#now tho i think i mostly just. like the version of him i've created. ex zealot thing aside. most of the things i like about him i've

[dolokhoded]

Why do you like Simon Z so much?

i don't, james is actually my favorite disciple. simon was just left on a carboard box outside the door of tumblr dot com slash dolokhoded eating trash, somebody had to take him in.

[abigfuckingbully]

Aiden Burke: This book is based in reality. How autobiographical is it?

Atticus Davis: This book is heavily autobiographical. It's a warped version of true life events.

Aiden Burke: You used to play music?

Atticus Davis: I grew up playing music. I thought originally that I was going to be a successful musician but I found it incredibly difficult. I was getting good at guitar, I had started a few bands from the ages of 16-19. Tried to make solo work but quit. I was depressed. Everyone I worked with 'couldn't do it anymore' or just 'lost interest.' I was 19 when I really finally gave up music and the hope of starting a band. To be honestly I'll never fully give that dream up, I'm a great performer. I am interested in being vox for a post-hardcore/math band. If you live in the Bay Area and you like my poetry hmu. My brother is the only one still making music as of now and he lives in Japan. I thought we were going to make music together at one point and play out. Again, just never happened.

Aiden Burke: You started writing when you quit music?

Atticus Davis: Yeah. It was a great decision. I had full control over the outcomes whereas with music I was relying on so many other people and their being fickle...

I started writing this collection of poetry titled 'Adulthoods,' which is how I eventually met my ex-girlfriend. Which I think is described in the book.

I can finish what I start and get my work as far as I want when I write.

Aiden Burke: Music is still important to your life.

Atticus Davis: Absolutely. I grew up in punk which lead to a really young interest in Anarchism and Ecology. When I was 16-19 I was frequenting shows and the more I learned I heavier life felt. I read Evasion and I read Endgame by Derrick Jensen, which is about how civilizations are all unsustainable and how our only hope for our future is violence against the state and monkey wrenching. I still believe in those things. But I was radicalized and exposed to those politics mostly thru music. I was hugely connected in music but I stopped frequenting shows when I was falsely accused of stalking a peripheral friend I'd known for 8 years.

Aiden Burke: You were blacklisted?

Atticus Davis: I was used for sex and then disposed of. I started to try to talk to this person about how I felt and found them completely unsympathetic. I had an idea that her ex boyfriend would be part of the picture again but I had no idea that we weren't going to be friends after 8 years of knowing each other. I tried voicing how I felt but I was met with silence and disinterest in the conversation then deemed a stalker for not accepting the silence. Feel like stalkers aren't confrontational. Feel like if the gender roles were reversed people would have been defending me and up in arms. They would have had to talk.

Aiden Burke: That's a huge loss of faith for you.

Atticus Davis: Yeah, after that I couldn't #believewomen and lost all interest in feminism. It seemed like a girl's club, borderline female supremacy, and on the ground having too many inevitable pitfalls for me to give a fuck what happened to women.

Aiden Burke: You said in a previous interview that you're interested in 'the relationship story,' or that model. That appears a lot in this book too.

Atticus Davis: Yeah, I wanted this book originally to be a vehicle to talk about all my previous relationships but by the time I actually got to writing about those relationships my memory was so bad that I really had to mine myself for the content. It ended up having the relationship stories in it but having a completely different main thread.

Aiden Burke: And You said that was heavily influenced by alt lit/indie lit.

Atticus Davis: Yeah I literally just used to write poems about myself/my thoughts but I started reading people like Mary Miller and Elizabeth Ellen who write about other people. I didn't think/care if it was responsible I was just blown away that you could make art and sort of create these portraits of relationships with people you're dating/have dated. It makes you care more about those relationships and draw more meaning from them. Alt Lit/Indie Lit was a huge influence on me and initially reminded me of punk in that everyone was young and making this explosive/pop art. But they really aren't very punk, like, at all. The snobbery that pops up in countercultural/indie/punk circles is covered a lot in this book and that's what alt lit/indie lit starts to reek of. Punk was already dead to me at that point. Autobiographical fiction seemed like a very intimate thing. Like, real life stories with the names changed was completely new as an idea to me. A lot of the book No Such Thing as Broken is like @abigfuckingbully in that way.

Aiden Burke: In this book you're the main character. How much of this character are you?

Atticus Davis: The character is definitely a more potent version of myself because I can compose it but it's like a film in that it's 'hyperrealistic'

Aiden Burke: There's a scene where you repeat that, 'feminism is cancer.' Do you mean that?

Atticus Davis: No. The main character is an obstinate person who resists completely identifying as a feminist for the same reason I do. He's repeating a slogan he'd heard a woman tell him before, I took it from a conservative. It's mostly just to set himself apart from people who relinquish parts of themselves for the hope of cohesion/tolerance. He/I believe that in order to be moral/altruistic the way you arrive at and believe what you believe is as important.

It's also kind of an extreme inversion of the attitude of people virtue signalling. Hiding in a kind of filth of anti-social 'values'/ideas more than beliefs. Even if I believe what you believe I am/this character is definitely averse to wearing those beliefs on his sleeves because to him it feels more like a prostitution of belief or a way of building some exclusive club. I wrote it because I knew you're literally 'not allowed' to say that, it's like blasphemy of a religion, so definitely wanted to include it, just to fuck people up and reject people's sensibilities like Dostoyevsky Wannabe or anyone else who was convinced I was alt-right.

Aiden Burke: This character rejects counter culture strongly.

Atticus Davis: Yeah I think there's a lot of things/experiences that show a lot of intolerance, misunderstanding, and elitism in punk/alternative circles. I've seen call out culture abused and completely without substance or oppositely for the purpose of social control. Once exposed to this jealous boyfriend, of the girl who accused me of stalking her, who used the accusation that I 'fetishize women of color' to try and get his ex-gf to stop fucking me. It was founded in nothing. I like/date white girls predominately but I've also dated outside of my race, like anybody else in the Bay Area. It was a racist thing to say tho and definitely only served to satisfy a jealous person.

Aiden Burke: What do you want people to take away from this book?

Atticus Davis: I want people to break out of any paradigm and be militant in mining your life for personal truth and then acting accordingly. I want people who believe in things like anarchism and feminism to question if they are making progress and meeting like minds or alienating people and driving intelligent people out of their group/scene/'community'.

The different between thought and endorsement.

I also want people to be more accepting of sexuality in general. Seems like the counterculture succeeded to be the snake eating itself so that now women are just as interested in suppression of male sexuality as men used to be interested in suppression of female sexuality. Can't be entirely convinced that men who are openly sexual/sexually viable in a small group isn't met with anger outright. The counterculture is accepting of sex if it fits into what women view as 'appropriate' which means subtle and don't hit on anyone. But I've gotten laid hitting on women and have brought a lot of the women I've had in my life into my life by being arrogantly open about sex or just communicate that my interest is more than being friends.

Aiden Burke: What do you believe this story is about, if you had to summarize it?

Atticus Davis: It's about never giving up and never giving in even if it feels wrong while it's happening you might find yourself closer to yourself and in effect closer to God. It's really about how nihilistic I am and how the only things I really beleive in are myself and God.

Aiden Burke: Does this novel make you feel closer to God?

Atticus Davis: Yes, absolutely.