alicia wright

writes poems

world’s worst

November 10, 2024

I have had a headache for the better part of a month. I sit at my desk all day, listening to my ears ring, screen split in half—one side a spreadsheet (what kind of spreadsheet? who knows!), the other a video I’ll forget about as soon as I get up. I can’t hear it very well. The ringing is too loud.

(In the car I play music so loud I can’t hear anything. I feel like I need to apologize to my speakers for the amount of screeching Mars Volta I’ve forced through them.)

I injured my back toward the end of October. How? I don’t know the answer to that. I was sitting at my desk, screen split in half—one side a Google form, the other…a spreadsheet, my iPad on top of the speaker by my monitor, playing a video I forgot about as soon as I got up. I turned my chair a little and heard a crunch. I was mostly out of commission until I woke up on Wednesday, suddenly and inexplicably pain free.

Wednesday. The Day Before, I joked that I was going to get so high I wouldn’t remember to pick up my phone, then maybe go to bed by 8pm. I did that, but even then the bad news was creeping over the horizon. I woke up at midnight and remembered to pick up my phone.

I saw it coming. I think a lot of people did, and I think a lot of the people who saw it coming were so violently in denial that they’re lashing out in away I did not see coming. The ~idpol lib~ meltdown on social media has been…one of the most disgusting, vile things I think I’ve ever witnessed. They’ve become (have always been) the thing they’ve been fearmongering about. It is okay, apparently, to call ICE on your neighbors if you’re wearing blue when you pick up the phone. It is okay to wish miscarriages and sepsis on women who maybe did not vote for your current favorite pantsuit and Converse girl boss. We’re going to tear each other to pieces while we destroy the world. The worst of us have chosen barbarism, clearly, and they’re going to drag everyone to hell with them.

(Of course this is not to say that I’m okay with the newly (re-)emboldened conservative nutjobs. I expect the worst from them, and I live in West Virginia so I’m also uncomfortably familiar with them. Their racism and xenophobia and misogyny is not at all new to me.)

Everything’s great!

(I’m kidding.)

There are so many other things—so much other noise. Dorothy Allison, chronic imaginary victimization, entire Appalachian towns swallowed up by mud and poisoned water.

Those are sentences for another day. Or…for never. That’s more likely.

Here’s something else instead:

I don’t really watch movies anymore. Actually, that might be a half-lie. I definitely “watch” “movies.” I can’t say I absorb the Lifetime garbage I use as background static sometimes. I’m sure someone is stabbing someone, someone else has bad trigger discipline, some other stereotypical nightmare wife is stalking their ex’s new partner. I don’t care and it doesn’t matter.

I don’t subscribe to any streaming services or have access to reliable internet, so I really only get a chance to cross stuff off my “to watch” list if I’m dog-sitting for someone who wastes their money on Netflix or Prime or whatever. I don’t think I would’ve remembered I wanted to watch Monkey Man if the home screen hadn’t offered it to me.

My first thought was something along the lines of “yeah I could go for some flashy bloody catharsis right now” (oops) (it was The Day After). Apparently that’s all I’d gleaned from the trailer I saw earlier this year (tbh…that was enough). If I’d looked into it I would’ve made a point of seeing it sooner. I might’ve dragged myself to a theater in Columbus, even, like I used to do when I was sure a movie I was desperate to see was too political or too queer or too not-white for the only theater left within an hour of my house. (I almost did that for National Anthem but I chickened out and still haven’t seen it.)

Anyway: the point is that I had no idea what I was getting into. Yes, it was cathartic to see right wing cultists get what was coming to them, and again—coupled with the fact that it looked good, that would’ve been enough. However! I don’t know the last time a movie ticked essentially every single box for me. Politics? Folklore and mythology? Location-as-character? Aggressively moody lighting? Useful plotholes? Minimal expository bullshit?An ending that is very much not tied up with a pretty little bow?

Hello?

Hello?????

I’ve read some reviews that have made me laugh a little, because it is stunning how much some folks need to be spoon-fed. Of course most Americans aren’t familiar with the nuances of Indian politics. I’m not either! I only know what I know because I retained information from exactly one class I took 10 years ago and recently stumbled upon a used bookstore in South Carolina that was for some reason full of political fiction by Indian writers. It explains itself, though! Everything you need to understand for the sake of the story is there, within the narrative onscreen, and it’s right on the surface! And Google is free! Grow up!

Thank you, universe, for allowing me to stumble blindly into that on that particular day.

Okay. I started this post because I was waiting for my laundry to finish so I could go to bed and couldn’t think of anything better to do. My single pair of jeans (ha!) is clean now, so I’m done. You’re welcome!
5 small things I’m reading, vol. 4

October 15, 2024

Why Every Appalachian Writer Is an Environmentalist, Book Riot

You might ask, if these disasters are such a huge part of Appalachian history and very current present, then why do you stay? There’s no one way to answer this question. I hear it so often. But ultimately, Appalachia is our home. In Belonging: A Culture of Place, bell hooks describes how important her Kentucky upbringing was to her. Crystal Wilkinson’s culinary memoir Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks delves into her family’s deep love for eastern Kentucky, a place they have lived for generations.

We’ve just begun to fully understand the complete picture of Helene’s destruction. The prospect of rebuilding — again — feels overwhelming. Even with the disasters in our region’s past, we’ve never seen anything like this before. But I’m already seeing Appalachian people roll up their sleeves and get to work. We don’t know what recovery will look like, but we’re going to fight for it, one day at a time.

The Not So Wild and Wonderful History of West Virginia’s Forests

Think of that. Out of the over 16 MILLION acres of original forest in West Virginia only 263 acres are standing today. The next time you go for a walk in the woods keep in mind that that forest is most likely only around 100 years old. West Virginia might be “almost heaven”, but it was grown from the ashes of Eden.

I had mentioned before that our ancestors artificially created the Irish-countryside-like appearance of the state we see today. For the most part that is true. They imported grass seeds to grow pastures, farm animals, and the farming techniques of the old country. Also, over time plants from the prairies of the west migrated into the region. (Yes. Plants can migrate. They just move really slowly.) Carried by migrating animals, the wind, or other means, you see the appearance of prairie plants like iron weed, milkweed, black-eyed Susan, and many others. However, leave an area in West Virginia to its own devices, and as if by instinct, the land will once again become forest. It might take decades, but it will happen.

A Cuisine Under Siege, Saveur

Teaching the next generation of Palestinians how to make a celebratory stew may seem trivial, inappropriate even, in light of the deliberate starvation and plausible genocide facing Gazans right now. But food is as integral to our identity and rootedness to the land as our centers of cultural knowledge, such as archives, libraries, theaters, and schools, which are also under attack. Israel’s assault is eliminating entire bloodlines, and with them, all of the memories and knowledge they possessed.

Could Following Joan Didion’s Writing Routine Make Me Write Like Joan Didion?, Bustle

What I learned from these books is it’s crazy how many writers — Sartre, Auden, Graham Greene, Ayn Rand of course — were on amphetamines. (Which proved one of my long-held theories: that if I abused Adderall, I would be famous by now.) I dug through these books for schedules by people whose work I admired, schedules that seemed largely drug-free, and schedules that were daily as opposed to the Susan Sontag school of “I do nothing for 2 weeks and then in a guilty panic I stay up 24 hours to meet a deadline.”

Union Buttons are Living Labor History, In These Times

Ultimately, I think what is so powerful is that these are made to be worn by workers themselves. It’s a direct form of worker self-expression.If you have a bottom-up view of the working class movement, this is really the best expression of it …These are things which were actually worn by people on the picket line, by people on the unemployment line, by people in organizing drives, in the mines, in the sweatshops.
on burnout

October 3, 2024

I spent a disproportionate number of April workdays on one task (because I am, unfortunately, fueled by spite and wanted to prove someone wrong about something that ended up being mostly inconsequential).

visual representation of what I worked on because I was angry vs literally everything else I was supposed to be working on. thanks, toggl. very useful.

I was “late” for a July deadline (that I imposed on myself)(…I finished with two days to spare), so I punished myself by working more than a week ahead of a personal project milestone in September. (I’ll explain this project more later, when I like it again).

I took a break (read that as “built a neighborhood of Sims 4 houses”) yesterday because my brain insisted and woke up this morning full of dread. I was exhausted within an hour, every ounce of energy straight up sapped by self-loathing. Huh?

I am a failure, how will I ever catch up again, etc

A series of “funny” events (I promise it’s all related):

I was smart once, in the way kids who win spelling bees and participate in Math Field Days are smart. (I was never Golden Horseshoe smart and that’s what I really wanted—I made up for this in adulthood. “Made up for it” and then some. Don’t get me started on enclosure in West Virginia!)

Then I wasn’t anymore. Algebra was forced on me and an English teacher gave me a B on a quiz because he was very, very sure “hamster” was spelled “hampster.” (This was the inciting event of the “funniest” part of this story.) Hanson was more important and I spent most of my free time using landscape design software as a game. Then I found 311, and 311 shows, and secondhand marijuana smoke, and firsthand marijuana smoke. All downhill from there!

I was meant to be in the smart kids English class when I started high school. That lasted for half a syllabus review period. I asked if a field trip was mandatory (field trips struck a bizarre terror in me, but no one knew that then) and the teacher saw an opportunity to verbally abuse a teenager, and boy did she ever take it. I was a loser, a big loser, a big loser who would never graduate, a big loser who would never graduate and definitely wouldn’t go to college or get a job.

All because I didn’t want to see Romeo and Juliet. Jesus.

I still hate Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, she also taught the dumb kids English class. I realized in retrospect that she likely felt at least a little guilty. I turned in zero homework, did no book reports, and still passed.

One great thing about living in a town of 800-ish people served by one school is that you might end up with the same teachers your parents had. A great thing about that is that sometimes those teachers remember your parents, and sometimes those memories are bad. My 10th-grade English teacher hated my dad, and because I knew that, I spent a year waiting to be yelled at. When it happened it was actually my fault—I kept a rubber band wrapped around the end of my pen, and I fidgeted with that rubber band. And then the rubber band snapped. And flew from the back of the room to his desk in the front. Self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe.

Out of every class I took in high school, though, that’s the only one I remember with any kind of clarity. We treated music as literature. We watched Logan’s Run for some reason. The boys learned how to knot ties. We were forced to watch CNN on the day the US invaded Iraq. Ask me how I became the person I am and I’ll point first to that class, then to the Anti-Racist Action table at the first 311 show I went to in Columbus.

I left school the following year, for a variety of reasons. I was very far behind, credits- and attendance-wise. I hated everything and was bullied relentlessly from all angles because I wouldn’t go to church. The district thought I was homeschooled. I was certainly at home, but I wasn’t participating in very much schooling. I found out that the state didn’t agree with the district that I was behind. I took one class by mail—finished all the work within a few weeks—and graduated early and started college while my former classmates finished high school.

I was a big loser who would never graduate or go to college.

I did change majors and transfer to a school across the state after a year, though, because I couldn’t understand a math class and was too embarrassed to admit it. Math was a personal failure. Maybe I should’ve gone to church because not understanding Algebra was going to send me to hell. (Etc.)

Then I transferred again because it turned out I had a West Virginia education and had no idea how to write a paper, which didn’t bode well for someone starting an English program. I was too embarrassed to admit that, too, so I transferred again and finished most of a programming and business degree. But I still couldn’t admit to not understanding math, so I transferred again, into another English program at another school.

Let’s circle back a bit now, to the “fueled by spite” thing. I started college in 2005 and finished, with an English degree, in 2014. I quit and I quit and I quit and I took postcolonial and environmental literature classes and quit a few more times, as a person more firmly entrenched in a belief system that made the people around me mad.

I was a big loser, after all. Then I graduated. Then I went to graduate school to study writing. In an English department. The bibliography I had to turn in with my thesis (I still think that’s a weird concept but I’m glad I didn’t have to write a paper) read like: Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album. Then because I looked at it and remembered what I was studying: Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album, Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us because I am still me, and Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” because I needed very much to prove that I was Golden Horseshoe^* material.

Big loser!

The bad thing about all that: I can’t stop. If I don’t know how to do something after encountering it once, I have to quit. But quitting puts a big fat black mark on the report card I’m giving myself?

I’ve gotten better about it. I turned it off for a long time with whiskey, but I quit drinking five years ago (somehow) and regressed (in more aspects of my life than just the aggressive perfectionism) for a couple of years, then West Virginia legalized medical marijuana and I felt like a person again.

This year, though. Yikes. I’m so out of practice at coping with it that I’m burning myself out at breakneck speed. I must have no free time. I must have ten different projects going at once and I can’t quit any of them. I can’t for the life of me find an indica that slams on the brakes. Not even one that taps them.

In sum: do or don’t force yourself into burnout. Twenty-year-old you isn’t always looking over your shoulder. Thirteen-year-old you isn’t always looking over their shoulder. PEMDAS can’t hurt you. You’ll still be 5,000 words ahead of your milestone tomorrow.

alternatively: yes it can.

^{* I typed “horshoe” twice before I got it right. Maybe I was wrong about “hampster.”}

world’s worst

5 small things I’m reading, vol. 4

on burnout