The Devil MTV/HBO – Jesse Hilson
February 26, 2025
12/1/24
2nd person sike-otherapy. Shock therapy. You must write in second person for ten years, no remission, no reversion to first. No let up. It’s sike-ological. Backed up by decades of scientific findings. Gets you out of ego grooves that are bad for you. Don’t think you can get away with just doing a simple technical word-replacement keystroke in your Word document, either. The replacement of “I” with “you” must be deep and thorough, and go to the bone. If you say “I” in a dream, you better wake up and apologize. It will be enforced by the Watchers, for ten years, gremlins posted up, stationed in your head for a decade, they take note of everything you say, write, think, and report to…me. You see, I can say “I” because I am the therapist. You as the writer, the patient must obey the treatment. The second person. It’s done to cut you down to size, your sense of yourself, not to be artistically edgy or novel. It’s not even done for “you” the reader but rather done for “you” the writer: me, in other words. The first person is allowed in these extraneous zones of writing which I occupy, for explanatory prefatory purposes, only.
Not a lot more to say, unfortunately. Get at it, you. Gaslighting yourself, as they say. Or gaslighting others. “You had gay sex.” No I didn’t. Don’t say that about me. “I didn’t say it about you. I said it about me, in the second person.” Who’s on first? I don’t know (on third) but I managed to autofellate in college when I was more flexible and manic, unmedicated. I did a handstand, kind of, and sucked my own dick. Upside-down. And I could get erect enough, big enough, that I gagged on it. “No you did not.” I don’t remember if I came in my mouth or not. “Yeah right, like we’d believe that.” Whoa, we, third person? Who else is in here? “You would remember if you came or not.” I don’t remember the details, just that I did it. No crick in the neck. My housemate, a girl who worked at the radio station, who was sick of me, earlier asked me the question in the living room, a trick question: “Hey Noah, are you able to suck your own dick?” And whether you answered yes or no, it still equated to you being gay. If you said yes, that meant you had once had a dick in your mouth: gay. If you said no, you weren’t able to suck your own dick, that meant you tried and were unsuccessful, you’d wanted to, which was the same as being gay. A straight guy would think on his feet and say, “I don’t know, Sarah, I never tried. Never even thought about it.” Maybe that’s what put it into your head, Sarah’s question. Anyway you did try and you did do it, with all the blood rushing to your head. Self-sodomy, on multiple levels of factuality. And what sensation were you seeking, what end of the telephone line so to speak. It’s a bizarre, alien thing to do, inhuman, contortionist, unnatural, like a demonic insect. Nonsensical. But like you said, you were crazy at the time. “And lonely.” Probably.
***
Recently on social media you tweeted, for who knows what reason, “That time I went to buy my ex-wife negligee as a gift, but I didn’t have enough $$ to go top of the line, and it was a disaster. She wore it once, w/ a horrified look on her face. It was orange silk, and it looked like capture the flag. But she looked like cake to me.” It was an orange nightie. You’d secretly gotten Natasha’s measurements, 36-24-37, and gone to the pop-up lingerie store in Oylesburg. The woman working there was a college student you’d seen in the arts building doing a production of The Vagina Monologues, you’d gone with Natasha. Anyway the Vagina Monologue student showed you an assortment of garments. You said you were shopping for your wife. She believed you. You forget the prices but there was a red number that looked great but it was out of reach for you and your wages at the hotel, so you compromised for the orange nightie. When you gave it to Natasha, her eyes bulged out. You couldn’t tell at the time if she was into it. You made her put it on. It might have been a size too small for her, she was spilling out of it, which was fine with you. But yeah: orange. Safety orange? Visibility orange, like the flags used by construction workers directing traffic? Anyway, she still let you hit it while she was wearing it. But it never came out of the box again. And then Natasha left you sometime after that. Unknown if she ever put it on again. Word to the wise: only buy your wife red, black, or white nighties. Cream is ok, beige.
There’s that unrelenting urge to check the phone, to see how the orange nightie tweet is doing, who’d liked it. The lady from Berlin, the podcaster lady, liked it, probably laughing, and another Canadian woman online. So two women got it. If there is something to get. It feels redeeming for you to get women’s likes on social media. A relation – not a relationship, but a relatedness. Women understand what you are trying to say. Even though you don’t yourself. If you can get a woman’s like, it is one tiny step closer, a molecule, unnoticed by her or them or Elon Musk or anybody watching, closer to the woman, some woman, womankind, to break through the crust of solitude built up around you, chitin-like.
It is not enough to look at women. Your sexuality license may yet be revoked. You’re not allowed to be horny on a case-by-case basis, in writing. You’re reduced to your category, your class, your status as a man, a sexual pig – you’re tainted by every public pronouncement that another man has made in the service of his libido, his public libido, which may as well be some Jungian group consciousness all men punch a clock and show up to like a workplace, as opposed to your individual private libido, which has a unique shape you fear showing to the world.
12/2/24
You want to clarify, you are at great pains to clarify, that you experienced Aubrey’s fearful attachment styles long before the term “attachment style” entered the pop-sike lingo of the zeitgeist in the early 2020’s. Years before. Maybe this is what spurred you to write, to start again on the novel about Aubrey, the novel she may assassinate you for writing if she ever finds out about it. You never really heard of borderline personality disorder before this, except what you saw portrayed by Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted, or Vanessa what was her last name from Compass, the “hospital for people who think too much” — suicidal Vanessa with the undeniable upper balcony (sorry ladies, the writer was imprinted with an Updikean male-gaze signet ring, as on a wax-sealed envelope, when the wax was still soft, as you might say), and the gleanings from your time at Compass as a patient, Marsha Linehan’s teachings about DBT. You deserve pain in life. It feels like it’s coming, it’s your birthright so why not induce it earlier? Get it underway so you can put your finger on it, acknowledge it, match it somehow in some stoic way. You want to play your part in the global history of feeling pain. You played the sadist role with Aubrey in the sack, pushing her face into the wall roughly during sex. What did you learn about pain there? That some people want it. You heard the red-haired androgynous executive on the TV screen pulse and sing, “Some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you” and get this, this is the crazy part: “some of them want to be abused.” You were about seven years old and eurythmic death angels spoke to you through the TV screen: MTV/HBO, your older sister Dawn insisted your family get MTV because everybody was getting it in 1983. What message did you pick up. Confusing for the kid taking massive cues from the TV screen. It means you were inducted by MTV/HBO into an understanding at a young age. Twisted arc of personality. A soul’s torque and a shearing. Of who you were supposed to be. Maybe the pastors of 80’s America were right to call it the devil’s music. Potent polymorphous perversion, given too early to the kid, too early to compartmentalize and sort out. You tried to unzip Dawn’s pants in her bedroom because of something you want to say was from MTV/HBO, the cable poltergeist in the TV. You want to say it was MTV/HBO because that would absolve you. That would provide an excuse. Your perverse awakening was due to the culture, not due to something inborn and devilish, perhaps. Why is this distinction important? If you can pass it off as MTV/HBO, Hollywood, the music industry, video directors and programmers, you don’t have to take responsibility for your actions. And responsibility’s what you want that’s what you need, because it’s pain you want to self-administer. You want the shame and guilt because it’s something within you, the new sickness, whereas the act of sexually assaulting Dawn (if you can call it that coming from a ten-year-old) was the old sickness, the sickness of Committing Acts. The new sickness is not quite committing things in that way. The new sickness has learned the world’s laws after your dad grabbed you and scared you to death. The new sickness is Thinking Things, guilty shameful things: still committing acts but the harms are blunted and redirected inward, the acts are imaginary. You wake up each day and think of either sex or bolt action rifles, sniper nests. It doesn’t mean that the devil MTV/HBO is not behind them, somehow. MTV/HBO wants to remain hidden, and you have the feeling that to find it, grab it, hold it up to the light will free you from its…influence? grip? prison? You don’t know because you stopped writing at the ellipsis, didn’t you?