Can a piece of art be dated before it has even been released? The internet is nebulous and wide and unbelievably segmented and small. I tried to write about a small part of it in 2022 and INTERNET BRAIN ROT emerged. Not fully formed, of course. In a lot of ways, I am releasing an unfinished work. It has made me anxious to think I could not make something timeless. However, it's two years later. My life and mental state have changed dramatically. I've gone through intense periods of grief, change and depression since then. Not releasing this chapbook sooner is a regret I will have to live with. There was no time to put it out. I couldn't physically work on it most days and it just sat in my Google Drive, haunting me with its deficiencies, the way that the future kept coming and my work stopped feeling relevant. Poetry itself is a dated art form so writing a poem called ' simp ' for example and then putting it out in the world in 2024 felt...cringe. There isn't
Last year, one of my most rewatched films was Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), a film revolving around four people whose lives become entangled due to their various sexual neuroses. It's a film very interested in infidelity and what it takes to make relationships work. In general, I find the misery of heterosexuality, as portrayed in many a film, tedious. So, I avoided this film specifically because I assumed that it would be another film people enjoyed because it had straight people screaming at each other in it. Sex, Lies and Videotape invited me in through its depiction of loneliness and perversion, both of which are aspects of being alive that are often mocked and derided. The serial killer is lonely and perverted. The stalker is lonely and perverted. Your average middle class married couple are not typically lonely and perverted, not unless the film ends with some kind of violent climax (I'm looking at you, American Beauty !). The film follows An