Beach Sloth

SELECTIONS FROM JORDAN CASTRO’S TWITTER

                Jordan Castro is having a trill year. Lately he’s been traveling across the country doing a reading tour with Megan Boyle, Sam Pink, Scott McClanahan, Mallory Whitten and the savory Salisbury Bushnell. ‘Shoplifting from American Apparel’ showed off Jordan Castro’s acting chops. In his spare time he runs his very own Ohio based band aptly named ‘The Ohioans’. Recently he busted out the big beautiful book of ‘Young Americans’ chronicling the life and times of a young, virile man growing up in America. Honestly Jordan is virile as fuck, despite his best efforts to rip off his own dick. 

                The set begins with an emphasis on his age. Jordan Castro graduated high school. Many consider this a true accomplishment, a testament to getting through the worst part of life. In fact judging from the last tweet about the first day of college there is really solid framing effect for these tweets. Megan Boyle does a really good job of showing how Jordan Castro’s mind works during that time of ‘pure freedom’ from school, away from old friends and hoping to make new ones. 

                ‘just want to write a book so good that all of my behavior is excusable’ is the best tweet in the whole collection. If there’s one tweet that deserves to be re-tweeted out of the bunch it is this one. Writers typically refer to their own work as a justification for their actions. Sometimes shitty writers are also shitty people. Book quality has nothing to do with it often. Yet the idea is common enough that Jordan’s take is particularly funny. Besides he recently put out a book, so perhaps this tweet also has a ‘prophetic’ quality to it. Maybe Jordan knew, subconsciously that he would be out a book to extreme critical acclaim. 

                X-men get a lot of attention in this tweet series. Clearly Jordan Castro loves ‘the fuck’ out of that perennial all-American comic book series. One of the most notable aspects of American culture is the fear of a massive, all powerful government. Usually this government hates mutants for reasons that are convoluted, boring, and poorly explained. Yet the explanation doesn’t really matter as long as some cars transform into robots, some web is slung, and at least one awkward love scene is shown. Jordan explains how he lost control of his left leg due to the overwhelming power of the X-men movie. 

                The tweets about loneliness are great. Rummaging around people’s homes in broad daylight searching for happiness is commonly referred to as ‘hanging out’. Crying uncontrollably on the floor while looking really good is typical for anyone between the ages of 16 to 32. After 32 it gets easier, hopefully. If someone is worried about the terrible direction their life is going they should read these tweets since these tweets would make anyone feel less alone in loneliness.

                Everybody has a grand old time in Miami. A whole slew of characters descend upon the winter retreat. Without winter there would be no Florida. People go there during the absolute worst moments in weather. Snow, cold, sheer wretchedness doesn’t exist quite the same way in Florida. Here the guests are tortured but by other things. Previous relationships come up. Complications of life rise out of the ashes of relationships killed. Oftentimes it seems hopeless to even bother with those old people in those old relationships. Yet Brett is willing to give it all a chance in this little ‘Excerpt’. 

                Parties are an important part of the city. Readings devolve into parties. Writers like getting down. Usually writers are thought of as intellectual, highly sensitive people with deep emotions. That might be true for some writers. Here though everyone works on a whole other level. Friends are stood up. Husbands are left to manage hotels. Brett decides to mock the professional of hotel management. Honestly though hotel management is a lucrative career. Anybody can make it in the glamorous world of hotel management. Right as Brett insults the very notion of hotel management there she is, in a hotel, looking at the richly appointed interior. Obviously she fails to appreciate the benefits of hotel management, which brings joy to millions of travelers all across the world. 

                Brett laughs at the ignorance of her friend. Sadie is well-dressed but poorly-informed. Thanks to the power of Paul’s idiocy, he too remains in the dark managing a hotel somewhere. Good thing Brett has a way more exciting life as a writer. Writing creates whole other worlds, the sort of worlds that involve all sorts of habits of ill-repute. Sometimes those writers simply go for that kind of writing, writing about the filth, literal dirt. One poet Brett meets writes poems about mud. Usually that’s the dirtiest kind of poem, a mud poem, wiping its filth all over the place like a mud-encrusted music festival goer. 

                Excerpt ends with a heartfelt look at extreme fucking. Sex is an important thing to ‘do right’. Many have sex incorrectly. Eduard appears to have a good idea about sex via the ridiculous amount of it he has with Brett. Besides the sheer quantity there’s also the obsessive insane type of sex being had, the whole drawing-blood sex that’s all the rage lately. At the very end, after the intense form of communication, they are together again.

Likable by Deb Olin Unferth

                Aging is the most depressing thing. Youth protects against the wretched awfulness backlash. To be young is to be a bit of a jackass. That’s part of youth. Being a kind and considerable person at an early age is a waste of a childhood. Childhood, the teenage years, the twenties, these are moments to excise the unpleasantness out of one’s system. Given enough time spent being awful suddenly the goodness begins to rise up. Rottenness is part of the growing process. Eventually the rottenness is defeated and the good wholesomeness can shine through. In some cases people refuse to grow up staying the same way for an indefinite period of time. Left alone they will die unloved just like everybody else does. 

                Poor character in the story fails to understand this basic premise and it is so basic. She chooses to be the same at age forty as she was at age twenty. There’s no room for that kind of error. Adults tend to be of the unforgiving kind. Miserable yet unable to be alone she manages to bother everybody around her. Unpleasantness follows out of her mouth. Out of her pores she secretes wretched vile awfulness. Watching TV the character runs into the same problem. Where there should have been evolution there is only the stagnant. No way exists for her to change her ways. Perhaps she could do it but she clings to an older time when people found her witty. 

                Humor evolves too. There’s a reason nobody thinks Seinfeld is funny anymore. The guy has hundreds of millions of dollars. He doesn’t need to be funny. If the character had that much money the character could simply insulate herself from her aging inability. For the years pass and she grows older. People tolerate her since that’s what age is all about: holding onto old friends. Much of the aging process involves pining for one’s youth. Despite her inability to please anyone by remaining in arrested development she can relive her youth each and every day. The downside is so can everyone else and everyone else has no desire to do such a thing. 

                Eventually the character remembers the power of death. Death ends all of that suffering. People grow old. With age comes wisdom. Give a few more years, after wisdom has been achieved and that’s death. For some reason living people hate being surrounded by the dead. Give people a dead person’s art, work, or biography and they are fascinated. Decomposing people are less interesting. Decomposing people get the ground so they may entertain ants and become the true salt of the Earth.

The Wolf at the Door by Rebecca Curtis

                Rebecca Curtis works an ordinary office job like any other person. Staying too late, burning that midnight oil in spite of ever-rising oil prices, Rebecca is a model employee. Unfortunately she makes a fatal mistake in her other diligent work. By going to the ‘off-limits’ bathroom she fails to adhere to the rules. Every office has that ‘good’ bathroom where the higher up people go to, going to the bathroom listening to Schubert, theirs is a life well-heeded. Trickle-down economics begins in bathrooms. Giving the lower echelons of workers something to really cherish, like a bathroom with working soap dispensers and towels, is the first step towards a happy productive workforce. 

                Home after a long day at work Rebecca is ready to sit down and relax with her beloved family. A wolf comes to the door. Before Rebecca can drink that cool refreshing taste of Coors Lite she must fight off a wolf. The wolf is persistent. Unlike Rebecca the wolf has quite a nice car. Next to the wolf is his bored girlfriend waiting for some sweet Rebecca to eat. Actually this part of the story appears to be patently untrue. Wolves rarely if ever attack humans. Fatalities from wolf attacks in the US are extremely low. Plus wolves generally lack the income flow to purchase expense imported luxury automobiles. In fact Rebecca has more of wolf personality, running home, peeing loudly, all wolf sorts of things. 

                A military complex is lucky enough to have Rebecca as a faithful worker. The lights are turned off on her, somewhat unfairly. Perhaps if Rebecca had noticed the lights she might not have encountered the wolf problem. And the wolf is a strong beast. Rebecca begs her sister to get a knife, any knife but the plea falls on deaf ears. This nasty wolf has been bothering them for a while. What happens to its victims is left unsaid. If Rebecca needs a knife the assumption should be something bad. Fortunately things work out a little bit for Rebecca. Not in the ‘her life was forever saved’ but more in the dissatisfaction that the wolf encounters. Being a wolf is a terrible job, perhaps worse than office work. 

                By the end the wolf is revealed to be a somewhat lonely creature with considerable pockets. Alone in its wealth the wolf cannot interact with people in any other way but violence. In other words the wolf is probably a card-carrying Republican just trying to ruin people’s lives in a more visceral, literal way. Rebecca does the right thing. She reinforces the loneliness of the wolf.

DREAM OF A CLEAN SLATE by John Haskell

                Jackson Pollock had two irreconcilable hopes: to be appreciated for whom he was while trying to hold back the artistic inclination others appreciated. Hence he lived an uncomfortable life. Few understood why he felt the need to suffer in order to properly deal with problems, internal problems not apparent to the naked eye. What resulted was the loss of a finger, a punch in the gut, all ways to deal with a reality that he deemed unnecessarily cruel. Unfortunately as this was his perspective and no one else’s there was no one else to share his pain.

                Haskell begins with a literal example of this: Pollock at the Cedar Tavern. He sees someone. Perhaps they are interesting. He is uncertain. Imbibing enough alcohol is impossible. Every drink brought him further away from her. Even in his dreams he grows further away. Things always appear to be drifting away from him, away from his control. In a way he is a controlling person. Despite his paintings outward appearance they are deeply controlled experiments. All he wants is to control his feelings, his emotions, and have others appreciate him as a person rather than an artistic outlier. 

                Acceptance is difficult for Pollock. He wants to earn it. The fact others accept him bothers him. He wants to prove himself to others. Yet these others, these Ruths, these Lees, and these people who pay him for the paintings take his word for it. It bothers him enormously. All he wants is a clean slate, the ability to start over without any pre-conceived notion of who he is. By proving himself he can earn his way in a way. Failing to do this bothers him, forces him to have a cleansing ritual. Picking fights with far less successful artists is one way to do it. Other ways is to yell at his wife Lee telling her to ‘Forget You’. 

                ‘Oh’ is part of his secret language with Lee. Since he doesn’t enjoy speaking he prefers using the word ‘Oh’ to convey whatever meaning he wants. With this language he can avoid lengthy conversations. The meaning is implied. Once more the outside world infringes on a world that should just be his. He wants his own world with people he likes and cares about. There are all these intruders, various bums, lookers, and he wants them gone. What he wants is to suffer and have people pity him. This is terrible yet from childhood he wanted the same things, to have suffered and have others pity his suffering. They could see him from afar and shake his head.

                Here it ends in a way where he has a clean slate. It ends with cleanliness. There is nothing more. Everything is over. He gets a relief after so much inner suffering of his life. Finally he’s at peace and nobody will misunderstand him again. He’s untouchable, unknowable, like he was in life only this time it is permanent. He controls the end.

A Short Essay on the War by Dylan Nice

                The war consumes all. It eats all. It greets all. People look for war searching for meaning to their own meaningless lives. Nothing gives them hope or despair. War though gives them change. As the anonymous person, the titular ‘hero’ of the story, thinks about war he seems almost happy about things. Like a war could finally give him something new different from what he has currently experienced. With a war he can find meaning. Like countless young budding losers before him he can find people who will come together under war. Relationships are forged that way. He imagines such a thing happening to him. War is good for bringing people together and for tearing people apart. It is sad that way. 

                School bores him. His answers are inadequate. They appear unwilling to surrender a degree to him. This frustrates him. Generally people pay for school to receive recognition for the ability to get through school. He sits in a limbo. Unsure if he is a man he dreams of a summer war. Assaults on the senses only occur in spring and summer. Fall and winter are too bleak for war. War needs to be glorified hence the hottest part of the year. He wipes his face clean. Despite his desire for war he wears a clean white shirt. Yes it may be clean now but he wants to be dirty. His cleanliness can be purified by the sheer muck and grime of war. No one even needs to be near war to be in war. It takes place mostly from far away. Only a select few experience it firsthand. 

                People are incapable of anything. All the unnamed character wants is to feel something. Unfortunately the geography limits him. He wishes to get hit by a car. This fails since cars hate him. Those driving the cars love him. Put together and it equals his life, saved. Romance is dead. Even his death is dead. His death fails to happen. Poor creature only wants to die. He looks out for the war to end it or to renew it. To keep himself occupied he tries to starve himself to create variation in his boring useless life. 

                Eventually like all good dead on the inside people he moved into a well-insulated apartment. This keeps him warm. With the apartment he stays on the inside looking out at a world he fails to comprehend. ‘Well-insulated’ indicates one of those young urban professional deals where people live in a style similar to city life only devoid of actual culture. Townhouses are actual townhouses in the cities, but in the suburbs they are weak compromises with what spawned the suburbs. The well-insulated places are full of fear and comfort in equal doses. 

                Wars wait for everyone. Most of war is waiting. This unnamed character wants it since he has nothing else to want.

SpencerMadsen.com

                Spencer Madsen is the ‘seems bleak kid’. Long ago there used to be ‘Billy the kid’ but Billy was born before the recession. The recession changed everything. So there’s Spencer. He’s busy bleaking it up. He lives the bleak life. In his spare time he smiles. Spencer Madsen has roughly 5 to 6 minutes a week where he practices smiling. But most of the time he is horribly, cripplingly depressed. Being sad is more than a persona it is a way of life. Millions of Americans live like Spencer Madsen: in a living room somewhere looking at Netflix. Things just got a whole lot bleaker for Spencer. His domain shrank a little recently. ‘SpencerMadsen’ is no longer there for Spencer. Or maybe Spencer wasn’t there for it. 

                Go Daddy states for the low price of $69.99 per period one can buy Spencer’s domain name. Technically this is allowed. This is off limits however. Buying someone else’s domain name is like violating the internet’s ‘bro’ code (via the number of bros on the internet). It is simply frowned upon in this society. That domain had Spencer’s massively depressed heart exposed for the world to see. As Go Daddy’s windswept hair suggests this is a wild website known for fun and good times. Could Spencer Madsen’s abandonment of his beloved website be due to his inability to have fun with it? Or is Tumblr the new Go Daddy? If people manage Tumblr well enough it can become better than any silly website. 

                What will Spencer do now? All he has left are pieces strewn across the internet, a world-class Twitter, Tumblr, and a Muumuu House presence. In case the internet is not enough there is his award-ass winning book ‘A Million Bears’. Perhaps this will cheer Spencer as he loses the website he held dear. If he held it dearer he may still have it. Yet there it is gone forever to a digital wind. The website is debris, an empty lot in the midst of so many online presences. Many others have let go of their online presences to disappear into the shadows forever. 

                Yes Spencer Madsen exists online. A new book from him is forthcoming. His Facebook picture stares into an uncertain future. What will he spend the additional $69.99 per year on? Will it go to Netflix? Will it help him purchase food? There are so many questions. Let this blog post serve as the tombstone his website never had. No one ever rues the death of a website.

Selections from Willis Plummer’s Twitter by Willis Plummer, Edited by Mira Gonzalez

                What a man, what a man, what a man, what a very fine Willis Plummer. There is no need to say it again now. Willis Plummer has officially ‘made it’ with this life-altering appearance on Muumuu House. Many have been wowed and won over by his epic, drug-induced, mustache-referencing tweets. At this point in alt lit twitter selections count as some sort of ‘collection of letters’ because who writes letters anymore. In real life nobody can like or re-tweet a letter. Such things are heavily personal and on the internet it is never personal. Most of the internet, when it does un-follows states it is not personal simply professional, implying ‘twitter ratios’ that must be maintained. 

                The collection starts chronologically to see the tortured mind of a mustachioed miscreant. Willis contemplates his own death. Live-tweeting generally does not happen at funerals but there is always a ‘first time’ for everything. Hashtags on twitter are an important way to bring attention to one and partake in a corporate-sponsored decision. Or it could simply be a ‘trending topic’ which is equally scary, if not scarier. People on twitter can be terrifying things. Impulse tweets on twitter show the portrait of the user as an unredeemed asshole. Thankfully Willis Plummer makes twitter a better place. 

                Summertime shows some serious scary vibes. No man needs breast implants, not when food exists. There is also the ‘sitting in an office blankly staring at a computer screen’ regimen which really helps put on those pounds. At other points Willis looks up what the point might be to having such a tiny sauce pan. Clearly he has never fed a fairy. That’s why his mustache weighs him down. Facial hair in general prevents smiling and laughter. Santa Claus only laughs because he does a ton of drugs. 

                That’s certainly Willis’s plan. Xanax takes up a large majority of his tweets. Many have written extensively about Xanax, including Tao Lin some alt lit bro. Getting a MacArthur grant to surf the internet sure would be grand. Unfortunately the MacArthur committee realized it was foolish to give out grants to people surfing the internet. Carles of Hipster Runoff fame still lives off of his MacArthur grant because he rarely needs sunlight or food anymore. Poor Willis can’t remember the last time he didn’t take drugs. Are drugs the new hugs? This is scary. Brave New World is here and people are lining up just to get down. 

                Mira Gonzalez edited these lovely tweets together. She certainly has a way with her careful selections, focusing on the funniest and bleakest tweets. Together Mira and Willis form an unstoppable duo that has never met.

Muumuu House - Meta Knight

                One Postitbreakup, a fine internet lad, bequeathed to me the title of ‘Alt Lit’s Guardian Angel’. I promise to uphold the key principles of alt lit in my new position. He sent me a Tweet about the recent ‘Meta Knight/Muumuu House/Alt Lit Gossip controversy’. To reply with a 140 character explanation seems outright foolish. No tweet sized text can accurately capture the thrill and drama alongside this highly complicated course of events. Every key outlet of alt lit was involved: Meta Knight, Muumuu House, Tao Lin, crown prince of alt lit and ultimately the New York Times of alt lit, alt lit gossip.

                Meta Knight is an up and coming player in the alt lit scene. Recently he tweeted that Muumuu House was publishing his short story collection ‘School’. This created a veritable discussion thread the likes of which have never been seen on the ‘Alt Lit Gossip’ group page. Many congratulated Meta Knight for this accomplishment he did not accomplish. It was a lie. An inside joke that Meta Knight took to the outside via ‘Twitter’.

                Seeing the potentially ‘huge’ amount of clout surrounding the news, Meta Knight emailed Tao Lin about this development. Tao politely declines the invitation to publish said short story collection ‘School’. Meta Knight is informed his chances of being published in Muumuu House are less than 0%, indicating a negative level of interest in publishing. Meta Knight, true to his word of shaking things up, promises to email Tao Lin in 2014, after which Tao Lin will be enormously rich and successful probably. 

                People express dissatisfaction at this level of ‘fooling around’. Muumuu House is a serious endeavor. It serves as a way for Tao Lin to publish works that interest him. The way it works is Tao publishes things from people he likes and feels he doesn’t owe anything to. Pressure is a bad thing for a publishing house to run under. Unfortunately many do just that, soliciting submissions and ‘smacking down’ the respondents. Rejections are a natural part of any zine/publishing house/etc. For this very reason I can promise one thing: Beach Sloth will NEVER create an independent zine, lit journal, etc. Having to make that sort of judgment call would break my little heart. I want to support everybody. Rejection is something I just don’t do. So these ‘solicitations’ that Muumuu House, Pop Serial, and others engage in show a way of avoiding this level of disappointment by selecting a specific few. 

                Of course Alt Lit Gossip was discouraged by this ruse. Meta Knight published a piece on Alt Lit Gossip that was promptly removed. The piece stated that Meta Knight’s piece was definitely not going to be published. Alt Lit Gossip understandably might have been somewhat upset for having fallen victim to this literary hoax. However it is hoped by me and others that the rift between Meta Knight and Alt Lit Gossip will be repaired, bridged, and hugged (for good measure).

                How does this effect anything going on in alt lit? It shows to some degree how news can ‘go viral’ when a particularly large name (Muumuu House) is thrown in with a smaller, lesser known writer. Overall it shows the extreme level of what a tight-knit community looks like. Judging by Tao Lin’s response, Meta Knight’s behavior, and Alt Lit’s forgiveness, all appears to be well within the alt lit community. And this is a good thing. Perhaps this model can be used for future promotional material. Only time will tell.

Zac Zellers is the Where’s Waldo of Ann Arbor by Elizabeth Ellen

                Zac Zellers is an online enigma. Offline he is a legend. People claim nobody is as big of a Tao Lin fan as Zac Zellers. Few ever get to meet this thick-framed possibly fictitious fan boy. Or is Zac Zellers something more of a fan boy. After Elizabeth Ellen’s piece the case could be made that he is forever immortalized both on and offline. This is assuming people print out Muumuu House stories, something which is definitely possible. His twitter presence still exists. His Facebook profile still exists. The few who have met him (Marie Calloway and Elizabeth Ellen) have yet to understand what makes this Waldo weird. 

                Elizabeth Ellen met Zac Zellers in 2010. Hipsters were dying off back then. No great bands came about in 2010. For the most part it was a blank slate of a year. A few bands died off in 2010. Elizabeth had her first in real life sighting of Zac back in that troubled year. He stood in the crowd at a reading. She didn’t approach him but recognized him from afar. Right in the beginning she felt stupid being so anxious about Zac. The dude was only 19 at the time. Even now, at this precise moment, Zac cannot legally purchase or consume alcohol in his home state of Michigan. Within the story she claims she felt foolish feeling so much anxiety about this Zac fellow. Heck she even had a daughter. Yet there remained something peculiar about this character. 

                Tao Lin and Elizabeth met briefly, hence Zac’s appearance. Unfortunately Mike Young and Elizabeth were not invited to see the movie where Joaquin Phoenix tried to become a rapper. Zac went. Zac worked at the movie theater. At that place she saw him all the time selling candy with care, like some crazed animal earning minimum wage as idiots watched mind-numbing movies to help them forget the drudgery of their meaningless lives. Movies suck. 

                Elizabeth felt unsure about the internet life. She was unable to determine whether or not Zac and Marie Calloway met. Many still wonder if Marie Calloway exists in real life so Elizabeth is not alone. Those who have met Marie Calloway appear to have a similar feeling about ‘enigmatic online presence’ that Elizabeth has about Zac Zellers. She de-activates Facebook, a wise decision. Yet she claims to have not seen Zac online since then. This is odd as Zac maintains a relatively ‘open’ online presence complete with an acceptable twitter ratio and Facebook friends. 

                This is a story about what happens when online stalking happens too much. Normally those obsessed about do not care about the others people’s obsessions. It is a strange thing. Zac remains a mystery hiding in plain sight in Michigan just like Waldo.