An extract with a very long title that I won’t reproduce here because it’s already in the title of this post from PRESS (A) TO START 01: LAST CHRISTMAS IN JULY: A COWARD'S EXORCISM, featured in the debut issue of my newsletter-exclusive zine, is now available on the PRESS (A) page. Note that I said extract, not excerpt: this was something that didn’t appear in the zine itself and was cut not because I didn't like it or because I disagreed with its sentiments but because it didn't fit in with the eventual final whole (and the POV shift was a bit too jarring, even for me). That said, I still wanted to publish it somewhere so here we are – this being a case in point of the benefits of carving out your own space on the internet. It has been edited only to reflect its newly standalone status. You can find it about midway down the PRESS (A) page:

An excerpt from the extract:

Having made it to early middle age without killing myself (though I've held more than one knife to my wrist (the right one, I am, after all, left-handed) and, on more than one occasion over the last five years, weighed the benefits of injecting a full 300 units of insulin with breakfast instead of my usual two or three) I'd like to take a moment to impart one lesson to the youths in my sphere, few though you are (my wife's cousins kids (which makes them ??? to me), our niece), yet uniformly the children of divorce.
Let me be clear about one thing: 99.999% of the time, the divorce is the right move, far less damaging in the long-term (the short- can really suck too) to everyone involved (the end of my parents' marriage was the best thing for both of them; truly, they never should have been together and I never should have existed – I'm a temporal aberration, apparently). In even the best pairings, the people that were married are never the same people that split – or even that stay married: the marriages that endure, that last, are the ones that accept that people change, that people grow up and out, and that duly evolve in tandem with the participants. Marriages are not staid institutions and opportunities to take one another's presence for granted nor are they a contract of ownership: each is a unique, living, breathing thing that have their criteria for evolutionary survival apart from and yet indelibly linked to the needs of participants who have decided to take their journeys together.
To put it plainly, having been married myself now for the last eight years – and with the intention of being married for many, many more – I can safely tell you, youth of my sphere, that marriages are hard fucking work.

The whole thing lives midway down the page; you can subscribe and request your copy of the complete LAST CHRISTMAS here.