lying under fluorescent light / lying to everyone blues (1/14/25)
You seldom see fluorescent lighting in a place you want to be, do you? They adorn the ceilings of institutions, places of work and dingy education, shops and prisons, city buses and psychiatric wards, oftentimes places where they can be hand-in-hand with their cousin, the security camera. This is because they not only are a staggeringly cheap means of lighting an area, they are also a very total way of doing so. For the very same reason — surveillance — all of these places must completely light themselves at a moment’s notice, without waiting for incandescent bulbs to warm and without allowing something, someone to slip away. These are places for being scrutinized, every aspect. Cold blue light hides nothing, spares nothing from the people watching you under it. Not even your concealer. It is hard to lie to light. This is tantamount to mild discomfort for the average person, and it is tantamount to injury if you are somebody with my afflictions. You cannot stand it.
The hardest and most crucial lesson you take from voice training is how to get embarrassed. Your voice, after your body, is the first thing a person will notice about you, and when you are somebody with my alleviations it is frequently the subject of small talk: “How long did it take you to sound like that?” Even my girlfriend, in bed next to me, half-aware asks me how I “put on that voice.” It is a question that puzzles me now, because I remember the humiliation, the strange looks from customers and cashiers alike, everything from the beginning. I felt like a faggot. And then I couldn’t tell exactly how I ever progressed beyond that. For a time, I would simply say I “got lucky”, as I have written in the past, because luck is value-neutral, as I have written in the past. It is a way for me to hedge my bets and not look so arrogant. I simply woke up one day and I could do it. I hardly even think of it as “putting on” a voice anymore, it just comes to me. It is too passive. It may as well be another person’s voice speaking through me. Who knows, maybe my angel, maybe even God.
The revelatory nature of fluorescent light does not only stop at people. When I worked at Taco Bell, it would illuminate every possible unclean crevasse of the food production floor, and every angle of the various menu items we were preparing, so as to ensure accuracy as much as possible — if we could really be asked to care about such a thing for fourteen dollars an hour, tops. It was dirty, grim work that I despised doing and yet had to do well. I took an inverse pride in it. On the thirteen-hour train ride opening to the first of my probing trips to Worcester from Newport News, I reviewed in my head the steps necessary to make a Crunchwrap Supreme, and all the others. I recalled the motions. After, I quickly built a muscle memory in the weeks to come, so much so that my manager told me I was the fastest employee on the night shift (after him). I despised that. I had put my mind to it, I had become very accomplished at something. I could wrap a burrito faster than anybody in the store, and it did me no good at all.
Somewhere over the course of half a year, in tandem with the beginning of my tenure at Taco Bell, I took lessons from a pair of Speech Language Pathologists who I was lucky enough to have fully covered by my medicaid insurance plan. This is the drilling which I would associate most with the institutional, yet it happened behind my computer screen sequestered in my room. And they made it clear to me that none of it would matter if I did not apply what I was learning to real interactions. Outside the scripted exercises, outside the contained little snowglobe conversations we would have during sessions. Because beyond that, nobody would be there to gesture upward at me when my voice slipped. Nobody would slip me a reminder of anything. It was instead under the fluorescent lights, with which I spent most my waking time working overnights those days, that I would learn to speak in a voice that I could tolerate. Conversations are by definition naturalistic, I could not learn to talk simply by repeating words anymore. I learned by yelling requests across the production floor, or in lengthy breakroom discussions. The success of it was enough to let me stand being under those tubes. Me and the voice I somehow put on.
I try to be honest, I try to preach sincerity without fully knowing what that means, because who even does nowadays? But my spoken voice is now a lie of sorts. Though, it is one I can tell in all the places where it is hard to hide from the truth. This is where the distinction lies, it must be Good Enough. That is all anyone with my asynchronicities can hope for. Now, as I begin to allow the conceptualizing of myself as an artist of a sort, I see that so broadly in all the skills I try to build. I have something I might at last take positive pride in, for a change, and as such I reflexively attempt to be so meek, so aloof, so intent to wash my hands of the same active involvement in it that I must’ve had in my voice training. My decision was to hide from the light again. So as not to be so arrogant. So self-aggrandizing. But in that, it is a bad, dirty lie, a stagnant one. It is what cowards use, but the lights that everybody is shining now don’t turn off for them regardless. You can’t just reject your decade entirely. As the old year crested into the new this time around, I have realized that impulse is incompatible with what I want. Singer-songwriter Yoni Wolf said, all across the Sanddollars EP, “Am I sick to think I look best under fluorescent light?”
When approaching art, you ought to attempt to be a Good Enough liar like I have been in the past. For me now, this is in learning the guitar. That is what this is about. And learning the guitar isn’t just about the drills and time trials, alike the building of a taco. It is also about being a convincing liar, alike the shifting of your voice’s pitch. A lie you have to tell, in order to tell the truth. When the lights are all turned on and up, you have to first be honest and say that you want this. Then, you have to be willing to make yourself look bad. That is the basal component. And you can’t lie so poorly under fluorescent light, and with it being everywhere now, it is hard to even sleep. But you have to try it. Because the things worth doing will be done less like Taco Bell and more like voice training, those final added few steps ensouling it enough to be considered a lifetime passion — should it be deemed worth it, and some of us don’t have any other option than for it to be deemed worth it. It is twenty twenty five, there are no dark spots left, there is no terra incognita remaining for us to hide from it all. That has all been dragged out, it is all surveilled now by a scrutiny of someone’s design, institutional or not. So, lie. Build yourself a platform. Steal, rip people off, and then lie about that. I’m even doing it right now. Though, that specifically is not something I am good at yet. You only can be once you’re done getting over the embarrassment: It is basically just as crucial.
there are very few microwaves in the third world (1/3/25)
Ever since discontinuing the dosage of sedatives which once would put me to sleep, I have come across the same method of winding down as so many others — YouTube. Lengthy videos devoid of anything overly attention-grabbing or substantial at all, only a mostly consistent drone with smooth enough edges so that my mind will fail to grab onto anything and consider it. That, after all, would keep me awake. This is what I sought out, and this is what I found, specifically in a certain genre referred to as “scam baiting.” The premise is straightforward enough, and yes, the undulations are repetitive and predictable. High praise in nothing else but the venue of background noise. And it goes as follows: The scammer attempts to lead the noble scam baiter through any sort of paint-by-the-numbers scam, only for the baiter to hamper these attempts at every possible turn for hours on end — which, the genre presumes, diverts the scammers attention where it could’ve been expended nefariously, successfully, robbing some hapless person. This tactic is the foundation of the genre.
I know it well, I have watched these videos for months. But, despite their smooth and redundant nature, I would eventually find things to latch onto. I would begin to pick out flaws present all across the face of the genre. The first warbles I noticed are ones in particular tactics. For starters, most scam baiters are not contacted by scammers first, either by cold-calling or advertising. Many actively seek out their numbers to dial, or are given targets by viewers. This is a sort of job for them, of course, and a stream of scammers to bait means a stream of revenue. Another particularity is that of how scam baiters “disguise” their identities to scammers. Premier in the genre is a YouTuber going by the screenname “Kitboga” — who the glut of this essay will focus on — and his personal modus operandi is to pose as witless old grandmother, which follows in line with our colloquial understanding of a scam victim. It must be particularly evocative to Kitboga himself, as he frequently explains in the beginning of his videos that his grandmother was a victim of scamming herself. In fact, this event is what constitutes the founding myth of his channel. But it does not represent reality. According to a 2024 Deliotte survey, Generation Z was in fact the most susceptible to online scams, over twice as much as the Baby Boomer generation Kitboga and so many others imagine to be prime targets.
At first read, these seem to be minor statistical errors at worst. The proliferation of the scam baiting genre does make scamming seem more common than it really is, alright, and the utilization of elderly personages distorts the image of who the victims are, clearly. But none of this matters if the genre fails to go much further than simple entertainment, which for a while I could not see it to. Or at least, not much further than it could be said to “raise awareness” of the forms of different scams, a virtue of the genre which baiters often extoll, and I suppose cannot be entirely discounted. I was only being a pedant. So I was content to let the contradictions lie, frankly, I needed to sleep anyway.
But two weeks ago, Kitboga published a new video: “Reversing a $52,000 Crypto Recovery Scam”. For the first almost twenty minutes, the video runs procedurally. It deals with a cryptocurrency scam (tautology) in which victims are guided to deposit very real money into the accounts of very real scammers, only for them to then be guided to a very fake website which depicts supposed returns on the crypto exchange market. Of course, the money is simply pocketed, with the crypto price interface being nothing more than numbers on a screen. It is a scam designed for the long term, fleecing what is believed to be investment money from people who do not know any better and have nobody to tell them otherwise. It even demands an up-front investment, likely to gauge gullibility foremost, and as such Kitboga had to break rank and send the scammers the fee of admission, rationalizing that his $200 would be worth it if he could distract the scammer from higher-value targets — which he would proceed to do, over the course of days. Viability as a tactic aside — crypto scamming of this variety is far more intimate than a typical scam — he did successfully act out what he set out to act out. It was all typically surgical. Until the very end.
After the scam had been veered off course into a refund scam, eschewing the crypto investment aspect, there came a section titled “Calling Them Out”. By now, it is well-known what to expect. The scammer is worn down, defeated and reduced to the territory of petty insults, greatly incensed by the loss of the promised funds. The baiter has dropped their disguise and is openly taunting, “how many people did you scam today”, “how much money did you make?” At least this, word for word, is what Kitboga asks. And he must not be expecting an answer, because I’m not, nobody is. This is the point where the scammer hangs up, throws the headset, and the video ends. Because if there is one thing that the genre of scam baiting does not do, it is challenging its foundations. The genre’s existence presupposes that scamming is bad, but it never pauses to ask why scamming is bad, and most of all it never truthfully asks itself why scamming exists in the first place. Why the majority of scammers are from India or Nigeria, why their governments might frequently do nothing when more proactive scam baiters such as YouTuber Jim Browning report their businesses to the police. It never even thinks to ask these things It is a genre absent of introspection. That’s why I sought it out in the first place. But, seemingly not knowing the script, the scammer does answer Kitboga’s question of income. “Zero dollars.”
Kitboga now for the first time has a line, so he does what has not been done before. He interrogates a little further. After all he has not only time, but a sum of money invested in this. “Do you think you deserved to steal money from me?” He asks. Rather lamely, he arrives at what he must believe to be the cardinal sin of scamming — that being, that it is a Lie — and he asks for a confession to this, which the scammer gives. “We are scammers. What we do here is scam people.” What kayfabe there was left has now been entirely broken. Kitboga, the improv artist and YouTuber, is visibly surprised. “We’re trying to make a living here,” continues the scammer, who uses the name James, “I know it is not the right way, but it is the opportunity we have in this country.” Silence. “It is a very sorry world we live in,” he concludes. Kitboga stutters, concurs that there are “dark” parts of the world, and makes an attempt at some paltry hope for James. But James stays stubborn, he lays it bare. “If I was living in Canada like you, I wouldn’t be doing this.” (It is worth noting Kitboga is an American, and had falsely led the scammer to believe he was Canadian) All Kitboga can offer is: “I hope you find a different job.” And then the world goes on.
But the genre unwittingly becomes recontextualized. India is a poor country. It also has one of the largest populations of English speakers. These factors, both of which make it a prime candidate for overrepresentation in the scam baiting genre, are also on account of the country being a former colony of the British Empire, and now a present client of American capitalism. Well over a billion people are made to subside on an average monthly income of roughly $95-$220 USD, by OECD metrics, far flung from the relative decadence that their scamming victims in developed countries live in. For all its dishonesty and played-up nefariousness, only about $10 billion total is lost to fraud annually in the United States, per the FTC. Even if every single cent of that somehow found its way to India, it would account for not even an eighth of exports from India to America alone. And if it were to be expropriated directly for the common good, this would come out to a sum just shy of $7 per Indian citizen. Of course, it would not even begin to scratch the surface of the true dollar value of the labor stolen by various foreign extractive regimes. It is not terribly effective for what it wishes to do. It is arguable that it finds the wrong targets, even, although in the right place. So this scamming can be understood as an act of simple desperation, now turned into not just cheap entertainment for the listless to fall asleep to, but righteous “revenge” enacted by scam baiters on the liars and thieves. But what of the liars and thieves who comprised the East India Company, the government of the Raj, the Fortune 500 companies? Those who dump electronic waste and disused ships and all sorts of trash onto India, those who pay them a pittance for the pleasure? Those who stole sums untold from the ground and from labor, to be redirected to the first world Anglosphere? It must be asked, who might truly be enacting revenge here? Or, who deserves to be? Because it is not the YouTuber internet vigilantes of the West. As of today, January Third, a commenter on Kitboga’s video asks: “how do these people sleep at night!?” But I ask the same. How do you sleep at night?
as an artist, that is incredible to hear. but as your friend? (12/15/24)
My father once – and only once -- gave me good advice. “Be true to your word.” Canned, re-frozen, served. I could’ve pulled the lesson from twenty-two minutes of animated television, plus eight minutes for advertisements and bumpers, as I often had with all the other formative lessons of those years. But this was different. It was coming to me from a human, all flesh-and-bone, and what’s more – it was coming to me from one of the bigger liars I’d met. The affair was shockingly perverted to me, even then. So it stuck around. Years later, I still remember, I still factor it in. Adulthood must be when you can share in a stable friendship with somebody you’ve reached second or third base with, I thought to myself while riding the bus in Worcester. Adulthood must be when you are mature enough to realize just how young you are, I thought to myself while getting off. Adulthood is when you can tell people your own tinned life-story advice, and then maybe half-follow it yourself.
My childhood demanded I keep journals, and many of them. Journals written in books pilfered from the storage room, bought at CVS, even in composition notebooks given to me by psychiatric ward staff. Journals in which I changed my handwriting several times to hone in on whatever would make me seem most interesting. Journals which had been stolen and photocopied for evidence in court cases, journals which had been torn up for guilt or anger. It began as a pedestrian exercise nearly a decade ago. Then it became a way to make sure I wasn’t crazy, that things were genuinely getting to be as bad as I thought. Then, finally, the project matured into a means to examine everything in relation to myself. The letter “I” features most prominently, alongside such hits as “ashamed”, “argument”, and “boy.”
My mother also gave me advice. In keeping with her own personal styles, she told me to “prove your father wrong”, and then promptly returned to her boxed wine. In later years I have found I look up to her just about as much as any wayward child can look up to her mom. Live your life in opposition to him, that was what she asked of me, though clearly it had given her little reprieve to live in opposition to her father. I had noted this especially when, over the COVID lockdowns of 2021, I took to my journals in order to break apart her life-story to see how it worked (much like one does with consumer electronics). She could tell a tragedy of her upbringing, an emotional history of the family with little left obscured. I could tell her the thing people now tell me: “you’re a damn good storyteller.” And then I could cry. But still, whenever I falter and lose motivation, I don’t think of my father. I think of my mother, thinking of my father.
These things are the past, I try to make them be. I brought myself and all of my journals (fifteen to be exact, plus the three supplemental notebooks from my detours through inpatient care) to Boston earlier this year, and was subsequently very pleased with the one thousand miles of distance I put between myself and the rest. Until my mother visited in the summer and my father took a mostly-remote job with a firm downtown in the fall. Nothing could more quickly become rendered pointless. I could trace, almost exactly, the shape of the narrative arc bringing me to this, even though I am certain that those do not Really Exist. Not even when I would attempt to bring them into existence, they do not. The perfection of it is almost teasing and you can see the words on the pages, they were telling me that this all was not over.
Am I self-obsessed? It is a question I asked myself at sixteen when I was struggling deeply with my sexuality and gender, among other things. I asked it again at seventeen, when I was struggling to formulate a way to live that would not damn me to acting out my parents’ lives again. I asked it at eighteen, nineteen, now twenty. And I suppose the answer is “yes.” It would have to be, or else I would not be writing this, or else I would lack even the self-awareness to even be “struggling deeply” with sexuality and gender and my parents as I was then, in the first place. But it is inarguable that self-obsession is the operative theme of the new millennium. On one of those nights where I feel less like an atheist and more like a bad Christian, I decided that we all must be self-obsessed. Further still, we are all now living in a narrative bubble – and it is exactly my sort of curse that the only reason I can be aware of this is that I have trapped myself deep enough to actually see its basin. You can refuse to know -- or just be plain unaware -- of the water you swim in, but the ocean floor is always unmistakable.
This is not the sort of neurotic thought-pattern you would seek out in a lover, or a parent, as if anyone could really seek lovers or parents out. It is the reason we regard a trait as insufferable in our day-to-day interpersonal relationships, but then find we adore it when it hangs on the walls of the MFA. The piece of art next to a short paragraph’s worth of context, explaining the tortured artist’s tortured life, it almost would not be complete without that accompaniment. And this exhibitionism must be worth something to You. But the worst part of me is that I find it all inspiring. My father gave passing glances to music and my mother from time to time would engage in drawing – and my God, it was the best part of them. Behind doorways I would page through sketchbooks, listen to idle singing. Because I have an entire lifetime’s worth of contextual paragraphs for the two. I don’t know where the things my parents said fits into their own story, but I know where it fits into my curated version of it, and most of all I know where it fits into my own self-dedicated life’s story. It took years, but I backed myself into this. I think about things, and all I can hope for is the same thing I always have. I hope that this ‘curse’ is different enough from my parents’, for me to be different from my parents.
People frequently come to me for the dispensary of advice which I am ill-qualified to give. At work, grown men and women will ask me in earnest for cooking advice. Friends will attempt to consult with me for relationship advice, or ask just how I got through voice training. My answer to all of these, after much consideration, is typically much the same: “I don’t know, man. Get lucky?” Because despite all the thousands of pages filled, that is still the truest answer I think I can give. Anything that might credit myself feels unearned, anything that might degrade myself is a cloying lie. Luck is value-neutral, we by definition don’t deserve it, and it is at the same time a means to disqualify myself from ever really having done anything at all besides think about how little I’ve done. “Who am I to give advice?” Goes the unspoken question, implied my response. I know nothing, I exact zero of my values. I just get the chance to self-address them. I must be proving somebody right, here.
Though. My very first journal tells me this: in fifth grade, we had a class-wide “secret santa” gift trade. When the day of exchange came around, and a crooked-smile peer of mine walked up to me to hand-deliver my gift, it turned out to be a football. I accepted it, graciously, as I knew by that age you had to – but I was no good at sports, this was well-known to my class. And football, I was among the worst at. And I had thought to myself at the time, maybe he had just forgotten, or maybe he had just misjudged me? But now I know. He was making fun of me. And for once, I am tired of pretending he wasn’t.
showcase
virginia (10/2/24)
Singer-songwriter David Berman loved to mention places in his songs. Each one given a little love and a little purpose, popular status be damned, each one was perfect for whichever vignette he was portraying. Cleveland is for drinking and Kentucky is for leaving. San Francisco is for seedy men and Manhattan is for hosting strangers. Nashville is for losing love and Dallas is for scoping out your potential oblivions. All given neat and tidy form and function. And then there is another place, stretched thin across his discography: Virginia.
In his songs Virginia lingers, it hangs. It is the expanse in which subjects wander from Kentucky, lost in thought, directions to old farmhouses are followed, phone calls are placed from train stations, "strong young poets" are interned in psychiatric wards, and -- above all else -- the birds of Virginia, they fly within you. It is there, in so many of his lyrics, though not always as stated as other locales. It is instead taken for granted, and why wouldn't it be? Berman himself was born in Williamsburg, a historic city on Virginia's southeast coast, and for a time studied in the foothills at the UVA before being taken on by my now-adoptive Massachusetts in order to study at her UMass (Amherst). When you are from a place, you don't treat it right. This is doubly so for Virginia.
I, for one, could not believe it when I first heard Virginia name-dropped in one of his songs. As a native, I couldn't let myself believe it. We are so undeserving! (With apologies for the reference I am about to make), I recall hearing a fairly accurate description of my very own home state in the podcast Those Good Old Fashioned Values: to paraphrase, Virginia is a crossroads of Northeast and South and Appalachia. And, yes, it distills all the worst of the politics and cultures of each region, the debauched and cold northerner met with the morally bankrupt and seething southerner, mixing with all the runoff backwash coming down from Appalachia and the Blue Ridge Mountains. I hated her, I hated her, and immediately I bought my way out of the Commonwealth when Boston presented herself. As far as I am aware, the rest of my family feels the same. My mother clamors at retirement elsewhere as my brother averts his gaze outward.
But each place is a canvas, sometimes. You don't hate that poor city, it did nothing to you. You hate the people in it and the experiences you had. I hated my childhood and the way I was sent reeling from it for years, all across my home. Virginia did nothing, but Virginia was nothing without a native culture to its name. Virginia has tourist merchandise of our demonic colonial past and Virginia has town centers with parking garages. Nothing there existed to distract me from what was happening, what had happened. A few months removed and I have clearer eyes now, but I still see her in a poor light. Though one a few degrees tilted to the right.
It may as well still be a place for leaving and never going. It is so, so overdone to hate your hometown, though, that even despite my copious reasons to do so, I feel a bit bad about it. That ever-living contrarian in me, in everyone. There are still things to appreciate -- I still remember the electricity I felt when I discovered that my teenage years' idol, Car Seat Headrest, had formed in a town just a few miles over from mine. But those were vapid and fleeting moments. A town a few miles over from mine still looks like my own, and the familiarity didn't bring me any closer to the art. This could be anywhere. The band didn't stick around in Virginia. It had fled west, like I once intended to.
Brightly lit smoke shops on Denbigh still haunt my memories, folded back into an impossible timeline on a single street alongside childhood car accidents on overwide roads and a garish, pathological tangle of hateful houses with hateful families. Things separated once by years now breathlessly play back-to-back when I least want it. I rode my bike drunk at 3 AM on shattered sidewalks in Newport News just after I learned to ride for the very first time down my too-steep, too-steeped driveway in Fairfax. No matter how hard I try, I will never have been born someplace else. Because the truest way to feel about a place is hatred. To hate some place in a certain, delicate semi-paternalistic way is to know that it is where you belong. I didn't formulate that specific that specific shape of hatred for Virginia, but I do at least hate Virginia -- and it is how I know I will always be from there. More so than Boston, yet of which I am still too smitten with the city trappings of the subway and the scene. Though Boston does get there, so slowly. Maybe all places do. Maybe it is right for us to keep moving. Knowing someplace means that on a long enough timeline, you will hate it.
You can leave the state, leave it forever, but Virginia never leaves you. Maybe more than most other places, some of who have the constant din of collective humanity to overwrite the old, Virginia is far too lonely. And so all that nothing she has, only empty strip mall parking lots where the burnout kids did drugs laying on tire skid marks, her hands are damned instead to be full with everything that happened to you. Virginia follows. After you are gone, all the places you signed your name behind bleachers and in wet cement, all the blood you left in the bedding and all the shit you forgot to take, lives forever. Virginia accumulates. It scares me, to know that this is the only way it'll ever be. I do not particularly hate the person I am becoming, but I can so clearly see me becoming that and the process by way this happens terrifies me. Doors are closing to never again be opened, and I think about how thoroughly I set my own path when I first decided to pay any mind to language. Choices made without my consent or with such reckless abandon have now set my life. It can't be helped. Matt Christman, in the October Thirtieth, Twenty-twenty episode of cushvlog, says that he is certain that he will not contract the then-looming COVID-19 virus. Then, for a moment, he pauses, then stutters. Then, he continues. "Until I get it. And then I will have always been destined to get it."
Ryan Walsh, in a piece written for Stereogum on the twentieth anniversary of The Natural Bridge, likens the album to something of a Pan-American road trip, Berman arriving at all these various places across the contiguous forty-eight states, all with something to say. Yet across this extended journey, there exists an overarching piece, the title of the album itself. As a friend of mine shared, The Natural Bridge is in part a reference to Natural Bridge State Park in Massachusetts, just south of the Vermont border. But I only recently discovered that there is another natural bridge which Berman knew of during the album's creation, in fact, the one which played the operative role in naming the album. Southwest of Charlottesville where Berman studied, some ways down I-81, there lies the Natural Bridge State Park of Virginia. Berman told Walsh that he had been in the tourist gift shop when he realized he could hijack all the promotional material there for his own album, in some ways an attempt to claim some helpless piece of Virginia. And all across the album, Virginia stands, from Albemarle Station and more. Virginia lingers, Virginia hangs. Virginia follows, Virginia accumulates. Like it or not, forever.