Life advice that, while tedious, is a must-learn. Alyssa Mastromonaco of the Hysteria Podcast employed this maxim when her co-host Erin Ryan confessed to falling for a fake headline due to her own confirmation bias.
If it were possible to get signs from the Universe – the aspect of it that is lovingly wise, affirming, exactly like your favorite AI “thought partner” – then it’s been telling me how important the work of media analysis is. Is this confirmation bias at work? Absolutely.
Following my intention this year to commit to publishing weekly blog entries, I heard Jay Smooth declare its importance in his Crash Course series on Media Literacy. “We need you to pass along these skills!” Olayemi Olurin declares it in this video and in an entire channel dedicated to the practice, because “A lot of motherfuckers have absolutely no idea what media analysis even is.”
And so I cast my eye to that personal/universal horizon of fulfilling my purpose. I’ve always loved this work, and it turns out it’s not a waste of time. It’s fun. It’s challenging, demanding. It’s even a public service.
What compelled me to finally sit down and start typing this entry was the phrase, “house of mirrors” in Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. It reminded me of the things I’ve been itching to say about Ryan Murphy’s true crime oeuvre, and the point I never hear anyone discuss in depth, which is that those shows are confronting us, the viewers and voyeurs, with ourselves. I’ll talk more about that later.
Right now, I just want to eat more food. Not an hour ago I polished off a delicious Marie Calender’s parmesan chicken pot pie, generously prepped in the oven for an hour by my mom, and already I can’t wait to shove the next rich thing into my mouth. I am a food addict.
But I have been weed-sober for over ninety days. It hasn’t been that hard. The last time I got high I got nothing out of it except disappointment and this powerful sense of losing. Losing my power, my potential, my juice – whatever the creative fruit I’d been unable to grow, from fiction to poetry. Don’t believe me, believe the users of r/leaves, whose stories of grief, misery, recovery and joy have been resonant.
That said, I started this writing on a two-gummie dose of amanita muscaria, and I’m a little worried about it only because it lent me a sense of corporeal euphoria that I haven’t felt in over three months. This made everything more enjoyable, from reading and writing to eating.
It’s not a big deal, in the sense that it doesn’t really make me want to chase the feeling. But I’m worried that next week I won’t want to sit down, roll up my sleeves and write without it.
And I’m keenly aware of the harsh reality I face going to work tomorrow, walking dogs in sub-freezing temperatures, and how I’ll need a cold shower in the morning to reset my dopamine pathways so I’m better primed for that stress. Some drugs are fun, but more purposeful highs are calling. Also, I just forgot how to swallow my own spit and have been choking myself sore for the last five minutes.
Big changes are coming. I’ll be leaving my beloved service job at the shelter so I can focus on developing my off-grid home with my partner, who’s been out there on his own since spring of 2024. I like to imagine there will finally be more quality time for us, such as writing music together and pursuing other creative projects. But only if we’re able to measure twice so we only have to cut once. So far, it’s still sinking in.
As I post: Refs work against the Seahawks and we all suspect it’s motivated by money. Go Hawks. Legal Eagle mourns the loss of life at the hands of ICE. I mourn and rage with him.
BLOG OF RHIANNIMATOR 