THIS is the NEW GAMES JOURNALISM

An advertisement for Call of Duty: World War II shows a veteran with a traumatized stare.

We used to report on coincidences.  Now we report on happenings.

This is the New Games Journalism.

AMERICANGULAG Prologue

Daph and Xavier are home doing whippets and playing Pokemon Snap.  I've resigned myself to my life as writer and I'm trying to keep up with the phony pacing of their lives.  In an instant my angel is gone and I'm here transcribing narratives of disfigurement seen at a distance.  Hence Pokemon Snap.  Hence the whippets.

As a cigarette burns down you feel the pain of being homeless.  It aches in your bones.  "Get up to get down."

Luke's crashing a car zap bam pop and Tracy's filming it live on Super 8.  This is the most astonishing moment of either of their lives, I can just tell.
"Great!" I scream.
The wreck crawls backward, a reverse slow-mo shot.

The GULAG eats dreams. Don't sleep.

AMERICANGULAG

A novel by Kyle Bern.

Coming Soon.

Untitled

Once more, for Bebe Zeva

"Now I am going to throw up."

A cartoon hand extends a quarter into the bathroom.

Thanks!

Nicole admires the quarter, thinking it looks nice.

What does it mean?

It means one-quarter.

"I like it, Ziggy, but I want emptiness instead.  Can you do that for me?"

I'll try.


Ziggy is drinking heavily when the word "suicide" enters the frame, then leaves it.

"What happens out there?"

You don't want to know.

I came to this McDonalds for the wifi and from here I'm watching it all go down.

Ziggy is taking a birdbath in the Cherry Cola.  Then Ziggy is drinking heavily.  The bath is made of stone and cut marble.  What happens before is arbitrary, or maybe not.  Ziggy and Nicole are rape victims here for reprisal.  The dining area looks like Ziggy's living room.  Very foreign.  Aliens exist.  Ziggy's mother rapes him in his own dining room every day.  He's thinking now would be a good time to quit the "victim" habit.  Maybe he could if he knew this word "rape".  Unfortunately for him, I've redefined it.  Fortunately for me, it means great literature.

Ziggy sees images from Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997) and he's thinking.  "Pain" and "suffocation" flash in his mind like lightning.  "Fear" lingers.  Being a child star he knows the feeling, not the word.  Now that he has a word to attach his feeling to he might feel better, he hopes.  Maybe not though.

Look, Ziggy.  I've deconstructed Catholicism for you.

He doesn't understand yet.  He will.

Knowing that fear is the crux of great art, I also know that I need Ziggy to keep being scared.

Fact is, Ziggy is scared because his mother uses fear to control what he eats.  And also when he eats.  And also how he eats.  When the mother's control fails society rises to compensate.

I want Ziggy to know he should go to a Chinese place and eat there.

I want myself to know I never wanted to be a writer.

For now.

For my 9th birthday my family got me a Nintendo 64 computer entertainment system (with Super Mario 64 (a videogame by Nintendo Entertainment Japan))

The year was 1999.

Let's just go ahead and call Nintendo the greatest computer entertainment platform developer of all

time.

This is a poem I wrote today

Hipster

Millennial aged children 

Broken fags

Art becomes void

Schoolyard losers so fucked they

 cant see anything more worthwhile 

than starting a band to get 

laid

For these priaprismic perpetual

Horny mongoloids "art" means

"Let me fuck you."

Hipster

Advance praise for Kyle Bern's AMERICANGULAG

"...kind of poetic genius...something very strong..." -- Matthew Stokoe

"The voice of a generation..." -- Bebe Zeva

AMERICANGULAG

A novel.

Coming soon.

My Father is the Devil

My father is the Devil.  THE Devil.  Satan himself.  My mom's a nice person.  That makes me 50 percent Satan, 50 percent a nice person.  An outside observer would never know.  When I'm awake I do pretty normal shit, like read books and lay around praying for death.  It's only when I'm sleeping that the beast runs wild.

I do all types of wild shit in my sleep, like invent methods of torture that don't exist yet.  I won't scare you with details but I'm telling you, my subconscious is totally fucked up.  My dreams are where my truly Satanic self comes out.

Being part Satan has its advantages.  The Hell I occupy while unconscious carrier over into my waking hours enough to allow me to express myself in really sick ways.  On the other hand I'm plagued with disturbing thoughts, like, if I sacrifice small children to Satan (my father) will it bring Eric and Dylan back to life?  Times like that I have to remind myself it's just my father talking and my mom would never approve of such behavior.

Now I'm awake.  Thank you, mom.  Thank you, God.  I'm shotgunning my third cigarette of the morning and my eyes are blurry but fuck I'm awake.  If you knew how much this hurts you wouldn't be alive.

Behind the Scenes of That Last Story

M: Let me see what you did here.

K: Yeah, for sure.  You know how much I value the input of my, you know, favorite editor.

M: Don't call me that.

K: Sorry. So what do you think?

M: You have drugs and lots of them, which is very you.

K: You think?

M: The camera angle shit isn't you, but you've done it so much it is now.

K: Thanks.

M: Come to think of it none of this shit is you, but it's not like anyone reading it will know the difference.

K: That was my thinking.

M: You get bonus points for the Columbine reference.

K: Bonus points?  That was the whole reason I wrote it.

M: I get that, but you have this tendency to write like you're trying to get to some sick punchline that only makes sense in your head.

K: You know me.

M: No one but you and I will have read the authors you're stealing this material from.  I say run with it.

K: Cool. You're the best, Matt!

Place of Interest 9,000

A shitty motel room.  Shitty and gray.  Fucking PCP.  It's been days.  I ask her for the third, fourth, fifth time, what's wrong.  She still stares at the spiraling ceiling fan which I see as a camera spinning around and around spotting all this gray in this fucked up room.  Static from the TV set tells me its not just the drugs or my imagination, Satan is here for real.

Outside it was crystal meth and night.  Lights in the night, neon, zoom zoom fast, we couldn't keep up.  Now we're here.  Dusted.  I can't tell you how much gray there is.  Too much.  I burn a hole in my middle finger lighting a cigarette.

What's wrong, six seven eight.  The camera zooms down, spiraling, locks on her pupil.  It widens.  A different shot from somewhere else in the room shows all the gray, gray clouds, gray static, gray gray gray dancing over her white body with the jeans halfway down and her hand on her crotch.  Switch back to the extreme close up of her pupil.  Offscreen:

"Dylan Klebod broke my heart."

Then she asks for more dust, or crystal, I don't hear right.

17

she moves about the courtyard, flesh eyes forward in their flesh frame, ghost feet not kicking up anything.
she took photos here, before she took pills and vodka somewhere else.
why has returned? maybe for me.
at least in the dream i can be that selfish.

25

winter
a new year
a fifty year old man's voice saying "did you cum?"
me mouthing "no"
him not knowing it wasn't about that
his yellow cum on my porcelain belly
it was about love or something he couldn't understand
i understood everything

AMERICAN GULAG: a novel

My new novel, titled AMERICANGULAG, is set to be published in 2017 with the kind assistance of Mr. Matthew Stokoe.

The Life of Pablo - album review

Kanye West's The Life of Pablo is one of the greatest albums of all time.  This is an album that should be played at funerals and in places of worship.  From the first track to the last one, we on a ultra light beam.  This is a god dream.

"Now, if I fuck this model, and she just bleached her asshole, and I get bleach on my t-shirt, I'ma feel like an asshole." Ye drops the pop lyrics of the year right here on the second track, "Father Stretch My Hands," but he's not done: if you keep listening there's a story there: "I was high when I met her. We was down in TriBeCa." Ye does a little step-step maneuver with his vocal pitch to match the spelling of "TriBeCa".  This whole thing is genus.

"I feel like me Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous." True? Maybe. What is true is that Yeezus has "loved us better than our kin did, from the very start" and as I'm typing this and hearing the screech of my mom's steering as she screams for me to to call an ambulance, I drop the phone and instead sing along full force with Kanye and Rihanna. "I just wanted you to know I've loved you better than your own kin did, from the very start. I don't blame you much for wanting to be free. I just wanted you to know."

David Bowie's death and the post-empire

It's 11 at night and I'm on a lot of drugs and I'm scared.  We have dexedrine to balance out the ADHD, klonopin to balance out the dexedrine, DXM to counteract the PCP, and mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics to balance out everything.  Its one of those nights where the paranoia that paralyzes the national character is paralyzing my own mind as well.  From across the room the night sky's abyss stares in at me, representing everything foul and fucked up in the USA.  I sit in my ivory fortress, in my ivory tower.  My ivory fortress is my last stronghold against a rapidly dying world and it is where I am reporting all of this from.

Nightmares

Whenever I fall asleep I have nightmares.  I have to stop falling asleep.

When I was 4 it was Thanksgiving and my uncle pulled his cock out in front of me.  He pressed it to my lips.

Before and after that was school.  School was the main nightmare.  I keep coming back to it, it and the tiny shit town that raised me.

I have to stop falling asleep.

College is where I accidentally smoked PCP.  For the next seven years after that I was locked in PCP hell.  I saw the world distorted and black.  My mind was a contorted version of what it had been.  When I slept on PCP, I didn't dream, or if I did I didn't remember it.  Seven years later my mom discovered that DXM can counteract PCP.  I'm out of PCP hell.  Whenever I fall asleep I have nightmares.

I have to stop falling asleep.

While I was under the influence of PCP I became a drug addict.  I was also raped.

I have to stop

THE SUBURBS

ARCADE FIRE'S "THE SUBURBS" has been my favorite album since I was old enough to know what it means to have a genealogical place in the world. I was born in Mahattan and lived there for many years but my real home is suburban New Jersey and it probably always will be. I fear and loathe the city, I've come to realize in my 25 years on this earth, and my true home is the suburbs of NJ. There are good things about it and bad things about it. ARCADE FIRE weighs them both and speculates on the future for suburbia, and, ultimately, the world at large.

CHILLWAVE, or C86, is one of my favorite musical genres and chillwave band REAL ESTATE, New Jersey natives, really strike a chord with me. Their self-titled debut album may not be their most musically accomplished but it's my favorite one. On songs like "Suburban Dogs" and "Suburban Beverage" they capture the milieu, the tedium and boredom, of suburban New Jersey while relishing in it, languishing in the general peace and privilege of living in such a place.

This is an album that feels good.

These are albums that I proudly identify with my home.

im glad my cat isnt mad at me: fuck

you can’t write through tears, i’m convinced it’s impossible.  that’s why when i tell you i was crying 30 seconds ago it has to be stylized.  there’s no way to put abjection on the page or screen.  there just isn’t.  this is why you can’t write about cataclysmic happenings from inside of them.  your brain just can’t process that shit.  it’s too much to be dealing with abjection inside and writing about it outside at the same time.

this why most writers’, especially young writers’, attempts at writing about pain fail miserably.  it tends to be, on my end, “i don’t believe you” or “who gives a fuck?”  most writers just don’t know how to convey abjection while not being inside of abjection, which is a necessity if you’re going to write anything powerful because, as i’ve established, it’s impossible to write about abjection from inside of it.

These people would talk about anything

These people would talk about anything: what drugs he's doing, what party should they were at when she told him about the rape, anything.  Keep me distracted.  Keep me distracted.  Keep me distracted.

The air comes funneling out of the vent in my wall and it's too clean and new to be Lynchian like it should be.  Maybe in a couple years.

We ate the Wendy's and then hotboxed his car.  Dave threw up.  We ate a bunch of xannies.  Xavier and Thomas blacked out.

On the streets, at night, Bob stabs a woman, just 'cause.

This is not the the end.  Wait, I guess it is.

24 hour abortion of a short story

Pot and cigarettes breakfast with anarchists.  Oh, we talked.

"i’m writing a one day short story.  it might end up being one word long, it might end up being one sentence long.  who knows?  i’ll post it here at midnight." I posted on tumblr as Built to Spill spiraled from my turntable's speakers.  I know that you'll get yours when you get empty.  And then: It's so close.  At least, that's what it sounds like to my weed fogged ears.

A blur an image a smear.  A person?  A shadow.  This is all on tumblr.

No Recess.  About 15 minutes into this recording of a dead heroin addict.

Pennington and awful pain.  I try to smoke and sing my way through it.  Windmills of your mind.  Tumblr bombards me.  I'm officially DISTRACTED.  Thumbs up.

I'm bored.  I smoke tons of weed.  I'll pick up more later.  I drive to Wendy's.  I don't really remember much about this part because I was stoned but I know I ordered some kind of chicken sandwich, fries, and a Dr. Pepper.  It was around 5:00.  I guess an early dinner?  Who cares.  I eat at weird times anyway.

An alien invasion happened.  Things got abducted.  Things got destroyed.  The president's brain grew cancerous and developed a tumor.  Clinton was caught in the oval office masturbating with a golden eagle up her cunt.

At home I pretended I was masturbating to Xavier Dolan masturbating to Jake Gyllenhaal.  When I came I needed to get high again.

Drones over the suburbs.  It's scary to wake up.

Waiting for coffee to brew.  Cofee and half past 6.  It might be ready.  I'll go check.