I called myself the axe: Thanksgiving masterpiece

Wednesday 11/26/25

I wrote a 2600 word masterpiece in an hour on Monday that has now run in Bloodvine called "You Can Pay Me Back Later" and will be going into my book about horror films. I don't say that I'm proud of something I've written very often because I don't want to suggest I think more of that work than I do of a work I haven't said that about and being proud isn't generally how I operate.

The piece--which is putatively (but not nearly "only") about Thanksgiving horror films--is unlike anything anyone else has ever written or could ever write. As I was saying yesterday: What I do isn't really writing. It's its own thing. And each of the things I create are their own things, because I never create the same art twice. The piece is hilarious. You know how people say something's funny and it never is? That's because basically no one alive has the ability to be funny anymore.

This is actually funny. It's sobering. It's deep. It's raw. It's real. It's impossibly learned. The prose is untouchable, and yet feels conversational. The ideas are significant and always accessible. This is film criticism, entertainment, art, social commentary, philosophy, satire, realism, kind of fiction in parts, history. With cameos from Jean Vigo, Rankin-Bass, the Doors, Jean Cocteau, Linus Van Pelt, John Keats, Blue Cheer, Billie Holiday, the Grateful Dead, Washington Irving, and Sbarro.

You don't have to already care about these films (or ever care about them), have any interest in horror, be someone who reads "criticism." Reading this piece is a life experience. There is no one who writes who does what I do here. Read it--it's awesome. I'm not supposed to say the thing that is true? I'm going to say the thing that is true. Especially when it's that undeniably true for anyone who actually reads it. Is it a nudge? Sure, call it a nudge. I don't care. But it should be read. And it's certainly worth being read.

I don't normally include or say much about a single published nonfiction piece in these pages. Usually it's just a link, if that. But I'm going to post some quotes from this one for this entry in this record. So here we go.

In more recent times, Thanksgiving has served as a convenient backdrop—meaning, excuse—for people to take to social media and do the “Look at me, aren’t I a good and grounded person” act by listing what they’re grateful for, which just happens to be things that play well with the masses for the garnering of likes, which we all know are so vitally important and telling when it comes to who you are as a person, what you offer the world, your ability, your mind, how much better you are than someone who gets less likes, and the quality of your human soul.

***

I’ve been serious thus far—albeit with a twist or two of mordant levity—and that’s about to change, because I am here to provide a service in what may be a small way, but then again, is anything truly small if it helps us get through a day? I should say not. Many view Thanksgiving as a day—which stretches to several—to get through. We are fragile, in part because we’ve made ourselves so. Primed to be triggered. We hang just above the chasm that we may descend into, our single thread snipped by some uncharitable comment, or, sweet heavens, an utterance of the truth, the monster of monsters of the 21st century.

***

The best way of beating the blues is often to give in to them for a few hours and combat pain with absurdity, which may or may not include accepting the absurdity of your situation, your family, and what I will call the entire human experiment as it tapers off.

***

And before I forget: there’s a breast-based glory hole, which sounds hard both to design and implement, so you should check out how that works because you’re unlikely to find many other opportunities on that score.

***

One of the nice things about people stuffing their faces, though, is that it’s harder for them to make stupid remarks. Harder, but not impossible. Stupid has a penchant for finding its way out.

***

As a high-school student, I had a yen to see 1963’s Blood Feast, from schlock auteur extraordinaire Herschell Gordon Lewis. Couldn’t wait. I’d read about its luridities. Propensity for shock. I thought I was very edgy. I called myself the axe. I didn’t call myself the axe. But my sister made me a necklace out of beads and I listened to the Doors and eventually I located a copy of Blood Feast at the video store.

***

What? You don’t think people stretch the truth at Thanksgiving? You believe your cousin is really happier than ever and living her best life like she’s said a dozen times? The hell she is. So I’ll say what I want about Blood Feast.

***

Sometimes it feels like Thanksgiving exists at present so that we may have Black Friday, which exists on behalf of Christmas and for American families to move further into debt. Do I sound like Scrooge? Fine. He was correct, though, about a lot if you go back and read that book.

***

Malls were fascinating. Your life could change in a mall. As when I acquired a tape of Blue Cheer’s greatest-hits compilation (discounting that they didn’t have multiple hits), Louder Than God. Your romantic life could change—forever—at a mall. You went there with your friends, she went with hers, you met up by the fountain, you each got a greasy pepperoni slice at Sbarro, she lied and broke your heart by dumping you later for your now former best friend, and you were never the same again. That’s why your marriage was doomed before it began and one of your daughters doesn’t talk to you.

***

The film was released on October 16. Thanksgiving soon followed, and even if we don’t know our history now, that doesn’t change what a seismic event Pearl Harbor—on December 7—was in this nation’s history and psyche. Many young men had just enjoyed the final Thanksgiving of their lives. Is it any wonder, then, that Thanksgiving was the biggest holiday in this country for a goodly stretch going forward? It meant something different then than it does now. Lots of things did, and that’s something we ought not to be thankful for, and endeavor to get back to, or bring about if we weren’t there.

Again: What I do isn't writing. It's something else. Whether it's with fiction or nonfiction. It is something else.

All the time I hear writers can't do this, they can't make any money, etc. etc. etc. I'm not one of them. You can't do "comparables" with this guy. And I may very well be screwed, but I'm not screwed in the "all writers are screwed" sense, because what every writer is is something I am not. That is obvious if you read the work.

Look at that excerpt from "Dead Thomas" yesterday. Look at that scene in the concentration camp. How that is interwoven into this other story. You have seen nothing like it. Look at the kind of pun of the turning of the page. How even in this excerpt that works thematically with the idea of starts, stops, perceived segmentation, integration. It's so powerful you'd have to think in reading that paragraph--a sort of advancing aside that moves us forward narratively and more-- that it's a pinnacle of feeling, this laying out and lighting up of your soul.

But it isn't, is it? All is in service to pinnacle. The paragraphs continue to build. What Bonita says about years? Where does that come from? How does anyone think those things up, render them in those forms, and do any of that?

Can you even imagine if such a work--which you've seen but a small part of, but that small part contains more life and artistry than the lifetime outputs of these other people added together--had Laura Van Den Berg's name at the top? It's completely inconceivable, right? It's like the most inconceivable thing ever.

Because when you see her name at the top, you know you're getting pretentious MFA drone wankery that no one on earth could possibly seriously honestly care about for a second. You know how it will go every goddamn time with her. With all of them. All of those types, and there are only types. There are writer types doing their types of writing and there is me, and we are not the same and we don't do the same thing. If they are writers, I am not.

Can you imagine this new nonfiction coming from Laura Van Den Berg? If you saw a Laura Van Den Berg nonfiction piece, what would it be about? It's be about being a boring fucking tosser of a shitty writer. Every fucking time. So where's my Guggenheim? Where's my MacArthur genius grant? What? The actual genius doesn't get one? Really? Where's my Pulitzer? Pulitzers? Because I'd like to make this thing happen sooner rather than later get my house back in Rockport.

What a joke. You know something? I'm loaded for bear. I am going to unleash such carnage in these pages about these people and their system. These thieves, bigots, rapists, sexual assaulters, sexists, racists, cowards, frauds, liars. I've been building towards it. Every day I restrain myself because there are other things I want get up first that aren't about publishing or writing. Discipline, I tell myself. Mental discipline. Move systematically. Finish, cross off, get to the next. Do what you need to do. Eyes forward. Don't over-leap.

You know the truth about those non-publishing entries, though? A lot of it is stuff that I'll later be using with or against these publishing people. The subject and content of an entry on here might just happen--to the person who doesn't know my reasons why--to be the Beatles or the Grateful Dead or Orson Welles.

But maybe I'm approaching someone at a press about an Orson Welles book. Or have. And I know how filthy they are. How it's incest or bust with them. If they prove me wrong--or prove me wrong that one time--so be it. I move forward with them. Here's the story, here's the essay, glad to be doing this book with you, etc. Cool. That's what I'm looking to do. Just don't do the fuckery, and we're good.

We could be friends, I guess, if you're a decent person and not like most of these people. But I'm not looking to be your friend. I don't need you to be my friend.

I'm here for one reason: The best writing ever. And creating more of it. Getting it out. Three reasons? It's really one.

I don't cause trouble unless someone makes me cause trouble. For them. It's the last thing I want to do. But when I have no choice? Or I guess I do, but that particular choice would be like me violating everything that is precious about my own work. Like being in on a gang attack and taking my turn and kicking that person on the ground in the head, over and over and over again, when there is no better person than that person on the ground, no person who deserves that less, no person who can do more for other people than that person, and, additionally, that person was born in my own soul, when the attack and attempted chronic sublimation is happening in the first place because that person is those things.

As I said: Not really a choice, unless that's what I'm willing to do. And who would do that? Nobody. So you can't expect me to.

And the bad news, I guess, for these people, is I'm not going to make the choice to do this thing against myself and my work. It's what they want. It would be what helps them out the most.

Actually, what would help them out the best is putting the person with the best work there is forward, the person whose work is so different than everyone else's that it is truly its own thing--you'd have to think up a name--and make a lot of money from that person and that work and get people reading again because of that person and their work, and people trying to write better than they have in many decades because of that person and their work and how cleanly it breaks from the robotized machinery of the publishing system and the writing industry, "business," and teaching models which can only produce bad, unoriginal writing. Try being your version of this guy.

Which doesn't mean copying him, because you can't. But it does mean he can be a liberator. Then we might start seeing--it'll take some time--people who actually have things for us to read that are worth our time, our energy, our thoughts, and maybe even our hearts.

I know when a reason is legit. I mentioned one the other day, didn't I? And that guy, by the way, is a classic favor trader. He bragged about it once to me in an email years ago. But what he said about them deciding not to publishing fiction anymore? That was true. Now, whether that would have mattered or not if they were going to continue to run it, is a different matter. There almost certainly would have been fuckery, which is what this guy had long been doing anyway.

But he told the truth--even if just because it was now convenient/easy for him to do so--the other day. And I gave him credit for that. I'll send him a nonfiction idea or piece eventually.

And then if he does the fuckery?

All of this comes out on here. His name, his favor trading, his boasting of favor trading. He made this gross joke in that email email, by the way. Ha ha ha ha ha isn't favor trading cute and funny. You'll love it. I just haven't shown it to you yet. Ha ha ha ha. Most of these people, man. They have no awareness. Basically of anything. They'll flaunt their bad behavior to you. Like they don't even understand what anyone would make of what they not only just admitted, but bragged about.

I'll write something fascinating here in this Many Moments More journal about Orson Welles. So that I have that in my back pocket. Have that in lined up in these entries so that someone who then reads about the twisted, discriminatory practices of a particular or particularly relevant editor--like, say, someone who puts out books on film directors--pops over to the next page in this journal and sees the fascinating Welles entry, and maybe in that entry there are links to five pieces this guy wrote on Welles that are the best there are and an interview he gave up Welles on NPR.

Maybe the link to the entry in this journal is included in an email with a book proposal. An additional item. Along with the items in what these people consider "famous" and "important" places. Which is funny. Because an appearance in one of those famous and important places, is a golden ticket if you're someone who isn't me.

You have fiction in Harper's, someone's putting out your story collection with that story in it, no matter how much it blows, automatically. Probably a major. If it's not a major, it's Graywolf, worst case scenario. You fell to Graywolf, the press that believes the ultimate criteria in writing is being as boring as possible.

Seriously--check out any Graywolf fiction title. It's the house go-to. They actually sent me an email once saying I wasn't boring enough. But when I had the fiction in Harper's? And also published a dozen other things that month in a dozen other different "famous" and "important" venues, a freeze was put in motion.

Arms were locked. Discussions were had by weasels in darkened corridors. People at different companies spoke to each other, agreeing that this man must be locked out. He was going too far, advancing too much, and we can't let him get any further. For not only isn't he one of us, he's on a different level than all of us. He's a threat to what we got going on here. And the lies we tell ourselves.

Which also means the 600 stories I've written since that story--and it wasn't that long ago--that are as good as that story, sit here for now. Seen by me, and a handful of people I share them with. Waiting. For their time. Should they ever get one. Get their chance.

But you know what? I don't want "Best Present Ever," or "You're Probably Just Tired," or "Friendship Bracelet," or "Dead Thomas" to just run somewhere. Writers just want the story to appear. That's the endgame for them. "I was in such and such." Because that befits the nature of what they have. It's all that they have. The endgame for me is the world and the future. There is no endgame in the latter sense. Now and forever is the endgame. Impact. Change.

These stories are events waiting to happen. They're not just stories. They're not just writing. They're not just fiction. If you have a work of art that could be an event, I don't know where that goes, what is the place for it. I don't know that the place exists right now. The showcase center.

But I know that "Friendship Bracelet" isn't supposed to be in the Indiana Review, if the Indiana Review wasn't just someone like Halimah Marcus at Electric Literature telling her intern who went to grad school and became the fiction editor of Indiana Review for a semester or two to publish her crap, which is exactly what she did, because that's how such a person gets published whatever they're able to get published. But what I create is for the world. It has to get to the world.

I'm not among the Halimah Marcuses of the world. Later we'll talk about Halimah Marcus and One Story and how they came to publish a story of hers. Because I know. And when someone like these people sees me say that, you know what they think? "Oh shit, he knows." Something to look forward to, if you're those people.

The world isn't Harper's, either. Harper's is what you're paid for it, and then clout--again, if you're the right kind of person--with these kinds of people of the publishing system, the Brooklyn clique writer system. Graywolf. Norton, a press featuring the delightful bigot and plagiarist and incestuous bed-hopper that is Jill Bialosky, who will be front and center with that aforementioned carnage in these pages, because she is one dirty devil.

Holy shit, wait until you see this. This horrible human being, this no-talent, this utter fraud, this joke of a writer, editor, publishing house head honcho, actually got people like her to write letters on her behalf basically saying her plagiarism is cool because of who she is.

Guess who wrote her for like fifteen years and didn't hear back once? You think it was because he wasn't good enough? Accomplished enough? Guess who showed more-than-saint-like patience in doing so?

Or do you think it was because of other, very bad, very twisted, very nefarious, very fucked reasons?

We'll get to it.

Is it The New Yorker? We've seen how awful all of the fiction is in The New Yorker. And as you've probably surmised from this entry--as if you didn't already know--we'll be doing a lot more of that going forward. You've seen fiction from two Pulitzer winners in The New Yorker in Junot Diaz and Joshua Cohen and how laughably bad that writing is, before you then saw mine, by comparison, after it. We've seen George Saunders' terrible fiction in this same manner.

And we all know, everyone would know, how much better the fiction is by this other person. That's not me being a dick or anything but a sane person with eyeballs.

And though they're warped beyond belief because of their hubris, and were never intelligent to begin with, people like New Yorker editor David Remnick who believes that sexual harassment is no biggie and permissible if you're the right kind of guy, and New Yorker fiction edtior Deborah Treisman, and New Yorker fiction coordinator (what a 1984-ish title, right?) David Wallace know it as well as you do and as well as I do.

The knowing isn't the issue in this case. Well, it is actually. But you see the distinction I'm making there?

This is how the knowing is the issue. These people think: Not one of us. Not on my level.

It's like an evil robot doing a computation that then produces the words DENY DENY DENY DENY DENY and so the robot sets about bringing that about.

This is how such people are hardwired. I've lived this for thirty years. Almost every waking hour of my life in that time. You can't get something wrong that you know as much as you know breathing.

It's just how they are and operate. You can't make a robot override its programming on its own if it doesn't have to. There'd have to be something else that does. In this analogy, that's taking away choice. That's increasing risk. It's money. It's exposure. It's asses on the line, jobs on the line, careers on the line, reputations on the line. It's a need to call off the dogs.

But you also have to understand how limited these people usually are socially to even save themselves or put themselves in a position that would be favorable to them, their company, their industry. They can't reach out say, "Look, you obviously feel a certain way, there's bad blood, this isn't doing anyone any good, what about starting over, that story looks amazing and it's the work that matters, can we have a look?"

That took me ten seconds to type. But getting ahead of something? Like if you're Jill Bialosky? You personally have a better chance of parting Lake Michigan later today.

Guess how many people have come forward and told me I was wrong and how great that New Yorker fiction was? Do you think it was anyone? Do you think anyone could honestly believe that? Do you think anyone having seen the cases laid out--meaning, they actually were made to look at this shit, rather than just saying/assuming it's great from a distance--is stupid enough to think that?

You don't, because they aren't and they didn't. No one is going to.

Let me tell you something about the emperor without any clothes. Down the street he comes, all 500 pounds of him, reeking to high heavens because of the poor anal hygiene that is the result of being 500 pounds. And the people are pretending that he's svelte, he's Adonis, he's clothed in the finest raiment, and that's silk draped on his back rather than some fetid infection juice oozing out of his many pustules.

Here's what the crowd is doing: Going along with something. Or not really paying attention. Held in the grip of a kind of infectious brainwashing. Looking elsewhere. Wanting to cover their own asses by pretending.

That's how that happens. And it's how Junot Diaz and Joshua Cohen and George Saunders happen and their fiction happens in the pages of The New Yorker.

But if someone steps out of that crowd, walks over to the emperor, and turns around and says the truth to everyone? So that they are made to actually look, if they weren't before?

Everyone in attendance will then see and know the truth. What many won't do--until they feel it's safe to do so, without cost to themselves, or fear of retribution--is say, "Hear hear!"

They'll be silent. But they know. Everyone there knows now.

Note what I'm saying: They'll be silent. You're probably taking that to mean that they won't then declare their support of the person who told the truth, by saying, "He's correct! Look!"

But that's not just what I mean.

What I also mean is that they won't say the teller of the truth, the person who has pointed this out, is wrong. They'll be silent.

Get it?

There isn't anyone who has said I'm wrong here about something like that Joshua Cohen story and Joshua Cohen. Go look at it. Go. Look. At. It. Tell me I'm wrong.

You can't.

And it's not a one-off, either. As I've also proven, it is every single time, with every single work. The examples are voluminous. Unilateral. And soon there will be many more of them.

Yesterday as I was working on "Dead Thomas," I wondered what would happen if there was a parallel universe where these people weren't all against me and I was still who I was and I had that story, and it ran in The New Yorker. It would be the best thing they had ever published. But that's just one thing. A separate thing.

I was thinking about what the reaction would be. And I don't know, but I'm pretty confident that I know this: It'd either be the biggest success the magazine had ever had, or it would draw less attention--and fewer clicks--than most of what they ran.

The story is its own form of life. It's also a life force for our lives. It's pure light. It's very funny, but much of the humor is also melancholic. There's the laughter of the belly, right? Well, this is laughter that vibrates in your bones.

The story is of unsurpassed depth, beauty, wisdom. It's so surprising. I was talking to someone yesterday and I said that people can sum up whatever they're written, do their little elevator pitch, and it's like, yeah, okay, been there, done that. It's all so basic. And people say--and writers complain--that everything has been done. There's nothing new under the sun. Whereas, everything I do has never been done before. There's nothing like any of it. I've never done anything like whatever the newest thing I'm doing is.

So we were talking about if you were going to describe what "Dead Thomas" is "about." The concept, the set-up, the story.

You take an Ed Park story. Pulitzer finalist for fiction Ed Park. It's just fucking Ed Park. The narrator is real life Ed Park, he just has a different name in the nominal--underline that word--story. Ed Park only has and wrote this story so that he can be Ed Park in publishing. It's not a work, it's a perfunctory formality. A pass to roam the halls of this adult prep school, which is kind of what publishing is. It's after-the-fact reportage from pretentious parties and MFA programs. It's not fiction. It's not a story. Ed Park knows people who know who everyone in an Ed Park story is copied from. It's just him and his boring, elitist, ignorant life. There's no imagination. It's transcription.

"Dead Thomas" begins with a new kid knocking on the door of a high school English class. These are the young high schoolers, we gather. Probably the freshmen. This kid is on his own. He's not accompanied by the principal, who, we learn, gave him a note and sent him on his way, like the principal couldn't manage anything in addition to that because of the state his nerves were in.

The English teacher does funny Medieval voices when the class is reading Shakespeare, never mind that Shakespeare wasn't from Medieval times, but her jocularity quails when she tells the kid in the hallway to enter. He walks over to her desk, gives her the note, which she reads silently a few times, sinking deeper into her chair. Because the kid is dead. He's not from this other state. He's dead.

It's all matter-of-fact to him. His normal. For the time being. He was from the 1940s, got killed, probably was done in my his stepmother while he was working on a car, and now here he is in limbo, or the next phase of limbo, which happens to be this school. He decides to give it his all. Be the best student he can be. Which the narrator, Bonita, finds admirable. It's nip and tuck, dead Thomas tells everyone--he could go at any time. He becomes this ace student. People in town want to adopt him, but he can't leave the school.

And we think, okay, the story is about this boy. Yeah...not really. Bonita's best friend, Rachel, takes an instant liking to Thomas. She falls hard for him. But she's also lonely. Rachel is sweet and weird. She makes these awful puns which are bang-on hilarious throughout the story, but will also make you cry later on.

I sat there at three in the morning yesterday, working on this story for the umpteenth time, sobbing. The pain, the beauty, the truth, the love. And also probably because here I have the sun. I have the light. And I'm not permitted to have it seen. The sun is in this cave where I am, when the sun should be up in the sky throwing its light on all. And I cry for that, too. But it's mostly because of what happens in the story.

Bonita's mother has said over the years to keep an eye on Rachel, as she's probably depressed, which is what Bonita's mother says about nearly everyone, because she's depressed. Rachel starts having these big plans. To hook up with Thomas, marry him, maybe put herself in front of a train so that they can be together in the way that he is. So we think the story is about Rachel, and Bonita keeping an eye out for her friend.

But then deep in the story, we learn of this thing that happened to Bonita. And it's the most horrible thing. The most tragic thing. The pain is searing. We learn that the story is really about her. It's about Thomas and Rachel, too, don't get me wrong. But we never see these things coming. Nor do they grow stale or familiar if you've read the story 500 times. It's always new.

You don't play your favorite song once. You don't read something like this once. It's more like a song than a story in that sense, but it's not a song either. It's more than a song. It also pulls back the veil and allows us to see--or at least to feel--why we are here. Why we exist. What it's all about. It'll change your life to read it.

But I thought, what if the people who get The New Yorker (note how I didn't say read) want to be miserable, joyless, humorless, think they're better than other people because they have a New Yorker tote bag, and they're basically embittered phony ass pedants without the knowledge that a pedant would at least typically have?

I'm not say they are or they all are. But it wouldn't shock me if they were, and they didn't want joy and life and love and humor and wit and truth and beauty and to be entertained and to feel deeply. Because I think that's possible, believe it or not. I don't know. I haven't had the chance to find out.

Aren't you curious what would happen, though?

I still have that book with the Harper's story sitting right here with me. It's called Cheer Pack. And it, too, is a masterpiece. I will be doing it over and getting it to be the way I want it to be based on what I've become since. So it's in flux. On the road to becoming what it can best be. For the most good. For this endgame of which I've spoken.

But I was talking about those entries in this record I wish to get up before the publishing and writing ones and my reasons for such. Perhaps those people about whom I was speaking with my proactive planning come here to check things out and try a search, and lo and behold, look how much comes up about the Beatles. Look how good even this guy's "blog" posts about the Beatles are. Wow, they're better than anything you find in Beatles books. It's automatically awesome and unique whenever he says anything about them.

I want to make that very plain. So plain that no one can deny it. That obvious. Which makes the fuckery even more obvious, if that's possible. Because when I nail you to the wall, I make sure you aren't going anywhere, by which I mean, I leave no doubt about who you are, how much you suck, and your motives. Then it becomes a matter of enough people seeing you like that.

And maybe that's not now. Maybe it isn't ever. But it could be. And I will try until I die.

I'm covering it all. Every which way. In exposing these people. Including doing things before some of them have done anything because I know who they are, what they are about, and I'm not dicking around after they do their evil to me. I'm coming for you, I'm going to expose you, I'm going to humiliate you, I'm going to make people see you for what you are, how bad you are at your job, how corrupt you are, how filthy, how everything in your life is about who you're in bed with, how bad you are at writing, and I want to be ready to roll.

There is no caprice motivating this record. "Oh, I feel like getting into my journal and expressing myself about my morning ablutions."

No. It's all for a reason, all part of a bigger design. And to get where I'm going and get what I have to the world, because the world needs what I can do and do do more than it needs anything. I'm just never writing less than 5000 words a day right now and it's taking some time. It's a lot of work. I cross things off that list. And when it's go-time with publishing again on here, it's just going to be blood and horror for these people. No one is going to say anything, do anything, but cower and pray that not enough people see it. I am all in. Because this is how it has to be and how it has to go.

Look at that piece, though, right? That's a great piece. Nothing like it.