, and sending letters I had no business sending. Two passages in this stretch needed a decision: cut them and pretend I was never that person, or leave them in and say plainly that I was. They’re here. [Barrett: this frame in particular is yours to rewrite or veto.]
this is the one shot
the big time
not on some television
more like walking out the door
unbowed back
satisfied
understanding contententment
isnt forever or ever
that if its flushed you
take it
this is life
the not giving in
fight again
in your own way
smile when you want to cry
die if you were supposed to live
but never
ever
forever
give in
—
sometimes i pray for a gunshot
not to me
just someone suitably far away
so that i can wear all black for a reason
—
sadists clawing at my arms
make me drown in air
play football with us
damn you no
lets talk
damn you no
love me
damn you no
there is nothing i want from you, darkness
what is worth having i have
i can dig, devil, my heart is here
in my chest under scratch scabs
\
—
i felt like writing you and the first thing i thought of was if my mother would smell vodka on my breath if i had a few shots. how terribly terribly emo, and emo is the new nu metal, its so out and unstylish so ive got to pull up and just go with the lack of alcohol and over dramatics. do you still exist? i ask that of so many people and everybody always takes it as a joke, but it is such a
serious question to me. everybody i know and love has morphed, changed in a day or a year or a decade into something alien. curtis B.’s out snorting ecstacy, alexias gotten bitter, tory is manipulating my mother and you never talk to me anymore. its been such a goddamned long ten minutes, i went from being perfectly content and watching donnie darko, to sitting in the pitch black of my den looking at
my msn list getting not depressed but infinitely sad. theres a stark difference. it just seems that the world has moved on but i haven’t changed and im alone. i just wrote
so metamorphisis eats my mind
growth fed from the inside
every new beginning begs a new end
new friends for lost love
education at the expense of logic
my mind has a cancer
so large, so rotten
its fucked up
what an idea
more and more
where does more come from?
economics: infinite demand
in a finite world
ghastly, its permeated my soul
—
from jenn
I just received an email informing me there are thousands of single asians waiting for me. Thousands. Isn’t that amazing? All for me. And my work is so closely related… I feel like I know them, and their culture.
Thats how I stay happy. Finding humour in the most insignificant things so many people overlook.
In other news…
Today I pulled out onto the highway, and a car honked at me. I am so paranoid that by the end of the day I had convinced myself I had caused a three car accident, and a pedestrian was involved. I felt sick. Imagination is my worst best friend. I still need to learn how to apply it, or else I will die of an ulcer when I’m twenty.
Theres a quote from Dogma I find very relative to how I feel:
“Faith is a cup of water. When you’re young, the glass is small, its easy to fill. But when you get bigger, so does the cup. It’s harder to maintain, but every once in a while you have to fill it up.”
I’ve started to notice how much I have actually grown. Previously, my biggest dilemma was homework, fear; going to the principal’s office. Now, my dramatics carry some actual weight, they can change other people’s lives. I could drive home tonight, make a quick wrong choice and kill myself and 4 other people.
I’m blown away by the power of a second.
I guess right now I’m overwhelmed by responsibility, and how flimsy life is. Life; considered a foundation, is the most unreliable thing I know.
Change is good, right?
Do you remember what you were doing last week, or even last month? The amount of things I forget appalls me. This is my life, my ‘one time deal’ and if I were confronted with half of my memories I couldn’t claim them.
Now that we’re adults, we should seize the world. Its ours to mould. We’re the leaders. So why do I feel like I’m standing in my dad’s shoes trying not to trip.
-Jenn (I swear I’m happy) N.
—
## buhk beginning and maybe end
themes:
I) loneliness
a) technological seperation
-talk on msn, emails, phone, xboxs, watering down social interaction
b) no more shared experiences
-family dinner
-best friends
c) blight of every generation but distinct in every generation
II) average
a) apex of generational horror
-son of the hippi failures
i) where is there to raise when we burned our house down
b) lied to, said world was ahead of us
-didnt know how to choose the world, what we wanted was wrong
III) bleak made out of the beautiful
a) driving down the highway, a drone
IV) beautiful made out of the bleak
a) celebrities, shallowness, love stories and death war horror
V) interesting time to live, the end of the world (last line as ive decided now right now this second)
—
And I’m sitting at my computer and I have no idea what to write about. Just finished reading Time magazine for the week, making sure to read it in front of as many friends as possible so they realize how smart and good looking I am, when I read that “my” generations author hadn’t been discovered yet. Well, its talking about them starting (fuck my mom keeps talking to me, how am I supposed
to write the novel of my generation like this (shit, ignore that, it ruins the climax of the sentence all this is written in the middle of (hope this doesn’t break the flow))) at 30, so I’m 18, why don’t I just write the best novel ever for our generation now, then when I’m 30 maybe I can be a rap sensation or an actor. Fuck. That sentence doesn’t make sense, my fucking mother. Fuck. Ok. Well I
don’t really know how to write, so maybe don’t go by the writing, just turn this book around, look at the picture on the back. Aren’t I adorable? Yeah. I am. And I want to go to Africa to work at a school, I’m a triplet, I help out tweens on their problems, AND i work at a special needs camp. Isn’t this the type of person you want to be your generational voice. And for the ladies. Or queers, who
may I establish now I am a supporter of. But not gay. I also support woman and the metis. Ok for you lot; yeah, im hot, maybe the picture doesnt do justice, maybe I got a hair cut, I have great hair, but the point is, your generation voice could be a hottie. If my book wins, you could stay up and watch larry king, and be smart, and enjoy looking at my magnifecently rippled torso and emo sad blue
eyes.
Unfortunately, I just figured out that I don’t know how to write a book, have a topic to write about, or really give a fuck. Hmmmm. Well, lets introduce ourselves. (TIME KILLER) No its fucking not, you should know the author, understand his mind set, get into his shoes like atticus rambled about in to kill a mocking bird which I know you read beceause we had to; yeah school system, thanks
for pulling through. I remember in school we used to do practices of writing where we described our selves and we had to do physical and ‘non physical.’ Yeah, non physical–I think I just see the humor of that now. Spiritual will piss the non religious off and everything else sounds to yoga buddhist corny. Anywase back to how good looking I am. Wow. I get the ass, but I get it by being sensitive,
using my tremendous humor and impeccable style to worm my way into every girls heart, then fuck em, leave em, and tell my buddy curtis “i scored MOTHER FUCKER.” Non physically, I’m also pretty goddamned attractive. I’m pretty friendly and am told to go to hell a lot.
Ok this isnt working to make me figure out how to write my book. Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way, who really reads a book that starts with the author rambling on about himself. It’s supposed to start “in the water lightness grows” or “the fallacious feline fell far; grace had escaped nobility–passion.” But my books starting like a conversation to my best friend, who I dont have,
because I like everybody the same (dont tell my good friends that).
I’ve so far got a sheet running of some themes I’d like to incorporate into my masterpiece fame getter. Ideas such as loneliness, bleak out of beautiful (and reversed), all this grade A shit, like my profs would pat me on the head for but how do I, to use us authors slang, weave it into a story. mmmm, well. I could write about me, but name me one memoir that made somebody famous, besides
anne frank and she had the holocaust, maybe if I died in a giant oven after writing some innocent grade 2( fuck my mom is interrupting me again. I wonder if she has any idea that I am trying to work. Note to self for all you amateurs, working in the kitchen with an overly gossipycurious red headed mother dont get shit done. Here she comes again: oh cutlerys on sale. Thats actually good news, I’m
moving into cluster in rez and need to eat somehow. For my buddy walker, yeah thats his name, i know (walker texas ranger) i found i giant box filled with dirty cutlery, dishes, cups, everything i guess someone was stealing and gave that to him. I guess I have to buy it this year though since whats the chances of me finding that once, let alone twice. Ecspecially with him looking for it.
Hey I’m almost at 800 hundred words, I wonder how long a book has to be, maybe I could write a book about wondering how to write a book. How perfect would that be for our generation. I’ll get into an angry anti societal rant later, but right now the suns just starting to set, I’m in prehead ache phase but a head ache might come, and just all around in a non revolutionary mood. Oh wait, I
take that back, now you, yes you, mothefucker you better have bought this too, librarys are for whores and virgins. You’re normal right so buy the fucking book, its like what, 20 dollars, 25 max, splurge. Its not like I want an escalade, just a little mercedes to bomb around town in, likely black, then I can go from gang fight to gang fight and wow them with me cool car and soon to be learned
kung fu. One step at a time, just like mommy sais.
For the beginning of the greatest work man has ever seen, I’m deffinetely referencing my mother to much. I know, I know, shes good looking, she raised me right, or I’m of her blood, or whatever that joke is, but, what. I forget what I was going to say. The point is, no, you may not fuck my mother you sick perverted cocksucker. Well maybe not cock sucker. mmm, what would be a good curse
for a person who would like to fuck ones mother,,,,you Mother Fucker you. What a good swear, don’t use it, its copyrighted to Barrett Nash (me) on this day of days june or or july. July, i went to the fireworks (canada day, not 4th of july, call it america day idiots) and they sucked, people should not be allowed to see good fireworks cus then how can you go back to bad fireworks in your local
shit hole of a town. Anywase the fireworks were good but awkward because I decided to self narrate the story of the fireworks (a prerogative to my fine work here) and well, fireworks, uhhh, it was of a sexual nature. Lot of use of the word orgasm and thrust, and made it awkward for everyone around us.
My dad wants to go to Home Depot, don’t worry, I’ll get creative inspiration on the way.\
–
Well that was only like a two week gap, not anything to interrupt my continuity. Get it, there is none, I’ve really mastered the humor here. There is so much fucking pressure in a life. How the fuck am I expected to deal? I don’t really give a shit if I write a book, I just want to get the awards, go up on TV in a meticulously fitted suit, bitch on my arm looking at my cock and knowing
she’s gonna do what I fucking want. Who cares about the build up, its the end, I’d try to be a fucking rock star if I figured it was easier to learn music then just write and write for a few hundred pages and assume that the end result will just make some publishers day. Weed dream, not really, I figure I got the ball in my court. I’m 19, which means I can be the youthful maverick, explaining the
drudgery of my surroundings to so many adults who fail to realize why their children have hit a brick wall in terms of measurable life. They can just read this, go “ahhhhh, he’s 19, now I understand, my child is fucked,” and go back to their hidden joint and third wife satisfied it was the Playstations fault and maybe digital cable had been a mistake but oh well everybody makes mistakes right.
You motherfuckers rot in a hell you don’t get to choose. If you want cold I want to sear your flippant flesh, rip out your hair one by one, put your neck through a meat grinder. Make you suffer. Death is something we’ll all deal with, how rude.
But yeah, 19, so thats a total ace, that’s if I can finish this fucker within a reasonable timeframe. See I’m already preparing, I’m actually 18, but using 19, so I have over a year to finish this, and Voltaire wrote Candide in a week (or two I forget, facts can give way to approximation, its my book motherfucker) and he died so long ago and French is so much more eloquent then English
because it picks up english girls while English doesn’t pick up French girls so I should be able to write a full book faster then Voltaire, if only I could get some continuity unlike this multi week breakfrom my first writing session.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: FLAGGED PASSAGE 1 of 2 (readers’ assessment; V2 original line 5262). The paragraph below contains a shock-comic riff that trivializes rape. Per the blueprint it is not cut silently. My recommendation: KEEP verbatim, framed. Proposed framing for Barrett’s voice in the surrounding interstitial: this “book about writing a book” is an eighteen-year-old performing bulletproof cynicism at exactly the pitch of his real distress — the mask is the evidence — and the unsent letters that follow are the same voice with the mask off. If Barrett prefers excision, replace the paragraph with a visibly marked omission; do not trim it quietly.]
I’m a triplet too, figure that must count for something, when was the last famous triplet author, it’s a prejudiced market, better publish this book publishers or I’ll say you didn’t want to take the risk of signing me for my tripletness. Don’t play naive, you know what I talk about, the inhibit fear that my brothers will also have to get matching billion dollar contracts since they’re my
brother identical (how would you know they aren’t) and look like me and must therefore think like me but really they have none of my prosical genius (its a word) and is wasted money. Shit, I just made that up on the spot (can you tell) but now I’m worried that being a triplet might be a bad thing, running in turn to the fact I’m a liberal, male, white, christian with rather good looks but nothing
phenomonal enough to capitalize on I’m feeling a little bit fucked. Maybe if I do some attention grabbing thing this could be my memoir instead, run naked from coast to coast, has that been done yet? That would take to long, maybe become a hermaphadite stripper who gets raped, I could do that overnight and that shits reversible except for the rape and can it really be that bad? Girls always are
like “oh that would suck” but you take it from your boyfriend or husband and seem to like it, why don’t you just get in the mindset that the random guy is your bf; sure its hard but then you could enjoy it. No other species gives a fuck, why are we the exception, and no offence but its not like rapes a new thing, go ask some Carribean woman from any era other then our own escaping into eternity
and she’ll tell you its a part of life. Or so I assume, once again, the whole research of this is kinda hazy, not my forte.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: end of flagged passage 1. Text continues verbatim.]
Holy Fuck its hot out, I suppose if this is to be one iota as magnificent as something that exists I should bring up global warming, maybe then it can be “THE THOUGHTFUL INSIGTFUL LOOK ON GLOBAL WARMING BY ONE OF THE YOUTHS WHO SHALL SUFFER FROM THEIR PARENTS FUCKING INEPTITUDE.” I kinda like the ring of that, has that been done yet. And I wouldn’t even have to do any research, I watched
that Al Gore movie yesterday with my parents, my idea aren’t I a darling son, is there a darling son market? So he did the research for me, and I can just give my generational spin on it. Well, sorry to say, but I don’t really give a fuck. Why the fuck should I have to change my life from being the best living standards in history so China can just pollute its way past us whiteys to be the new
world powers, them taking our example to just get clean while Africa is fucking with the pollution. Like really whats the worste case scenarion: the imminent end of man? Well, we had a good run, the world will come back, it survived a meteor that wiped out all life and maybe we did worse then the meteor but thats why time exists to fix up fuck ups. Besides, earths gonna get destroyed when the sun
blows up anywase, might as well do it on our terms, teach that fucking sun it aint to hot. That wordplay was totally unplanned PS. It’s kind of a rush of adrenaline too, the idea that what countless generation upon countless generations of human lives took to realize, the total control of our world, nothing to fear from anything, will end in one brief flare up in time our total annihalation
purely on their own incompetency to realize when survival tactics became murderous. How wonderful to be in that select group of people who gets to watch the end of the earth, how many people in history get to see how this movie ends? Its a privilige.
But yeah seriously, maybe we’d better get better air conditioners because its good and all to say it’s sweet to watch the world end, but it is so fucking hot out, its giving me a goddamned head ache. Totally unfun. I think I’m going to go take a break, maybe go eat a piece of garlic bread, its so delicious. Or a popsicle, I’m not a big popsicle person, but seeing as its so hot out I can
make exceptions. Ciao
–
Back after only an hour break, smashing my previous multi week break meaning that if I can keep up with this ratio I should be done tonight. It shouldn’t take that long anywase, I was getting kinda bored with this whole writing thing, so I googled how long a book should be and the internet told me about 60000 words would be more then enough and I’m at like 3000 so only 60 writing sessions
or so which means if I write once every two days I can be done in about four months, just missing the holiday rush which is a good thing because, lets face this with a tad of honesty, maybe this isnt exactly holiday rush material. I wish I got in for boxing day though, catch some people with the massively reduced stickers.
My goddamned mother is back on her warpath of destroying my book. Its her country music award show, and every goddamned act “Barrett, its Brad Paisley” “Barrett its Faith Hill” I could not care less. Reminds me of being little, “Barrett, you have to listen to the words,” ummm, ok mom. “I’ve gotta BBQ stain on my white T-shirt” about somes it up, except for that lonestar song from
September 11ish that I used to deliver papers too, it was so nice. And Ryan Adams and Fleetwood Mac and Dixie Chicks but don’t tell my mom because then she’d think she’d won and my betterment of the Nash line by evolving musically above my parents would fail and lets face it, I don’t want to be the person to prove Darwin wrong. Understand? Certainly. Obviously by me rocking out to Boards of
Canada loudly, singing along to the incessent “the past inside the present” for maybe the thousand times its played in the songs gives me full right to mock the third rate poetry of Toby Keith’s plying inept ballads. We’re all fucked.
But notbody likes my music which must mean something right, I get to be an individual, break the mold, new word order. Nobody has my sight, don’t you motherfuckers get it, its beautiful, how did they do it, “Ice age coming Ice age coming” good job Radiohead I fucking love you for saving music from guitars since I can’t play the guitar but I’m good at computers so keep on with your tech
whodunit and maybe I can compete too.
I got typecast as the idividual in my family, how fucking ironic is that. One brother the sports/science god, the other brother the social prince and me: the individual. I always figured individual meant being seperate, uncategoricable (i’ll spell check that later) and here I am typecast as being impossible to pin down. Boo. Not really anything fucking special about being an individual
anywase, its the in thing. Oh wow, you made your own pants, thats so sweet, yeah, that music has a screamer spouting lyrics in a purely unlikeable, intentionally ungoddamned likeable style, its so our own, way to be seperate, lets all wear black hair and smoke weed and collectively fail in every measurable form of anything, wow, we’re so fucking individual. Ok, maybe we’re (i include myself)
fucking idiots. It’s understandable right, how do we compete to out parents, the baby boomers, the most profitable generation in mans history, fucking changed the world in a day more then a generation would in, well, a generation, how do we compete, just make another internet. Makes it way easier, just spout garbage about how meaningless their accomplishments are, who gives a fuck if you make a
lot of money you never lived a fucking day in your life. Go enjoy your beach at 80 grandad, I’m a fuck up now, be a fucking individual. Don’t worry though, the individuality movement is already failed, gotta rock the free fucking world, so I’ll work 100 hours at my dead end job for a new amp. Participate to society more dronish then anyone before us, our deepest questions are answered. This is
getting kindof bullshitty, maybe I’ll take a break now, come back when I’m more geniusy. I bid you, sirs and madams, a good night. Stop reading here. Stop it. I say stop it.
—
2) While maybe my reasons for trying to write are a tad shallow, I do think I have a viable view point. Maybe its been beaten into the ground by Al Gore monotously talking, boring everyone to tears, Annan calling another desperatate unanswered plea, or that bitchy woman who lives next to Bush’s Crawford ranch that nobody likes. Maybe my views the same as theirs, but I got to have some
message, some underlying theme to make so much waste at least have a hint of resonance.
I believe my generation is suffering under the blistering, horrifying truth of being average: perfectly, monotously average. We are at the height of the greatest civilization ever recorded, every day bringing man to new greater heights, yet here we sit, wasted, not defining ourselves in the slightest. When we wake up it is to go to work and put our minute meaningless work power into
furthering civilization forward. Consciously, we participate as a clog, the trillionth decimal point on the equation of the humanitys machine. Ultimately, we have achieved the communist goal of the greater good on a scale unfathomed by the likes of stalin of Mao, since we are not forced, we take nothing for ourselves.
Somehow I just don’t understand. Why did I go to school? Why did I love my family? Try so hard, so fucking hard. For this instant? What is so great, why is this better then the unknown darkness of death. Pray for a dream during sleep, same chance in oblivion. Give me god but this inbetween gray is wretched, so wretched, like a flight forever in that weightless second of takeoff: my
stomach is forever heaving in my mouth. What travails as a life, we are robots.
> [INTERSTITIAL — draft for Barrett’s voice]
> The first journal ends here, and the second one starts the way the first one did: tired, in love with somebody unavailable, taking attendance of everyone I couldn’t hold onto. Then back across the water to a new room at UBC.
## august 5
todays spencer pools pool party, hes leaving and i think thats ok. i think the seperation, the transitional era of highschool to post whatever is finally finalizing. hes going, ill miss him, but its ok. its a good feeling, we’ve had our good times, might still have more, but they exist and thats all thats necessary. i think im finally untired. i think its almost time for this journal of sorts to
be over; i read over it and enjoy every word I’ve written. the memory there in front of me of who I was at that second, but it is not me anymore. Maybe I’m less, maybe I’m more, but the change is there, I can feel it. My first entry, I could not write today, and I would not want to write today. If this is how it ends, then good.
—
## B year 2 journal.doc
well i guess im tired. best way to start my next journal, tired from nothing, pissed off at family, lonely and unprepared. I guess I’m happy somehow, maybe even today was a great day, but right now my mind is in a state worse then drunk: inoberable. I guess thats not a word. Whatever. I’m feeling empty, not like some hole inside me, like I’m not a full creature. I am lacking something critical,
a man with lungs, a brain, a heart but no liver. Something critical that I don’t understand.
I can’t love anyone. But I want to. I want to love every girl with deepest love of the world, drown them in my thoughts, be comforted with their returned love, slake my thirst for having a person to be with, to exist, to prove I exist. Why can’t I have that, technically shouldn’t that be every girls dream? Isnt that what they want, love pure, not just for sex but for a soul? I guess I’m
not the anomaly in being a liar, maybe it is all a game, gotta make sure we look good on paper but who gives a fuck I want to fuck. fuck you i want interaction.
Last years journal started with me whining for N., i wonder if there’ll be a new girl to whine for this year. Its neverending, find cute girl, fall in love, make friends with them, dont want them. I should jsut start kissingthe first cute girl I see, and explain everything after, show them its not beacause I’m a monster, some rapist motherfucker, but because I’m not. I just want to love
you.
Maybe that is so bad, I don’t want you to have a career, I only want you to have a life when I’m not around in which case be busy, be productive, I don’t want anything but love. i can find my insight from others, I can get my love from you. Keep it seperate, else the world might start existing only with you, I’ve stayed away from drugs, don’t let me wreck myself over a woman.
Am I dissappearing, how do I know that I’m not. How do I know that the best times aren’t gone, how do i keep topping myself without going into taboo. I’m already riding in taboos. It feels like every step forward is ripping a step out of my past and pincering out a vital part without me even recognizing it. Its filling a glass up from one of my old glasses. There can only be one full, now
theres one being empty and one barely filled.
I’m going to go read, be invigorated, today was a good day.
—
aaron: i wanted to fix you but couldn’t
alexia: i loved you and we are different now
A.: i miss your humor and being so tight; seperation is a disease
e.: we have our times, but seperation is important to friendship
bjorn: of the trio we were weakest yet you are purest to what we were
brandie: i hear stories, gossip, but dont care, i miss your warm house
cam: you are cool
christian: we are similar deepest down
christine: i love your sugar gum outlook, your cuteness, you’re out of a movie and its good
curtis: you made me who I am and now you’ve receded, no competitionbut i miss you so so so so so much
fatu: you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met, and you respected me, and now i have an ego
garrett: we were good, then so wretchedly bad, now good, i like you, i sense so much potential that i cant tap but love having it there
isaac: maybe our time is over
jill: be cute forever, remind me the world is beautiful
jason: we have the world at out fingers and its a bitter pill to swollow jenn: i think i love you
jenny: cute, a novelty, Im sorry but theres not much left between us
jordan: im scared for you
julie: i miss you, you were something that can not be found from here
katie: i think you like me to much, it scares me
kim: how did we interact, I miss that ability
kurtis: we are very different people my friend
lyndsay: you’re fun, but you have something, an outlook maybe, that is addictive
N.: you arent what i wanted, what i prayed for, but you’re beautiful and soft and a friend forever
pete: u’re bad in a group, but i say you’re bad alone. i like to relax, you help.
radu: there is no diet radu, you are to much of everything and its great
mike: i lived with you for a year and still dont have an opinion: a nice guy
robbie: u dissapoint me
sean: we had some best times togethor, teaching you the world taught me
robyn: peripheral vision—always
shaun: i will remember you till the day i die
S.: cute, deep.
spencer: kindergarten, we shouldnt be friends but we both gained so much
tra: i am in horror at myself for squandering my potential to help you. for what. fuck my god my god, fear strikes at every man.
troy: i would do anything for you, just to be the only one who equates your bargain
victor: you’re a nice guy in every way i can find, i like that
walker: you’re fucked up and a genius. cool.
xander: maybe a little metro, but so am i. in some ways a mirror, enough ways different to feed off each other
zoe: you suck at a part of my soul, if only you were beautiful or I wasnt so shallow. i could never feed you anywase. we each bit into our dreams.
im the one with the problem. a cancer, i eat off you untill im full: onto the next person.
—
## August 8, 2006
we are all so into ourselves, so terribl terribly into ourselves. i worry constantly about what other people think about me, if they are having more fun then me; i see the same questioning in their eyes, we are all scared of each other, privately horrified at a communal secret.
—
its windy out and all i want to do is go out into the crisp night and suck in the wind but I can’t. I remember being 14 years old, staying up till 3 am just walking and walking and walking. me and my friends, we thought we were smart, that we were unlocking the locked secrets of life just by the power of our combined voices. maybe those were the best moments of my life, how can you measure. I
can’t do that anymore, or more correctly: I can still do it, want to still do it, but theres nobody to do it with me.
i guess thats where you come in. I was just at my uncles house north of toronto, and he, and my aunt, and my two baby cousins were off at the minute hours of the morning doing errands so I did the natural thing and woke up and went through their possessions. naturally, being an idiot, I got sucked into not my aunts diary or their rather large liquor cabinet but a book on how to raise children. to
me it was such a neat reflection piece, to see how my age group is percieved so I can go “Uh HUh, you were fucking wrong, it wasnt like your book at all.” Well, it kind of was like that book, science, I guess it’s good for something, and it had an entire section on first crushes. It stated that theres a large chance that most teens will have a suffocating first crush, somebody to live and die
for, somebody more real to them then reality, since they imbue on this person characteristics which she might not have. Maybe ignore her meaness because how could the person you’re in love with be mean. The book continues on to say that as the realization sinks in that the person of reality does not match up with the person in your head, the relationship will start to flounder, and after a
certain amount of relationships like this, a callus will be created and there will be a more realistic insight into a persons character.
I guess I’m on the stage of beginning to see the reality is not what I have matched up into my head. Maybe the fourth time. So I’m starting to think the book is right, my minds constructing it, and I think it such a tragedy that likely soon I’ll be hit with a dead pan view of the opposite sex; the ability to list the pros and cons of an individual into some equation of their worth certainly lacks
the magic of any real romance. i like the fantasy in my head. i like just the thought that there is perfection out there. better to have happiness unattainable then non existent.
well maybe I lied, I guess this is where you come in. I think you’re the type of girl who could just go for a walk with me at 1 am on a windy day and be perfectly content talking the night through. no pretensions, no unhappiness, just the drunk joy of virgin minds feeding. my dilemma is I’ve met the perfect girl so many times, then gotten to know her and suddenly the perfect face from a distance
is covered in wrinkles and her breathe smells like garlic. I’m pretty sure the depressingly pessimistic view of endless relationshipd of know one fitting the bill as right for me has fluttered through my mind more then once. right now to me, you’re perfect. you’re intelligent in an unpretentious way. you’re funny but never hurt anyone feelings. you have goals but live in the moment. you’re
charismatic, admirable, gorgeous and perfectly distanced.
so im being kind of creepy right. im implying i want you to be my frozen madonna, and am also implying i don’t want to get near you because those qualities you see shining from my eyes reflecting back at you could be castles of cloud, my own devising. well i don’t think they are, i think you’re closest to my idea of perfection then anyone i’ve ever met. i see you tell a joke and other people
laugh to, theres a base for my asuumptions.
—
I read today that not thinking kills brain cells. Immediately I started thinking.
—
see i wrote this to jenn but wanted to write it to you but have convinced myself that you arent who id write it to because you are water to my oil and thats what lets me breathe as a fish out of water. still i wish id written it to you.
—
i dont think you have any idea of how much i write to you. if the words were put togethor thered be a novel, the characters might describe a life. i write them so much and its always the same sentences, the same sentiments, the same uneeded words spewing out to an audience that wouldn’t care and wouldn’t want such words spouted in their direction. i saw lynsday B. tonight, i tried to be
entertaining to her, i hoped she might tell you how fun i am, i baked a cake that ended up with her last week, i hoped that she might tell you how thoughtful i am. i feel like a satellite orbiting you, always in the periphial but always there.
between this paragraph and the last one i had two swigs of vodka. i hate vodka but its probably the liquor i buy most, i feel its the expected liquor to buy. i dont know how rum hurts me, how tequila hurts me, but i know how vodka hurts me and its a pain i can handle. every time i write i drink. i have a hundred and sixty pages of words, how many drinks does that entail, how may drinks equates to
drunkeness. contrary to the popular story telling of an ill begotten prom night i am no drunk. drinking loosens the lips, makes us the person we are to scared to be, my last letter to you that i couldnt send to you was how i was desperately searching for someone to walk endlessly in the windy night with me; a few drinks makes me realize i can be alone and still enjoy the sultry night.
i dont really know what to say to you. you have an effect on me. its harrowing. i think harrowing is my favourite word, it expresses so much of the human dilemma. ive tried and tried writing adjectives to make a picture of you. they always seem hollow, something you’d laugh at, make an awkward time killer joke about then back to our real typical conversation. things like how you’re a magnet, how
you can not attract but imbue the energy of an entire party in one look, how your words are edible in the sense that they have the ability to sustain my starving mind. words are so meaningless in describing a person, a thousand words to describe a picture, how much more vibrant reality is. i don’t know what to say to you.
last year, maybe on this day, you sent an earthquake through my equilibrium. im a typically composed person. just seconds ago i went upstairs, and my mother rather casually gave me my fathers gold and diamond studded watch, i refused it. im a larger then life person because i intentionally make my life so small that i have no option but to burst its seams. i keep my cell phone on vibrate. never
tail gate in my car. always let my phone ring twice before picking it up. and certainly dont wear a several thousand dollar baroque gold watch. or be lossed in the romantic ambiguities of a fit for tv A per typical teenage relationship. i try to fit between the lines i set and am overwhelmingly happy because my lines are so narrow that i burst them.
to me the most admirable life is that of a tibetan monk. a life of prayer in archaic splendor, a life of peace with no worries but the betterment of man: how admirable. but ive grown up around excess, always wanting more, capitalism has sunk from the nike commercials into every pore of my skin untill i live and breathe with the idea of how i might better myself. im trying to write a book about
writing a book, that is a bound i can limit myself to, a task i cant implode, there is no option but success. and in my mind it brings me the artistic and commercial success i crave. how bening a dream. how meaningless.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: FLAGGED PASSAGE 2 of 2 (readers’ assessment; V2 original line 5595). The paragraph below contains a racist, eugenic fantasy (“let the africans die… castrate them. everyone.”) and homicidal ideation (“what if i killed someone”), written while drinking, inside the same letter that holds some of the truest writing in this volume. My recommendation: KEEP verbatim, framed. Proposed framing for Barrett’s voice: this is the nadir the whole Youth section has been falling toward — nihilism said out loud to see whether anyone would stop him — and the book’s honesty about it is what licenses everything gentler around it. It should be named as repugnant in the frame, not sanded out of the record. If Barrett prefers excision, mark the omission visibly.]
my problem is the search for a meaning. im sure humanitys purposes have withered away. we are hunters, we hunt to survive. that need is obsolete but still we are hunters. now we prey on clothing, have to get the best deal. prey is money and we will strike it down into our bank accounts, even when we have more then we can spend. winter might come. there could be thinning months. we are animals, i
cant understand the christian seperation of humans, one glimpse of my mother with a dollar off coupon on wonderbread is enough to prove to me the same wild gene inhibit in cheetahs and the fair swallow also inhabits my mother to her very core. i have no meaning. i have nothing to hunt for. i think maybe i can make money and use it wisely. but then i think if i save an african he’ll have nine
children and they will all starve till hallow, swallowing air untill their stomachs implode. let the africans die, a kindness. castrate them. everyone. what a solution. how can i help, i could write but only in my fantasys can i write anything. sometimes i think what if i killed someone. imagine the effect id have, the biographical significance of ripping a page out of the book of man, how
meandering the world would be without me. id change so much. so many people who would not meet my creature the corpse, so many shoes that would not be bought, bread that would not be eaten, children that would not be raised: id change the world so very very much. i search for a meaning because maybe i have no meaning and no way to get a meaning. tory wants to rise up in business, his existence is
the begetting of money to insulate his secular lifestyle, stuck in the religion of materialistic demigods. worship the dollar because the dollar steals heaven. i cant go that route it eats my mind. reston is alive for the furthering of the destruction of the unknown, a day is wasted where some secret goes unravelled. engineer a bridge to cut across the virgin forest, it was impossible but didnt i
prove you wrong. i love the mysteries of the world, i wish so hard that god hadnt been tainted in my eyes by the prying conniving hands of science. the easy lucious route of religion is denied me by my own doubting heart. i can’t solve the mysteries of the world, their solving eats my mind.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: end of flagged passage 2. Text continues verbatim.]
i just want to exist. and i was making a success of it. i lived in my imagination and it was beautiful. no hard decisions to make when i ride a white horse and am the essence of purity. i cant just exist, the termite nature of man fills me. i want the world but cant have the world but i see you and want you because you can have the world but cant have you because you can have the world and i cant
have the world
thats probably the easiest i can say how i feel for you
ive tried writing pages to you and they only feel like nails on a chalkboard, unreadable for their misguided sentiment. maybe i want you but shouldnt have you because ive made you perfect in my mind and am scared not that you might not fulfill that perfection but perhaps you will and then what and what if you are perfection and i cant have you how can i ever settle for less then perfection.
there are so many conundrums. it seems easy to stay in my narrow scope. happy as i break my narrow bounds. snap the little elastics, never think theres a greater purpose. i am happy. and thats depressing. happiness should be fought for. but fighting is fearful because theres the chance of loss and herw i am happy as a clam but why are clams to be thought so happy.
this feels like another letter i wont send you. one ill save for a week then delete out of the isolated fear that somehow tory might scour my hardrive and read my meandering thoughts and condemn me with belittling humor. how much life is missed in the fear of others judgement. all i want to tell you is that youve sent me emails and you spout garbage. you say driving is horrible since you’ve been
a cause of disaster, that you drink to isolate yourself from some intruding reality, that life isnt paying off on what was promised and all i really want to tell you is that it better be fucking paying off for you. you’d better be a motherfucking better driver then me because you are everything, and i can settle for being less then everything but everything has to be everything. maybe every
person inhibits reality to the fullest. maybe its just the study of you has revealed the perfection of eve to me, the same statue sculpted by god yet still causated the fall of man and endless suffering. maybe im perfect too and perfection is the fulfillment of being tragically flawed. maybe im in love with you. maybe i dont know what love is. maybe it doesnt make a fucking difference.
b
—
im no tragedy king, i think the french saying is i fucked up, but i disagree. im not going to lie, i think theres the potential to find perfection in every single person on the face of the planet, everybodys marrying someone, why shouldn’t i have my two contrasts. i dont get either or try to get either, all i get is thought and drunken mistakes of making life easier by not having to spout
gibberish twice, writing was more for me to get things off my chest then the good deed of the day letting you know you’re wonderful. i move in fucking three days, i didnt want to go with sentiments unshared. thanks for the coldness though. and stripped sincerity, id tell you to fuck yourself if it wasnt such a sunny day and anger so understandable. stripped sincerity. you strip my mind with your
aloofness, with your detached air of meaningless, with your chilled emotion. i dont really have anything else to say. id say im sorry if that would make you less volatile, but ill take the male route of saying i didnt do a fucking thing wrong. christ. there is only one way to say things right but such an infinite way to say things wrong. i must have a thousand left feet. maybe ill find you today,
but i think you’re determined to take my writing and equate it with nothing. how degrading. i think you just might delete this before reading it, anger overriding curiosity of how scum flails in the gutter. i suppose i can be your monkey. im going to reiterate myself because this has shied away from any point i might have made into a justification of a self confessed fuck up. i dont justify
anything, i just say it wasnt the wrong thing to do, a world away from being the right thing to do. i always take pictures of myself at the computer with my brothers camera, i like knowing who i am exactly at a certain moment, i find it centering, maybe i dont know who i am but the picture can show it to me. right now i look angry and im so motherfucking angry with myself because i did strip
sincerity away, i built up more sincerity then ive exhumed in a lifetime and squandered it. what caucophony, treachery of a mind whose walls ive never felt betrayed by. i dont think ive ever been at a point where im completely lost for words such as this second. id apologize but that would be stripped of sincerity. obviously this muddled confusion is making you feel better but there needs to be a
strait out of this wreck because i cant leave knowing that ive hurt you, or worst turned you into an ironic enemy whose sarcastic eyes eat away my every move or worste yet turned you into an uncaring former friend. obviously all fun objects. can’t you see why harrowing is my favourite word. i think i wrote that but im far to scared to look back and check. what i wrote to you is, i think, the
greatest thing ive ever written. its only competition is one of my other letters to you from february. it felt so complete, it was a rush to know that i hadn’t peaked in february, that talent if i have any hasnt dissapeared; obviously we differ with your sarcastic reference to genius, but i felt my emotion i wrote to you was the purest output of myself that ive ever exhibited. i wasnt going to
send it to you, i think silence is better then shouting but I felt i could never equate what i felt quite as perfectly as it exploded out of my fingers two nights ago. i sent it to N. too. i have feelings for her, different then what i feel for you but words are words and i felt (apparently so much but my over use of the word) that i could never tell her how i feel for her as perfectly as i told
you, that perhaps the words are for a different person but just so she can see the depth i have for you could exist for N. too. that id wished it was for her because i could never write such things to her. its like a poem written for a girl and yet everybody might take pleasure in it. i want you to feel better, i want you to read what i wrote and have it not be tainted. maybe day dreams are an
addiction, more of my life is spent in the what ifs then the what ares. this is still said wrong. but im sorry, i think this is the best i can do right now. im hollow with unshed emotion, i put a dent in my year books edge when i kicked it and said a motherfuck loud enough to kill a dog a block over and am so hollow now. im sorry, i dont want to wollow in dirt apologizing, im not worth it and my
sense of self respect has been shaken enough. but i am so sorry.
b