I spent part of January in a surprisingly tender generative writing workshop focused on electronic formats. Below is my response to a prompt from our workshop guide, Erik Ehn - “encaustics today. mess - how to stay tangibly messy, hot, melty online...”

How To Stay Messy Online

1. Choose a device and clean it free from particles and memories.

2. Protect your edges with sunlight and other therapeutic methods, keep any medications nearby.

3. Pour wax in the crevices of your keyboard. Smush it in with your finger pads, elbows, face, until it no longer types. Let it dry completely. 

4. Communicate solely with copy paste.

5. Secrete (cry, spit… whatever) into your headphone jack, through the thin lines of your speakers.

6. Always leave your camera on.

7. Alternatively, never turn your camera on.

8. A note: Facebook comments and Twitter ratios are the shallow mess, don’t waste your time. Instead, yank yourself backwards to the shadowy spaces of the web of your childhood:

   1. Romance a creepypasta

   2. Frighten a stranger who won’t stop asking your age/sex/location

   3. Begin another transformation ritual:

      1. Anything could happen here

      2. Find a way to stop recognizing yourself

75 Transformation Techniques

• Get older

• Chemical reaction

• Magic (general use, more potential applications throughout)

• Dye hair (whatever you have, if you have any)

• Draw hair 

• Remove hair

• Hormones

• Cultivate new bits

• Scars

• Lose an appendage or limb (organic or manufactured)

• Gain an appendage or limb (organic or manufactured)

• Surgery (of any kind that involves only your body)

• Surgery (of any kind that combines you with something else)

• Surgery (of any kind that combines you with someone else)

• Decay, embrace the rot

• Décollage (rip rip rip)

• Shed skin

• Remove clothes

• Change clothes

• Change vibes

• Change shells

• Grow scales

• Grow feathers

• Grow wool

• Grow fur

• Grow skin

• Grow an exoskeleton

• Grow bark

• Grow leaves

• Grow hair!

• Similar to the second hair technique, create any of the above coverings in a different material and attach it to yourself (permanently or temporarily) 

• Grow a fungus (different than decay)

• Fùngere

• Bud

• Bloom

• Fruit

• Mingle your roots with other roots until you’re not sure where you begin and they end

• Build a cocoon

• Leave a cocoon

• Buy a mask

• Carve a mask (wood or whatever else)

• Shape a mask (clay or whatever else)

• Print a mask

• Sew a mask

• Filters

• Weirder filters

• WEIRDER filters

• Create an avatar

• Combine an avatar with another avatar

• Be kind to a fairy disguised as an elder in the woods so they cast a spell that makes pearls and jewels and roses fall out of your mouth when you speak

• Be rude to a fairy disguised as a royal in the woods so they cast a spell that makes frogs and snakes and rot fall out of your mouth when you speak

• Ask the Blue Fairy to turn you into a real boy

• Promise not to lie and ask again, ask again, ask again

• Fuck it who needs the Blue Fairy become a donkey instead

• Obtain stepmother who will sew you and your brothers magical shirts that turn you into swans

• Rewrite a memory

• Rewrite that memory

• Adjust posture (any which way)

• Cover in earth

• Melt (any which way)

• Cover in water

• Bloat in the ocean

• Pickle

• Spatchcock

• Debone

• Obtain power

• Face your disposability (question the disposability of others)

• Screen-printing

• Dye (non-hair)

• Let the seams out

• Straighten the sides

• Add darts

• Fumage - basic flame

• Fumage - gunpowder & explosives

• Fumage - smoke