The Sock-Monkey As Alone

Sitting on his couch, this is Basel Walker. He has just woken up and sits scrolling through his notifications on his phone. They amount to several likes on social media from people he has never met and a message that he has an appointment on Friday with his therapist. He rubs his eyes, trying to get the night's dreams to leave. His poor shape laid back. Black circles like halos to terrors unknown wander around his apartment. When he looks in the mirror, those rings around his eyes always bother him.   He lives a sad life, but he is content. Living a life like this would bother most but, he feels he knows people deeply through the novels he reads and the videos essays he watches.   He loves the tube and the multitude of voices it brings to his world. The novels he enjoys are anything from old pulps to paperback originals from the nineteen seventies and eighties. However, it's is the tube where he hears voices—the ones of other human beings.   During the month, he g

Thinking about starting back on the books...but no promises. I keep losing my confidence as a writer of fiction. I refuse to make the world worst with my art. and have actively spent most of the last couple of months trying to find more constructive outlets. Those are less destructive to me and others, like painting miniatures and such.   My main problem has been that I don't want to leave negative graffiti on the walls of the universe just because I feel bad. It's not fair to the perfection of creation as lucid and straightforward as a diamond in its glory. I want to inspire people. Not make me into a laughing stock. I mean, technically, both give a kind of joy... but I really can't take much more psychological violence, even if it is self-inflicted.   I have spammed so much crappy art across the walls of the internet. That karmically, I feel like silence is a justified penance. So if it takes a while for those projects to be finished, then know that it may be fo