Shouldn't You Be Proud? (Or, Fantastic Heights and Dizzying Lows)

From the Foreword: "So, like… what is this? I guess you could ask that but that’s sort of just a question I’m asking myself. Even though a lot of the pieces in here stretch back to 2013, I started “work” on this around June of this year (2015) with the intention of just getting something out there. I had a lot of poetry and prose building up and I wanted to finally put it to good use; at first it seemed aimless and more like a boasting ground (“I WROTE A BOOK!”) than an actual honest-to-God real-as-hell work of art. Like, something with integrity. The more I wrote though, spending my summer mostly by myself in front of a computer screen, the more I was able to see the path that this thing was carving for itself. Not like the book had developed a mind of its own, but more along the lines of me throwing shit at the walls and seeing the eventual shape of what stuck, some nebulous, but overall purposeful shape. I like to be really black and white with things, so if I had to put a succinct thesis statement on what this book is about, I would put my nose up in the air and tell you “this is a book that explores how anxiety and depression affect your relationship to reality”, and, while I guess that’s technically true, because that’s what most of the pieces here deal with, this has really been more like an overwrought diary for me that I wrote in when I really needed to, then went back later to rearrange and make it look pretty. Am I important enough to market my diary to people? I mean, probably not. But, in a nutshell, that’s what this whole aggregate is about- anxiety, depression, all those buzzwords, and how, when thrown into a centrifuge with a subject (me!), it can get all messy and create really weird and cool shit. So this is my cool shit. Maybe “cool shit” is taking it a bit too lightly, because I go to what I consider to be some far depths of my mind trying to map out what goes on in there and put it on the page. There’s a lot of stuff in here that came right out of the absolute worst and most miserable parts of my life. That’s a lot of what art is, though, a purging of the intangibles laying on the seabed of our psyche and making it physical, or at least substantial. So, to hype myself up a little, I hope this surges you with catharses. I think that often the material we grab from the darkest parts of our mind is the most easily relatable, often to a frightening degree. In putting my worst shit out on the page, maybe you’ll find that a lot of us share the same dark parts floating around our heads. So here it is, a quick little sketchbook, diary, re-visitation, exploration, etc, of some of the little black things running around in my head and how I learned to get on their level and play patty cake with them."