John Doe

🦅 MuuMuu House, 🫀 Hard work, 🏇 Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and more.

August 26, 2024

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John Doe is a Michigan-based poet who writes about sex and America, and whose work has appeared in journals like Joyland, Hobart Pulp, and Spectra Poets. I think of him as Mark Kozelek for Zoomers; his anonymous free-verse prose about love and loss has won over the affection and perhaps even obsession of e-girls nationwide. My introduction to Mr. Doe was his poem for No Agency’s newsletter that opened with the line “The pussy had me straight up convert to Scientology” and he has not ceased throwing out equally punchy lines like “Girls reciting my poems like future verses”, and “Did you know JFK died of a broken heart?” spliced in between saccharine ramblings. These sentiments about lost love might reflect the state of modern romance better than anything else out right now. John Doe’s debut poetry collection Autumn in the Pain House is available for preorder now over at ExPat Press. Lucky for us, John’s here to tell us what he’s been into.

😮‍💨

Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous

Helped me escape my toxic psychosexual addiction to ruining beautiful women and being ruined by them. Mastery over the body is empowering; it frees you from becoming a tornado of erotic dysfunction.

🫀

Hard work

Don’t you understand that it all goes back to hard work? And it always has?

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance

This requires two shoutouts. I recently went through a quasi-breakup, after which Heartlocket Amazon Primed me a PS5 and Delicious Tacos encouraged me to channel my depression/rage into Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Video games are a perfect vessel for male anguish. Deliverance allows you, if momentarily, to step outside of the Longhouse.

🦅

MuuMuu House

Don’t you understand that it all goes back to Tao Lin? And it always has? I wouldn’t be writing, or posting, without Tao’s influence; I imagine this is obvious. Richard Yates is the great American novel. My own precious copy has been rendered unreadable due to impassioned/psychotic scribbling, it now resembles a treasured keepsake of the criminally insane. Tao recently brought back the MuuMuu House blog and it is the only publication I routinely check. His editorial choices are very strange, I particularly recommend this.

🥤

7-Eleven

“There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.”

🧘‍♂️

Living Alone

Spending ~60% of one’s income on rent is an honorable and Lindy thing for an artist to do. Living with others is a developmental milestone I never met; I am an untenable roommate. Being alone allows you to revel in your strange, peculiar, and poetically pathetic existence. It helps if, like me, you don’t mind being cucked in a precarious and underpaid position in the economy. I understand others do.

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John Doe

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