Sex Goblin

The following is an excerpt of Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook, forthcoming from Nightboat Books on May 28, 2024.

Congratulations nobody makes me feel bad like you make me feel bad

What would you like to do with that news?

Just chillin’ at home
Sitting at my desk on my laptop like a monk
before the printing press was invented
Just copying the Bible word for word and when
you finish you just start another one

You ever look God in the eyes and be like I would do anything to have my pain transformed into any other emotion. I would do anything to have my pain replaced by any other feeling. And god says ok do it then? And you said I don’t know how that’s why I came to ask you and god says lmaooo you definitely know how and you’ve done it many times before don’t you remember and you’re like oh yea

Sitting like a bird rotting in its nest

I can’t help you if you don’t use your words 

As a little kid I loved being like “can you tuck me in before bed?”

Google contacted me to tell me stop googling “swollen lymph nodes” every day . . . they said I was annoying them 

Excerpt continues below

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I’m not looking for reality

I’m looking for a simulation of reality and I’m not afraid to admit it. Everything is unbearable to look at in front of me. I have had a hard life and a hard childhood so I have to just sit on my phone all day and do many drugs including numbing myself completely with marijuana and other things and sort of eating these foods that make you have diarrhea only. That type of way of living for a long time. So I’ll kinda look for an artifice to hold on to anywhere. Whatever is easiest at that time my brain will sort of think up or engage with to make me away from here.

I found an online game where you are a migrating bird. It is the end of winter so you are flying back up north. Leaving Mexico to go somewhere very north, maybe in the Arctic Circle. You do that long flight journey for the first half of the game, non-stop. Over oceans and land along the coasts. It all centers around these sort of made up lands and countries I suppose. It looks geographically like a combination of everywhere, like a drawing in a science textbook they use to show you different land masses (peninsula, plateau, valley, mountains.) Some birds in real life fly up to 500 hours at a time straight across oceans to migrate so it is somewhat based on reality, your long journey over the sea and coast. After you migrate, you mate and sit on eggs and feed the small bird children. You’re not any specific bird species though. The animation is these sort of very shiny looking rounded cartoons. I am sure it is for a fetishist of sorts, that its selling point is that, but for me I find it to be accurate enough to suspend my disbelief. But I’m just looking to be anything else. I will move on to the next one soon.

I play Solitaire, Tetris. All the normal games too.

There’s another game where you are riding a motorcycle on a rocky woodland path. There is no music and you’re being chased by a giant rock that’s rolling, sort of one of those cartoon ones from like Indiana Jones. The game is basically Temple Run with the giant rock trope. And you’re on an enduro motor bike, from the early seventies or eighties. But you’re a woman in a bikini with no shoes. And in your basket, which is attached to your bike, are groceries and there is no explanation as to why you are being chased at all or in the bikini. But you still collect coins and jump over obstacles and make sharp turns. It all just seems routine almost and when you finally make it home at the end of the game/across the finish line, the rock just goes away as you enter your front door. There is no celebration or acknowledgement of who, what, when, where, or why. You just start cooking dinner after you bring the bags in. 

People who talk shit about “low-hanging fruit” have never had a strawberry

I can’t live a single day more without a birdfeeder

*

HOLDING ON