RED MEAT

Actin— myosin— tropomyosin— contracting in unison to pull my finger flexors inward, yanking my fingertips down to hammer the keys of this computer. Blood saturates my muscles, delivering oxygen, returning carbon dioxide, delivering oxygen, returning carbon dioxide. A never-ending symphony of red meat moves beneath my skin, zapped with different frequencies of electrical impulses to puppeteer my body exactly how I’d like. I eat my steak medium-rare; I enjoy the similarity to my own flesh— the aforementioned saturation of blood. Delivering oxygen, returning carbon dioxide. The second-closest I’ve come to red meat was in the Toledo Medical School’s cadaver lab. The donor was an 87 year old female taken by non-alcoholic cirrhosis. She was inexplicably missing a kidney, pancreas, and gallbladder. I held the sawed-off ventral section of her ribcage. The intercostal muscle stuck between the ribs was textured similarly to the dry rotisserie chicken legs I used to discreetly toss in the trash. I held her heart. The myocardium had the same dry texture. Her aortic tissue was flimsy and reminded me of the slippery-thin layer of fat I peel off my chicken breasts. Still, it served her well for 87 years. Delivering oxygen, returning carbon dioxide. I held her liver. It resembled overcooked pork: stiff and scarred. The medical student conducting our field trip made an incision in the skin of her thigh. At once, I recall the first-closest I’ve been to red meat: sitting cross-legged in my bedroom a month prior, holding a scalpel over my leg in the same fashion. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t anxious. I was listening to Clair de Lune in an eerie Lexapro-induced calm. The blade went through my skin like butter. Parting epidermis, dermis, blood beading before I reached subcutaneous fat. Delivering oxygen, returning carbon dioxide. It looked just like the anatomy diagrams in the books on my shelf. Like red meat. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t anxious. Just taken by morbid curiosity and a craving for physical sensation. I scrubbed the incision out with isopropyl alcohol and slapped a band-aid on it. It didn’t happen again. Like I said, I wasn’t depressed. My curiosity was sated. I gained tactile proof that my steak, my cadaver, and myself were all the same beneath the surface. All red meat. Two warm, one cold on the metal table. Two dead, one terribly and wonderfully alive. Two saturated with blood, one exsanguinated and embalmed. Delivering oxygen, returning carbon dioxide. All rapidly propelling themselves toward the same fates— enzymatic breakdown, bacterial consumption, disappearance at last.

OCTOBER 16

today i’m grateful for the violent femmes and cured meats and iced capps and hesse’s demian and compression stockings. i would like to turn my skin inside out.

SODIUM CITRATE 3.2%

lately i've been alright. i dance around my room when no one's home. overnight jazz radio is my best friend. i crack my neck and hear the cerebrospinal fluid ringing in my ears like a bell. i lost too much weight again. i'm getting better at remembering which phlebotomy tubes to draw first. it's yellow, i think, then light blue. my dirty shoes are wet from the pouring rain, but that's okay. i eat apples more than i used to. i'm always eating, but nothing sticks to my bones. i crave a certain sensation that i can't define. sex doesn't do much for me. i wish it did, i wish i enjoyed it as much as i enjoy pain. i'm scared of college, c. diff, and rich people. i wish my best friend liked me enough to mention me by name at his school. i want a broken nose. or to break someone's nose. not much of a distinction when the focus lies on the crack of knuckle and bone. my shoes are still wet. i'm beginning to hate the familiarity of my hometown. lately i haven't been able to get enough air in my lungs. lately i've been missing people i haven't lost yet. anticipating grief. i think about god whenever i study atp synthase. sometimes i hear the high-pitched whirring of the machines in my midst. they sound like laminar flow, like hypertensive emergencies, like the bell that rings in my ears when i crack my neck. i've been alright.

GUNFIGHT - M. WEISS

Yes, my hands do shake. Yes, I worry about death. A Lot.

Though I will pride myself as the most open-eyed person I've ever known.

Even when I'm wide awake, and I always am, 

I'm asked what's going on with me.

I have this daunting and cluttering behavioral type; 

it's hesitant, confident, funny, serious, disgusted - 

overworded. Underworded. Wet.

And lately, when I crack my back, I feel it in my throat.

Blood, perhaps, or mucus, liquifies further into a rushing river, 

rises up to my lips, daring to make me sicker, but stops.

Right at my chin. And I am alive.

And my neurons spark and rattle,

They make my fingertips push up to my nostrils, 

shoving the stream back into my mouth,

and though it's still flowing, though it is still red and lustful, 

more willing than I am, to do quite anything at all),

it curls into a feline position of nobility, 

and rests until it is hungry once more.

Do you do anything else? I am asked.

No, not really, I said. Told them I can't teach an old dog new tricks.

And they sat up straighter, told me about euthanization, 

about the end, about how bright it was.

But the only death I've met is ego death, gifted by God.

I hope He will guide me to its revival, too;

because I don't know what's going on.

Even so, I still taste blood in my mouth.

Even so, I am more alive than you.

Written by M. Weiss

GAY LOVERS’ DELI

 you know how it starts, babe

how we gnash teeth against shoulders & pick eachother apart like vultures & separate layers of meat with our fingertips; it's not like we can do much else— when two plugs entwine by the wire & connect, god throws stones but when i leave fingerprints on you it's electric & it's heretical to call eachother good, yet we continue down to the bone— actin & tropomyosin contract and we sigh like pigs in a slaughterhouse who can't stop kicking— god holds the shotgun at the end of the line because he didn't make our bodies for each other, babe; this wasn't part of his plan

be my butcher and i'll be yours, alright?

THE ONLY TIME I’VE EVER MAXED OUT MY CAR SPEAKERS

A friday night in September; I'm driving home from a football game. Senior year. I have the windows down and the Smashing Pumpkins on. Our team lost, but I couldn't hear the crowd over the sound of our laughter, as we made out under the tiny baseball bleachers on the edge of campus. Right there, in the pitch-black, I decided to stop pretending like I didn't care, at least for this golden year. Our last year of real, undiluted youth. The sky streaked with black and blue in a color we'd never see again, at least not with the same eyes.

Crucify the insincere.

The game theme was camouflage and there you were in your dog-tags and shorts, smiling into my mouth like you were made of sunlight.

ADVICE TO THE ODD YOUNG GIRLS AT THE PUBLIC LIBRARY:

Keep coming back. The library will always be there. Walk, bike, beg your parents if you must, but keep coming back to the library. Keep that little yellow card in your pocket. Get a second card for your bookbag. Waltz up and down the nonfiction aisles with your sticky note covered in Dewey Decimal numbers. Remember that the library will be there for you when no one else will. Get to know your librarians. Learn their names. They were in your place once. They don’t care that you’re weird, they’ll get you the books you need. I’ve known my favorite librarian, Mrs. Michelle, since I was an infant in her story hours. I’m sixteen now, and she has grown with me over the decades. Take my advice and don’t dumb yourself down. When you start public school after years of being taught by PBS and raggedy library books, you’ll be tempted to minimize your vocabulary to avoid stares. But by doing this, you won’t reach your full potential. Say words like “oxymoron” and “juxtaposition”. If they don’t know what it means, teach them. You probably don’t know half the slang they use, either. Laugh at yourself when you mispronounce “epitome” because you’ve only seen it in writing. Remember to keep your room clean, but not sanitized or dull. It shouldn’t be Pinterest-worthy. Paint your walls bright teal. Buy all the book-fair posters you want. Hang your cringy fanarts up on the wall with Scotch tape. Stack up Telgemeier and Riordan books beside your bed. Cover your ceiling in stars. Keep your floor swept, but beware of aesthetic minimalism for the sake of fitting in. You’ll try and fail at that, at fitting in, after years of ostracization, and it’s best not to waste the effort. Similarly, don’t dull yourself. Recalling what I said about not restricting your vocabulary - apply that to your appearance. Wear the cat ears from Claire’s. Paint your nails neon green, if you’d like, or coat them in Wite-Out during social studies class. Buy the most obnoxious Justice shirts and galaxy print backpacks. Don’t fall into the H&M trap. You’re in elementary school, not a music video, however much your classmates want to pretend you are. Also, nerd out without shame. I promise, if you know all about leeches, or medieval torture methods, or the periodic table, you know more than most of your peers. They’ll demean you for this, since they lack the same knowledge. Let them stare, but cut down the words they’ll inevitably hurl at you. Let them know that shit won’t fly with you. There is tremendous power in knowing when not to hold your tongue. And please, please, advocate for yourself. That mental health diagnosis will come soon enough, and adults will say you’re “too well-behaved” or “too well-spoken” to have [X]. Stand up for yourself. Demand accommodation. Learn about your condition and how it affects you. Chances are - your brain sacrificed social skills for a stellar memory. Most people have the opposite problem. And when it comes to friendship, don’t settle. Fact is, there are going to be very few people similar to you, or who want to be your friend. Find those other oddballs and cherish them, but know that it is better to be alone than to settle for shitty oddball friends. You’ll do better alone at recess than you would desperately trying to appease the “cool kids”.

Know that it’s lonely. I try to make the weirdo life sound fun, but there are horrors that accompany it. You’ll be terribly, terribly lonely some days. You’ll watch your peers dancing together in the cafeteria from afar, knowing that they’ll turn off the music if you dare to join. You’ll probably get asked out as a dare at least once. When I was your age, the popular girls pretended to be my friends and rehearsed a song with me for the talent show, and then ditched me the night of. Truthfully, I simply don’t have any magic keys to make your childhood like everybody else’s. This advice is merely stuff I wish I would’ve heard as a kid. You can disregard all this if you want, it’s up to you. You can attempt to squeeze yourself into Lululemon and learn all the top 40 hits to sing on the playground. You can kick your stack of beloved books underneath your bed, and replace them with a TV that cycles through Disney Channel and Cartoon Network on repeat. If this is your goal, I certainly don’t mean to discourage you, but just know that I’ve tried what you are trying, and it made me miserable. However, if you managed to glean anything coherent from this wretched stream-of-consciousness disaster, it should be my first suggestion. Drill it into your little head. Tape it to your mirror. Write it on your hand in Sharpie, even though your mother hates it. I repeat:
Keep coming back. 
The library will always be there.

AN OPEN LETTER TO KENNETH BRANAGH

Mr. Branagh,


To faithfully adapt one of the most popular classic novels of all time is a daring feat. A feat which has been attempted 189 times before your own. I will make it clear that I do not expect any adaptation of Frankenstein to be completely book-accurate, as that is near-impossible due to the limitations of film. But to label your grotesque mockery of this book with Mary Shelley’s own name in the title is beyond disrespectful. My problems with this film are all directly caused by you. You ordered a second draft of the script to satisfy your own personal sexual proclivities. You cast yourself as the lead, and butchered the character of Victor for your own ego. Your “adaptation”, if it even deserves the status of one, is nothing more than a thinly-veiled fetish piece that sexualizes human birth, incest, and mental incapacitation.

The script of this movie is littered with inaccuracies and ego. You fired your original scriptwriter, Steph Lady, and commissioned a second draft from Frank Darabont to specifically include “explicitly sexual birth images”. The original script was sold to Francis Ford Coppola’s film studio, and is unavailable to the public, so I don’t know how much better or worse it was than Darabont’s. Darabont himself states that the film was "the best script [he] ever wrote and the worst movie [he’s] ever seen". He believes the script was ruined by your direction and adaptation of it, which is true to a degree. Since the direction of this film hinges so firmly upon sexuality and lust, I imagine the parts of his script dealing with those topics were written by your orders.

This movie is an injustice to Shelley’s novel in that it fetishizes the non-existent incestuous sexual relationship between Victor and Elizabeth. For example, the scene where they kiss at the ball is completely contradictory to book canon. In the novel, they grow up with a sibling-like bond, and both express discontent over the expectation of their future marriage. In Darabont’s script, Victor and Elizabeth kiss before he leaves for Ingolstadt. Elizabeth says, “This feels… incestuous”, to which Victor replies, “Is that what makes it so delicious?”. This line alone is a gross mischaracterization of both characters involved. The two of them never kiss or express lust for each other in the novel, and their marriage is used as a symbol of the traumatic family dynamics in the house of Frankenstein. The usage of the words “sister” and “brother” during sexual exchanges makes it clear that those scenes are meant to provide gratification to the viewer by fetishizing incest. However, I have not met one viewer of this film who found those scenes gratifying.

If it couldn’t get any worse than your blatant fetishization of traumatic incestuous relationships, you manage to sexualize human birth in this film. You added an unnecessary scene where Caroline Frankenstein, Victor’s mother, dies in childbirth with William. Upon my first watch of your film, I was confused as to why you changed this plot point, since Caroline dies of scarlet fever in the novel. But when the camera panned to her exposed, bloody, postpartum dead body, I realized that the inclusion of this inaccurate scene was yet another addition designed by you to get yourself off. This isn’t speculation! Recall your words that I mentioned earlier about how you specifically wanted sexual birth imagery in your film. Another “birth” scene that you sexualized was the reanimation of Elizabeth. Although you compared her new form in the script to a “brain-damaged child who’s wet the bed”, you make sure to include plenty of shots of her fingering your and De Niro’s lips while she dances with them. Not to mention being a complete plagiarization of the much better 1990 movie Bride of Re-Animator, this scene fetishizes her incapacitated mental state, which just blows my mind. Why did you think that was a good idea? Not only is the reanimation of the Bride non-existent in Shelley’s novel, a major theme of said novel is bodily autonomy and the consent and authority of women to make their own choices. Book Victor refuses to create the Bride, recognizing that “she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation”. You turn the Bride into a sex object to further the lustful overtones of the film.

On the topic of Book Victor, your portrayal of him is an atrocity. You turned the sensitive, intellectual, withdrawn Victor into a horny buff freak. Victor Frankenstein would not create human life without a shirt on. He would not kiss his cousin with tongue. He does not have a large ego! In the novel, Victor’s conflicts are internalized. He does not go around preaching his greatness as a scientist like you do. Victor becomes disabled with psychosis and fatigue after creating his monster. You lie in bed under Clerval’s care for a few hours and then go back to flexing your abs on camera. Book Victor escapes from the horrors of his life by going into nature, reading poetry, or traveling, all features of a Romantic novel. Your Victor’s escape is passionate incestuous sex. Calling yourself a fan of Shelley’s work, and then confusing Romanticism with romance, is a level of ignorance expected from high school students. The ego shown in your depiction of Victor taints the scenes you have with Walton. Their interactions are not supposed to be testosterone-fueled yelling matches. In the novel, Victor knowingly humbles himself by sharing his tragic story with Walton. That theme is completely lost in translation. I am not surprised whatsoever that you cast yourself as Victor, because his intolerable film personality directly reflects your own.

I’d like to congratulate you on producing the worst, most perverse, and most unwatchable Shelley adaptation since 1973’s Flesh For Frankenstein. It takes so much willful ignorance and disrespect toward the creator of science fiction to produce a film this terrible. If I had two suggestions to improve your film, the first would be to remove Mary Shelley’s name from the title. The second would be to burn all existing copies and turn your duties over to someone with a grade-school reading comprehension level. I pity the pigs who had their bones boiled to produce the gelatin for the film that this movie would eventually be shot on. I pity the miners who extracted the iron that would one day be used to create the props for your atrocity. I pity the cameramen, actors (except yourself), crew, and costume designers that were subject to your mere presence in the studio. Finally, I extend my most sincere condolences to anyone who has had the misfortune of viewing your film in the decades since it was released, for their brains are now imprinted with a corrupted telling of Shelley’s tale.


“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
Insincerely,
madtunesmith

ON ROBERT WALTON

something i find really fascinating about walton is that walton is fundamentally someone who does not live in his own life so much as he lives adjacent to it, in the narrative projection of what he thinks that life should be.

like my dear friends @dykensteinery and @robertwaltons said, i don't think walton experiences life and the world the way a normal person does. it's not just that he's ambitious, or self-important, or even naïve, there's something externalized about how he processes his own existence. he doesn't live in his life, he observes it from outside, like he's writing his own biography in real time and already picturing how the sentences will land. there's this almost-need to see himself through the lens of a narrative, not as a person but a character, and it's like that framework is the only way he can give his life meaning. he’s not content just to live or love or fail like a person might; he has to achieve, he has to strive, he has to become. and it’s not enough to do the thing—he has to be seen Doing the thing. he has to be known, appreciated, immortalized. 

he wants to be the kind of man who ends up in the polar expedition books he reads, but more than that, he wants to be worthy of the myth he’s built up in his head about what those men were. and he's very self-efficacious in this (“my first task is to assure my dear sister of my…increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking” “do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose”); he cannot allow himself to imagine that he might fall short of that.

take his crew's deaths for example. it's merely mentioned once, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line ("The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation"). despite being surrounded by the very men keeping his voyage afloat, who are risking their lives to realize HIS ambition, he barely mentions them. the sailor's deaths have no narrative weight. i used callous in the past to describe this tendency of walton's, and i think callous is, in hindsight, too strong of a word, but it does reveal something fundamental about how he orients himself toward others: walton is the protagonist of his own life in the most literal sense. he’s romanticized his ambition so thoroughly that everything around him becomes scenery, even people—they're just desolation to highlight the cold. they bolster the narrative of heroic striving that walton has cast himself in, which requires suffering. victor, obviously, is the exception to all this, which i touched upon here.

all of this doesnt really bring me to a single cohesive point other than i find this perspective really interesting. i just have walton brainworms lately. ok bye baii

written by the lovely frankingsteinery on tumblr

MY HUNGER IS A SIN BUT IN THE MOMENT OF CONSUMPTION I AM NESTLED NEXT TO GOD

Gnawing on the stone fruit that at my mercy, 

resides firmly gripped in my palm, 

I am overwhelmed with a perverse satiation 

unlike anything 

but the one thing I cannot possess. 

It is a substitute lacking in the placating taste 

but proving its worth through its cloying, tender texture, 

this peach shall honor the imitation 

of the flesh 

lining your lurid bones. 

Its fuzzy outer layer is a fine enough replacement 

for the contentment I’d find 

in taking a bite out of your upper lip. 

However, soon enough, this honey wrapped in velvet will be unable to satisfy me, 

and I, salivating and starving for you, my love, 

will reach out, 

take your wrist in my hand, 

and consume your being whole. 

Because my gluttony is only tamed momentarily by conventional nutrition. 

Never will I be fully fed until I am able to savour every inch of you. 

Not until my tongue meets the stinging passion 

of the blood that runs through your veins, 

Not until my teeth meet the dogged strength 

of the muscle that lay in between your 

brash skeleton and your contrasting pliant skin, 

not until then, will my stomach be sated, 

and my cravings be assuaged.

by battooth