New Year, New Meh…

The Gonzo Journals

January 9th, 2023

Today is the day! I promised myself I would concentrate on other areas of my life until January 9th. It’s impossible to slip into my own world when I have a seven-year-old who needs tending. Today was the first school day of the New Year so here we go. When did schools begin waiting so long to take those little urchins back after the Christmas break? Lazy tax suckers!

I celebrated this event like any other from the previous year. I have a weak cup of covfefe (that never gets old) and a stale donut from 7/11 to loosen the pipes a bit. At least the owners of the store are pleasant. Not just to me, but to everyone who enters. They even feed a couple of the local homeless folks who keep the parking lot clean and the trash under control. Finally, I have the complete KISS playlist blasting me in the face from Spotify. I was almost in the zone with Car Jam 81 but then it changed to Beth. Damn you, Beth. Damn you. At least Unholy was next!

Also, you’re reading this while I’m sitting here in my underwear. Black boxer briefs. A little on the loose side so the air conditioning can sneak up one leg, kiss my wanker, and giggle its ass off on the way down the other. Nice.

This is the day when I’ll peck out the opening lines to Hellfire & Blood for the upcoming Shut Up & Bleed anthology. I’ve thought about this story for months so it shouldn’t be too terribly hard to finish in a couple of days, or maybe even a single day if I get lucky and find my jam. It’s a horror western tale about a steam locomotive fireman who must feed the demonic engine body parts to keep going. Think Little Shop Of Horrors in the old west with a C. Derick Miller flair. It should be fun! My only problem is how much longer I’ll be able to stomach the indie horror scene without gagging myself with my index finger to vomit atop the new royalty. Wait…you don’t know about indie horror royalty? Let me explain.

Every year, like rusted clockwork, a new king and queen of indie horror are crowned. No, there’s not any type of procedure or ceremony, just a pair of folks who post to social media pretty much every hour on the hour to tell us all who we are supposed to like and what we’re supposed to read. If you don’t follow these decrees, they’ll gather up their cronies and cancel you, banishing you from their imaginary kingdom for all eternity, or until you write something worth bragging about.

Over previous years, I’ve gone head-to-head with the self-appointed monarchs for their blatant stupidity and closed minds, only to be shunned for speaking plain truths. Some one trick pony was a review whore and accused me of possessing the same traits as a character I once wrote. Silly twat. I didn’t mean to accidentally slip in the slimy sensibilities that was her vagina, but things happen. Sop that nasty shit up with a buttermilk biscuit and move on, oh highness of the low. No one even speaks her name anymore and I can live with that. After all, her unquestioned rule was the catalyst which led me down the forever road of antidepressants.

Last year was no different. Another king and queen of indie horror was crowned, and they told us all who to read and love regularly. Heaven forbid we stood against them and voiced our own opinion on social media. They piled us all up with their literary broom and brushed us beneath the rug of sensibilities like the fucking dust bunnies we were. Onward they went through their term of royalty until the year subsided. Sure, their voices continued to command us all, but those commands became whispers as the year came to a close. For about a week, the sucklers of indie horror’s tits couldn’t tell us which films to watch and which dead poets to worship. It was pure fucking magic in a cracked and molested bottle, awaiting its journey into the next willing ass of imaginary dominance.

After nine days of pins and needles, my wife and I awoke to the new invisible monarchs of the immortal genre known as indie horror. Like those who came before them, with their over hyped blogs, their ‘read me or die’ reviews, and their ‘me, me, me’ social media fixations, they laid down their dick sometime in the night. The peasants opened their sleepy eyes to yet another command of who to love otherwise they’d be peeled away like dogshit beneath Stephen King’s shoes. It’s humorous at best, but don’t you dare laugh within earshot (or eyeshot of a Facebook post) or they’ll decapitate your ‘laughable at best’ career during the halftime show of indie horror’s annual ‘superbowl’.

The most important question which needs answering is when will the subjects of this kingdom in ruin stand up against its ever-changing rulers and do whatever in the hell it is they want to do. Can you imagine how much it would suck if your high school bully (we all had one. If you didn’t, it was probably YOU) stood in the lobby of your local movie theater and demanded you see the film he and/or she wanted you to watch? Why is that scenario any different than the keepers of the Facebook keys in the indie horror community? Newsflash: it’s not.

Our choices are to stand up to them in a public display of idiocy or just ignore them until they realize how truly insig-fucking-nificant they are. Perhaps they’ll move on to another genre and tease and taunt their fans until they’ve had enough as well. Perhaps they’ll rule supreme in the Chicken Soup For The Soul crowd. In the end, who knows? By my calculations, they could use all the goddamn self-help they can get.

To answer your question, yes, I just flipped off the status quo to their faces, but they’re too dumb to realize I’m not showing them that they’re ‘number one’!

I am the ‘army of me’ I’ve always been, and it’s high time I got back to believing in myself with or without a publicly recognized following.

Read what you want.

Watch what you want.

Write what you want.

Fuck the powers that be and the indie dicks they rode in on.

Peace…