The Internet is a strange thing. I’m ambivalent about most of what people do on it, but since I’m not terrified of it, I was a plausible candidate for any of the several internships I applied for this summer. They have different names—”online outreach internship,” “digital media internship,” “Web strategy internship”—but basically, they’re all I’m Not Terrified of the Internet Internships.

The company I finally signed up with isn’t just terrified of the Internet, they hate it. It’s a nonprofit literary publisher that lands grants on the strength of its back catalog, which includes several national award winners. The founder, who’s in the 70-Something-and-Still-Feisty-But-Also-Kind-of-Crazy demographic, has a long history of being able to convince foundations that he can take their money and use it to publish books without seriously fucking anything up. It’s true that he can do that, but it’s also true that the books are read by fewer and fewer people. The publisher’s solution has been to jack up prices, print everything in hardcover, and describe the books as “craft editions.”

Nothing here goes on the Internet. The Internet is the enemy. My hire was forced by the three under-50 board members who told the founder he had to get the company on Facebook and Twitter, or else no one would take us seriously. He doesn’t believe that, and plans to ignore me and the Internet I represent as much as possible.

Representing this Internet-hating company on the Internet is like trying to have a conversation with your ex and his new girlfriend: you keep everything positive and superficial, and skate around the fact that you actually hate him, hate her, and hate the conversation. Sample tweets:

Our author Alec Robinson talks about why he’s proud to be in print! [link]

Check out these stunning letterpress designs by the studio that prints our chapbooks. [link]

Welcome to Twitter: @RoseColoredBooks, a proudly independent poetry store in Oxford.

The arms-length relationship with the Internet is ironic given that this is a literary publisher: an enterprise founded on the premise that there’s value in putting a lens on reality, on valorizing the subjective. “The Internet isn’t real,” grumbled my boss when he resentfully hired me. You wonder what ditch-diggers and plumbers would have to say about letterpress chapbooks.

So here’s my summer: using one medium to promote another, all in the service of freeing writers to express themselves and advance human imagination through institutionally sanctioned channels. This should be good practice for writing short stories that will be graded by a TA being supervised by a professor who was hired by a dean who liked the books the professor published through a company owned by an international conglomerate. The business of literature, the science of art.

Whatever. Like all writers, I basically just want to get paid and get laid.

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.

Photo by Artnoose (Creative Commons)

Maybe because he was busy kissing his girlfriend, Lindsey didn’t notice me putting a condom on. I was already in position and about to slide between Leah’s legs when Lindsey noticed what was happening.

“Whoa. Whoa there, bro. Hang on.”

Leah and I both just looked at him, saying nothing. He kept his hand there on Leah’s tit, and looked back and forth between us, like he assumed we knew what he was thinking. I did, but pretended I didn’t.

“It’s okay, sugar.” Leah put her hand to his cheek. “Just…feel the moment. Feel the energy.”

Lindsey sat up. “Yeah,” he stammered, “yeah, yeah, it’s cool, but…come on, man.”

“Right, it’s cool,” I said, and moved back in on Leah. Lindsey blocked me with a hand on my chest.

“WHOA!” he shouted. “Just don’t…do that, okay?”

“Hey, baby,” said Leah, sitting up. “Don’t worry, all right? We all wanted this.”

“Yeah, well…” Lindsey shook his head. “I didn’t want…that. I didn’t want…”

“You didn’t want me to fuck her?” I yanked the condom off, since it was clear the party was over.

“Well, yeah. I mean…I wanted to see you two together, I just didn’t want…that.”

“You just wanted to see us get to third base,” I said.

“Aw, shit.” Leah reached for her cigarettes. “I don’t believe this is happening again.”

“Again?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Leah, lighting her Camel. “This is just like last time, except that was with a girl.”

“And he didn’t want you to fuck her?”

“No, he didn’t want him to fuck her. I gave her a shitty blow job, then she wanted him, but when she climbed on top of him, he started to cry.”

“Oh, for chrissakes.” Lindsey stood up and put his hands to his head, his dick flopping around between his skinny legs. “I’m sorry, okay? I just don’t want us to be unfaithful to each other.”

“We’re all on the same plane here, honey,” Leah said in a voice containing little affection, dangling the cigarette from her lips like a Blues Brother. “We were all getting aroused together. We were all in the moment. We were all loving ourselves and each other. What does it matter whose parts are where?”

“It matters!” exclaimed Lindsey. “It’s the difference between making out and…and making love.” He put his hands on his hips. “Making love is for lovers.”

I reached for my clothes. “Listen, I’m…”

“No, hang on.” Lindsey dropped her smoke in a half-empty can of High Life. “Come here.” She grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down. “I want to finish this.”

“Should I get another rubber?” I asked.

“No!” cried Lindsey.

“Hey,” said Leah, “let’s just finish this on a nice note.” She reached for my dick, but before I could decide where to put my hand, I heard Lindsey choking back a sob.

I sat up. “I can’t do this,” I said. “You two figure your shit out.”

Leah sighed and shook her head. Crawling under the covers, she turned towards the wall. “Whatever,” she said.

“I’m sorry, bro,” said Lindsey as I pulled on my jeans.

“No,” I said, “it’s fine. Now I just have to go jerk off to a relatively recent memory of having my dick pressed up against your girlfriend’s naked ass. But don’t worry—we didn’t make love or anything spiritually intimate like that.”

Lindsey hung his head. “I don’t believe I suggested this.”

“I do,” I said as I buttoned my shirt. “You wanted to get laid tonight, and you knew nothing would happen unless you spiced it up. Now, excuse me.”

As I went down the cottage steps, I heard Lindsey try to say something to Leah, but she interrupted him. “No, just be quiet, lover. Come over here and work this knot out of my back. But put on your pajamas first…I hate it when your junk dangles on me.”

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.

Photo by M. Orellana (Creative Commons)

In the last six weeks, I’ve been given a 1,400-page unpublished novel to read, asked to sign a printout of a blog post I wrote called “Fuck This Shit,” posed for a Snapchat that was sent to “this girl I know who likes to read,” and hit on for sex (twice) and an egg donation (once). All without even leaving this goddamn house.

They’re now calling this place a “writers’ retreat,” and I’m now a “writing fellow.” My presence is advertised in the brochure as a perk: paying guests get to rub elbows with the esteemed fellows, “promising young writers who have already achieved substantial recognition and are honing their craft.” Fuck that. If I didn’t shit out the next Great American Novel when it was just us staying here—and I didn’t—these goddamned rubberneckers aren’t going to make that outcome any more likely.

I made it through the first 28 years of my life without being labeled “a writer.” I just wrote sometimes. Most of what I wrote got thrown away or lost or rolled up and smoked, and if it’s ungrammatical to write “got thrown away,” I can’t tell you, because the only people who ever read anything I wrote were teachers who were incompetent (grade school), lazy (high school), or stoned (college).

I was the “outsider” picked for this program, the “vernacular stylist,” as Arts & Letters Daily put it. Now I’m officially a “writer”—and, worse, a “fellow.” I’ve been certified by someone with money (because that’s all that really matters, even in the world of Arts & Letters) as a Writer Who Matters, and therefore I’m assumed to have things like a Process, an Aesthetic, and a Trajectory.

Being able to assemble coherent sentences does not make me special, it makes me your mom. Writing about sex and drugs does not make me Jack Kerouac, it makes me someone who was a 28-year-old college dropout working at the kind of service-sector job where if you don’t steal from the register or bone the manager (and then bone someone else), you don’t get fired. Writing online does not make me “alt lit,” it makes me someone who doesn’t have a book contract.

Here’s what made me a “writer”: I said I was. Only once, but that was all it took. I wrote one cover letter for one program and said, “I’m a writer from Columbus, Ohio.” They believed me, and gave me some money, and now everyone suddenly wants to know what angle to the sun I prefer when I compose prose. All because I said I was a writer, which I did because I didn’t give a fuck what a “writer” was. I still don’t give a fuck, and you do, and that’s why I’m a writer and you’re not.

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.

Photo by David Baker (Creative Commons)

7:10 AM: Woke up. Thought about masturbating. Thought about Lena Dunham obsessively-compulsively masturbating eight times in a row. Jealous if girls can actually do that. Can girls actually do that? She makes it sound terrible, but how could it be? Had a smoke in bed. Masturbated thinking about Spring Breakers, which made me think about Hipster Runoff, which got me thinking about Alice Glass. Had to get back to Spring Breakers to finish. Finished, started watching Tiny Furniture on Netflix.

8:01 AM: That whiny little shit is thumping around already. He’ll be on his iPad in the living room. He doesn’t even bother to use headphones. Didn’t anyone tell him this is a motherfucking writers’ retreat?!

9:32 AM: Finished watching Tiny Furniture, went down for breakfast. Danny makes the best over-easy eggs—one clean swipe of the spatula, and BOOM. He says he learned it at a ranch in Nevada where he stayed with his lover Molly Ann and her crystals. “Those crystals gave her some energy, man, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

10:05 AM: It occurred to me that someone would probably give me a book contract if I came up with something while I’m here. Brainstormed book ideas: premature memoir, book club book, fantasy adventure for tweens. Thought of Jenni’s kid, filled with hatred of tweens. Gave up on book ideas.

11:38 AM: Asked Tanner if he could get me a fake so I could drink in town. He replied (a) no, (b) why would I want to go into town and drink when I can drink here for way cheaper, and (c) everybody in town knows about the teenage prodigy staying at the house on the lake, so I wouldn’t be apt to pass for 21. Shit.

12:30 PM: Went to Tate’s room, told her I’m bored. She said (again) that it was my decision to come out here, and pointed out how much I’d hated school. She asked if I’d done my Internet school stuff yet. I said no, asked what she was doing. She said she’s thinking about getting back to her novella. I said that sounded great. I said it in a sarcastic way.

1:00 PM: Started my Internet school stuff.

1:17 PM: Finished my Internet school stuff. Took a nap.

2:47 PM: Looked out the window and saw Jenni come back from her run, sweaty in spandex. Masturbated.

3:33 PM: Went downstairs for lunch. Ate a bag of Goldfish that I knew were meant for the kid.

4:07 PM: Let Lou teach me how to play cribbage. Spiked my Mountain Dew. He had no clue.

5:45 PM: Barb asked me to help make dinner, so I chopped shit for soup. Continued drinking Mountain Dew and gin.

6:13 PM: Drunk. Picked up Catcher in the Rye, felt like a stereotype, put it down. Started watching something on Netflix, felt like a stereotype, turned it off. Kept drinking, felt like a stereotype, kept drinking.

7:34 PM: Family dinner. Jenni asked if I’d been drinking, Bets said “obviously not” and went back to her soup.

8:16 PM: Pretended to pass out on the couch, listened to Tanner and Tate talking about ye olde times. Lucy showed up and sat on me. I threw up a little in my mouth, and Tate said she was going to go work on her novella. Tanner and Lucy decided to go to the bar and let locals try to pick them up.

9:53 PM: Decided to do some Internet school stuff before I got too sober.

10:40 PM: Tate came to check on me, saw me doing Internet school stuff, was impressed. “Whatever it takes,” she said.

11:58 PM: Went outside for a walk. Thought I heard something in the trees, came back. Fucking nature.

12:23 PM: Lucy and Tanner came back, and I followed them out to the place where Leah and Lindsay were staying. Leah and Lindsay had pot. We smoked it. “When you gonna start chipping in for the stash, little bro?” asked Lindsay. “When you stop calling me little bro,” I said. Everyone laughed.

1:44 AM: Lucy put on Justin Timberlake and we had a three-minute dance party, until Lindsay turned it off. “Sorry, I just can’t do that corporate shit,” he said. “Fuck you,” I said. Everyone laughed.

2:09 AM: Thought of Leah’s cornrows. Masturbated. Fell asleep.

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.

Photo by Jack Zalium (Creative Commons)

Danny the caretaker. He lives in the basement, in an apartment that was full of waterskis and shit when we lived here last time. He’s pushing 60, and he has a lot of opinions about classic rock. He worships Hendrix, but has good things to say about Jackson Browne. His dad was a union man in Detroit, but he ran away from home and ended up in India. Three communes, four rehab stints, and one self-produced album later, he’s living in our basement. He’s always fiddling around with things on the property, but somehow nothing ever gets fixed.

Jenni and her kid. She’s Thirty and Flirty, and she’s recently divorced from the kid’s dad. The dad’s not a bad guy, I guess, he’s just boring as fuck. She brought her kid out to the country to get him some fresh air and to have some hot rebound sex with a moody, drug-addled creative writer. One out of two ain’t bad.

Lou and Barb the old folks. She reads, he fishes. Classic.

Leah and Lindsey the hippies. Lindsey’s a guy, named after Lindsey Buckingham. His parents were cokeheads, he’s a stoner. Leah’s his life partner who teaches yoga and makes tea from things she finds in the woods, a habit that’s already led to one hospital run when she picked the wrong mushrooms. They stay in one of the guest cottages, and they love all of humanity except the people who steal their stash. (That would be Danny.)

Bets the lone wolf. She has long flowing grey hair and looks pretty hot in her mom jeans. She makes a living as the author of a self-published series of erotic horror novels about lesbian mummies. Since we moved in two months ago, I’ve said four words to her and she’s published exactly that many e-books.

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.

Photo by San Diego Shooter (Creative Commons)

Here’s the thing about bad decisions. Once you’ve been making them for long enough, you’re hooked. You think that fucking up constitutes the essence of your being, that there’s something essential about you that would be lost if you started doing what everyone’s been telling you to do for your entire life.

It’s a trap, of course. You’re doing the math wrong in your head: you’re telling yourself that because people you don’t like are telling you to do something, the enjoyment you get out of doing the opposite thing is a sign that you’re heading in the right direction. Actually, though, you’re just falling more and more into their control—because you’re losing control of your own life, and you’ll increasingly depend on their largesse.

The fucked-up fact of the matter is that you have to do what they’re telling you to do. That’s the only way you’ll ever take control of your own life. You have to do whatever it takes to be able to do it. Go far away from the people so that they don’t see you doing what they’ve been telling you to do, so you’re as clear as possible about the fact that it’s your decision and not theirs.

That’s my theory, anyway. We’ll see if it works.

Right now I’m pretty damn far from the people I like least in this world. It would be a lie to say I feel positively about the people I’m living with now, but at least I feel something closer to neutral. I feel tied to them, like they’re a sort of family. Unlike my original family, they didn’t run away when shit started to go bad.

Well, actually, one of them did. So never mind. I don’t even fucking know.

I do know I’m glad not to be in Ohio, and to be back in a room that feels like mine. I’m not sure what I think about all these bitch-ass tourists who are here now, gawking at us like we’re robot animals in a theme park. That’s what this place has turned into now—a goddamn theme park. The fucked-up thing is that the more shit I talk about it, the more cred I establish for the house as a place where hard-boiled writer types live. That’s the price of us fucking up the first time: now the gawkers aren’t just on the Internet, they’re under our roof. At least they’re not in our beds.

Yet.

Photo by Matt Trostle (Creative Commons)

If you have any sense of what constitutes literary merit, it’s already obvious to you that I’m the greatest writer in the world.

I strike the perfect balance between irony and sincerity, between justified confidence and  sly self-deprecation.

My sentences typically begin with virile, compelling pronouns, but I’m not afraid to lead with a preposition when my testicles tell me to. I also end sentences with prepositions when I fucking choose to.

I don’t need to use obscenity to have an impact, but sometimes I choose to swear because I know it makes you wet.

I’m young, and in writing as in all other endeavors, one can never be too young. You’re insecure about how much younger than you I am, given how blithely I’m shitting this out.

The fact that I’m willing to shit stuff out is part of what makes me such a great writer. The more I write, the greater the chances that I’ll write something truly great, and I will forever after be judged for that. You’ll wait your entire life to publish a novel, and if it’s not truly great, you’ll have missed the one chance you allowed yourself.

Thanks to the quality of my writing—helped by my compelling personal story—I’ve been awarded a lucrative fellowship. I’ve actually been on this fellowship for several months, but all the money was going to my bloodsucking foster parents. On October 4 I’ll turn 18, and then I’ll be given a check that will allow me to do whatever I want with the next year of my life.

This year, I’ll live in a house in rural Minnesota with three other writers. I expect they’ll give me what I want, because they’ll want to stay in my favor. After all, I am the greatest writer in the world—and like all great writers, I desperately want to be drunk.

Photo by Eric Peacock (Creative Commons)

A year and a half ago, I was a poster child. A freshly-minted graduate from an elite teaching college with a 3.97 GPA and as many recommendations as I could ever have wanted. I could have gone to medical school, I could have taken a consulting job, I could have taught English in Tokyo. Why didn’t I?

I didn’t do any of those things because I had a sense that I didn’t really know myself. I’d always done the right thing, done what my parents wanted, and I’d always succeeded. Continuing along that path seemed suddenly wrong. I decided that I needed to discover myself.

Taking the Unreality House fellowship seemed so rebellious at the time—but now, looking back, I understand that my “defiance” was as much a product of my upbringing as my compliance had been. My parents are hippies. They were worried about me going off to an isolated house in rural Minnesota on a brand-new and very poorly documented fellowship, but it’s exactly what they would have done. I was getting off the grid, going to “find myself” in the wild, as though my true self was somewhere out there, detached from the self that had been living very happily in my skin for 21 years.

The first posts I wrote at Unreality House now seem incredibly naïve. “I could tell you about who I am and where I came from,” I wrote in my first post, “but I prefer to think of this as an opportunity to start with a clean slate. I’m not running away from anything, but I don’t know yet what I want to run towards.”

Reading those first posts now—mine and the others’—is like watching the first episode of a reality show, which of course it was. We weren’t selected for our writing talents, we were selected to bounce off of one another for the entertainment of the World Wide Web. In going to find “myself,” I was actually leaving myself and becoming a character, a stereotype.

If it was a reality show, I don’t think anyone anticipated how real it would get—and how quickly. When I refused to be seduced by the house’s “bad boy”—a development that would have made it all the more moving when I later fell weeping into the arms of the “good boy”—the bad boy turned on me, and so of course did the bad girl. The good boy was good, very good…but he was weak, and I think he really loved that bad girl. I could have loved Will, but I don’t think he could ever have loved me. He would have stayed with Lucy until she killed him, if someone else hadn’t killed him first.

I don’t know who killed Will. It might have been the bad boy, it might have been the wild man, it might have been himself, or it might have just been the god of bad luck. Very, very bad luck.

I was gone by then. I couldn’t have stayed. I found a place in Minneapolis, just to get back on my feet—but I never got back up. Just when I was starting to find my way, to make a plan to get my life back on track, Unreality House sucked me back in. I couldn’t say no to all that money, and the chance to mentor a boy who, I was told, was the most gifted writer the committee members had ever seen. He might be, but now he’s just another sucker.

I’m still haunted by Will, and by Daniel, and by everything about that godforsaken house in Tarrytown. I’m not ready to write about everything that happened to me last year, but none of it was good, and none of it was me. I need to get my life back—the life I had, not the life I was supposedly going to discover. I can’t do that until I leave Unreality House…but really leave it, leave it on my own terms. That’s why I’m going back. I’m going back so I can leave.

Photo by Marcus Ramberg (Creative Commons)

You lounge by your parents’ pool, getting tan and reading Ulysses and thinking about life outside of your bubble, life among the people who are hungry and angry and don’t get hand-slap house arrests when they run into the kind of trouble you did. You think about how glad you are that you live in a bubble and don’t do the kind of writing where anyone expects you to go outside of it. You decide that things are only going to get worse, overall, during your lifetime and that if you happened to do something that might risk hastening your death, that would be okay.

You work at a “clever people” job, an online job where you spend four hours a day writing paragraph-long blurbs about spa specials and Canadian getaways and sushi platters in a style that communicates intelligence and cultural savvy without ever betraying a hint of cynicism. This pays poorly, just enough to buy your sex and your drugs.

You buy sex from the kind of women who will come over, sell you drugs, use the drugs you just bought from them, talk to you about the classes they’re taking at Tallahassee Community College, and then casually ask you to pay them for sex as though the idea has just occurred to them.

You make your sister take a non-hooker to the emergency room when the non-hooker ODs, arguing that although, yes, it was you who invited the non-hooker over and supplied her with drugs, it was your sister’s tit that the non-hooker did her last line off of and, anyway, taking a coked-up chola to the emergency room is no way to break house arrest—especially when the entire reason you’re under house arrest is because a man died after doing drugs you allegedly supplied.

You wait nervously until your sister texts you that she left the non-hooker on an ER gurney at Capital Regional and got out of there without anyone seeing, and then you relax and jack off, thinking of the undergrads who used to fuck M.F.A. students not because—contrary to what most of the M.F.A.s thought—of their superior writing skill, but because they had enough fortitude not to get boner-blocking drunk.

You learn that a certain wealthy foundation has intervened with your parole officer, and that you have the option of leaving house arrest to resume your writing fellowship. You accept this deal, not because you’d rather be at a rural Minnesota B&B than a Florida McMansion, but because you’re fed the fuck up with writing about microdermabrasion.

Photo by Andrew Guyton (Creative Commons)

1. My career. It’s not so much that I’ve been fucking up my career as that I’ve been fucking up having a career beyond serving bar-rush sausage and biscuits. My career as a writer consists entirely of one abandoned fellowship that ended in an overdose and a drug bust, but somehow that still eclipses anything else I’ve managed to accomplish in my life.

2. My friendships. You know that guy who’s a good friend but he obviously always wants to sleep with you, and you know you shouldn’t but then you get drunk and you do and you immediately regret it because then you can’t just be friends any more? I have like eight of those guys, and after I got back to Ohio I slept with all eight of them again. So there go all my guy friends, and my one girlfriend is on an archeological dig in Australia. Makes Friday nights pretty damn bleak, and that’s coming from someone who used to be at the same small-town Minnesota bar every Friday and Saturday and Thursday and Tuesday and sometimes Monday and Wednesday night.

3. My relationships. I just want to date a nice guy, but the thing is that nice guys don’t stick around long when you’re also fucking all eight of your dude friends.

4. My family life. When you’ve fucked all eight of your dude friends and your one girlfriend is in Australia, it’s all too tempting to stay home on Friday night and split a bottle of whiskey with your dad and then yell at him for no reason. Well, no reason that you couldn’t have ignored when you were sober.

5. My car. The oil change sticker fell off, so that kind of wasn’t my fault.

6. My body. When you hang out with people who like to do drugs and go bowling, you realize that eight months have just gone by and all you have to show for it are meth teeth and athlete’s foot.

7. Scrabble. FUCK memorizing a list of two-letter words. It’s not fucking worth it. I’m telling myself this now, but just watch: next week Tanner’s gonna play “WO” and I’m gonna drive a tile rack into my left eye socket.

8. My online following. People say I should get on Twitter, but @LucyColeman is already taken by some dipshit who hasn’t said anything since 2009, and I have no idea how people are going to find me when I’m sharing the Internet with @LuLa86x, @LucheColeman, and @lucy1coleman. Maybe I’ll try the new MySpace. JT probably needs some friends.

9. My soul. Via pissing on a church.

10. My life. This was really meant to be a point in my existence when I would have something more compelling to do than go back to that fucking mudhole in central Minnesota. Sitting around and writing pissy blog posts for foundation money seems to be my destiny, except now they’re making me clean the bathrooms too. Christ. On. A. Fucking. Cracker.

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