Category: personal

I’M BACK, BABY

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

That’s it. That’s the post.  I have finally shed the post-Covid brain fog.  And to anyone suffering from “long Covid”: I have tasted a tiny bit of your pain and I offer every bit of sympathy and funding you require to navigate this blameless nightmare.

Ok, here’s the rest of the post, because AS IF that’s all I’ve got to say.

I have hated writing this book.  Every word, every freaking *keystroke* was a gargantuan effort requiring all my will. Up until the last week.  Now it’s a dream come true, the chapters falling together like someone else wrote them for me and I just have to fit them together.  A perfect side character stepped fully formed out of my brain and performed a key role in the story while earning himself a lead role in a future book.

People…this is going to work.

“This” being my delusional but totally achievable dream of making a living from writing what I want. I’m releasing six books this year, not counting the short stories and re-launches.  I’m writing at least four, one of which is going to be done by the end of the week.  I have never felt more engaged with my writing career.

2023 is my year.  Yeah, right, we’re not supposed to say that anymore.  This is supposed to be a year for heaving a sigh of relief.  As a card-carrying Discordian (look it up yourself, ‘kay? Providing succinct answers is as close as we get to a mortal sin) I’ve waited my entire life for this numerological opportunity.  Me and the goddess, we’re lighting this year up like you’ve never seen. 

the soundtrack to my revival: Bop x Subwave’s set from the release party for their album “Renaissance.’ I have listened to this slapper of a set twice a day, every day since it dropped last month.  Tell me you’re a 90’s kid…

New recipes for the uninhibited

a cluster of wine glasses lay on their sides on a white marble counter, dregs of white and red wine in each glass. a little of the red wine has spilled on the marble.
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

(who wish they were maybe just a bit more inhibited now and then because really, saying yes to everything is sometimes a bad idea)

Part Two of our ongoing series of semi-sarcastic but functional drink choices for people who are trying to reframe their relationship with alcohol, caffeine, and all the other complicated molecules that so radically affect how we think and act.

[Read Part One here]

The Interrupter

The low- or zero alcohol drink that tastes like booze that you drink when you’re already drunk and want to keep drunkening further but know you cannot, for your health and manners. Best served fizzy.

The Cold Front

Whatever medication you say you’re taking so your pushy relatives stop asking you why you aren’t drinking at Christmas.  Please pretend to consume responsibly by faking a minor ailment that won’t lead to a ton of questions.

(All recipes by The Fixer, some fairly insignificant rights reserved)

In Defence of Being Interesting

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

or

When Every Day is Hallowe’en

Though I keep my face off this blog for the most part, should you ever meet me in person, you will almost certainly remember what I was wearing.  To sum it up in a hundred and forty characters or less, my aesthetic ideal is something in the realm of Jay Gatsby’s disreputable cousin, down for the regatta with a cask of bootleg Canadian rum in the backseat of my Studebaker.  Like, when I die, I want to come back as the Arrow Collar Man, dig?

Steal His Look!

My ADHD is the high flicker style, where I benefit from nearly constant stimulation.  My exterior conditions affect me so much that I do best when I surround myself with fun, interesting things to keep my neurons firing.  

Clothing achieves this very well.  Compact, portable, and perhaps the most psychologically rich expression of the human experience, clothes are the first of all first impressions, for when a stranger approaches, long before you can make out their face, you can see what they’re wearing. 

Dressing to be noticed–being deliberately attention-getting–involves a constant negotiation with your fears.  It makes routine the assertion of your right to exist as you wish.  Being thought ridiculous becomes mere background, a given.  We are all ridiculous.  We are all in drag.  Some of us just have more consciously formed personas.  

And people freely give me compliments.  They go out of their way, cross rooms to speak to me, to tell me they like how I look.  This feeds my soul, not because I live for praise (although that’s in there too for this precocious only child of a chaotic family) but because it thrills me to think I’ve made someone happy, just by being myself.  I take it as almost a sacred duty to be able to provide what might be the most interesting moment of someone’s day.

Like being kind to grocery store clerks, being nice to your server at the restaurant.  Nice things are (duh) nice and we don’t get a lot of them in our day to day lives, not usually without being told to pay for it. Being nice costs nothing.  Being interesting, which is really only being fully present in your life, however you choose to shape it, costs you nothing.  

Be as alive as you can, as often as you can.  Wear that shirt you think is too bright.  Buy the hat.  Put on something shiny or sparkly or beautiful today, something to make you happy.

Life is what you make it.  I like making it more interesting.

On the Watchtower 

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

If we were not so frightened

If we didn’t need so

If every home was a homecoming 

And none died gnawing bones beneath the walls

Would we still set these lamps

Still ward the world away?

Yes, Brother

For the woods are deep and pathless

Yes, light them

As we prepare to receive 

Yes,

For the night you lose the path

For the night I set the lamps

For you

(November 2022)

Photo by Gadiel Lazcano on Unsplash

You cannot have it all

On a pale blue background, a fortune cookie has been broken in half and pulled apart to show the fortune, which reads "A plan you have been working on for a long time is beginning to take shape."
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

In something like 1997 I went to the Detroit Auto Show

Big deal, because no one ever does that, right?  It felt big.  It may in fact be the last time I felt technology was going to solve our problems, because they had electric cars, and they weren’t horrible little boxes but huge shiny objects of maximum desire. 

After a few hours of bright lights on slowly rotating supercars, we left the semi-arid wasteland that was downtown Detroit in the mid-1990s and returned to the innocuous inner/outer suburb of Ferndale (pre-gentrification, as in they didn’t even have an Old Navy yet) in my friend’s economy four-door.  An American-made car with an engine so poorly designed he feared to drive it two weekends in a row.  Clearly we were not yet living in the glittering super-future.

But I had a thought. Like any good chaos magician, I know what thoughts can do.  So I let this thought have its way for a little.  It was a thought about myself in the future.

Even ordinary people have heard of using visualization to get their goals. This is nothing new to magick, and is pretty much how anyone gets anything done, not by knowing how they will do the thing but by knowing what they want to have done by the end of doing it.

You have to see it, feel it, taste it, know the experience of success.  Our brains are easily fooled.  Thoughts and memories strike us like lived experience, and so giving yourself the “false memory” of having achieved your goal fools the mind into thinking: yes, you have achieved before, and yes, it was this amazing.  So let’s do it again.  

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and vision-work and “clarifying your goals” are similar paths to a similar goal, that of getting to know the feeling of having what you want.  It’s one thing to plan how to reach your goal.  What works even better is believing the goal is so achievable that it might as well have already happened.  It exists in the future and all you need to do is keep moving and you will align with it. 

I don’t give a hot damn whether magick is ‘real’ or not.  It’s real because it works (we can discuss spelling in a minute if anyone cares.)  It’s so real that science does it too (see above under CBT) and spiritual practitioners of all stripes have been doing more or less exactly that for centuries.

What’s my point?

My point is that as we left the auto show I saw a sort of self.  A me that I might be.  And I wanted it.  I wanted that me to be a real me, to be where I was at the age of 45.  In ways too complex to explain, through circumstance and luck and a number of really interesting mistakes, I think I might have done it.

I think about myself way too much.  Really I do, so much that I had to start writing fiction to deal with all the selves I wish I could be. 

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I’ve come to terms with my limitations.  There are thousands of experiences I will not and cannot ever have, no matter how badly I want them.  This isn’t because I’m denying myself, but because I simply do not have space or time in this single human life to do all one could ever want to do.  I have to choose how I spend my time with deliberation because I can only have so many decades left, and certain paths take a long time to walk. I could become a neurosurgeon/flamenco world champion/*insert huge achievement* if I truly wished, but I would have to give up what I’m presently doing and make that my sole endeavor. Do you see now what I mean?  There’s just too much world.  I can’t have it all.

But I can have my little vision.  I have become my little vision. 

Which means I had better get another one.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 8: The 1990s

a view from the back of a cheering concert crowd in a darkly lit nightclub. The exposed metal beams of the ceiling gleam in the brilliant golden lighting from the stage
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Lots of new readers have started following The Fixer since I last posted one of these.  It seems sensible to preface this episode, which happens to be my 100th post, with explaining again why I say “ruined.”

Because I’m not wrecked. There is as much “wrong” with me as there is with you. We are none of us normal, because the norm isn’t a thing, it’s a statistic.  We can talk as long as you like about the ghost of Aristotle in the shell of modern thought, but suffice to say there is no Normal Person we can all strive to emulate, and there never will be.

So why say ‘ruined’?

First, because it plays to my obsessional idiom, which has most of my written correspondence (from this blog to my text messages) employing the intellectual, somewhat stilted but still wholly lucid prose of an British college don circa 1948, for which I only slightly apologize.

Second, because in a sense it’s true.  Any instinct in me to get along, accept good old school-marriage-breeding-working-death as my inevitable path, was further and further eroded by each of these encounters with The Other.

And boy, was there ever a lot of Other in the mid-1990s.

If you knew where to look.  We used to call it counter-culture, because it offered a wholly alternate universe that felt wildly contrary both to what I’d grown up with and with what was being shown on TV.  A realm in which the earth was held as sacred, my body was mine to both worship and gleefully deface, sexuality of all kinds was not just tolerated but encouraged, drug use was by informed consent and sensible practice while alcohol use was almost nil, and the music was both relentlessly joyful and wildly seditious in a time of increasing state surveillance and corporate control.

I’m not saying it was a golden age because I don’t believe in golden ages.  Much of my experience was a function of my privilege (white, middle class, expensively educated, etc) because looking back I understand how hard other people were struggling for basic rights of safety and freedom that are only now in place.   It’s deeply concerning, even embarrassing, to think how far we’ve backslid in the last few years into unfettered corporate control, restriction of reproductive and sexual rights, and infantilized violence perpetrated against people who are already oppressed.  The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that yeah, Boomers and Gen X are all suffering from lead poisoning from their toxic childhood homes, because otherwise why are they acting like such fucking idiots?

Yeah, yeah, not all Boomers…don’t even start.

On the other hand, I’m firmly in the camp of the historical dialectic (see above re college don) and the notion that the pendulum each time swings further towards justice and freedom for all and away from authoritarianism.  I fully expect that this present day ultra-conservative movement is not a new beginning but their last gasp, the Hail Mary, the desperate acts of desperate individuals who see their old way of life eroding and can’t deal with the fact that change exists, and that it spares no one.

Plain Air

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Remember that time

When the light was golden

And the colours lost their edges

Like an old photograph

A chemical reaction in plain air

On the forward edge of thunderclouds?

Do you remember? she asked

As if that was a thing I could forget 

(2022)

Choice

A mysterious box decorated with gold Chinese scrollwork with an ornate clasp sits on an antique leather desk-top
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

this is the magic of the fear-not ritual

this is why ritual is

so that when you place your hand in the box and

the pain is indescribable

when your fear says: pull away, save yourself

questioning this fear, you remember everyone before who passed this test

generation upon generation who did not pull away

who asked this question: why?

remember this like your own name: pain and fear are two separate things

distinct, divisible, neither inevitable

we mistake them for each other

the experience of one produces the other

but they are separate things

when, from pain, you experience fear

ask it: why?

some pain simply happens

or maybe all things

happen simply

what we call fear is a reflex

the animal retreat

hate is the choice to not question your fear

(July 2022)

Is there such a thing as a blessed ride on the swings?

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

For the past few years I have been going to bed so early it’s a problem. I’m missing time with my family, and I’m waking up at 3AM local time for no reason other than I went to bed at 8:30 the night before and I’m a person who does best on 7 hours of sleep.

Why is this interesting?  Because lately I’ve been trying to stay awake longer. So after dinner I walk to a local park and ride on the swings until I can’t bear it, then walk home. this is a peculiar aim, given my tendency to get motion sickness from, like, every conveyance I’m not piloting myself. The big swings at the amusement park? Big ol’ yuck (don’t ask me about the pirate ship, me hearties.)

At any rate, there I was, walking across the park at dusk. As I neared the swings I noticed a woman with a rolling walker, doing laps around the playground with the determination of someone told by their doctor to “use it or lose it to amputation.” Someone struggling to stay active in a world that seems bent on her senescence.

With a smile I passed her to claim a swing, where I sat facing the sunset, pumping my legs, riding aloft on a drum and bass playlist that never fails to energize me. I don’t count it a good go on the swings unless I see over the crossbar. One of my characters whose book has yet to be published wrote a poem about swings. In it he writes:

One day you will let go

At the top of the arch of the swing

In spite of the lake and the cliffs and the sky and the steel

You will let go and she will be there

To catch you

I always swing until I see the sky above the crossbar. It was no different tonight, as I leaned into each swoop of the parabola, kicking my legs to arc higher, squinting into the cotton candy summer sunset. Wanting the wind in my hair, I tossed aside my hat, and as the woman with the walker bent to retrieve it I told her to leave it be, that I didn’t mind, that I’d come back to it.

She circled me again, two or three times, before she brought her walker over to the handicapped swing. Then got on the swing and swung along with me.

Was this something she did all the time?  Or did my swinging somehow give her permission? I couldn’t have asked.  My heart was too full.  From her complexion I might guess she wasn’t born in my country, but to say a word about what we were doing felt wholly unnecessary. We swung, me kicking myself as high as I dared, her reclined in a seat made for comfort, made for those to whom swinging might otherwise be a luxury, an impossibility.

When she’d had her fill of the swing, she resumed her circuit round me. When she reached my fallen hat, she bent to pick it up, then tossed it to me.

I just about caught it.