New Year/New Flesh

When You Died Time Died Too/When I Get My Shit Together

(Fuck if I know the artist, I make memes, 99% of images I use for them have no credit.)

NEWYEAR/

We didn’t make it to midnight. I took the drive home expecting more cars on the road, more Nissans with dented fenders running drunken sine waves across the city. Instead I found it desolate.

Some of us didn’t make it to 2024.

This was the least gunfire I’ve ever heard on a NYE in STL. Ratchet city was not lit up like Russia just crossed the border into Ukraine. Some fireworks. Someone emptied a shotgun. Several AR variants, a few AKs chopping, the off key tone of an SKS or two. A lone pistol, the report of .45 ACP less than a block away, not a new year celebration, a new year threat, trajectory horizontally malicious instead of vertically in celebration. Last year the gunfire didn’t lie quiet until 3AM.

Every year the city stuffs postal worker bags with door hangers. They’re discount printed full color do not disturb signs you’d put on your hotel doorknob that say “YOU CAN HAVE FUN WITHOUT GUNS THIS NYE!” I collect them, maybe ten years worth rattle around my files. Every year a variation on the theme, every year a slight change to the logo.

This is the first year I can remember not having found one on my doorhandle at some point before the 31st. They usually hit the week before Christmas.

Most of us only halfway made it through 2024.

Lying in bed with my fiancee who couldn’t make it to the ritualistic annual NYE party at my friend Steph’s house she Googled it. They passed a law this year over it. Get caught once and it’s a misdemeanor. Twice it’s still a misdemeanor. From there it accelerates to felony and then straight to prison industrial complex. The law is named after a little girl who caught the wrong end of gravity’s rainbow when a 5.56 round zinged through her head without more than a whistle, the trigger pulled somewhere in the vicinity of Dutchtown—So far away no one could hear the shot. Maybe she lived in Illinois, just across the river, or St. Charles, which would mean she was definitely white, so they would definitely name the law after her. Because rich white fucks scared of the city live in St. Charles. Proud raging bulls parading around in their hubris, content that they’re separated from St. Louis county on all sides by river confluences. So in return, once a year, the city rains bullets on them.

There are no public transit routes into St. Charles county and they’ve blocked all attempts to connect to our pathetic light rail system, but they love to import any lower class color from the city to work their fucking service jobs. This isn’t a polemic or critique on race or class though, just the gateway to the west, just how the city and the counties around it are. These are issues too large to reduce on New Years day.

The Oracle is in Arizona with her sister, visiting her brother who was just moved to Arizona to escape an abusive Stockholm marriage and a definite case of elder abuse. Three siblings contemplating whether they’ll have a chance to see each other again.

The first time the Oracle has missed NYE at Steph’s in a decade.

The first time we all didn’t make it to midnight.

The second time we all didn’t make it through a year.

Somehow the grief was worse for her absence. Worse for my fiancee being injured and too tired and hurt to do anything but go home and curl up and be comfy. Worse for the fact that this is the rest of our lives.

Wake up later than anticipated, remember that there is no discreet unit of time. We live in a continuum. We want every year, every anniversary, every birthday, to be a compartmentalized part of a whole that adds up to the narrative of our life, how we’ve lived, what we’ve done, where we’re going. But really it’s just a stream of the same three second window that we perceive as “the present” going on until our personal expiration dates.

Someone at work yesterday came in sick, my fiancee woke up visibly ill. Virus, headcold, something.

Pray for better days.

And the call goes straight to voicemail.

On the way out the door last night in the mid century modern kitchen that was redone over a decade ago shiny as new, now thoroughly lived in again, with the booze on the table, my last best friend plays with a wine bottle, holding it by the neck and rolling it around in slow circles on its base, spyrographing it, she laughs the best laugh left and says “I am doing REALLY bad. I mean, fuck. I am SO DEPRESSED.”

All there is to do is laugh about it.

“We haven’t even hit peak grief yet.” She says. “I need more liquor.” She drinks so little these days. “I miss working out.” opening up my pill container with the extra Xanax in it to pop another bar, mouth full of chalk, wondering where the money for a YMCA membership will materialize during this reign of famine, I’ll be your workout partner. The truth is I miss the iron too.

Not miss as in miss working out: in particular, miss the feeling of the prison weight yard, as perverse as it is. One of the most welcoming and accepting male dominated spaces you may find. Especially at camp cupcake. Because you’re out there putting in work. Motherfuckers you’ve never talked to in your life will come up and slap you on the back when you hit five reps with 275 on incline bench and call you a beast. Quit eating the overpriced frosted cinnamon buns off commissary like they’re going to run out of the motherfuckers and waddle out to the weight pile at 400 pounds. Everyone will clap and welcome you on in. Good to see you here, come on man, been waitin’ on ya, do you need some help? Seen it happen.

This sorta shit is how you find out the world is upside down and backwards all over again.

Post that video to Substack as a note. Hits one person in the chest as intended. Sometimes one person recognizing something is enough. A lot of the time it’s all you’re going to get, if you’re lucky. I feel lucky.

The first time we didn’t play Cards Against Humanity.

The first time no one gave a fuck about the actual clock.

The first time we who were there, were just happy we made it through the year after the one that killed you.

Sorry.

The year after the one in which your dumb bitch ass finally drank the dumb bitch juice and hanged yourself from an over the door coat rack in your bedroom.

583: I count every day.

14, 042: You’re frozen here.

14,506: I’m still alive here.

Counting forward from today I’d be 78ish when I’ve lived the length of your life in total after you took your leave.

Ten more New Years Eve’s and we’ll be past when the tradition started.

Thirteen more years and we’ll be to you meeting me in the parking lot of the prison when they released me.

Twenty one more years and our friendship has wound back to the start of our friendship.

Twenty one and change to the first time I saw you and your bitchy defensive look I figured out over the years was a defense mechanism.

We didn’t make it to midnight last night.

There wasn’t a toast.

We didn’t all make it.

We will never have all made it again.

/NEWFLESH

Burnt Tongue started because a friend said every writer needs a Substack. Notes happened because my fiancee told me she found where the discovery algorithm lived.

It started as a repository for older short and flash fiction and works in progress for the

nine story hotel

. Since then I’ve posted enough notes that were essay length that I should probably just start compartmentalizing a little bit.

So in honor of my departed co-founder, I’m going to be bringing The Cult Of The Rainbow Rat to Substack. Possibly as another publication, or at least a subsection here. What’s The Cult Of The Rainbow Rat? Click the links, this is not the time for the story.

I’m going to do some overhauling and rearranging if my absolutely fucked executive functions allow for it, and I’m going to try to participate in as many group writing projects and as much fun shit as I can this year.

The Nine Story Hotel will be coming back soon, but it’s been a year since it launched and somehow I have almost more subscribers than the sprawling experimental group project I edit and help steer. Something seems fundamentally off right there, having typed it out.

Now I realize aside from various issues with consistency because life just happens how it does, shortly after the launch of the Hotel, Notes appeared, and we didn’t end up taking any sort of advantage of a built in ecosystem of new voices (that’s what we’re looking for, new voices in horror and noir (horrornoir, we like the ring of it) who god forbid, enjoy writing fiction.

Unfortunately by now the Hotel has 55 dense posts and is THICK with lore. It’s a project that has some rules, some guardrails, some constraints, but is mostly a sandbox. People have done amazing things inside it. We were going for figure it out, but because of the speed of the first month of posts, six days a week, and the trickle of posts afterward, the hotel maybe needs a bit of explanation. (I hate breaking kayfabe on the hotel page though.)

I’ll probably cross post that one both here and on the Nine Story Hotel Substack because it’s dense to the point of intimidating new readers at this point. (Also, disorganized. Live and learn. New ecosystem, new rules, new practices. Shit I think about in terms of UX/UI but somehow went flying over my head when editing the hotel.)

This is a New Years day one hitter quitter post. A bit of prose. A statement of intent. Definitely a threat. Yes, mostly a threat.

Don’t threaten people with a good time unless you plan to make good on it.

I’m tired and angry and I do what I say I’m going to do.

Here’s to the new flesh.