The Fire This Time

voices boiling to life in the wilderness

Not to worry I won’t try to monetize this fucking thing because I reject google’s list of words you can’t and must not say, the double plus not good words you must avoid if you want to suck from the advertising teat at the house of don’t be evil. Words like suicide or references to self harm cutting rape or details of eating disorders words or references to pedophiles and sexual assault or you know, all the words teenagers aka the future shepherds of this rock the words they most need to be okay with talking about. And I don’t mean to go hard throttle doomer on anybody but the time for scratching our heads and poking the algorithm like it might give us life or make us famous or devour us like the snake eating its own tail is done. The time has come to throw everything at the wall like this is the fucking gathering and the Kurgan is coming for all of your heads and mine.

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I’m speaking for the first responders in the field the journalists still on the ground and yeah the storytellers always but know too that I’m not alone none of you are alone out there. take solace and find faith in some of the artists and poets my brothers sisters in the velvet the voices who I believe in the artists I trust with my heart my life my stories they are out there in the halcyon wilderness the far edges of the abyss just like so many of you in the fiction and poetry slums of substack the new death star of social media but look for these voices these writers who may yet be unknown to you but they are my people.

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Bil Brown is speaking up for the photographers and the fashion models. I’d urge everyone in the stack universe to read what he has to say about everything from the entropy inherent in the simulation of the simulacrum to the decay and destruction of society by the hyperreal imagery of advertising and propaganda and the algorithm war half of us don’t even realize we’re fighting.

Clevenger will speak for librarians and archivists for luddites and old school writers who understand why the style guides matter if you ask him kindly, and by the way if you didn’t realize or hadn’t clocked it, the contortionist himself is the reason the bots are so addicted to the friggin em dash. Dermaphoria and the Handbook are filthy with the em dash and they were in every LLM pirate training run next to Kiss Me Judas and the others.

go follow Motel Siren on iG for the poets and daughters the artists of the future the matriarchy of Gen Z and follow slaughterhouse666 for the graphic artists for the riot girls of today and tomorrow.

check out Emergency Horse the magazine the home of my first ever paid writing gig in 1992, go read The Editor aka Emil O that brother speaks for everyone of us but especially for the sinners for the damned the good criminals the robin hoods of the abyss and look I only drop their names here and below because I trust them and they trust me and because they know important shit I don’t know and I can’t be everywhere and these are the voices I believe in, so if you had a question I couldn’t answer they are velvet, they are like family to me and even if they weren’t they are the artists and writers I’d point you to.

anyone still trying to chase a career as a poet and translator teaching college in the straight world, I’d say go ask Andrea Jurjevic, if you want to know about the trainspotters the paranormal poets and goth kids of new Scotland go talk to Evelyn Hollow and yeah fuck dude I know right it’s only taken six no yeah seven years to grasp that nobody really wants to read anymore especially on their phones and I don’t either.

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Keep in mind, I was still carrying a motorola Razr till 2017 and never gave a damn about the napsters of the literary world because who the fuck wanted to read a book on a kindle, that was just amazon selling you another useless brick another powercord another adapter just another gadget to make you look like an asshole on the beach anyway yeah nobody wants to read a short story or an essay or disconnected chapter of a novel that’s nonlinear and fragmented on their fucking phones and I don’t blame them.

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The point is this.

War is coming in one form or another and we may not quite see it taking shape around us but to that I’d say go revisit Alex Garland’s civil war and pay attention to the scenes in the small towns off the beaten path where yeah you could still go shopping and act normal but there were bodies hanging from scaffolds in the distance and if nobody gets that that is the final endgame of this shit with ICE and the zionists and the battle over what the fuck is even real or true or worth protecting remember the fire next time as James Baldwin said back when.

The fucking fire.

This is next time. The fire is now and the voices from the abyss telling the truth and remembering the old ways those voices my voice and the ones above and below may be the only thing between some lost soul eyeballing the dragon and still waking up tomorrow.

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That in mind I’m launching two podcasts Razorblade Haiku on the Involuntary stack where I will try like hell to parse reality on the ground and on the fly. The Velvet Numbers Station on the velvet stack, where I’ll be doing what I ought to have during last lockdown but never say never I say. I will be reading bedtime stories from the abyss or specifically the audio book of Kiss Me Judas through Hell’s Half Acre and back to deception of the thrush roughly one chapter every other night or so to hold the fort for the rest of what may be a very strange scary year ahead with deleted scenes and lost chapters aka the director’s cut of the phineas poe trilogy all eleven hundred seventy-nine pages of the behemoth that brought me here and brought so many writers together the last time when the ghosts of myspace were clawing themselves to life and death before the hot or not autistic dude with weird hair fucked everybody up with the goddamn like button.

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if you’ve never looked at the list of contributors to the Velvet warmed and bound anthology from 2012 you might be shocked fuck I am anyway how many names are famous now or famous adjacent with dozens of books published and movies in the works: stephen graham jones and paul tremblay, brian evenson, gavin pate and craig wallwork spring to mind aka writers who don’t have the time or the need to come jabber at us here in the abyss of notes but these are my people same as everyone of you here in the ghetto my students from the Nine and rule 35 but also every writer I’ve had personal messages to and from here know that you are my people and the time is now for us to figure this shit out or die trying.

There are voices in the wilderness coming to a boil.

The authors of the first novels that will define this decade this generation are walking among you.

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Pablo and George and Maddie Rune, CJ Stockton, Alice M and Noreen Z and Amanda Gowin and a dozen more too in the wings like jaime noga and lchristopher, edith bow, wrong dimension, priya and javier the bladerunner and the moonlight bard, go read pharmer and the cowboy kid go read miss elizabet lamont, I want nothing more than to help all of you guys get those first books out in the sun where some lost nineteen yr old can read them in the park rather than choose the needle, where some runaway or veteran adrift can find comfort in pages that smell like dust from the back row of a greyhound bus heading west before it’s too late, before there’s nobody left to print them, nobody to read them or even give a fuck. I believe that we need to not fuck around, we must get those books and my new and old never published stories into print and out of the cloud because.

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Because they may well be the books that people are passing around hand to hand smuggling paperbacks with torn covers into detention centers the books and stories the ideas and characters that people locked up will be whispering about like Winston reading in the corner of his garret just out of range of the all seeing video monitor the fish eye from hell the black mirror on his shoulder that world is coming harder and faster than we may want to believe but yeah baby the whirlwind is at your door and the fire next time is this time so the Involuntary youtube channel is now not just an idea in the back of mind’s eye.

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And what the actual hell. Now that substack TV is a thing well, wouldn’t it be existentially delightful if Television Sky had a dead television channel to call home why not and what the fuck indeed you’ve always been the caretaker here mister Torrance but the point of this screed was really to say that Involuntary is now squatting on google’s back porch talking shit so help me god, I will be the firewalker and the whirlwind reaper best I can but I can’t do this shit without the velvet family, so pass it on.

much love and as ever fade to peace.

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ps. and look dude if you are’t already reading Vinny Reads and Inigo, katherine dee and deer girl, james worth, Elizabeth Lamont and Schecter’s shieldbreaker saga and the ninja from the future known as The Author I don’t know what to tell you go now, you have a lot of shit to get caught up on.

if nothing else support their work we need those voices.

ps2. link below is just me talking for seven minutes trying to explain to anybody who doesn’t get it what it was like to be Alex Pretti the day he was murdered for stepping between the forces of evil and an innocent woman on the street he probably had never met but still defended with his life.

seven minutes. please listen and pass it on.