There is a strange comfort in moving from room to room while other people are falling apart.

I have a day job working in healthcare as a resource technician. I like it because nobody fully knows where I’ll be tomorrow. One day I’m in one clinic, the next day somewhere else. I leave before the politics of the workplace can fully harden around me. I move through hallways anonymously. I help where I’m needed and then disappear again. There is relief in that. The flexibility keeps me from feeling trapped inside a single atmosphere.

But lately, I keep thinking about the emergency department.

I think about the automatic doors opening every thirty seconds. The overhead pages. The compression of time. The way everybody is carrying something visible. Pain lets itself be known. Fear is loud. Nobody in the ED pretends to be doing great.

This has been pulling me away from my responsibilities at brief + incorrect lit. These things will always pull me away. My mind will wander, fall apart, and then come back again.

I remember liking the feeling of entering a room and immediately having a purpose. Somebody needs to be moved. Somebody needs blankets. Somebody needs to be calmed down. Somebody needs water. Somebody needs to be listened to for thirty seconds longer than everybody else is willing to listen.

Outside of work, my chaos spreads shapelessly: My thoughts will multiply and keep me up at night. My decisions remain open too long and I question them later. My days become abstract.

In the ED, chaos becomes physical. It arrives attached to bodies, monitors, blood pressure readings, wheelchairs, facial expressions, clipped sentences. It narrows the world into immediate tasks. The mind stops drifting because there is always something directly in front of you demanding attention.

A man comes in short of breath. A woman is crying in triage. Security is called overhead. Someone is vomiting into a plastic bag. A nurse laughs at something horrible because everybody has been awake too long. The waiting room television keeps playing through all of it.

And somehow, inside that environment, I feel quieter. I desire it to the point of idealizing it. When it comes to that, I don’t know that I trust it anymore. Is this what I want from my life? Has it become my identity?

That feeling has begun influencing what I want from writing.

I notice I’m less interested in polished narratives that explain themselves cleanly. I’m more interested in fragments. Interruptions. Abrupt tonal shifts. Moments where absurdity and suffering occupy the same sentence without resolving each other.

The ED teaches you that people rarely arrive with coherent stories. They arrive mid-collapse. Mid-argument. Mid-symptom. Mid-divorce. Mid-relapse. Mid-life. You gather partial information while alarms sound in the background and somebody asks where the bladder scanner went.

I think that rhythm has entered my writing.

A person saying something devastating while somebody nearby unwraps a sandwich. A bureaucratic sentence accidentally revealing cruelty. Humor appearing at the exact wrong moment. Emotional intensity broken apart by fluorescent lighting and institutional language.

Even the pacing feels similar. Brief encounters carrying disproportionate emotional weight. People appearing for a page and then vanishing. Conversations interrupted before resolution. The sense that every person contains an entire unseen narrative moving just outside the frame.

The ED also changes what feels true on the sentence level. People under stress stop speaking like characters in novels. Their language becomes repetitive, fragmented, strangely direct. Sometimes the most honest thing a person says all day is: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

I think I trust those kinds of sentences more now.

Maybe that’s part of why the ED keeps pulling at me. Not only as work, but as an atmosphere. A structure. A way of seeing people when their performed selves begin to fail.

Maybe writing, for me, is becoming another version of triage.

Accompaniment: “Dayvan Cowboy” — Boards of Canada

I’ve moved through long stretches without confidence as a writer. But I didn’t trust the reader, either. That came from not having found my people. Trying to write while imagining a reader who might reject it only tightens the work and drains it of any kind of forward progress. So I made brief + incorrect lit as a way to locate others who are reaching for the same thing. I want to meet them, and in doing that, become honest on the page. When I come across writing that runs parallel to what I feel and how I want to write, it gives me fuel. It reminds me that confidence isn’t something you invent alone; it grows out of recognition; out of finding your people; out of finding the books that show you what you’re already trying to do.

One of those books for me is Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms. It is composed of short stories and journal entries. Reading it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t name at first.

Read—

Comrade Mashkin struck Comrade Koshkin on the head with his fist ... Comrade Koshkin measured his length on the floor and died. Mashkin killed Koshkin.

And then,

Pushkin and Gogol were sitting on a branch. Pushkin fell off, and Gogol laughed. Then Gogol fell off too.

Plus,

A woman fell out of the window. Another woman leaned out to look at her and also fell out of the window.

As well as,

If someone is given a good beating, he becomes modest and doesn’t boast about himself.

Etc.

Years before I encountered it, I had posted something on a forgotten Tumblr page that moved in a similar direction. It felt wrong because the piece leans so far into the absurd that it seems to refuse an audience. I assumed no one would care to read it. Maybe that’s still partly true. It feels like it’s something meant to be written more than read.

Kharms’s work carries a similar wrongness in that it removes the structures we rely on. Things happen without reason. Events don’t build toward anything. People die and nothing follows from it. The story doesn’t step in to explain or repair. It just stops.

People often say this reflects the politics of his time. It was written in the late 1920s through the 1930s, during the early decades of the Soviet Union. This period was dominated by Joseph Stalin’s rule, when strict censorship and state control over art intensified. His absurd, nonconforming writing put him at odds with Soviet cultural policy, leading to his arrest and suppression. The absurdity he wrote mirrors an absurd system. What Kharms does is strip away the expectation that the world will make sense at all.

Systems—political or otherwise—tend to insist on explanations. Kharms writes as if none of that can be trusted. He builds a world where logic fails quietly and completely and then leaves you inside it.

The work I’m trying to make and collect moves in that same direction. Toward the edge where meaning thins out. Where events happen and don’t resolve. Where nothing steps in to tell you what to do with it. It asks for a different kind of reader. One who doesn’t need the pieces to lock together. One who can sit with something that doesn’t justify itself.

Finding that reader is the same as finding your people, and once you do, the work doesn’t change, but your relationship to the work does.

Accompaniment: “The Dead Flag Blues” — Godspeed You Black Emperor

Sometimes I try to tell myself I feel nothing. It never works

When things go slightly misaligned, a few degrees off, like something in the room has shifted, but I can’t name it, I listen to an album. Not a playlist.

There’s something about staying with a thing. Letting it unfold in the order it insists on being in. Being a witness instead of a curator.

Maybe it’s a 90s kid reflex. The memory is physical. A cassette case cracking open. That thin plastic hinge. The paper insert slipping slightly. And the smell: sharp, synthetic, specific. It hits somewhere behind the eyes.

I remember stealing them.

I was fifteen, give or take.

A local grocery store.

The cassette tapes were in those long plastic cases—awkward, obvious, impossible to hide well1. I’d slide them down the front of my pants and hold the fabric out as I walked, like I had somewhere to be, as if the urgency could disguise shape.

I got away with it long enough to fill four shoeboxes. Possibly more. My memory’s been shot.

Stacked beneath my bed.

A small archive of theft and purpose.

They caught me eventually. Of course they did.

But the smell stayed.

It still comes back randomly. No warning. Just there.

I don’t need the plastic anymore. The feeling still shows up.

Heavy Meta by Ron Gallo is one of the albums I return to when things feel off.

The opening track arrives already mid-thought and feels a little confrontational. His voice is far away from needing to be liked. The guitars grind; the sound erupts.

What comes out of the song—what leaves it—is not the same thing that went in. Not for me, not for you. That gap is where the work happens. When a song exceeds its lyrics, when it starts to operate somewhere else entirely, that’s when I trust it.

Go ahead. Read this and tell me you feel nothing:

Let’s get a house, you and me and your 12 cats
We’ll put mirrors on the ceiling
We’ll have a bunk bed by the bath
You’ll line my mattress with nails
One for every time something psycho came out of your mouth
Your cavern eyes are preying
Your scarlet lips half saying
A sales pitch for the circus in your mind

Anything?

Exactly. That’s when I start writing.

The lyrics are the engine.

We all need something that pushes us forward.

A movement.

Coda: What the Album Gave Me

• Permission to be jagged. To follow a thought past where it’s supposed to end.

• Permission to choose voice over polish. To let something feel said instead of carefully composed.

• Permission to hide thought inside noise. To trust the reader to feel something before they understand it.

• Permission to repeat. As rhythm. As return. As pressure.

• Permission to be slightly unhinged but still in control. To let things feel unstable while holding to the internal logic it possesses.

• And maybe, most importantly—permission to not resolve anything clearly. To let the piece end where it ends.

Not everything needs to be finished to be alive.

1

See image below for those of us who have no clue what the author is talking about.