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<![CDATA[My Site - Blog]]>Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:16:50 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[October 04th, 2026]]>Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:09:44 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/october-04th-2026

Fast, Feast, Write, Repeat: Confessions of a Fat-Bodied Autophage

Recently I read this book called “Fast, Feast, Repeat.” Like a lot of popular nonfiction these days, it has a subtitle that gives you some more info, but I think the main title is self-explanatory enough for me to forego including that. It was a good read, “lifechanging,” to use the cliché, insofar as after reading it, I not only feel much better physically, but emotionally and maybe even spiritually….
Various fasting strategies are listed in the book, but the one I chose was the On-Off cycle. Basically, for one day I eat three meals fairly closely together (9 a.m. breakfast, 2 p.m. lunch, seven p.m. dinner.) The next day I hold off on eating entirely until 8 p.m., which gives me a full twenty-four hours and some change without food. The only drinks I’m allowed during that time are bottled or tap water, carbonated flavorless water, black tea, and of course, black coffee. The author of the books explains all the reasons why artificial flavors can trigger the body’s old responses and make it much harder to lose weight, even when fasting. This involves concepts like autophagy and the Cephalic Phase Insulin Response (CPIR), but I won’t bore you with those details right now. And you can of course research the topic for yourself if you’re truly curious.
Thus far, I’m finding the diet more than manageable. That first day without eating was maybe the first time I’ve gone without food in a twenty-four hour period in a long time, perhaps in my entire life. And having written that sentence, I realize how spoiled postmodern man is, how much we take for granted, and how being spared even the smallest bit of privation (or even the vague threat of it) has probably had a warping effect on us. Perhaps, though, this diet is not only altering my metabolism, improving blood sugar, and lowering my risk of various cancers, but it’s also “unwarping” me a little, reminding me how grateful I should be for food, and the novelty of its superabundance, how good we have it compared not only to most of humanity throughout history, but a good part of the globe today.
I’ll confess also that that first day without food was challenging. Several times I felt dizzy and had to sit down. At other times, an unfamiliar pain would start in my stomach, sort of like the dull but unpleasant ache that lingers about an hour after one gets hit in the unflexed stomach. Trying to localize this feeling beyond the vague region of the belly was difficult, as was trying to define this feeling, until I finally realized what it was: the beginnings of my first real genuine hunger pangs. Everything that I’d experienced as hunger prior to this moment was a mild gastrointestinal discomfort that no one in a developing country or with real problems would probably even recognize as hunger.
Needless to say, I got through that first day without dying, or experiencing anything more painful than a few belly rumbles and some minor irritability as my blood sugar went temporarily haywire. Studies have shown, by the way, that this diet can reverse type two diabetes, and prevent prediabetics (like yours truly) from passing over the threshold into full-blown Beetus. (Wilford Brimley, eat your high-blood pressure-having heart out.)
Yes, I could always reverse the Beetus with clean living once I crossed that threshold, but I’d rather avoid all of the rigamarole (not to mention the expense) of things like insulin pumps and daily injections. Both my father and my sister are diabetics, and while I can think of worse diseases, it does not look like fun.
What’s more, the pleasure I get from eating now—just after a few days of being on this diet—is exquisite, even when I eat healthy. Contrast that with before, when after succumbing to an urge to pig out I would begin to feel disgust with myself halfway into that bag of chips or pint of ice cream, and would regard finishing the food as something of a chore.
Getting to the most interesting part of the experience—the emotional and spiritual—even after fasting for twenty-four hours got slightly easier I was still limited in what I could do physically, or I at least I felt that way. “An army marches on its stomach,” as the old military saw has it, and while I was not doing anything as strenuous as going into battle, I still had to take it easy. Then as my body began to adjust, I got curious about what kind of physical activities I might do. At first I did little things, like going for walks or going grocery shopping. You can imagine how hard it was to be so hungry while touring one of those big box grocery stores, lost in that temple of food arranged in colorful displays strategically placed and advertised to make the consumer not just eat, but eat well-past the point of satiety.
But I got through the experience without breaking my fast, and even managed to bring the groceries in from the car without collapsing to the floor in a heap.
Going through those first few days of fasting, I kept flashing back on that scene in “Mermaids” in which Winonna Ryder’s earnest Catholic schoolgirl, fasting as a form of penance, pushes it until she faints and drops to the floor.
At last, I took a bigger risk and mowed my lawn while in the midst of my twenty-four hour fast, my vision of falling on the carpet like Winona Ryder now replaced by an image of me collapsing in the grass and somehow overturning the mower as I did so, so that I ended up getting my face mangled by the blades.
I am happy to report, though, that I mowed the lawn without incident.
And because I’m a writer (or I occasionally play one when I’m bored enough and there’s nothing on the Smart TV) I eventually tried writing while in the thick of a twenty-four hour fast.
I was worried about that, though, worried about what Charles Bukowski said about what he discovered when trying to write while very hungry. His ultimate conclusion was that the myth of the starving writer “was just that, a myth,” and that a man could write much better after a big steak dinner than on an empty stomach.
Still I was curious to see if I could do it, either ignore or transcend the hunger gnawing at my belly long enough to concentrate on the contents of my mind and heart (assuming there was anything in there that day.) And besides, just because “hungry writing” didn’t work for Buk didn’t mean that it wouldn’t work for me. Writers’ methods are as manifold and varied as their styles.
And much to my surprise, I not only wrote and had a productive day, but the act of concentrating on writing distracted me from my hunger. Not just that, but by the time I finished the day’s work, I found that the hunger had abated somewhat, that the hard edge was off it and that my stomach was no longer grumbling or panged, but instead was alight with that butterfly buzz that invariably arises after overcoming one’s initial fear and insecurities to engage in any creative act.
This reminds me of what happens when my shoulder pain discourages me from writing (or doing much of anything besides icing the injury, lying down, and moaning so loudly my dogs begin to look concerned.) Writing with the shoulder pain is always a process that starts out being nigh-excruciating. After about twenty minutes, though, the pain is significantly lessened. I would need more of a medical background to guess what exactly is going on, but if I had to guess, the adrenaline rush that comes from writing—that unpredictability, the mix of fear and anticipation—released hormones that counteracted the pain, if not quite curing it.
No surprise, then, that “endorphins” is literally a portmanteau of “endogenous” and “morphine.”
Hunger also comes with its own buzz, one I fear could become addictive.
The reader can relax, though, I will not soon be retreating to my hermitage and writing longhand while denying myself food until my ribs stick out like xylophone bars. Neither will I be trying to make a dramatic aesthetics out of this particular form of ascetism, denying myself food to explore the exquisite depths of torture like the protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s famous novel, “Hunger.” Nor will I engage in some throwback form of autophagous exhibitionism like the man in the cage starving himself in the old Kafka story.
But I will keep fasting, then feasting, and hopefully writing for some time to come.

…

The little dog laughed

]]><![CDATA[September 05th, 2026]]>Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:26:06 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/september-05th-2026

My Only Problem with the Movie Obsession is Me

For starters, this is not a film review, as I reviewed Obsession elsewhere, and if you’re curious about how I rated the movie, I’ll be happy to furnish you with the review in question. This is more of a think piece about how the film affected me, unsettled me for very personal reasons, reasons so personal in fact that I’m not even really comfortable addressing them on an ill-trafficked blog.
I typically hate articles on subjects in which the writer makes the piece more about themselves than the work they’re supposed to be addressing. In the case of Obsession, though, I simply can’t separate my feelings about the film from how I feel about myself, my life, my own manhood, my inability to ultimately connect with women in any substantive way.
For those who haven’t seen the movie, insert your standard “In case you have been living under a rock,” clause here. Suffice it to say that it has become a cultural sensation, transcending the narrower world of horror cinema to become a topic of sometimes-contentious general conversation. That it was made for under a million dollars and has generated roughly half a bajillion dollars at the box office has also, in its way, made it more worthy of attention.
The movie’s premise is pretty basic, with the director admitting he got the idea from a Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror episode that was itself based on the short story “The Monkey’s Paw.”
“Paw” is about someone making three wishes and getting what they want, long and hard, with each of their wishes being spoiled in some way by a darkly ironic twist.
“Obsession” gives its protagonist one wish, which he uses to make a girl he likes “love him more than fucking anyone in the world.” Naturally this ensures her love is terrifying in its intensity, which results in scenes that range from ridiculous to horrific. When Bear (the male wish-maker) leaves for work, Nikki (his ensorcelled crush) waits at the doorway for his return with the eagerness of a loyal dog; later, when another girl is about to kiss Bear, Nikki smashes the girl’s face with a brick.
Both men and women who saw the film were deeply disturbed by it, but for very different reasons. At a basic level, a lot of men cringed in fear at Nikki’s extreme behavior, mostly because it reminded them of an unhinged ex who once keyed their car or attacked them before calling the cops and claiming to be the victim.
Many women responded to Bear’s wish for Nikki to love him with a different kind of horror. His desire triggered fears about patriarchal attempts to mold the female to conform to man’s desire and expectations. The male lust to possess sexually and romantically is still in some way a will to power, and it’s one that has limited female agency throughout most of human history. Yes, there are women who enjoy being homemakers and enjoy having children, but most would probably prefer to make the decision for themselves rather than having the decision made by a father who’s more interested in the dowery or solidifying relationships with an ally by joining two kingdoms.
Of course there are plenty of other, less facile levels at which to analyze the film, and those with overpriced film studies degrees will be getting quite a bit of use out of them when studying this movie. Cultural theorist Asa Seresin, for instance, who coined the term “hetero-pessimism,” has already provided a lens through which some of the more thoughtful early critique has occurred. You can expect many pots of ink (or their pixilated equivalent) to be spilled talking about the film in the coming years. There will probably even be a book-length treatment or ten, complete with footnotes and endnotes, and prose dry enough to wring the last bit of joy from the experience.
As for me, my main takeaways from “Obsession” and the Apache dance that plays out between man and woman in the film is that 1). I’m old, and 2). I’m a soulless monster.
To address these sobering revelations each in their turn, then:
First, this is a movie written and directed by a man in his mid-twenties, and most of the actors in the film appear to be at or around that age. While watching the movie, I became immersed and found myself in sympathy with the characters, basically seeing events unfold through their eyes. But at odd moments I would pull back and think, “These are kids. I’m middle-aged. I’m old!” I couldn’t help but notice how their eyes contained a glint that has already dimmed in mine, that the early signs of inevitable decay—some obvious and some more subtle—have not even begun to manifest in them. The acceptance of eventual failure—death—has still not sunk in with them yet. I bet, I found myself thinking, their bodies don’t hurt every morning when they wake up. They can get drunk tonight and eat whatever they want and not suffer the consequences in the middle of the night.
Second, and more unsettling was how much time I spent with my attention divided between the story and the beauty of Inde Navarrete, the girl who plays Nikki.
I understand it’s normal and makes biological sense to find younger women attractive—and it’s not like I’m not attracted to older women as well—but my response to her beauty was a little jarring. It was most unsettling in those moments where her behavior was off, or we as audience were made most conscious that she was basically a somnambulist acting under a spell. At such moments I didn’t think, “This is terrible what is being done to this girl,” but, “Man, she has really nice legs,” or “nice hair” or “eyes” or “breasts” or “lips.”
It makes me think of what that one feminist comix artist said of R. Crumb, and his depiction of vulture women or even more disturbing, that headless Devil-Girl. The head of females in Crumb’s comix is many times removed or distorted in some way, reflecting a deeper male desire to have only the body, which of course you can do whatever you want with.
Notice that in the “arms race” to create the most beautiful and realistic sex doll, almost all of the designers at these creepy conventions are men, and almost all of the dolls are female. These female poppets rarely have the sneering poise of a dominatrix or the joyful look of a woman who derives her own gratification via the sex act. Instead these facsimiles wear the blank and demure look of lobotomized sex slaves, without will or even consciousness. Despite all the “progress” made in creating these things, the expression is still the same as it was on those novelty blowup dolls, moony eyes and a puckered "O” of a mouth.
I find myself drawn to these things, sometimes as much as real women. And I don’t really like that. At least, though, I have not reached the point where I would prefer fucking the things to an actual living and breathing woman. Hopefully, that day never comes…
Every one of my emotions functions well enough in every other kind of relationship I have—with my parents, with strangers, with women who I only know professionally. But something is simply haywire with my circuitry when it comes to my romantic relationships with women.
Almost all of these relationships have followed roughly the same pattern. I hook up with a girl, we have some fun, she grows more serious while something in me gets colder and shuts down. Soon she is crying and I feel miserable but I'm not sure how to change the situation. Sometimes, at that point, the relationship dies of natural causes. Sometimes I cut it off, feeling ashamed, embarrassed, guilty, but also confused by the intensity of whatever emotion the female in question is enduring. And almost all of these girls had fathers who either died when they were young or who abandoned them, which makes me wonder what kind of absent father pheromone I must be exuding to keep attracting the same type.
And after a few too many of these miserable experiences I eventually resolved to basically live the life of a hermit. Frankly, it hasn’t hurt too much, for, like the writer Karl Kraus, I have a good imagination and subscribe to the notion that “Sex is a poor substitute for masturbation.”
I suppose that I should be grateful at least that I’m in my forties and not my twenties, and that sex is no longer some great unknown mystery that I fixate on as if it might be a solution to the human condition, rather than something that just makes the complicated and painful world a little more complicated and painful.
I guess, then, there are some good things about getting old, and some bad—and very painful—things about being young, and even worse, young and beautiful.

]]><![CDATA[August 03rd, 2026]]>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:00:10 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/august-03rd-2026

“Vengeance is Mine,” Sayeth the Hack? Some Thoughts on Revenge as a Plot Device

Last month I was reading this book on horror films. I suppose I should take historian Paul Fussel’s advice and say “movies” instead of “films,” since he claimed (probably rightly) that it sounds affected when Americans say “film.”
Anyway, one of the chapters in the book was devoted to horror anthology movies. These typically feature some kind of frame narrative—either a party host telling chilling tales or someone discovering an old musty book in a haunted house—that leads to the telling of three or four tales. Despite having heard of “the Rule of Three,” in fiction, many of these anthologies contain four stories. Five actually, if you count the frame narrative, which many times ends with one of the monsters described in the stories breaking free of narrative containment to menace the storyteller and his audience.
Every once in a while you will get that hoariest of framing devices: several campers sitting around a blazing fire in the middle of the woods, trying to scare the wits out of each other.
The author of this book, like a lot of people, considers “Creepshow” to be the gold standard of these collections. That makes sense, as the pedigree of the creators—Stephen King and George A. Romero—is so damn high, and the two exhibit a lively chemistry when their respective sensibilities mesh.
There are other collections that are more creative, more experimental, and some with entirely open-ended or ambiguous endings as well. But this writer was an unabashedly avowed “meat and potatoes” kind of guy, and he liked his horror vignettes not only to stay true to form, but to stick to formula. And his formula was basically this:

Some shitheel behaves in a terrible way toward someone decent who doesn’t deserve the mistreatment.
The shitheel crosses the line with their victim, appearing to permanently vanquish them, either humiliating them so badly they flee, or flat-out killing them and getting away with it.
The supposedly vanquished victim returns—or their ghost returns, or something—and the shitheel gets their comeuppance, usually in a satisfyingly ironic manner.

Sometimes, even in such patly formulaic tales, there is a bit of ambivalence. In the second of the four stories in “Creepshow,” for instance, a rich shitheel (played with menace by an against-type Leslie Nielsen) tortures and kills his wife and her lover, who then come back from the dead to kill him. Sure, torturing someone automatically qualifies the torturer as a shitheel, but cheating isn’t exactly a nice thing to do, either.
Regardless, I respected this author’s unqualified preference for this simple, straightforward style of storytelling. It’s not exactly the “Poetics” of Aristotele or the four part Kishōtenketsu of traditional Japanese narratives, but it obviously gets the job done for him and a lot of other people. Those E.C. Comics-inspired anthologies are still getting cranked out, both in print and on the big screen (or at least on streaming services) and demand isn’t likely to die anytime soon.
Still, there are those who find revenge a hackneyed plot. To give you an example, a few weeks ago I was getting ready to submit a short story to a magazine. It’s always a good idea to read their submission guidelines beforehand, not just for the technicals, but because sometimes they include lists of what they don’t want to see. These lists usually come about after the publishers—or their poor slush pile screeners—see too much of one thing and get sick of it. So sick of it do they get, in fact, that they give up on seeking out a novel variation on that old song and simply tell contestants to stop singing it. The list I read included everything from “pandemic-based tales” (understandable) to anything with vampires, werewolves, or zombies. Also, included on the list, were revenge tales, especially ones in which the revenge is far out of proportion to the original offense that precipitated it.
We all, of course, have a right to like whatever kind of stories we like, and it doesn’t require a great defense or apologia to back our preferences. Still, if I could, I would like to arrange a debate—or at least a friendly exchange of letters on their aesthetic theories—between the author of that book on horror films and that publisher. It would be fun, or at least intellectually edifying, to watch the pro and anti-revenge factions duke it out with words.
As for me, where do I stand on revenge as a plot device in fiction? I suppose I could do a survey of my body of work and see how often I used it, though so much of my old writing is shitty and unreadable that I’m not sure I would survive that research project.
Still, I probably stand where I’ve always stood on using any kind of plot device. “The dance,” as my old writing partner Adam Howe liked to put it, “is in the doing.” I don’t mind hearing an old song sung as long as singer brings new life or conviction to it, or at least novel choices in terms of phrasing and emphasis.
And of course, a dose of irony or a nifty bit of unexpected symmetry at the end can really make or break the whole story. That said, there are those who also think that the twist ending—sometimes called the “O. Henry ending” (based on the writer who perfected it) is also a bit hackneyed as well.
I will add, as a final thought, that you can really piss readers off by denying them revenge to which they feel emotionally entitled. You can call it catharsis or the primal urge or a desire to reestablish karmic balance in the universe, but it all comes down to the same thing:
People like to see someone who’s got it coming get their comeuppance. Failing to do this causes a kind of “narrative blue balls,” in the reader who feels they’ve earned the release of pent-up frustrations. To deny them this is to violate that “silent contract” between reader and writer that some argue is sacred. The great Ian McGuire did something like this in his follow-up novel to the masterful “The North Water”—subverting the revenge after seeming to build up to it—and many readers could not forgive him.
Having the aggrieved party get revenge only to discover it doesn’t provide the hoped-for satisfaction is sometimes effective, too. This is what happens in the Hitchcockian and underrated film, “Blue Ruin,” in which a man sets out to kill the person who murdered his parents twenty years prior. It’s only after he’s enacted his plan and is well down the path of vendetta that he discovers things are not as they seem.
That “things are not what they seem,” is not only the oldest plot, but probably, as noir writer Jim Thompson once said, the only real game in town. Thus it would do no good for a publisher to caution writers against submitting stories based around this concept, since pretty much every story has this at its core.

]]><![CDATA[July 03rd, 2026]]>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 06:58:57 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/july-03rd-2026

The Internet-Broken Brain: Write to Repair It, or Simply Write to It?
The internet is screwing up our brains, or has already screwed up our brains quite a bit. I imagine that I’m not telling you anything that you do not already know. Then again, if the internet has really screwed you up, you may be too screwed up to even realize you have a problem. You may just be sitting there watching one YouTube video after another with drool falling from your mouth and onto your keyboard, blissfully unaware that you’ve allowed the box to lobotomize you.
I’m not picking on you, by the way. I’ve allowed the box to lobotomize me, too. Almost all of us have. And those whose brains haven’t been destroyed by the internet are pretty annoying. They’re like those people who used to always find a way to interject into every conversation the fact that they didn’t own a TV.
There is all sorts of evidence that constant exposure to an array of overstimulating content—and the option to always seek out more and newer stimulation—has done great damage to our ability to think. Like lab rats pushing the feeder that dispenses cocaine and ignoring the feeder that dispenses food pellets, we’re more interested in the short-term high that comes from dopamine rather than the long-term sense of wellbeing that comes with serotonin.
As a result of this hyperstimulation (I like that word more than “overstimulation,” in this context) our memory and even our ability to hold a thought in our mind for any length of time has been greatly harmed. This damage naturally shows up in many realms, from our ability to hold a conversation to our ability to remember things.
One of the things that has suffered—or has at least changed drastically—is our writing and reading habits. A short time ago, for instance, I read a study that found the average sentence length is continuing to grow shorter and shorter. In the eighteenth century, an average sentence was something like twenty-five words. Now it’s down to something like seventeen. I don’t imagine that all the aids like Grammarly and the AI tools are going to do a lot to add nuance and depth to our increasingly staccato, shortened, and simple style, either.
It isn’t just the length of the sentences that’s changing, but the construction of them, the way they’re built and what that framing reveals about our frames of mind.
A blog entry on my ill-frequented website is not the place to get into a big thing on syntax, so suffice it to say here that sentences basically show one of two types of construction: there is parataxis and hypotaxis. Parataxis is the straightforward sentence, the sentence that reads like a bullet, without a lot of subordinating, coordinating, or relative clauses. Here’s an example of a sentence showing good parataxis:
“Bob went down the street looking for his sister Bertha.”
See? It’s straightforward, the words (like Bob) taking no detours, sure of its mission (also like Bob.)
Here’s a sentence that demonstrates hypotaxis: “Although Bob had never intended to spend his day looking for Bertha, and even though he hated chasing her around town, he still felt compelled to try to find her, if only to mollify his mother.”
You can argue about which kind of sentence you prefer, but I’m pretty sure you can guess what kind of sentences are more common these days, and what kind were more common in the past. If you said the paratactic sentence has won out over the hypotactic, give yourself a gold star.
You also probably don’t need me to explain why this short and straightforward kind of sentence has thrived while the more ornate and complex has begun to languish. The hypotactic sentence requires holding multiple thoughts in-mind—sometimes in juxtaposition with each other—deferring completion of those thoughts until the very end of the sentence.
Conversely, the paratactic is much easier for those with short attention spans or myriad distractions before them to follow. I had a buddy who worked in corrections and said the only thing he could read while doing his shift as guard was Vonnegut. The writing was so straightforward that nothing short of a riot would have short-circuited his enjoyment of the novels while seated behind his desk.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rules. I’m sure if you scour the literary works of the eighteenth century you’ll find authors who kept it short and simple. And there are more than a few writers who, despite having their brains turned to mush by the internet, still insist on keeping it dense and complex, and demanding thought of both themselves and their reader as they compose.
And there is, of course, more to the change than the rise of the internet revolution. There are people who prefer shorter and simpler sentences for aesthetic reasons, people who tend to regard the more complex as more given to pretension, artifice, falsehood.
The writer Charles Bukowski wrote some dense and flowery stuff in his twenties, but soon after abandoned this style and made (in his words) “simplicity his god.” A test was developed years ago—called the Flesch-Kinkaid—that claimed it could calculate the readability of a sentence based on many factors. There’s a chart online that shows how to grade a sentence, if you’re curious. Needless to say, the test favors simplicity and shuns complex sentence construction.
And the shift was well underway before personal computers became a thing and long before people had the internet. The switch from writing longhand on paper (or even old-school parchment or vellum) to typewriters certainly helped to change writing, as did the much faster pace of the modern world.
For all I know James Cain and Dashiell Hammett found Proust as unreadable as would your average high-school student these days who spends half their day texting.
All that said, there is a difference between preferring to write a certain way and having no choice, being rendered a mental cripple who can either avail themselves of parataxis (or even sentence fragments) and not write at all.
Another study I read, for instance, found that constant overstimulation from the internet has made the myelin sheaths around adult brains smaller and thinner than in the past. Myelin sheaths are typically much thicker in adult brains than in child brains. This allows adults to be better at concentrating, focusing on tasks, and resisting distractions. We aren’t quite at the point where we’ve lost our sense of object permanence—I’m not going to be stunned by someone playing peekaboo disappearing and reappearing behind a washcloth—but we are clearly hurting ourselves. Kids of my nephew’s generation call it “brain rot,” and many of them deliberately avoid those short videos that tempt the eye (and thin-sheathed brain) when scrolling through YouTube videos and seeking distractions—courting the kind of dangers it would be best to avoid.
Fine the reader who’s followed me this far might be saying. The internet is screwing up our brains. What, then, is to be done? Can we write to repair the damage? Should we get out the longnose revolver and, a la Elvis ensconced in his Graceland mansion, start shooting every glowing box in the house?
You and I both know neither one of us are going to do that. Moreover, I’m not sure that anything can be done, by which I mean, I don’t think we can write our way out of this, write to heal the internet-broken brain. I think, instead, we might just have to write to it, in the knowledge that the damage is done and cannot be undone.
Is that too defeatist? Depressing?
Maybe. But telling a man who’s paralyzed from the waist-down to just get up out of his wheelchair and start breakdancing is simply cruel. And I’d frankly rather write to the broken brain than not write at all.
Still (to end this post with a white pill) it may be possible to not only undo the damage, but undo it rather quickly. Prior to writing The Adderall Diaries, author Stephen Elliott conducted an experiment in which he gave up the internet for a month. He described the experience as giving him back his ability to concentrate, to think through complex problems. To, in a word, make him think more like an adult rather than an overstimulated baby.
However (and this is a big “but”) Elliot—despite noting all these benefits accrued from abstaining from the net—shortly thereafter not only returned to his old habits, but started his own website and began spending even more time online.
I guess, then, that promised pill is not quite as white as I thought it would be.
Sorry about that.

]]><![CDATA[June 02nd, 2026]]>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:55:56 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/june-02nd-2026

Three Shades of Black:
An Exploration of Three Men and Their Darkness

An old friend of mine came to town recently, let’s call him Bill. Bill and I have been friends since childhood and we’re both now in our early forties. During our time together, we toured the sights intown, hitting restaurants and revisiting old haunts, while also spending a fair amount of time watching the tube at his Airbnb.
Bill preferred lighter fare, like sketch comedy shows, while I mostly watched war films and horror movies. After a while Bill turned to me and said, “You’re a dark motherfucker, you know that?” Then he shrugged, and said, “Maybe it’s the War.” By which he meant the Iraq War, which I’d unfortunately participated in as a young man. Apparently he thought the War had left some kind of stain on my mind or soul (or both) and this was reflected in my taste in movies.
Bill’s words hurt me a little—should I take offense? But then I just sort of shrugged them off. Okay, then, I thought. I guess I’m just a dark motherfucker, and we left it at that.
Here’s the thing, though. When Bill and I weren’t driving around town or watching movies, Bill was drinking, a lot. In fact, as soon as I picked Bill up from the airport, he asked if we could stop at the nearest liquor store.
“That one looks good,” he said, pointing out the first one he saw. It was in a bad part of town, and had some shady men congregating outside its door, but Bill was unfazed. And since he was going in and not me, I just shrugged.
As soon as Bill got back in the car, he had a big smile planted on his face. “Man, prices on the Mainland are so much lower." He pulled the liquor bottle out of the bag, ripped the seal off, and had a drink right there in the passenger seat.
I didn’t mention that his act could get me thrown in jail, nor did I tell my friend that he might have a problem. I knew it was something he didn’t want to hear, something he undoubtedly already knew at some level, and something that, were I to mention it, would ruin our reunion, maybe destroy what remained of our friendship.
So I let Bill drink, and I let him continue to rag on me for my dark choice in movies. But I silently wondered to myself what the hell was going on, both with me and with Bill…
Okay, Bill was an alcoholic, and considering his mother was a bad one and he had a rough childhood—bouncing from one reform school to another while his parents went through a messy divorce—some of this was maybe inevitable. But every time I had talked to Bill on the phone before our reunion he had sounded like he was doing well. He was living in Hawaii (hence his previous reference to “the Mainland”), in a paradisiacal bamboo house on stilts surrounded by palms. His place had a swimming pool, but if he grew tired of the smell of chlorine the beach was within walking distance. He had several million dollars in the bank and he lived mostly from collecting rents on various properties that belonged to his stepdad, a multimillionaire many times over.
In our phone conversations before our reunion Bill talked a lot about his tiki bar in the basement of that house. He mostly spoke about the décor, the potted palms and the cups hand-carved from coconut to resemble Olmec heads, or the cool neon signage hung on the barback.
He also talked about the various parties he held there, and the people who attended, many of them attractive women eager to sleep with him. But he never talked about the actual drinking.
The only sign that anything was wrong in our phone conversations were his occasional complaints about his love life, women using him for his money and abusing his love then leaving him.
When my week and some change with Bill were over, I drove him back to the airport. His next stop was Vegas, where he claimed he was going to get into baccarat, after, like Dostoyevsky, having fallen madly in love with the roulette wheel.
That surprised me, too. Bill was smart, and good at poker besides, and probably could have beaten house odds finding some sensible play at blackjack or craps. Only fools and carefree highrollers would play roulette, where the only supposed strategies were derived from the old “Gambler’s Fallacy,” which is to say seeing potentials for a statistical edge where they simply could not exist. And baccarat, while slightly less fiscally suicidal, was not much better, and mostly attracted Chinese “whales” who could afford to blow $250,000 a hand without batting an eye.
I didn’t bother saying any of this to him, though. Like his drinking, I thought it was his business.
Instead I just got out of the car with Bill at curbside drop-off, helped him get his luggage from the trunk, then gave him a parting hug. I also told him to watch his ass with the ladies, and to watch his wallet in Vegas. I wanted to tell him to watch it with the drinking, too, but I knew how he would have reacted, and how it would have soured all our time together, which was not, in toto, all bad. We’d had some fun in a sports bar watching a hockey game and eating wings (though Bill snuck off to the car a few times for nips) and I’d also shown him a few architecturally impressive structures around town.…
Now, though, I’m feeling a little guilty, and am asking myself (in an afterschool special narrator’s voiceover voice), “Was I a bad friend to Bill?” “Was there something I could have done for him?” Maybe slipped a pamphlet on AA into the outer zip-up pouch of his suitcase?
Speaking of friends, I had another friend, this one in the Army, we’ll call him Dunphy. Dunphy and I have not seen each other in over a decade and it’s entirely possible that we will never see each other again. We haven’t talked in at least ten years and I’m not even sure where he is, or if he’s even still alive.
The last I heard (after a quick online check) he’d returned to his home of record in Missouri and was working there as a janitor at the VA.
Regardless of where he is now, Dunphy and I share a deep and unbreakable bond, one that may go deeper than any other I’ve experienced in my life. We come from entirely different worlds, classes, religious backgrounds, but the time we spent together in Germany, Iraq, and Texas has fused us spiritually in a way I can’t quite articulate.
Dunphy was a metal head, played electric guitar (quite well), having developed a shredding style influenced by the ill-fated but insanely talented “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott of Pantera.
Dunphy wore headphones plugged into his amplifier when he played. That dulled the sound but I could still hear a muted version of his soloing, but that didn’t bother me, since I liked hearing him play.
Sometimes, either in the barracks room we shared in Germany or in the little singlewide trailer we shared in Iraq, Dunphy would cease shredding, kick back and play some metal on his stereo system. This included everything from Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” to Morbid Angel’s “Domination.” Most of the cover artwork for these albums featured pentagrams, demons seated in the sky blowing ill winds, goat-headed satanic gods perched on blood-soaked thrones. The singers in these bands tended to growl and the guitars were sludgy and strangely tuned but when I could make out the lyrics over the fray of clashing instruments they were usually about grisly subjects: damnation of souls, Nazi doctors vivisecting innocent children sans anesthesia, unholy congress between satyrs with giant prong penises and their mortal female victims.
Once I turned to Dunphy and asked him, “Doesn’t all this heavy, dark shit kind of drag you down?”
Dunphy, unlike me, was not offended when he was accused (albeit a bit more indirectly) of being a "dark motherfucker.” He was pretty Zen and hard to rile, despite his Satanic taste in music, or maybe, strangely, because of it. He merely smiled at me and my impertinent question, then said, “No, it doesn’t bother me, because I feel all this chaos in me all the time anyway, so when I hear someone else going through it or expressing it, it makes me feel a little better.”
Fair enough. But it makes me wonder: who among the three of us—Bill, Dunphy, and yours truly—carries the most darkness in his soul?
…

]]><![CDATA[May 05th, 2026]]>Tue, 05 May 2026 08:21:51 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/may-05th-2026

Midlife Monstrosities: My Secret Desire to Give Up and Be Like Everyone Else
I turned forty-four a few days ago—April 27th to be exact. That’s not one of those big milestone birthdays—six more years until I have another of those—but it still is a reality check. I can remember, for instance, when my parents were in their forties and I thought they were getting old. And I can certainly feel my own age—soreness in body, fatigue, a bit of bitterness over the gulf between early life expectations and what I’ve actually achieved.
A lot of that is no doubt due to the extra miles I put on my body in the Army—especially during that year overseas in Iraq. Some of it, though, is undoubtedly just due to the reality of the human condition. Medicine and science have advanced quite a bit over the centuries, but there are still limits, even in this time of seemingly limitless wonders. Go ahead and upload your consciousness to a digital substrate or do the old cryogenic deep freeze, but it’s looking like immortality is destined to remain on the horizon for some time. You and everyone you know are going to die, and before that your bodies and minds are likely to betray you in painful and sometimes embarrassing ways.
That’s the reality I couldn’t help avoid thinking about—even if such thoughts were mixed among sentiments of gratitude—while I cut the cake this year.
And there is, in fact, much for which to be grateful. Not only am I still alive—many of my friends are not—I am also in relatively good health. My dream in life was mainly to survive the ordeal of Iraq, make it home, and become a writer. I didn’t expect to become a bestseller like James Patterson; I merely wanted to prove that I could write something, sell it, and see it published, which I have done now many times over.
I make sure to remind myself of that quite often, especially during my darker moments and those times I surrender to self-pity and self-loathing.
And still, despite this acknowledgement of gratitude—despite continuing to write in spite of all the obstacles—something is starting to grind me down, wear on me in a fundamental way. What is it? I’m not sure. I only know that it has always been there, but until now it has mostly existed in the background. Now, however, its presence feels much more constant and powerful, and while in the past I could mostly ignore it, these days I can’t help but hear its increasingly insistent voice and even concede its wisdom.
“You’re right,” I say to the voice in my darkest moments, usually late in the evening when I’m lying in bed but sleep eludes me. “This is pointless, and I should give up. To delay the inevitable is just to give the monster chasing me more time in which to afflict me. Why not deny it the satisfaction it achieves in so sadistically pursuing me, even if ‘it’ is merely my consciousness, i.e. ‘it’ is merely me?”
There are times even when I think of ending it all. Understand, I have no concrete plans to end it, and I’m pretty sure that every sane and sentient creature at least idly considers suicide from time to time. It’s an out—an option—that keeps the weight of being locked into existence from becoming unbearable.
I suppose there’s a bit of a paradox to be explored there: the ability to commit suicide gives one the strength to continue on with life rather than ending it.
You want to know something I’ve been thinking about that’s even more disturbing than suicide, though?
Becoming a stockbroker, maybe getting involved in day trading, or giving penny stocks a chance. It’s true, don’t laugh. The other day I bought “Investing for Dummies” and opened a Charles Schwab account. Not only that, but I’ve been thinking of chucking this whole writing thing in the trashcan and instead devoting all my remaining time on Earth to making money. And why not? It’s the American Dream, is it not?
I suppose this is my version of a midlife crisis, and I’d be happy to call it that if I thought I had a good chance of reaching eighty. Most likely the midpoint of my life is already somewhere in the rearview. Life expectancies, after trending upward for decades, have now begun to reverse, especially for white men in my age cohort and older.
And thinking about my death naturally leads to thinking about all the things I failed to do thus far in my life, things I may never do: far-away exotic lands I may never see, exquisite foods I will never sample, beautiful women I will never fuck.
Do I really want to spend my remaining time here on Earth writing stories hardly anyone wants to publish or read?
Simply put, I’m frankly a little tired of struggling, eking out an existence as a writer, barely making it from month to month. Gas being $5 a gallon isn’t helping. And although I can pretend to be above the fray—an artiste, ladies and gentlemen—I find myself ground down more and more these days by feelings of basic inadequacy. Unlike in the past, I actually care that my cars seems to be ten years older than every other car around me when I stop at traffic lights. And during those same nights I spend staring at the stucco ceiling in self-negating silence, I yearn for the basic material things that all men want. It’s not just a sleek German luxury automobile, or a sprawling many-roomed mansion with acres of property surrounded by rolling green hills. Nor is it just the kind of woman money can buy, the kind of woman who may (no undoubtedly would) only be with me for my money but would also be beautiful enough in a superficial way for me to not even care.
It’s all that and more, the extravagant hedonistic joys so delectable that they can even make me forget the central fact of the human condition, if only for a short time. Celine was right when he said that there was really only one reason to get rich, and that was to forget. A rapper’s gold or platinum chain seems like an extravagant waste until you recognize it for what it is: a talisman they can clutch whenever childhood memories of poverty emerge, a precious metal totem that can ward off such painful thoughts.
Of course, I’m being ridiculous, and even if I commit myself to this other path, my chances of somehow getting rich are fairly slim. But in addition to my ridiculous dream of wealth—which I suppose we all privately harbor—there is a more basic and practical desire simply to have enough money not to worry about basic necessities. Being able to have some dental work done, having my car’s AC repaired so I don’t have to sweat marbles during the long, hot summer months tooling my Hyundai around Cincinnati. Not fearing that I’m going to end up living in a tent under a bridge and shooting fentanyl on account of a couple minor disasters—washing machine broke, dog with hacking cough needs medical attention.
And yes, the desire for some minor creature comforts—nice meals in gourmet restaurants, trips abroad to practice the languages I’ve been learning over the years—would also be nice. Because I used to survive on tips—delivering pizzas—I also enjoy tipping well, and believe in tipping karma.
There’s a part of me that’s deeply embarrassed to be admitting all this to you—the two or three people who might stumble onto this post over the next several years. But there’s also a part of me that recognizes I’m being overdramatic.
For writing, as the great Arthur C. Clarke once observed, is at most a part-time job. And there’s no reason I can’t trade stocks on the side or make a few sensible, unsexy investments, and still spend the rest of my time still writing. And I’m not sure the desire to have a little more than I have—or even to harbor a desire for obscene wealth—even makes me a monster. It might make me a douchebag, but even if that’s the case, I’ve got plenty of company.

]]><![CDATA[April 04th, 2026]]>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:50:37 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/april-04th-2026

We Need Another Factotum, i.e. a Book with Soul About Working Crappy Jobs

Most people hate their jobs. And most people also love to read about other people performing their shitty jobs. Figure that one out. Maybe it’s a bit like the old Patton Oswalt bit about why he enjoyed watching Cops: watching other people endure misery helps you endure your own, maybe especially if their lots are even more miserable than yours. We even get a loanword from the German to describe this feeling: Schadenfreude.
There are enough books on working crappy jobs for various subgenres to have developed within the main body of the genre. There’s the story of a socially conscious journalist slumming for a year or two, working crappy jobs and keeping notes before writing their book. Usually these works mix field reporting and personal observations with hard data and quotes from more academic sources. The other main subgenre (which I prefer) consists of firsthand accounts of people working various crap jobs not out of sociological interest or class solidarity but simply because they have no choice. These people tend to be overeducated, underemployed types who dream of being professional writers or at least tenure-track professors. A lot of times they got their MFA in the hopes of writing the Great American Novel. In the meantime, though, they’re saddled with a ton of student debt and they have to do something to avoid ending up on the streets.
My favorite of these books is probably Iain Levison’s A Working Stiff’s Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can’t Remember. Its subtitle should give you a sense of its darkly humorous tone. Levison was an extremely talented, insightful and acerbic writer. I say “was” because the guy hasn’t written anything besides a handful of articles in years. The last I heard, he fled to China and is teaching English to Chinese kids there. Why is it that the most talented writers are almost always the least prolific?
Getting back to the book: Levison’s description of his various crap jobs—the physical pains, the sometimes dangerous mishaps—evoke laughter but also push the reader toward tears. Whether you’re still working a crap job or you’ve escaped it (or you’re one of those lucky souls who never endured the grind) you’ll still feel for the man.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but some of the scenes were so vivid that even years later they remain fresh in my mind: like the time he served wine at a toney party but kept cutting his hand with the corkscrew and ended up getting his blood mixed in with the drinks; or that time he was delivering home heating oil via truck to large mansions and—thanks to some confusing instructions from dispatch—ended blowing the head off a statue with a blast of hot oil from a hose; or working an offshore fishing rig and having netfuls of stinking mackerel dumped on his head while he attempted to shovel his way free.
Of course, the granddaddy of all crap job books is Skid Row poet laureate Charles Bukowski’s Factotum. The book follows the peregrinations of young Hank Chinaski from one Greyhound station to another as he seeks work while trying to make it as a writer. He works at a dog biscuit factory, as a janitor, as a “ball bearing man,” and at a million other sundry shit gigs all while remaining either blackout drunk or enduring the agonies of an excruciating hangover. Reprieves come in the form of trips to the horse racing track and making love to equally sloshed and shabby women in seedy rooming houses. It’s a bitterly funny-sad book whose point appears to be that the average life at the lower social rungs is mostly pointless. Scene follows scene with no connecting thread except that Hank—somehow—remains alive despite a strong self-destructive streak…
I suppose people are still writing books about their crap lives and crap jobs, but I haven’t read anything on the subject lately. It’s a shame, as I feel that the genre is long overdue not only for an update, but for a book on the subject to outdo everything that came before. Not that the aforementioned books weren’t great in their own way, it’s just that the labor market has become even crappier since those books were written, the situation of your average prole even more desperate.
Yes, Bukowski had endured the Great Depression, but Factotum took place in the Forties, during the war boom when jobs were plentiful, especially for young, able-bodied men. It’s debatable how able-bodied the heavy-drinking Buk was, but with all the non-4F (draft deferred) youngsters overseas, getting a job was fairly easy even for him.
In the intervening decades—especially since the Dotcom boom and bust, as well as the opening of the immigration floodgates—competition for even the worst jobs has grown only more fierce. It’s not just that, but most of the gains have been for management and the owners at the expense of the workers. The game is rigged thanks to all kinds of legal and linguistic legerdemain, as well, designed to keep you from getting even the meagerest benefits. You’re not an employee, you’re an associate, or subcontractor. People no longer have jobs, they work gigs. Octogenarians who should be doting on grandchildren in living rooms are struggling to keep smiles on their faces while stocking shelves or serving burgers to obese ingrates; Amazon fulfillment centers that look like concentration camps sprout over the countryside and fleets of blue panel trucks comb the land delivering sex toys to shut-ins. People who were in war-torn nations last week bring orders of fast food and recreational marijuana edibles to the doors of young girls masturbating via webcam for men old enough to be their fathers.
It’s all quite hellish—hellish enough, in fact, for new words, concepts, and neologisms to have emerged in hopes of describing or dealing with this monstrous society we’ve created. The “precariat” slave away in a “techno-feudalist” system ruled by billionaires who dream of leaving Earth behind for Mars and implanting microchips in our heads (ostensibly for our own good, but probably for their own, nefarious purposes. After all, turnover in slave mines is probably pretty high and those rare earths and cobalt are not going to dig themselves up.)
The people who run the show grow ever more detached from the people they rule over, as well. Rather than wearing giant wigs and powdering their faces with arsenic-soaked puffs like the elite of a bygone era, our rulers go to ski resorts and talk about installing internet kill-switches to keep the rabble in line, or achieving the singularity and uploading their consciousnesses onto deathless electronic platforms.
The only good part about such a terrifying situation is that there are still some people out there strong enough to laugh, and perceptive enough to find the beauty in all that ugliness. Brave, enough also to look their situation in the eye and describe it as it is—without meaning or purpose besides what little they might give it with their words.
I can’t help but think about the person who could do it, come out and finally say it for the rest of us, an avatar for a whole class of people who tend to get overlooked. A young man or woman who dreamed of becoming a writer but is now currently pushing a forklift. Tomorrow they’ll be delivering Chipotle for Uber Eats or driving a bagful of groceries for Door Dash in their tiny Prius. The next day they’ll be stocking shelves at a vape shop run by an Indian berating them for moving too slow. Maybe they’ll even sign up to be a subject of medical testing just to add a touch of novelty to the agonizing grind.
At night, body aching, mind numbed, soul almost without hope, this person will return to their apartment they share with three equally hopeless roommates. They’ll go to their room, sit down in front of a PC and force themselves to write a thousand words or so. Slowly—through excruciating trial and error—they will learn to be a good writer. They will learn what to leave out and what to put in, how to hold a reader’s interest, how to make reading about hell less than hellish, or even enjoyable.
Hopefully it leads to a good book, and hopefully they have the balls to send it out into the world. Hopefully also some publishing house picks it up. But if not, I hope they self-publish the work and don’t worry about it being perceived as a “vanity” project.
Hell, part of vanity is caring what other people think, which makes most established, well-respected writers vainer than any kid out there willing to circumvent the “Big Six” and take the DIY route.
One thing I know for sure, though.
I’m not going to be the one to write that book, as those days of busting my ass for shareholders and owners I’ll never meet are far in my rearview. I busted my ass hard enough in the Army, and if this writing shit doesn’t work out for me, I’ll go live under a bridge somewhere. Roast rats on a wooden spit over a barrel fire during the day while nodding out on fentanyl in my little canvas tent at night.
Maybe—assuming I don’t overdose—I’ll even write a book about it.

]]><![CDATA[March 07th, 2026]]>Sun, 08 Mar 2026 03:24:33 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/march-07th-2026

Single Words and Readymade Phrases: Writing as Subtraction and Addition

Forgive the prolixity of this post’s title. Forgive me also if this blog entry ends up going all over the place. It’s fairly late in the evening, several publishers have been running me ragged with various assignments, and to top it all off, I’m on a rough diet. It’s got me a little lightheaded, a little cranky. I think I may be going through carb withdrawal.
Usually it takes me some time to get to the point in these things (sometimes too long) but that shouldn’t be a problem tonight. Mainly because the thing I wanted to talk about—my problem—is staring me in the face in that first paragraph I wrote. Go back there and read it again and see if you can see what the problem is, the weak spot that’s calling out for correction.
Don’t see it? Lucky you. That means you’re not torturing yourself at two a.m. trying to do the impossible, by which I mean perfect your writing.
Here’s the part that’s bothering me: “…to top it all off” is a readymade phrase, and the use of such phrases is many times evidence of lazy writing (or at least a tired mind.) A writer is supposed to consider every word that they write, measure its effect, judge its placement with regards to the other words around it. Only then do larger structures such as sentences and paragraphs begin to factor into the picture.
When you write something like “to top it all off,” or “one fell swoop,” you are not writing. You are basically allowing the stale and tired concepts of other writers to march through your mind, out of your fingers and onto the keyboard.
Kind of scary when you think about it, almost like being possessed by the spirit of some lazy hack.
Maybe, in fact, the writer William Burroughs was correct, and that language itself is a virus, a way for us to contaminate each other with bad ideas. That old “Bull Lee,” developed this insight well before Dawkins talked about memes and “lateral transmission” only underlines the man’s genius. There’s almost a syllogistic logic to it all. Humans are a viruses (in Burroughs’ estimation) and we are inhabited by viruses, and thus everything we do (from sex to speaking) can’t help but be viral.
Maybe we should all just shut the hell up?
There are certain writers who seem to be a little less downbeat than Burroughs, inasmuch as they behave as if they believe the virus is at least treatable. Certain writers have used a reductive, “deceptively simple” style that helped them avoid regurgitating the pat phrases of their lazier forebears. Reading Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy or Sherwood Anderson—whatever you think of them—is always a clinic in seeing what happens when weighted consideration is given to every word. It’s as if with each keystroke they’re trying to drill through layers of received and accreted wisdom, trying to clear the air and begin anew. It’s learning via unlearning.
Some, like Bukowski, take it a little further. Bukowski, after all, is the one who said he decided to make simplicity his God. Raymond Carver also ideally aimed for sentences of ten words or less, in order to avoid the problem. Keep those sentences short enough and it’s hard to let the pat phrases and preexisting ideas sneak through.
Still, if there is a peril to this style of extreme vigilance, it’s that it seems like…work, both to write and sometimes even to read. Writing, for me, should not be like climbing a mountain, should not be arduous. It should be a way to unwind, find some succor and solace after a long, hard day.
Others obviously don’t feel this way. Someone said that when Normal Mailer wrote, it was common to hear him grumbling, banging things around, making himself miserable.
Hemingway—like a handful of other writers I can think of—wrote while standing up, mostly in the morning.
To me that seems too much like work. Yes, I believe in developing good habits, being disciplined—trying, in a word—but I don’t view writing as a chore, not most times at least.
And Hemingway obviously felt that way. To bring Bukowski back into it again: “Anyone who writes standing up at seven a.m. has no sense of humor. He wants to defeat something.” Hemingway, by the way, began writing early in the morning (also strange and uncomfortable for me) mostly because it left him the afternoons free to fish and drink.
In other words, writing wasn’t a way to have fun; it was something to get out of the way so that he could have fun after that.
And frankly I don’t want to feel this way about writing. I want to have a good time when I write, and if this prevents me from ever creating a stone cold masterpiece, then so be it. I have better things to do than immiserate myself in pursuit of praise and awards. Moreover, I can think of several writers off the top of my head who were feted and showered with accolades who went on to take their lives. Nothing is going to immunize you against the pain of the human condition. You might as well use writing to palliate that pain, rather than exacerbating it in pursuit of some probably phantomic perfection, or praise from other pained beings.
Of course, too, there are times when readymade phrases are entirely appropriate (I almost wrote “just what the doctor ordered” but stopped myself in time.)
Say, for instance, you are writing in close third or first person perspective for someone whose language and culture are well-salted with peculiar idioms. Say this character is especially religious, and very familiar with the Good Book, loquacious and given to homespun wisdom. In such a case, the following would be perfectly acceptable:
“I was plumb tickled when I found out ma wasn’t going to die. Lord willing, she’ll live for many more summers, the crop will come in, and then we’ll be in high clover.”
Those two sentences are filled concepts that did not originate with your character, or with you, the writer. They were inherited, “horizontally transferred” (h/t Dawkins) alongside social mores and taboos as memes, just as eye color or hair color are “vertically transferred” (ibid) via genes.
That’s something else to consider when it comes to starting “fresh” and trying to simplify things in order to avoid using the timeworn and readymade. Language itself is inherited, and while the “language acquisition device” touted by generative grammar proponents has never been literally located in the brain, no words we write (or think, or speak) are probably sui generis, or ever necessarily our own.
Hell, concepts like egology nicely dovetail with Dawkinsonian mimetics to argue there is no “you,” or “me.” And I don’t mean this in the sense a spiritualist guru means it. I simply mean that the concept of personhood is a convenience for our genes to transmit themselves into the next generation. You, in a very fundamental sense, might not even exist, so how can you hope to be an original writer?
It’s something to think about the next time you sit down to write, I suppose. That “you” are not really writing, that it’s all just genes and instinct and mechanisms of the brain developed over eons.
How the hell did I get from talking about aesthetics to this murky outpost of phenomenology?
Hell, don’t ask me. I told you it was late and I was tired and hungry. Even worse, the central heating here has crapped out, so you can add “cold” to that list.
Christ, sometimes I wish I knew how to do something more useful than writing.

]]><![CDATA[February 03rd, 2026]]>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:12:18 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/february-03rd-2026

The Misery to Joy Ratio:
A Quick Rumination on the Lives of Road Comics, Writers, and Other Chasers of the High
A while back I heard an interview with a comedian (I can’t remember which) talking about how almost every aspect of a road comic’s life sucked. You spent almost all of your time traveling from one gig to another—either in anonymous and sterile airports, or driving mile after mile on unchanging highway. Once at your destination, you either went to some random hotel (or even worse, a motel) for the night, or you went to a house the club kept specifically for their acts while in town. A lot of those acts—comedians, musicians—knew others would come after them and they liked to play pranks. They would leave perishable items out rather than putting them in the fridge, hide used condoms beneath the pillows in the bed, unscrew lightbulbs and throw them in the trash. The usual gross and immature stuff you would expect grown adults not to do, unless, you know, they were comedians or rockers.
But then the big night of the show would come. Granted, said “big night,” was probably just at some tiny, smoky comedy club—The Chuckle Hut, the Funny Bone—and not a coliseum, like when you first envisioned taking this path. But the fans would be there to see you (if you were lucky) and not have just showed up for a night of random comedy. Maybe parts of the set would be clunky (you’d be trying out new material), or a drunken heckler would ruin a bit at a key moment. But, some nights there would come a time where you hit your stride, a kind of comedic flow state where you were having success and the crowd was in that moment with you. Maybe it was a bit of improvised crowd work that didn’t just go well, but featured the kind of serendipitous exchange everyone would be talking about on their way home. And there would be a little bit of something ineffable—euphoria—when things went your way and you felt like you’d made the right career choice. You knew, in this moment, that you were doing what you were born to do, and that—while you might be generally useless—you were at least good at this one thing, dammit.
Yes, the high would soon fade, and be followed by an hour of manning a merch table, selling a handful of CDs and t-shirts to fans. After that, maybe a couple of bumps of cheap coke cut with God-knows-what in the greenroom with your opening act and the bartender, then the comedown. After that, who knows? Maybe anonymous sex with a fan or a more random hookup you met at the bar. More likely, though, just coffee, a slice of pie, and a cigarette at some vinyl booth in a dingy all-night diner on the edge of town, before heading back to the motel to get some sleep. Only to get up and do it again, and again, and again.
And somehow, either for the luckiest or the unluckiest of comics, those few minutes where everything flowed right on stage make the rest of the nightmare worth enduring…
I’m not sure what exactly this comedian called it, this life of so much tedium and hassle with that little bit of incredible joy mixed in there. But it’s something I’ve come to think of as the “misery to joy ratio” (which you can probably tell from this blog entry’s title.) And it’s something that I imagine exists in probably every artform, some bargain the art makes with the artist that ends up winnowing the large cohort of people who try it down to a much smaller group of those who have no choice but to do it.
My own art (I feel ridiculous calling it that, but just play along for the sake of this blog) is my writing. And it is an art that comes with its own many agonies and its handful of joys that must still somehow provide enough compensation to keep me going even when there is very little literal remuneration involved.
What are those pains and joys?
The pains are myriad, and probably any writer can tell you about them, and many in fact spend more time complaining than writing.
There are, for instance, those days where you not only don’t want to write, but you don’t even want to get out of bed. Maybe your body is hurting (I know mine is) and even the physical task of sitting in your chair and typing brings a certain amount of agony with it. Most of the time, though, even when the physical pain is absent, the psychic pain is still there, the gnawing doubt, the self-loathing, the feeling that you are the least successful and least talented person to ever attempt your particular craft. For me it’s a running monologue, a soliloquy of self-defeating insecurity that continues to play in the background as I work. It always starts out very loud and (usually) if I keep writing, keep plowing through it, the voice grows quieter, more distant, faint. But even then it’s still there, if only as a remote and faded echo.
At first, though, it’s speaking in ALL-CAPS.
WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DOING THIS? it says DON’T YOU KNOW YOU’RE THE WORST WRITER IN THE WORLD? NOT ONLY THAT, BUT YOU’RE GETTING OLDER, AND YOU STILL DON’T HAVE A WIFE OR KIDS OR ANY KIND OF REAL CAREER TO SPEAK OF. DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU COULD DO SOMETHING—ANYTHING ELSE—THAT WOULD PAY YOU BETTER THAN THIS? WHY, YOU COULD BECOME A DAY TRADER! STOP DRIVING AROUND IN YOUR RATTY HYUNDAI AND WEARING PANTS THAT ARE BASICALLY COMING APART AT THE SEAMS! IF YOU WOULD ONLY GIVE UP THIS STUPID DREAM AND FACE REALITY, YOU COULD HAVE A CAR THAT WOULDN’T LEAVE YOU FEELING EMBARRASSED AND INFERIOR EVERY TIME YOU STOPPED FOR A TRAFFIC LIGHT. YOU COULD EAT SUSHI AT A NICE BOUTIQUE EATERY WITH A PRETTY WOMAN WEARING AN EXPENSIVE DRESS, INSTEAD OF EATING TOP RAMEN WHILE YOUR DOG WAITS AT YOUR FEET HOPING FOR A NOODLE TO DROP FROM THE TINES OF YOUR SPORK.
BESIDES, JOE (YOU ASSHOLE), LET’S SAY YOU EVEN DO WRITE SOMETHING THAT—MIRACLE OF MIRACLES—DOESN’T SUCK. ARE YOU AWARE OF HOW GREATLY THE ODDS ARE STILL STACKED AGAINST YOU? HOW BIG THE SLUSHPILE AT EVERY PUBLISHER IS? HOW HARD IT IS TO BREAK THROUGH WITHOUT CONNECTIONS, A PEDIGREE, AN AGENT? AND DID YOU NOT HEAR WHAT EVERYONE FROM JOYCE CAROL OATES TO JAMES PATTERSON HAS SAID ABOUT THE POLITICIZED NATURE OF THE PUBLISHING CLIMATE AT THIS POINT? NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ANYTHING ELSE FROM YOU, WHITE MAN, AND EVEN YOUR VERY EUROPEAN, VERY STODGY NAME IS GOING TO MARK YOU AS PARIAH BEFORE THE SLUSH READER GETS PAST THE COVER LETTER. AND YOU CAN HARDLY BLAME THEM. AFTER ALL, WHY PUBLISH SOMETHING WRITTEN BY SOME SCHLUBBY WHITE DUDE FROM OHIO WHEN YOU COULD PUBLISH AN AFROFUTURIST MASTERPIECE WRITTEN BY A UGANDAN TRANSWOMAN RECIPIENT OF BOTH A GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AND A MACARTHUR GENIUS GRANT WHO ALSO WRITES MOVING POETRY ABOUT THE PLIGHT OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN AND EVEN PERFORMS THE WORKS AS SPOKEN WORD WHILE WEARING A KEFFIYEH AND BACKED BY A BONGO PLAYER.
And the worst part about that self-defeating litany is that a good portion of what it tells me is in fact true. This is a very hard gig. Even successful writers for the most part make less than enough to subsist on, and either have to rely on spouses or other gigs to support what the world views as a hobby, regardless of how seriously the writer takes it.
So why do it? Why, when there is so much misery and disappointment involved in the craft, and even those odd and unexpected moments of joy are so ephemeral and fleeting and are never guaranteed?
If you followed the first part of this analogy about comedy, you already know why I keep doing it.
I keep doing it, 1) Because I have to and 2) Because when everything goes my way, when the fingers dance and typing feels more like moving a planchette over an Ouija board than “digging a ditch,” to quote John Colapinto, the buzz is unlike anything else. Hell, even after it’s passed, that residual echo of the high is something you can carry around with yourself for hours afterward, and it makes trudging through mud or slogging through snow feel like walking on air. And it’s something to look forward to finding again and again, something I’m willing chase no matter how much of a harangue I have to hear from that self-defeating homunculus screaming from the center of my head every time I sit down and begin typing anew.
Besides, what else am I going to do at 2.a.m. when I can’t sleep and there’s still nothing good on TV?*
I suppose I could try day trading, but even that pursuit probably has its own misery to joy ratio.
* Yes, even in a world where there are a thousand streaming services offering a million options, many times it feels like there’s nothing on TV (or on my computer.) On such nights, I have come to realize, I’m better off entertaining myself with my writing than relying on Hollywood, YouTubers, porn stars, and assorted other riffraff out there in cyberspace to entertain me.

]]><![CDATA[January 10th, 2026]]>Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:51:27 GMThttps://www.joeyhirsch.com/blog/january-10th-2026

Is Horror All There Is? Is It All That Exists? Some Ruminations on the (In)Human Condition

I had a sort of rough Christmas season. Not as rough as the Reiner Family’s (too soon?) but as much darkness as light certainly. Part of that is just the kind of weather we had here in the Nasty Nati. It was blistering cold and overcast, for the most part. And when the chill finally let up, the rain started falling, threatening to become ice and snow as soon as the cold returned, which it always inevitably did. Someone once said that Cincinnati only had two seasons, freezing winter and scorching summer, with only a couple weeks of fall and springtime thrown in. Whoever said that knew what they were talking about.
Another thing that made the Christmas season hard was seeing how frail both my mother and father have become. I know, it’s the human condition and I should be grateful they even made it into their late seventies like this. Especially considering the old man is a former smoker and the old lady is still smoking (both weed and cigarettes.) I haven’t talked to old Ned Ryerson recently, but I’d still venture they’ve both already beaten their odds on the actuarial table. I should be more grateful, but gratitude is the hardest of virtues to muster, and is usually only forced on us when we see someone else in even greater distress.
It hurts to think about what’s coming for them (and the rest of us, no matter what), and a sense of dread accompanies every parting with them, that question lingering in the background of our every interaction. When? Even my dog, once a feisty little terrier with a black coat, is now a gray dame with no teeth, bad eyesight, and poor hearing. At least, though, the olfactory bulb is still in working order. I know this because every time I drop the smallest piece of food on the floor, she comes alive and starts rooting around like a truffle pig let loose in the forest.
Part of what made the time gloomy, though, was what I was reading: horror author Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” subtitled, “A Contrivance of Horror.” In the book, Ligotti argues convincingly that all of human existence is a horror, that in an ultimate sense horror is the only thing that is real.
Ligotti further makes the case that human consciousness is different from the awareness that exists in other animals. It is an outgrowth of instinct, or rather a mutation, that has allowed us to think about thinking (metacognition), but also forced us to think constantly about our own mortality and the meaning of our existences. In Ligotti’s opinion, every invention of man is in some way designed to try to solve the unsolvable problems created by this mutation. Some turn to religion for answers, but the answers it provides are lies or delusion. Others try to distract themselves with hedonistic pursuits, blighting the pain with drugs or orgiastic sex. But as both sex and drug addicts can tell you, there comes a time when the pursuit stops killing pain and starts causing it.
Ligotti offers no solution in his book, because—unlike almost everyone else—he simply cannot bring himself to lie. He faces the void as long as anyone can without blinking, and though the book was depressing—terrifying even—his unwavering commitment to the truth as he sees it is admirable. The closest he comes, in fact, to a solution is a philosophy of anti-natalist nihilism. He’s not talking about drowning babies in the bathtub; he simply refused to bring children into a world whose pains outnumber its pleasures by some great order of magnitude. Like William Burroughs, Ligotti thinks pleasure an illusion, or simply “relief from pain.” The “pleasure” the addict feels when indulging their addiction is always greater when they indulge it after a long time without the drug. Because the pain prior to fixing was then at its most intense, and the abatement of pain is confused by the human animal as pleasure. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that among the biographical tidbits available about Ligotti online, it is mentioned that he is a lifelong sufferer of anhedonia. When he won the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, he chose that time to make a speech in favor of assisted suicide. The man is almost sui generis in his commitment to ending what he perceives as the farce of existence for the human animal, a puppet motivated mostly by pain.
There is a time, without a doubt, when I would have been less receptive to Ligotti’s arguments. Had I read the book as a fifteen year-old on a breezy summer day, its rhetorical perfection probably would have had a quite different effect on me. It’s hard to feel much besides lust—let alone think—when the endorphins are pumping and the hormones are swimming as they are at that age. Naturally, as a middle-aged man in the dead of winter being visited by his ageing mother and paying visits to his frail and trembling father, the book hits differently.
There were times I wanted to quit the book, and yet there were also times when the sublimity of the guy’s prose was its own compensation. The film critic Roger Ebert once said that a well-made film with a dark subject can leave the viewer feeling exuberant, and the experience was something like that. Ligotti is so good—so erudite in his interdisciplinarity—that the book remained a fun read even when he was basically telling me I was doomed and any arguments to the contrary I could proffer were born of delusion. Yes—horror of horrors (at least from Ligotti’s perspective)—the book was actual fun. After all, how many people can go from talking about G.K. Chesterton to the Buddha to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in a single paragraph? The man simply has a gift.
After a couple weeks of slow reading, I finished the book and reviewed it over at Goodreads, then I went on to the next thing. Of course, it has continued to linger in my mind, as evidenced by this blog post here. And I still worry about my mother and father. They both have good and bad days, but the bad days are seeming to start to outnumber the good ones, especially for the old lady. There was one day when she fell on the lawn and could not get up, and reached out to me for help. Alas, I couldn’t help much, either, as I had torn my shoulder apart in the army and have to be careful about lifting more than twenty-pounds. She’s thin, shrinking by the day, but she still exceeded my twenty pound limit by nearly a hundred pounds. And it wasn’t just the torn shoulder preventing me from being much help. Recently I had been diagnosed with “afib” (atrial fibrillation) and an aortal aneurism had been found in my heart. It’s treatable with pills, diet, and exercise, but still, it’s another reminder of my mortality. Am I the guy who used to max out his PT tests in the Army? The guy who could do eighty-something sit-ups in two minutes then run two miles in 13:30 even after a night of hard drinking and chain smoking? Clearly that guy and I share the same name and fingerprints, but he is no longer who I see in the mirror.
My terrier, it turns out, is not the only one who has gone from black to gray…
I recall an interview with Ligotti I read some years back, before I had read “Conspiracy,” before I had encountered much of his fiction. The interviewer asked him what advice he would give to those who want to write horror. Ligotti’s answer was succinct, and a little terse, a rarity for him. “Don’t,” he said, or words to that effect. “Unless you absolutely must, in which case, I’m sorry.”
In the past I have written some horror stories, some of which even saw publication and earned me a few dollars and even a few words of praise. But it was not a matter of necessity with me, a feeling of obligation to stare into the void and write about that and nothing else. Now, though, I’m starting to feel like I may write nothing but horror, at least for a time, and that maybe that time will be the rest of my life.
In any case, on the day writing horror becomes a simple must rather than an option, I will accept Mr. Ligotti’s apology, and of course extend my own to him as well. Not, however, that my sympathy can save him, any more than anything else can. Besides which, he’s sort of hard to find. He doesn’t go to conventions and after more than three decades in the field, I can only find three photos of the guy online. It would seem, like a lot of geniuses, the man is something of a recluse.

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