This Year In mouse-car

5. Bathtub Djinn

All hail the number five spot— Bathtub Djinn. Maybe my personal choice for best piece on mouse-car, this one originated as a friendly competition with a rival Substack, Acting My Age. We challenged each other to an eclipse-off, and both produced some of our finest work. You can find hers here.

Bathtub mourns the visceral experiences we lose access to as we open the door further and further to digitization. I began writing the story about five minutes after the eclipse, just after the events detailed in the piece. I walked away from my friends at the lake, grabbed a pen and a found a littered cereal box on the ground. I tore it open, laid it flat, and wrote most of the piece there. A few days later I compiled it into its current version at a plant shop in NYC. This is one of the pieces from mouse-car which went on to be published elsewhere, and I had an interesting exchange after the editor suggested an edit. The paragraph he wanted me to revise reads:

We should be silent. Or not silent, but screaming, running wildly. We should throw Bacchanaliae, should choose one skyscraper in each city to burn to the ground, should choose one mayor to hang, should turn our cars and our water heaters into weapons, should unilaterally launch, each head of nation in one petrified twisting of the keys, every weapon growing dusty in Indiana-stockpiles. Should pillage nearby towns, should claw and tear and rape and slaughter.

My response to the editor (minus all the gratitude and hedging) went like this:

It's certainly a transgressive passage, which is unusual for me and which makes me protective of it. What I'm trying to relay is the ways in which humans don't quite fit into the modern world. Eclipses used to be sufficient grounds for beheading Kings, for abandoning or joining religions. Their reduction to a predictable phenomenon is one of the final vestiges of the mythical world to fall in the face of Reason. We're essentially the same beings we were five hundred years ago, and yet the modern equivalents of ‘beheading Kings’ are so unthinkable that we hesitate to write or publish even the thought of them. I went back and forth on this section as well. My defense is that I'm not saying we ought to do these things, but moreso that they would be the pristine, lost way of reacting to such chaos. In a Mesopotamian tradition, on solar eclipses a town-member would be made King For A Day before being sacrificed to maintain peace. What is the "town-member" of modernity but a demolition or sacrificed mayor?

The learning experience from this was that I could defend my own writing with paragraphs of explanation, which were even longer than the writing itself. It helped me become much more aware of the inner monologue which runs as I work. I finally allowed myself to believe that the words I was writing stood in for more complicated ideas, rather than the worst case scenario: the complicated words I was writing stood for simple ideas.

In the end, I offered the publisher a much tamer version of the paragraph. The post is behind a paywall, so I’m not sure which one he ended up using.

4. Panpsychic Rivers: an eighteen-month argument over Consciousness

The success of this post shocks me. It describes a series of letters between me and a friend discussing whether humans are conscious. As the essay predicts, my own take on the subject has progressed. At the time, however, I was a pretty stalwart panpsychic, and I still believe in the merits of that philosophy. How this deeply entrenched and pretty unintelligible essay has performed so well I don’t really understand, but it tells me that there are some wonky motherfuckers reading this blog, and that I shouldn’t hold back from leaning into the more esoteric topics on my mind. I mean, get a taste of this:

Suddenly a line was drawn, from Strings through molecules, from molecules through me, from me through my community, from my community through mankind, from mankind through history…. I saw at once that the same way a droplet is of a river, the way I am of my body-politic, our ingredients are of us. There was no leap from the physical to the subjective necessary: I was a river, an entity which moved due to influences but which was made up of other entities, which moved via their own influences. In the same way, I was a being which flowed alongside countless other beings to create another entity: humanity. In the same way, molecules flowed together to be rocks, and those rocks flowed together to be planets. Certain Strings hummed like gravity, and those gravitons flowed together to make that ageless pull which defines all known movement and being.

I mean… what am I talking about? This post required a butt-load of research, most of which I ended up ignoring or misusing. Hat tip to Nagel, and cheers to the friend mentioned in the piece, who is still working on a rebuttal essay.

3. ellay

I wrote this one after returning to West Virginia from a trip to Los Angeles, my home for over three years. Its success is probably due to the amount of fellow writers I met and exchanged Substack links with while over there, but I’d like to believe that the merits of the piece help too. It is peak form of what I call ‘my-fi,’ or mythical fiction, and it’s the sort of tone that I heavily over-used in the first book I wrote. It traces my unintentional time living in Los Angeles, and the home I eventually found there. What the piece really tackles, though, is the way we rely on mythos to function. The way we build narratives around ourselves and our experiences in order to understand them and, moreso, in order to suffer their morose meaninglessness. It compares Echo Park to the ancient city of Uruk, and tries to thread the shared ethos’ of city-dwellers across eons. It steeps itself into the necessary mythification of the city itself, and questions whether that’s a myth we should adhere to. Its tone is an homage to the sort of language which myths are known for:

If this city is one monolithic legerdemain, one perfectly curated distraction, then what is its prestige? What does Tuesday mean here? What is a spring afternoon in a sempiternal summer? Not the reminder it is elsewhere, not the rejuvenation suggested by the foothill’s Black Mustard bloom, but merely Tuesday. One of fifty-two, a card tossed at random sevenths into a pile of a thousand decks, reduced sevenfold by the mirage of time. A mirage which has willfully duped the wisest and most base in turn, again and again. The wistful and tasteful youth who you will emulate just too late, wherever you are but here. But why should you be anywhere but here? Is there anywhere but here?

In the end it tries to understand what pulls people there, and takes a big gulp of kool-aid which bolsters the Los Angeles eminence:

You wanna live fast and die young? Light a cig on a fault line at the tail end of a 45-minute sunset splendor. Ignore the angry tar beneath your feet, the stolen land, that pervasive haze and the mysterious smell of smoke in the distance. Imminent richters coming for your infrastructure, dust and sun and doxological voluntarism. It’s the fucking end-times. If you want to party, might as well do it by the doors to hell.

How’s that for an ending! I was very sad visiting Los Angeles, finding it a lot more beautiful and entertaining than I remember. It was the first time in years that I actually thought about why I moved there in the first place, and I honestly don’t have a good answer for that. What I do have is an answer for is why I stayed, and that’s the piece.

2. Jazz Fish

This piece is the rightful inhabitant of the number 1 spot. It is the one which folks often read when they first log on to mouse-car, and is by far the one which people bring up to me the most. It tells the briefest version of the story of a life which landed me on a pier in West Virginia, fishing for meaning. It talks about my general incompetency, my tendency to move along just when the living gets good, and the sort of moves one has to make when they have no idea what they stand for. I think it gets a solid metric-boost serving as an introductory essay to the m-c-moment universe, but something could be said about its deeply personal nature. I’m not really a write-what-you-know sort of guy— I tend to go on about stuff way outside of my wheelhouse. But the lesson of these top-performing posts may be a confirmation of the old maxim, that the deeper one goes into the personal, the more universally relevant it may ring.

It’s fair to say that this post is the reason why mouse-car exists in the first place. I was sitting on that dock, fishing as I describe in the piece, when the first paragraph popped into my mind, pretty much as you see it there now. The rest just tumbled out, and it ended up convincing me to make a home for me to post these writings. I also find it perfectly fitting that the first paragraph ever released on mouse-car includes the murder of a mouse. This piece has a lot of the elements which became typical of a mouse-car post, and I’m grateful for it standing at the helm of this rickety ship.

I spent a week on the road, a month in a Vermont cabin. I read a hundred pages a day, made a dent in the bibliographies of Virginia Woolf, of Updike, of Steinbeck; finally tackled Magic Mountain and for the first time read through my journals— eight thick, leather-bound nightmare-sequences— in chronological order to ascertain what precisely was wrong with me. The answer wasn’t there, or anywhere, and despite every urge within I had no choice but to continue existing. I left the Vermont mountain-scape and continued roaming, spent a night sleeping beside Kerouac’s grave in the bitter cold, a night in Portsmouth, in New Bedford, in Concord, all in search of an America lost, one I had the delusional hope of reclaiming. It is a literary and lawless one, one with walkable downtown strips and cantankerous bar-keeps in underground dives. One without tax documentation, where to make an extra buck I could hop on a frigate or a whaler and try my hand at the harpoon.

And the top-spot goes to…

'Letterboxd' 101: All you need to know about the social media platform ...

1. Overly Complicated Letterboxd Star-Rating Score Sheet

I mean, are you kidding me? This entire “essay” is just a justification for giving Love & Other Drugs a 4.5 review on Letterboxd. Does it go off on wild tangents like I Watch Dennis The Menace Every Day For A Week? No. Does it tell the story of a tortured genius? Nope. It’s click-bait sensationalism, and I lie awake at night in shame thinking about it. But here it is, shining like a platinum turd at a proud #1. Just goes to show, I guess.

Will I take this as a lesson about the publishing industry, about public engagement, or writing what people want to hear? No. I won’t.

Honorable Mentions

The award for “Most Work Put Into A Single Post” goes to Tenets of the Aprés-Garde, a manifesto on the next artistic plateau which I feel Culture needs to conquer. This piece, also my longest, steps wayy out into territory which I am wayy under-qualified to talk about. But the writing of it felt like the most significant and relevant work I’ve produced here, and it is also the piece I think about the most. A few friends of mine who have read it reference it often, and I’ve found them using the term “Aprés-Garde” to describe pieces of art, the philosophies of people around us, and small moments

News Blues— my confessional about how bad I was at being a videographer for the local news. It is mainly about how many on-the-clock naps I took, how many golden newsworthy moments I missed because of how many naps I took, and the guilt I felt working in an industry with a tendency to make loads of money off the suffering of others. The piece goes on to talk about how in the current system, decent people are forced into doing jobs that don’t really move them, jobs with moral implications which might even keep them up at night. I frame my laziness as an act of “dissidence,” and call readers to tank their own professional lives for the sake of their souls. The volta comes when I find small, meaningful and fulfilling moments of artistry and expression in the humdrumesque existence of a photojournalist.

Pieces which have gone on to be published elsewhere:

Pieces with the most likes / comments

Thank you again to everyone who has joined the mouse-car moment. It’s deeply meaningful to see readership grow and hear from you about these pieces. Each essay in this post has about three times as many ‘reads’ as I do followers, meaning folks are revisiting them multiple times (or reading without subscribing, which is also valid).

Stay tuned next week for my list of book recommendations.

the mouse-car moment

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