Ian Pierce

Tag: brain shit

  • down here near the poison stream our god has gone insane

    On Monday I had a sustained panic attack that lasted for nearly an hour. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, the whole enchilada, if an enchilada can be made of cortisol and tears. I stayed on the phone with my parents for that whole time while they tried to calm me down. It worked, eventually, but the whole time I wanted to die, to have my throat close up and suffocate me, just because that would end the pain.

    I’m sure you can guess why I felt that way. It’s not every day that the president of your country threatens an entire 3000-year-old civilization with extinction just so he and his shitty friends can game the stock market. But that’s where we are. That’s where the last fifty years have led us, ever since billionaires used Ronald Reagan as a shill to sell Americans on the scam that if we let them exist without paying their fair share to the society that sustains and enables them, it will benefit us in the long run.

    We are building dystopia brick by brick, one that combines the surveillance of 1984 with the medicated numbness of Brave New World, and for what? So a handful of people can become trillionaires? So that moneyed pedophiles can escape accountability for raping underage girls? So we can cram AI that no one wants or likes into every physical objects? So boomers can die in their giant air-conditioned houses, surrounded by wealth that my generation will never know, like Egyptian pharaohs in their lavish tombs?

    I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the constant emotional trauma that these brigands force into my mind. I know this blog post is a rant, and that’s fine. Sometimes you need a place to rant. But if the next fifty years are going to be as exploitative and dehumanizing as the last fifty, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get off this elevator bound for the abyss right now.

    ~ Ian (listening to New Day Symptoms by Final Gasp)

  • mountain stars

    I’m in California right now, but I thought I’d check in. I was up in the mountains skiing for a little while, which was weird, because the highs were in the low seventies, so it was like skiing on Slurpees for most of the time. But even so, I had fun. It was typical spring skiing: guys in shorts, girls in bikinis, guys in Spider-Man costumes… the usual shenanigans. The only problem was that the weather was like what it is at the end of April, not the middle of March. So it goes!

    I tried to take some pictures of the stars while I was up there. I think they turned out pretty good! At least, they were pretty good for a basic iPhone camera.

    It’s nice to be able to see stars. Back home, the night sky is shrouded in clouds most nights and light pollution the rest of the time, so seeing some actual spacelights is a welcome treat

    Writing continues apace. I’m almost done with a draft of a novel. Gonna ship that out to beta readers soon and start querying it by this summer. I’ve also written a few short stories that I’m going to submit after revisions. My hope is that 2026 will be the Year When It Finally Happens™. Unfortunately, I wanted that about 2025, and while the Resnick award was cool, I’m still not a Publicated Authorist, as I call it. My fear is that I’m going to think that this year will be the Year When It Finally Happens™ until there are no years left. I don’t think that’s a writer thing, though. It’s a human thing.

  • they promise education but really they give you tests and scores

    This last few days has, unfortunately, been the cat vomit frosting upon the giant shit cake that 2026 has been so far. There has been a bit of turmoil in my personal life. Unfortunately, I got fired.

    I won’t go too far into the details, but the tl;dr is that there was a girl who was being a consistent bully. Every single day, she was consistently, deliberately cruel to other students, mainly a group of other girls, and – worse than that – an autistic first grader who had to be moved into another group because of her actions. The bullying took the form of insults, mockery, physical harassment, and, on two separate occasions, spitting on other students. Last week, I finally lost my temper at her and said some things that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have said. She told her mother, who is a teacher at the school where I worked. And because of that, I got let go.

    I accept full culpability on my part. I said things that were wrong, and I acknowledge it. But I cannot stand bullies, and especially those who enable them: which, I realize now, my after-school program was doing. Furthermore, they provided me with inadequate support to deal with the situation from either a disciplinary or emotional perspective, and then punished me for their lack of competency. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt. But by condoning this child’s harmful, antisocial behavior, I realize now that this job wasn’t worth my time.

    When I was growing up, I was conditioned by teachers and, especially, my in-classroom aide of ten years to expect bullying as my birthright. If I fought back, I was punished for acting out. If I reported other kids’ behavior, I was told off for tattling. The other kids, seeing that I was being punished for their actions, were emboldened. Eventually I bore it in silence, keeping my anger simmering on the inside like a pressure cooker with a faulty release valve, until it exploded outward.

    I don’t blame the other kids for their actions. Kids don’t have fully developed empathy, and honestly, they don’t entirely finish growing that part of their psyches until they’re in their early twenties. But I blame the authority figures around me, who should have seen that I was vulnerable, and instead of protecting me, just made me a target. Furthermore, whenever another student was nice or kind to me in any way, I was expected to treat it as an act of generosity on par with Mother Teresa. For my teachers and aide, bullying and cruelty were the default state of affairs, and even being deliberately ignored was considered a kindness.

    Ever since I left high school, I’ve arranged my life so as to avoid bullies. Now that I finally have a choice as to who I spend time with, I’ve cut off contact with any of the teachers who enabled my bullies, as well as other toxic influences in my life – arrogant bosses, narcissistic roommates, manipulative and judgmental former friends. I survived school. I’m done with it.

    I believe I’m done working in education for a while. I don’t want to be a part of a system that punishes those who stand up to bullies while, at the same time, rewarding the arrogance and cruelty of those same bullies. As the death stick merchant in Attack of the Clones said, I need to go home and rethink my life. As that nice Mr. Vonnegut said, so it goes.

    ~ Ian (currently listening to The Silver Cord by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard)

  • finished with my woman cause she couldn’t help me with my mind

    I got some criticism from a reader recently that I’m having trouble getting out of my head. I don’t need to go into the details about who the reader was or what the criticism is. It’s just something that stuck in my head, making me question a lot of things about my writing. And even if I’ve talked with other beta readers who’ve told me, some in emphatic terms, that they disagreed with this reader’s particular analysis, it was still something that I’m hyperfixating on, probably to the detriment of my work.

    I know I shouldn’t do this. I don’t know why I put the opinions of someone who doesn’t like my work over the opinions of people who do. I wish that I could kick this paranoia, but it’s hard. If I get too in my head, however, I try to take the advice of this old Dan Shive comic:

    It’s a good idea in theory, but at the same time, hard to put into practice. Having a moderate anxiety disorder means that my paranoia can take over everything I do and lead me to question everything. Of course, I make up for the anxiety with bouts of self-loathing depression. Such is the life of a writer, I suppose.

    Yesterday, I got so pissed off at a novel in progress that I decided to completely change the antagonist and the main character’s backstory. This, of course, is not a small change, and it’s frustrating. If revising a novel is like renovating a house, then I expected to patch some holes in the drywall and repair some faulty plumbing, and instead I have to tear the house down to the foundation and replace the entire roof. This work in progress is one of my favorite things I’ve done, and I love writing scenes with the characters, but ultimately I estimate that I’ll have to completely rewrite about 40% of the book, not to mention revising most of the existing scenes to make it so that everything is consistent.

    I should trust in myself, I know. I’m a good writer, and I’ve had multiple publishing professionals tell me that. I can fix what’s wrong with the story. At the same time, though, I’m angry at myself – even though first drafts aren’t supposed to be perfect, even if the road to a finished product is never easy. Even if the twists and turns I’ve taken on this story have been like pulling teeth.

    Speaking of pulling teeth, I’m going to the dentist tomorrow to get most of the teeth on the upper left side of my mouth fixed. This involves multiple crowns, fillings, possibly root canals – and even that may not solve everything. So my generalized anxiety right now is understandable, I suppose. I’ve learned that autistic people tend to mask when we’re in discomfort or pain, because so often our discomfort is dismissed or minimized. This leads to minor medical problems eventually becoming severe, costing thousands of dollars. At least I have insurance now from my new job, so the bill will be in the three figures rather than the four or five.

    This has been a bit of a bummer of a blog post, I guess, so I’ll finish it with a drawing I did several years ago. It’s the main character of a very long, complicated writing project that I hope to complete one day. Her name is Sophie. I’m excited for you to know her story.

    ~ Ian (listening to Pogo Rodeo by Psychedelic Porn Crumpets)

  • i take a whisky drink, i take a lager drink

    I’m trying to get back into the swing of blogging, now that I have a website again. It’s been something like ten years since I’ve done anything approaching a blog, and those ten years have been filled with a lot of things: moving to Seattle, starting and ending a podcast, getting a house with a friend (which subsequently led to the end of that friendship, but that’s a story for another time), teaching English in Madrid, writing and sending out thousands and thousands of pages of fiction, not to mention world events like the pandemic, war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and the creeping spread of fascism in the United States… A lot of history can happen in ten years. Besides, even in the last few days, a lot has gone on with me personally. I started a new job, and literally one day later, I broke a tooth and ended up needing several emergency dentist visits. Needless to say, things have been stressful lately.

    When I was in college, from about 2012 to 2015, I had a blog. I was a kid then, and yet I thought that what I had to say to the world was so meaningful and profound. When you’re a teenager, there’s a weird combination of arrogance and doubt intertwined in your personality. Your thought process goes something like “Yes, the world sucks and everything is scary, but I’m awesome so I’ll be fine.” The thing is, the arrogance runs out faster than the doubt. For me, that arrogance was depleted by about 2014, when I had a moderate nervous breakdown that delayed my graduating and led to a period of time when I was sort of a hermit, living at my parents’ house and sleeping all day so I didn’t have to interact with people any more than was absolutely necessary. If it weren’t for the fact that I love going to coffee shops for caffeine and snacks, I might not have left the house at all. 

    I got out of that state after a few years of angst, medication, and meeting with a shitty therapist. That doubt was still there, however. I didn’t blog for a lot of reasons, mostly because I felt like I’d be some kind of imposter if I did. Maybe when I’m published, I thought, people will take me seriously. I guess the reason I waited was because I didn’t take myself seriously. I craved external validation, and only when I got that would I give myself permission to actually make a website. 

    Really, I had a classic case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. The less you know about a topic, the more you overestimate your own skills. When I was in college, I thought I was shit hot, that I was only a few months, or even weeks, before I broke through the publication ranks and became the award-winning, bestselling author that I knew was my destiny. A decade and hundreds of rejections dissuaded me from that notion. Instead of being a transcendent literary genius, I was just another kid with big dreams, writing checks with his mouth that his ass couldn’t cash. 

    Maybe that’s a sign of how much I’ve progressed in my writing skills. The fact that I have so much doubt about whether I’m any good or not – whether there even is such a thing as good writing – means that I’ve actually hugely improved over the past decade and a bit. I have to tell myself this: that hubris is the worst thing for any creator. Once you think you’re untouchable, that’s the moment you’re ripe for a fall. 

    Still, beneath all that doubt, there’s a sliver of arrogance left in me. Maybe the ratio of doubt to arrogance is about 90/10. Maybe it’s even 95/5. Still, as long as there’s that remnant of arrogance left – combined with its cousin, sheer bloody-minded determination – I’ll keep going. As famed anarcho-punks Chumbawamba said, “I get knocked down, but I get up again.” Maybe a little arrogance isn’t entirely a bad thing.