observations – Page 5 – Jamais Mayville

Disgusting Stuff

Sometimes, I’ll think of something so disgusting that I make myself cringe. I can usually keep from saying it out loud, but even if I don’t say it, I find myself dwelling on some horrific stuff.

The other day, I described a handsome man as “hot from his pores to his sores.”

I thought I’d forgotten it. I did not forget it. And now, because I can’t forget it, I’m sharing it with you.

This isn’t the only 🥴 thought I’ve had this week. The other thought was about a line in Megan Thee Stallion’s “Simon Says.” The part where she talks about tights and … parts of the human anatomy. Big-built parts of the human anatomy, in particular.

I listened to that song on the day it was released, IIRC. In all my years of listening to that song, I’ve never said anything unsettling or cringeworthy about the lyrics. But now, in 2023, I managed to make myself cringe by saying, “He can tell this ain’t no Slim Virginia.”

Meg, girl — I — I’m sorry. From now on, I’ll only post peer-reviewed bars.

I immediately wanted to tape my own mouth shut. I absolutely need to spend time on something more productive.

I should probably invest in some duct tape, anyway. I never know what horribly corny thing I’m going to think of (or say) next.

4

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I make the number 4.

I do this with my legs. I put one foot under my knee, in an attempt to warm my feet — which in turn (usually) helps me fall back asleep.

Just throwing this out there, in case it helps anyone else who’s struggling with falling asleep. Melatonin probably works better — but making-a-4 is free!

The Squelching ‘20s

“It suxx that I was born in 2047. I wish I’d been a 2020s kid!”

I want to preface this by saying that I’m not a bitter or mean person. Whenever someone says something like that, it generally means that they’re about to say something wildly cruel, ignorant, or insufferable.

I promise that this isn’t the case. (This time, anyhow.)

Let me start back at the beginning — that manufactured quote, about life in the 2020s — and life as it’s going to be perceived by future generations.

I try not to fall back on pessimism, but it’s safe to say that we’re living through some wild times right now. In spite of that, in twenty or thirty years, our kids (or our grandchildren, or perhaps even our great-grandchildren) are going to romanticize life in the ‘20s.

But these are not the Roaring ‘20s. These are the Gasping ‘20s, the Sobbing ‘20s, the Squelching ‘20s.

Certain things have made life in the 2020s so … disconcerting. There are many lovely things happening right now that are worth celebrating — but there are plenty of trends that are less than swoon-worthy.

The same way that Millennials have cringed over photos of their Spandexed, bemulleted, and acid-washed ancestors? Generations Beta and Gamma will scream-laugh when they see an IG Reel featuring their grandpa’s gas-guzzling, vinyl-wrapped, Carolina-tilted Ford F-250 Super Duty. They will hoot and holler when they see their meemaw’s Shein dresses and Fashion Nova janties.

And I’m not a hater — I swear! After seeing The List — a compilation of the side effects of pregnancy, meticulously logged by a young TikTok user — I felt like I could do something similar. I wanted to start a catalog-slash-index of the worst trends/moments/crises of the 2020s.

And so I did.

Here’s a running list of things that have made the 2020s less than romantic:

anti-intellectualism
artificial intelligence, misuse of
cryptocurrency
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
dogs inside restaurants
facial-recognition technology, abuse of
fast fashion
high-beam headlights
hostile architecture
housing crises (mortgages, rent, and homelessness)
hydraulic fracturing
inclement weather, higher frequency
insurance ads, unfunny
insurance companies, greed
janties/jiapers
low-rise jeans, revival of
main character syndrome
Marvel movies, ubiquity of
mass shootings
media illiteracy
monthly subscription services
multi-level marketing schemes
non-service animals, service vests on
opioid crisis
over-the-shoe bodysuits
pandemics
pivot-to-video
plastic, single-use
politicians, authoritarian
price gouging
public health crises
1. See pandemics and opioid crisis.
push notifications
road rage, increasing
Shein
1. See fast fashion.
side hustles
spam callers/text messages
streaming services, enshittification of
SUVs, increasingly large
tip creep, self-service checkouts and
tornadoes and tropical storms, increasing prevalence of
Twitter, downfall of
vaccine denial
vindictive landlords/AirBnB hosts
wage gaps

I believe that the only way we’ll be able to counteract the worst of this stuff is by talking about it, so … let’s not sweep it under the rug. Let’s acknowledge it. Let’s talk about it.

And in the meantime, I’ll keep adding more entries to this list.

A-Fiction

After spending the past year writing essays on Medium and newsletters on Substack, I’ve accepted that I’m more of a non-fiction writer/essayist/blogger/ex-journalist than an author of fiction.

I’ve tried writing fiction. I think anyone who enjoys writing for the sake of writing — or storytelling for the sake of storytelling — has made up a character or two. Or they’ve built a secret world, or drawn up a fake map, or imagined a new place.

And I’m not just talking about fantasy writers — I’m talking about folks who write romance, contemporary fiction, literary fiction, and dozens of other genres and sub-genres. Inventing fake people, fake colleges, fake bands, fake music festivals, fake contests, fake romances, and fake countries is pretty fun — and it’s common across the genres.

Having said that, I have such a tough time writing fiction, because I often fall back on my real life for inspiration. I can write about stuff I don’t know about. (I love doing research — and I’ve always worked in research-heavy fields, so I know where to find good sources.) But I like to write about real people and real memories and real places.

Lately, I’ve spent time working on a … short story? A novella? I don’t even know what I want it to be — I don’t want to overwrite it, so I imagine it will be fairly short.

Even though I don’t know how much I’m going to write, or how I want to end it, I know that what I’m writing is a love letter to three separate, imperfect parts of the South: the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, the river-lined wedge of western Kentucky, and the wide-open Llano Estacado, in western Texas.

I’ve written before about another part of the country my family hailed from — the Chesapeake and Outer Banks areas. I wrote a bit about these parts of the world in Alameda and Sabrita, two short stories I wrote back in my early twenties. That was a while ago, when I was first getting my footing as a writer. (I’m still getting my footing, all things being equal.)

But this new story — Old Granddad — has the flavors of the other places my family has called home.

Speaking broadly, I come from a part of the country that’s been a land of growth and a land of cutting-down. Black and Indigenous people, poor people, working-class folks, and women and children have faced adversity — and triumphed against it — in this place: the South.

My own family eked out a living by doing just about every typical working-class job. From the earliest colonial years, my ancestors were sharecroppers — and at least one of my ancestors was an enslaved person of Congolese descent. These early ancestors of mine certainly didn’t have an easy time here in the South. But our family remained here for generations, making a living one way or another.

My great-grandmother was a sharecropper, a clothing factory seamstress, and a caregiver for her murdered brother’s children. Her daughter, my maternal grandmother, was a maid and a hairdresser. My maternal grandfather was a veteran, a cattle farmer, and a machinist. My paternal grandfather was a coal miner, a crane operator, and a logger.

His father — my great-grandfather — was a bit more carefree. He spent all day doing nothing, and then spent all night drinking and playing cards. He once sold a box of turnips weighted down with rocks, and the grocer bought it, so I can’t say he didn’t make at least one attempt to feed the family. But my paternal great-grandfather was the direct opposite of my maternal great-grandmother, who nearly broke her back working as hard as — if not harder than — any man in her family.

At the end of the day, my maternal great-grandmother and my grandfathers were probably the three hardest working people in our family. Their toiling was brutal — and they were underpaid, under-thanked, and under-rewarded. Their effort was all worth it, and they knew love and respect and support, but they never could be thanked fully and properly for all the sacrifices they made.

These two sides, paternal and maternal, met in me. I’m three parts hard-working, one part ready to take a break. (That’s thanks to my great-grandfather, who made recreation his life’s work.) I feel like I owe them all something that I can’t quite give them.

In some small way — to record bits and pieces of their stories, and to incorporate these stories in whatever I’m writing — I hope I can preserve their memory. FI may not be able to do a lot, but I want to try to do that.

I want them to live in, in stories, in recollections, in warm memories. They live on, in the writing and the reading, in the pictures, in the words.

Af-Flix-ion

Me: I’m looking for a documentary about —

Netflix: Got it, friend! 😎

Me: … okay. The documentary doesn’t involve crime or celebrities, right?

Netflix: Uhhhh. Let me look again.

Me: I’m just looking for something about, like, an obscure moment in history, or a scandal in a competition, or a person who makes cool sculptures, or the rise and fall of KMart, or —

Netflix: Yeah. We don’t do stuff like that. We have Kaled Over: Death of A Vegan Pizza Heiress and Load€d: The Big ₩ild Bit¢oin $tory.

Netflix: Take it or leave it.

Please Be Kind — And Help Me Find My Mind

Over the past four years, I’ve lost my mind.

Before the pandemic, I was a normal person, and a normal coworker — if a bit quiet and shy. But in the wake of stressful times, I’ve become completely anxious and overly-precise. I’m not too particular when it comes to other people — but I constantly chastise myself.

I’ve also become dull-witted, tongue-tied, and poorly spoken. I used to be able to make jokes, but now, I just sit with my anxious thoughts. I feel like even my voice sounds weak and sad, when it used to sound so … warm and full of life.

Sometimes, I hope and pray that I’ll win the lottery – even when I haven’t bought a ticket. Just so I can start over somewhere else, where no one knows me. Just so I can reinvent myself — this time, as a happy person.

Jesus Be An Editor

Around here, and on Twitter, I occasionally hear people say, “Jesus be a fence.”

Right now — to be brutally honest — I’m finding some members of my immediate family to be annoying, so I often find myself asking for Jesus to be a security fence between them and me.

Protect my mind and my fists, Lord. Inshallah it never comes to blows.

But I also find myself asking for divine intervention in other areas of my life.

Today, as I was alone with my thoughts, I started thinking about the folks who work in PR. These people go out and film things, and then they go back to their editing suites, and then they produce the final package. They’re responsible for the whole thing.

As I write and post things on Medium and Substack, I start to get excited. Not overwhelmed, not really, but jumpy. I have something that’s ninety-five percent complete — but then I start getting antsy.

I’ll be editing something, chopping over here and adding over there, and then I think, “Surely this is it. Surely I can go ahead and click Publish. Surely it’s done. But what if it isn’t? What if I need to go back and …?”

I start to wonder if I need a user’s manual, or at least a little guidance.

There are industry standards, I’m sure, in making advertisements and things of that nature. But what about personal essays, and blog posts, and newsletters? How will I know when I’ve met all the terms and conditions? How will I know?

Then I realize that it’s probably a good thing to have a little freedom. It gives me a chance to use my own voice and do my own thing, without having to be hyper-vigilant or punishing myself. I can just … exist.

And I’m pretty good at doing that.

I Am A Publisher

A while back, on another blog, I wrote about the Golden Age of Blogging.

Between 2004 and 2009, you could surf the web and find all sorts of blogs.

Mormon mommy blogs, with super short paragraphs and long, long photo dumps. Blogs run by German high schoolers, where they’d wax poetic about their favorite music — My Chemical Romance, Justice, Tokio Hotel. (Those were the usual suspects.) Blogs that were only created for a class project, only to be abandoned a few months later.

I actually enjoyed those the most. It was fascinating to find a three-to-six-month time frame preserved in amber like that. A digital scrapbook of sorts. I love it!

But … that was then. And this is now.

I have to say, I only got back into long(er) form writing when I started (1) posting essays on Medium, (2) blogging on WordPress again, and (3) writing a monthly Substack newsletter.

I do all of this for fun, by the way. Not for money. Although …

Where’s that Donate button? There’s got to be a Donate button or block or widget that I can insert on here and … Nah. I won’t do it.

This time.

Anyway, I’m not here to give tips on how to make money by writing short little blog posts. I’m just here to say that I only got back into long form writing because of the downfall of Twitter.

Between 2009 and 2023, I wrote roughly 21,000 tweets, most of which I didn’t delete.

I look back now and laugh at this — but when I was 19 or 20, I realized that (like many others before me) I wanted to write a novel. I figured I needed to write around 75,000 words — so I was constantly doing math. 500 words a day, and I’ll be done in just a few months! 100 words a day, and … I can spread this out over the years, right?

No book materialized. Not even a novella. I will say, I kept a 200-word schedule up for about a month or so, which is impressive. I had a 700-day language-learning streak on Drops, which I also eventually quit keeping up with. But other than the streak on Drops, I would have to say that my regular attempts at writing …

Well, it gave me something to be proud of. I was proud that I kept chipping away at it. And I did churn out a lot of words — some of them were pretty good. But there were no novels, no novellas, and no short stories.

I repurposed some of the more colorful descriptions into poems, and I compiled those into a little chapbook. It sounds pretentious — and maybe it is. 🫠 I can see how it might seem pretentious, even though I genuinely love poems and poetry. Even the ol’ epic poetry. But I digress.

I never managed to produce a novel, despite my best attempts at word-counting.

Like counting calories, which can also feel like wasted effort.

When I saw, though, that I’d posted 21,000 tweets, I felt even sillier. There they were — my 75,000 words!

If each tweet were at least six words long — and I’d say many of mine were longer— then I’d have 126,000 words under my belt. A novel and a novella.

I realized — about a month ago, actually, when they were threatening to purge inactive accounts and the accounts of deceased users — that someday, all of those tweets would probably disappear.

So I immediately downloaded my archive and uploaded everything I could to the Internet Archive. It took about a day and a half, but it’s there now. It’s preserved.

Until someone goes after THAT website — Lord, don’t let him try to acquire the Internet Archive! Millions of pages will be taken down overnight. My chest is hurting at the thought of that happening. “OhhhhhhmyyyGodddd, nowayyyeeayyeeeayyyyyyaaaay!”

But … whew. I need to calm myself down right quick. Genuine terror struck my heart. Damn.

In any case, I may never publish a novel — although I am working on writing one. Just for me. Just for fun.

But even if I never publish a novel, I have “published” things online. Forget the quotation marks — we can just drop those. I don’t need to try to qualify what I’m saying here, because this is a blog entry, and not a scholarly paper. I can just be literal, without trying to write defensively.

The Internet has enabled all of us to be publishers. With just a single click, I am my own Simon & Schuster.

Now I am become the Big 1, publisher of words.

I have published tweets. I have published blog posts. I have published newsletters. I have published poems on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. I have published reviews on Letterboxd and Goodreads. And it only took one click to call myself a publisher.

Someone else is doing the hosting, I realize. But I am the writer, the editor, the marketing department, the sales department, and the publisher.

The sales department is being really lazy, by the way. One of them suggested adding a Donate button to the blog instead of actually trying to sell anything. Can you believe that?!

… I have to go now. I need to add publisher to my LinkedIn.

Thinking About Writing > Writing

With that title, I’m (only sort of) joking. Today, I’ve been thinking about all of the things I like to write about.

There are all of these familiar elements in the fiction I write and post elsewhere. I like to write about young women who feel lost, fatigued, or out-of-place in this world as it exists now, with its constrictions and social mores. I think these feelings are universal, outside of gender or ethnicity or lifestyle or … anything else, really.

I think it was Brandon Taylor who wrote about Banana Yoshimoto — if I remember correctly, it was one of his pieces. It was a review of one of Yoshimoto’s story collections. I’d just finished reading Kitchen, so I wanted to read more about the writer and her work.

The reviewer pointed out that for all of the lonely women her books are about, she always seems to retain a genuine warmth in her stories. Plenty of people write about lonely people — but I want to write about lonely or uncertain people who have still managed to carve out some time for fun, or pleasure, or enjoyment. Or satisfaction.

That’s what I’m looking for — the satisfying thing, whatever it is.

Shell’s Belles

I like to gas up at 5:00 on a Friday, because it gives me a few minutes to pause and think. Because, by 5:03, I’ll be back on the road, trying not to get roped into a drag race with some guy in a V8.

I’m firing on six cylinders, so there’s always some show-off who wants to race. I’ve raced some people, sure, but I’m usually too emotionally exhausted to put much effort into impressing a guy in a big truck.

I stopped at one of our local Shell stations this evening. I was enjoying my little break before the long journey home. As I was gassing up, I noticed a guy with a big trailer was trying to pull into the gas station.

Now, my dad has a son, too, but he made sure that his youngest daughter also learned how to tie up/wrap my chains whenever someone needs to hook up a trailer. You have to tie the chains a little, you see, so that they’re suspended. So that they won’t drag on the road.

The chains on this trailer weren’t just dragging across the ground. They were making music, baby! So much janglin’ that I thought I was at an Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros concert. It was wild.

I looked away, because it was almost time for me to hang up the nozzle. And that was when I noticed a cobweb on the sign over the pump. I was torn: the side of me that likes cleanliness wanted to sweep it off. But the side of me that likes spiders — I really do! — didn’t want to disturb their web-weaving.

I ended up leaving the web alone. I’m not going to evict any spiders, because I’m not a landlord. Thank goodness.