A Dreg’s Notes | Entry #1: Shepherd of Urine
Lit Culture
“A Dreg’s Notes” is a new column by Garth Miró. Written in the vein of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, it is an outsider’s look at the writing life and what it means to create in heavily corporatized times.
We don’t want to be ourselves. Yet we want to live forever. It’s a special kind of hell we’re cooking up.
But I think I have a plan. It’s always been my gift to avoid any form of self-improvement. In this column—which has miraculously been given to me at my great reluctance—I will be sharing this gift with you. So you may become so completely unremarkable that digital eternity skips right over you.
I’m talking about Twitter.
It’s known that writers today must almost never write. Instead, we must first and foremost brand, and network, and engage in every shred of discourse, no matter how ridiculous or petty. Writing is secondary or even tertiary. This much became apparent to me as I scrolled Twitter this morning, waiting to piss in a cup for my doctor.
Today’s hot topic: AI. I see people saying things like “writers better learn to plumb.” And: “So, AI is going to steal my writing job? But my writing helped train the AI?” As well as gems like “Writing erotic prompt for Chat GPT hoping to be the first person to make AI cum.”
Clearly, AI is coming to steal our inspiration as writers. It will scrub all forms of social media for the very best to be placed in the algorithm, so that it may replicate the very best. And, of course, it only wants the best.
“You’re ready in room three,” the nurse says. I come to this office so often we’ve become friends. She likes to ask what I’m reading. I imagine one day she won’t have to because she’ll know. We’ll all be reading the same thing. The work to end all work, The One Great Tome that AI finally hooks us with.
After plagiarizing my first piece for this publication, my initial thought was to have AI spit out some janky article for me. Type “pseudo journalism that will make my editors give me a raise” and see what crawls out. I don’t have a lot of time. Between staying clean, refilling my Suboxone, working subcontracting gigs, chasing down contractors to pay me, sending them emails just threatening enough to cast reasonable doubt, I write most things on my phone between trains. AI could help.
But reading all the chatter on Twitter this morning, I see the problems using AI will bring. I don’t want to live forever. That would be exhausting.
So I will write this piece myself, unremarkably. No herculean feat for me—as I said, I’m a natural. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m doing it right now, writing in a way that’s both plain and forgettable. This is my first in a series to come. Notes. A guide, too, for all of you who wish to do the same. Be unremarkable. (If you’re really lucky, you might even be hated.) Only then will our writing not be stolen by algorithms.
Anyway, it’s more fun down here at the bottom. Don’t worry about being forgotten. Or poor. As Bataille wrote, “He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not, and he knows something the others don’t know.”
“So,” the doctor says, looking over my charts, “your test came back positive again.”
“For what?” I ask.
“Fentanyl, morphine, heroin,” he says.
“Like a salad,” I say.
“We’re in those days,” he says. He clicks the computer off and turns to me. “I’m only going to give you a week’s worth of strips until you can produce clean urine. Schedule an appointment with reception.”
My job is now to shepherd the urine. To produce what my body should naturally: a rather unremarkable goal.
OK, so how can we become our most unremarkable, unappealing selves? Well, self-help books have been around over a hundred years, so we have a lot to work with. By this I mean do the opposite of what those manuals recommend. One way to do this is by being pathetic. As you can see, you just have to want something that you don’t have, publicly. Most of us don’t have everything. Just pick one from the list, down in your gut. The things that keep you wincing at night. Beg. Ingratiate.
“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone,” as Cioran wrote. Write your worst, and maybe you’ll never have to.
The next thing to do is be late. I’m referring now to the tenets of contemporary literary citizenship: branding, networking, discourse. For any given bit of discourse, wait until it’s been covered to chime in. Come here, to this column, for the last word in the lit scene, folks. This week (weeks ago) it’s AI, but last week it was closing magazines. Before that it was nepotism. Come to these discussions late, and treat them with the contempt they deserve. Hell, don’t read my column at all—that would truly be the most helpful and keep me unnoticed.
I open Twitter again on my way home. Just to see what else there is to cover. Now people are whining about how AI will impact cheating. They’re worried students will use AI to write papers. I see that as a massive problem, too, but not in the way they do. I fear for the bookish kids the rich ones pay to write their papers. What about them? We’ll need those bookish cheaters in the upcoming eternity.
If we are all unremarkable, I think everything else will fall into place. We’ll certainly live short lives. And those lives will be firmly associated with our selves, for people are always eager to attribute the most boring parts to a person’s most essential viscera. That thing you did was the real you because it makes me look exciting. But I, for one, don’t want to have to drudge through all the posturing and self-enhancement just so that I can shepherd my urine even longer.
For this column, however long—and I assume not very—it lasts, I will be flattening myself. Piece by piece. Online. I will make sure the banes of the modern writer’s soul—success and glory—never come to me. (I’m already a writer with a drug addiction. What’s more cliché?) That success and glory become disgusted with me, turn their heads, and run. If I do this right, I will show you all what it means to be common.
I finally make it home from my doctor’s office. The sky is blue. The clouds are white. The sun is round, and yellow. My apartment is small, but not remarkably so.
Garth Miró is the author of The Vacation, out now with Expat Press. His stories have appeared in Litro, Sundog Lit, XRAY, and Maudlin House among others. He currently works as a handyman.
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