MISSING AUTOPSIES:EDITORIAL ABATTOIRS

White Light White Freeze

(AI generated image from Dall-E of Emil Ottoman facing down a burning elephant in a field, by Emil Ottoman, 2023)

Usually an autopsy would go here

But this week has been hell. I’m admittedly behind on all contracts. I may be mildly depressed. I may be overwhelmed. I may suggest you never see five rental units in one day. My sincerest apologies.

There was the drama to reconciliation reconciliation cycle, and it led to an idea, a seed swallowed, or the entire pit from a peach, scratching its way down my throat, tumbling through my esophagus. Maybe that’s why I’m spitting up blood.

But in a good way.

The drama which, admittedly, I helped to incite because I’m a shit starter at heart, ended in something I find beautiful, it made me happy because I saw it at first as irreconcilable, but then it wasn’t. See, I rarely call people brother in anything but a generalized “I’m from Kentucky and we just talk like that” way, but it took me a week, ten days tops and I was willing to call

Andrew Robert Colom

brother. (No one tell my brother Shonee in Brooklyn, he’s Octopus east, I don’t wanna throw hands with him, he’s exactly my size and knows how to bang. However he does have the only child I have ever bought a Christmas or birthday present.) And I respect

Thaddeus Thomas

and his craft game. So seeing this end well made a shit week a bit brighter.

So read this.

More Than Spectacle

OK, now go read this.

BEEF: VOLUME I

Now subscribe ARC if you haven’t. I got turned onto him by Sum Flux (Thanks

Brock Eldon

and

Sandolore Sykes

, thank you so much.) Because let me check, yeah, me and him have so little overlap that it doesn’t even have numbers on the dashboard for it. My biggest audience overlap is Palahniuk, go figure, and 19% overlap with Saunders? So I’m trying to cross pollinate everyone here. OK.

Go, read.

---

WHERE IS THE AUTOPSY?

This week overwhelmed me. I gave links to the

announced that you can send one in ANY TIME, and then was demoralized when, I think, less came in than any other week.

So now I’m thinking here, has this run its course?

I don’t exactly think so. But it was a decisive factor in there not being an Autopsy on this post. Send me more writing.

And I’m sitting here at my desk thinking, I could take a heel turn. Start weighing people’s organs without their permission. That’s asymmetrical warfare, but ARC has been doing some of that in notes all week, to great effect, if you ask me. And I could do this with as gentle and caring a hand as I do the weekly autopsies people send in. But I KNOW those are people who have interest.

There’s some in the chute I need to organize, along with my editorial work on the board, but this dead house makes it hard to do anything but think about entropy and decay. I find new structural cracks in the walls of different rooms every day, and there’s snow coming they say gonna be a foot thick hitting all week with temps so low the sun won’t melt the shit off a black roof at noon. I’ve been decontextualizing my space. I tried to sell some things on private collectors groups in FB and no one bit. Moms just sits in the kitchen, probably the most toxic part of the house, and it feels like there’s no community here anymore. A rift has separated. I’m irritable and cranky and I apologize for every time my tone raises and I don’t register it immediately because I’m not mad at anyone I’m talking to, I’m mad at the system I’m forced to live under, the roof I’m stuck under, the weight of knowing that now to get up the stairs or navigate the ice, moms doesn’t feel safe without a little hurri-cane, with the four pegs for stability. Put a knife in my heart for her, for having failed her.

My rituals have all been sacrificed to this continual nightmare. My diaries lie empty, and I’m a constant diarist. My journal, because I need to use paper planners, my daily notebook, my five year Hobonichi diary I’m on year 2 of, all covered in stickers, waiting for me to open them. Sitting in arm’s reach and unopened.

Young

Magnetic

who you should be reading, in a comment thread said that everything he writes is non-fiction earlier this week. I’m the opposite. Everything I write is fiction. Because no one believes the truth, and none of this is happening.

(Gif by

Jon T

photo of me and the Saint, 2015.)

EDITORIAL INQUIRIES: EMILOTTOMAN@GMAIL

put EDITORIAL INQUIRY in the subject line.

See that’s the hustler in me. Always with the next lick I’m tryin’ to hit.

If you think you can write, squabble up and get ready to get bloodied. No punches will be pulled. Two distinct and experienced editorial viewpoints from two hard ass editors, two rounds, no peer crit, we don’t want to hear your opinions because you’re paying us for help. Any suggestions, reading, et al. will be given by the editors directly to the students. Early registration starts soon. This is not the autopsies. It’s two vicious editors who will pick apart every single bit of your work, meat and sinew from bone, exsanguinate the story you send us, and tell you how you can make it better.

Submissions will be vetted with one story you consider your best, and the story you want to follow the Judas lamb into the slaughterhouse.

If you think you’re ready to step up and you have the funds, it’s free to apply, but no guarantee you’ll get in. We’re picky. We can afford to be picky.

That hustler, always looking at the next lick right?

Always ten things going on.

I have a story I want to autopsy. But drink this shit down with your morning coffee. I don’t give a fuck about this property aside from you renting it to me. What you want to see, man, I’m feeding it right back to you. I don’t give a fuck aside from every day it’s colder in this shithole apartment and the landlord is duckin’ contacts from everyone. There’s more snow coming. I feel disconnected and it’s hard to get up in the mornings. Got a fancy alarm app and the bitch makes me do squats and shake my phone like I’m giving it the worst early morning handjob ever just to get out of bed before eleven. And this week that’s barely worked.

The Oracle sits in the ruined kitchen with the stove on for extra heat like when I was a kid and we needed that extra heat, every bit of it.

Back in Oakland dreamin’ of the past this one picture is stuck in my head.

Walkin’ money.

Only evidence.

Don’t surface.

Used to break cameras. Can’t imagine what it would be like now that everyone has a smart phone.

Downstairs neighbors emptied out most of a restaurant into the walkway between our units today and are they scrappin’ now, or are they doin’ somethin’ else. Oracle says neat little piles of lumber like you frame a wall with have appeared under the back porch. Asks why like she doesn’t know the answer is going to be they’re cutting a fake wall in the back of a closet or a pantry. Like knows like. I’ve taken down those walls. Found that treasure at the end of a pry bar. And yesterday ARC commented on a story that started strong with an opening line and devolved into movie violence, the kind people who’ve never experienced the real thing up close write. Great philosophical opening line. Gangster shit. But that ain’t how crime works. People ask me why when I write about a gun I’m precise about it. The reason was in the story. One character was constantly grabbing an FN. OK, Fabrique Nationale makes everything from battle rifles to the p-90 sub machinegun, to the FBI standard P229 10mm, to the infamous cartel pistola, the FN FiveSeven (1200 from my boy in 2008, who knows, he had a crate of the fuckers. He also had a dude tied up in his basement, to a brown metal pole, the kind that holds up the floor, covered in blood, head swingin’ side to side, face all bloody purple blown up and homie says “don’t worry about him” so I didn’t.) One of the main characters in the piece has a Glock 40. Ok, cool, not my favorite caliber but, you know. At least it’s descriptive. Dialogue was weak. I’d like to see the writer develop. I forgot about who they were instantaneously.

But, the point is, the detail is so you, the reader, can go find what you’re being described to in the story as a tool. Which is all a firearm is. A single purpose tool. Because if I say a Benelli over under breach barrel 12 gauge with carved walnut furniture it says something entirely different than if I say a Mossberg Pro Tactical SPX - 940 with a holosun optic.

If it’s described, there’s a reason. Everything is intentional. Down to the truth that Kimber 1911 style .45 ACP pistols have long known but never fixed jamming issues on feed causing the need to be able to clear a misfed bullet from the chamber.

On that note. I posted this.

Go read it. Now write me a complex action scene involving violence, send it to me and I’ll go over it. Everyone wants to write violence at one point or another, but it’s one of the hardest things to do. Why do you think so many deaths in literature take place off page? It’s because controlling action, time, flow, and precision of movement in a scene is hard. A review of a book about little girls boxing in Reno that I wanted to read but now don’t proved this when in the review the writer said part of a fight was described thusly: “she hit the other girl with her hand.”

No shit?

More things are bubbling. Slow the oil will rise to the surface. Just gotta see if it catches fire. I’m hoping, and thinking it will.

CULT OF THE RAINBOW RAT/INCOMING