The Blood Where Words Should Be
Fire, failure, and a lifelong quest to say what’s really on my mind.
I’ve often wished to murder. Lusted after it. Fetishized it. I’ve giddily romanticized the way in which I’d do it — quietly, quickly, on a boat at sea, a la Michael and Fredo, and a concrete anchor before speeding off into the yonder — before soothing my nerves and returning to grace. But for a moment anyway, me, a stone-cold killer. Ruthless and righteous.
I couldn’t, I wouldn’t; I won’t even kill live lobster whilst cooking. Someone else do it; I can’t take the pain of ending a living being’s life. Spiders? Lovingly liberated and flung out my window. Fishing? Throw ’em back. I cry at coral bleaching; I cry too often — a soft and sensitive little shit.
I’m not sure when I first noticed I was a bit too sensitive. Didn’t seem unusual to me at first. I was young — like, Lego young — and I routinely laid awake at night, silently crying into my pillow.
I’d cry about almost everything: asthma attacks, any disturbing news I saw on TV, sad stories others told me, my parents’ rocky marriage, my sister’s melancholia, my brother’s outbursts, the thought of my eventual death or the death of my loved ones, incessant replays of my life’s most embarrassing moments, a nagging dread that I’d one day fail spectacularly. I remember crying when I found out our solar system would die billions of years from now and long after I’d be long gone.
I’d spook at scripted TV when emotions got too intense: A sitcom couple’s standoff, injustices or interventions on after-school specials, deaths on medical or legal dramas. If it was on VHS, I fast-forwarded. If not, I just found a soft place for my eyes to gaze and waited for the next scene. I felt it all, all too much, and for a long time, I just wanted to talk about it … and I couldn’t.
See, every time I wanted to talk, something would happen. I’d glitch out. Freeze up. Forget what I wanted to say. I’d just sit there in silence, or cue the needle of my own voice and start skipping like a record. Then I’d get anxious, then I’d get interrupted, and then I’d shut up and slump over, crestfallen. The voice, silenced; the fire stoked; A murderous rage ignited.
I know what you’re thinking: “You’re lying.” Heard that before. Heard it plenty from my mom growing up. Now, every kid lies to their parents sometimes and I sure as shit did my fair share, but I was accused of lying an awful lot and almost never while actually lying.
It got to the point where even as I told the truth, if I was merely hyper-vigilant about seeming trustworthy, I’d set off alarm bells in the halls of the general other. “I don’t believe you,” they’d tell me. And they’d be as right in their feelings as I was in my diction.
Lord, I bore the brunt of being called a liar like a brick affixed to my back. I just accepted it. As an example: I spent a long time in my mid-20s in a relationship with a woman. Convinced I was cheating, she timed my trip home from work, and openly revolted over the five-minute delta between my actual and estimated commute times. Who would I fuck in five minutes between there and home? Yet I almost believed her.
I’d often vomit over-explanations to ensure I’d be perceived as honest. [Author’s Note: This didn’t work.] In doing so, I’d trip over a sentence or three, and then I’d hem and haw and huff and puff and try to emphatically convince them I really was telling the truth. [Author’s Note: This also didn’t work.] One thing I’ll say is it’s always been a struggle. Frustration built.
As you can guess, the more frustrated I’d get, the harder it felt to come across as believable. No matter how right I was … no matter how honest I was being. I just could never get the words out. Especially if I wanted to talk about my feelings or about anything that bothered me, or if I knew I had a potentially vindicating story to tell about myself. Mostly, I just buried things.
And then I got angry. I raged and seethed and yet the madder I got, the more I knew I couldn’t talk about it. I thought, “You don’t speak unkind words when someone crosses you, you don’t express your indignation. Who would believe you anyway? It’s probably your own fault and you should think about how to better yourself so that you never feel this way again.” Silence until the storm passes.
So I started writing. I think I may have been around five or six years old when I started. I really had no trouble with words themselves: I could read at three, I could mimic just about everything I saw on TV or heard my parents say, and if you got me started on a children’s book or commercial, I could recite the rest in its entirety. So as long as I had a framework — a twist of phrase, a memorable tone — from which to start, I could flesh out the rest.
I just took these spiral notebooks and started writing stuff: sometimes it was words, sometimes it was just my name over and over, sometimes it was sports statistics, sometimes it was whole imagined-ass play-worlds where I could summon a hero’s courage … a kind of Gorman fanfic. I could write it and it, I, would be perfect. No one would see it; I’d always be safe.
And I just kept doing it. I started writing lyrics in the vein of other songs I liked, then I learned to sing and play guitar and I wrote parody songs, then real songs. And I could perform them pretty good, too … even if I always forgot the lyrics — and I always, always forgot the lyrics — I could mimic the sounds I wanted or make up new shit on the spot.
Then I finally crossed over into writing on the Internet. I mostly wrote sports, but I found writing public-facing salvos about what I was thinking or how I was feeling — about anything, particularly the weight of how it felt to be so downcast about the world — to be oddly comforting. If anyone came across them, they’d be so well written and so emptied of vocal hiccups that maybe folks would believe me.
If you gave me a framework — a twist of phrase, a memorable tone — from which to start, I could flesh out the rest and contort it into what I wanted to say. Over time, I found out I could mimic the tone, voice, or structure of anything.
I watched a lot of Seinfeld and Letterman growing up, so I knew how to throw punchlines. As a young kid, I memorized commercials, so as an adult, I could make a viable career out of ad copywriting.
I read a lot of Bill Simmons, so I felt comfortable dropping raw and self-referential first-person chronicles. I read a lot of Rolling Stone and Allmusic reviews, so I could clearly and intelligently sum things up. I read a lot of inspirational quotes, so I learned the formulae for inspirational quotes.
I listened to (and played) a lot of popular music the whole way, so I unwittingly developed a commanding cadence, a keen interest in metaphor, and an odd penchant (among “serious” writers) to copy-paste whole passages from earlier in my essays into later parts like choruses.
I found I could, at times, “memorize my lines.” I always knew what words I wanted to say ahead of time, just, in the moment I needed to string ’em together, they were lost, delayed, damaged. But by writing and re-reading things I had written, I could remember them the next time I struggled stringing syllables or sentences together. As I grew more comfortable writing, I grew more comfortable speaking.
Sometimes, in real life, I could take my more eloquent self out into the wild. I could tell my truths and make ’em captivating. I could talk about all the things I always wanted to talk about because I’d already said them before — muscle memory … with such command and such confidence, too!
At my best, I could sound detached, witty, deadpan, earnest, cocksure, acerbic, fiery, surrealist, idiosyncratic, or profound. Except for sometimes I would swing and miss and come off as precisely none of the above.
At my worst, which was still most of the time, I’d trip over my words again. If I’m hungover or nervous or tired or new trying to express a new thought or just waking up — or, as I tell my partner, if “my mouth is new to the day” — I’ll just mumble and trail off, or space out entirely.
“Cir-cuh-cle.” That’s how my dad tells me I said “circle.” Cute story about a cute kid. Went right along with “buh-duh-duh” (banana), or “me-go” (unknown). A little later in life, it was “nar-cis-isst-iss-sic” (narcissistic), or “lah-zinj-er” (lozenge). There I’d go, murdering, but murdering the Queen’s English.
Sometimes I’d straight-up commit verbal genocide: I’d work up enough momentum through a sentence, and once started reading or talking too fast — wham! All the words at once and then nothing. I’d stop, sweat, and restart my oral presentation. I’d ask the teacher to call on me again later.
Sometimes, I’d troll along the depths of my brain for words with a motorboat sound and just drag it there until I get a bite on my line. Or I’d start a sentence I was familiar with — like “I/it got to the point where …”, or “One thing I’ll say is …”, or “I can’t tell you the number of times …” and just hope I’d pick up my train of thought by the next clause. I usually didn’t, so I’d stay hung out to dry, trying new sentences and feeling pretty stupid. Or hurt. Or untruthful.
I’d rage because I had to be perfect not to feel like that. And I’d make all these dumb-ass mistakes as a kid, you know? Like, shit I was actively on guard to get 100% right. Like I’d just forget letters in easy words on spelling tests, or miss one crucial word (like a “not” that would invalidate a whole passage) when doing reading comprehension, or write something down to remember later and then lose the sheet of paper I wrote the thing down on, and I’d get told in no uncertain terms, “You’re too smart to be this stupid, Johnny!”
I know — I tried, man. I tried through tears and clenched-fist fury. If I missed an answer on a test, I would study the ever-living life out of that question till I murdered its answer in my sleep. The next time, I’d still forget it.
I’d scream and cry about how “I just forgot.” I’d stare at people, hang on their every word, and they’d ask, “Now what did I just say?” I just couldn’t do it. Goddammit, I wanted to, instead: “You never listen!”
I’d try to remember everything they told me to do — vital tasks ensuring my survival or success — and I’d do half of most of it and also like 12 other things, but wouldn’t finish the one lynchpin task. If I needed a note turned in or a form signed, I left it in my locker for months. At first, I forgot it — then I’d hide it in shame. And I’d forget everything everywhere I go: pens, keys, books, papers, toys, balls, backpacks, jackets, gloves, hats, snacks, wallets, lunches. [I always find them again, though, usually because I outthink myself and put places where I won’t forget (or remember) them.]
They’d ask me why I didn’t care and I’d say I did and they’d tell me I was lying again. I couldn’t escape that persistent gnawing that I could’ve been better … I should’ve been better. So I learned to never talk back to people unless I was absolutely certain I was right, or unless I could open-and-shut prove I was telling the truth. And when I could actually do it, and pry the words from where they hid, I unloaded them in a gale-force blaze. I’d incinerate their beliefs, though I’d murder our bond. Who would want to be so right, so believed, so furiously, that you’d leave yourself feeling so wrong, so much worse than if you’d have quelled your desire and just … shut … up?
So around and around I went, in one giant cir-cuh-cle. Crying or beating myself up over dumb shit I knew I could do better, unable to explain why it always kept happening, or finish a full thought, until I finished them all in a full-throat paroxysm. That’s the carousel you ride when you’ve known your whole life that you were a liar and an absent-minded asshole until upon further review and professional consultation, you were relieved to realize it was only a stutter and ADHD.
There’s a word I hear out there in the internet extended universe — and I’m sure you’ve heard it, too — that’s evolved into a blunt-force pejorative: performative. The word seems to most commonly precurse the words “activism,” “allyship,” “wokeness,” or “feminity.” It’s described everyone from Shaun King to Tomi Lahren, from Oprah Winfrey to Rachel Hollis. Yet what it almost always seems to describe is someone who is trying too hard in public, and it’s never used as a compliment.
When you hear that word, depending on who you are, maybe a certain set of somethings bubbles up in your mind. Maybe you think of someone who expresses a certain level of outrage that doesn’t quite feel calibrated to the situation at hand. Or perhaps you think of someone who expresses a certain emotion that feels a bit disingenuous based on what you think you know about that person. Or perhaps you think of someone who just has no chill or off-switch.
Maybe you feel that way because either you don’t agree with them or because it feels quite obvious to you that they are pandering for clicks, likes, or retweets. Maybe you scoff and mutter under your breath for them to ease up on the saber-rattling or the personal branding. Maybe you’re right.
After all, writing for public consumption is, by some definition, always performative. If we weren’t compelled to perform, we would simply jot things down in our journal, tuck ourselves in for the night having mapped the territory of our emotion, and call it day. Instead, we mix raw data and raw feelings and filter them into little screenplays. The page is the stage. We perform our soliloquies. My writing — under my own name, anyway — is no exception.
In my essays, I get to adopt a persona that’s an elegant hyperextension of some facet of my real-life self. I can be detached, witty, deadpan, earnest, cocksure, acerbic, fiery, surrealist, idiosyncratic, or profound. Except for sometimes I would swing and miss and come off as precisely none of the above. At my worst, I cringe upon rereading and I feel like a caricature of myself. Maybe I said what I said in that moment but now, wiser and evolved, I can’t relate. At least I wasn’t tripping over my words — and I’ve written millions of them.
With every word I wrote, I got to satisfy my bloodlust. I’ve hit bullies with broadsides, taken potshots at people I’ve never met, cussed unnaturally for emphasis, used obviously nonsensical hyperbole for comic and dramatic effect, and eviscerated whole subgroups of people standing within a nine-block radius of the princely fucks I was aiming at.
The performance of it all. I pretended to be an actual writer when in reality I was just a guy who really wanted to talk about things I couldn’t articulate in a traditional two-way conversation. I’m still not sure that I’m able to talk about them — too risky, too unusual, too many starts and stops and fits and glitches and blanks and the blood where words should be.
So yeah, my writing’s performative. My entire body of work’s been me trying to tell the truth without tripping over my words the way I always do whenever I’m trying to talk about shit I can’t seem to find the words for. I write in lieu of those conversations because those conversations were never easy for me. I wrote, and write, because if I have to ask you, “Did I stutter?” I already know the answer and it’s never been “no.”
Instead, I developed a way, to cope, to give an elegant voice to ideas, or feelings, too inelegant, or viscerally unpleasant, to talk my way through, to be heard and believed. It comes from a compulsion, a determination to “finish a goddamned sentence” without someone jumping in to talk over me or tell me I’m full of shit.
The bleakness inherently present in most of my words aren’t always because things are bad out there in the world — although, things are pretty bad and there’s data to prove it — but because when I feel good and heard and validated and satiated, my last impulse is to write. When It’s a good day for my mouth and I feel like I can find the words and communicate with confidence, I’ll just call you.
But when I can’t, I write it down — cocked and loaded and spraying and praying and dead-ass certain that I’m not gonna miss — and I polish those words to a shine before speeding off into the yonder. And, no, I did not stutter. The storm passes; the frustration subsides. I soothe my nerves and return to grace. I’m back to saving spiders and letting you kill my lobster on my behalf.
But for a moment anyway, me, a stone-cold killer. Ruthless and righteous. No evidence, your honor, but the blood that remains on the screen.