LAST UPDATED:
JANUARY 17TH

CHRISTOPHER BUCHANAN

Dear Reader,

Our New Year, 2025, started on a Wednesday; the bipolar middle child of the week. The fact of whether this is a gift or a curse has yet to reveal itself… But, I’m almost certain it will — much sooner than later, too. I think so, partly, because a bit of the young year’s ugliness already seeped out from the overrunning pot of three hundred sixty-five more days and revealed to me some mystical fortune I didn’t truly understand at the time. I saw it all very clearly, an image of the future on the reflective metal face of the New Year’s ball, before it even dropped.

To illustrate my predictive prowess, I’ll drop a small spoiler for a story meant to come out a week or so from now: The day Los Angeles Fire blew its top and started to get really vicious, I wrote something in my digital notepad that might as well have been in a history book, as far as I’m concerned :

“Peering over the hills were white, cotton ball clouds that looked slightly worn, as if a woman of ivory brown complexion used them to wipe a night of makeup off her face. Probably just a mutated form of alien smog, if I had to guess… Could have been a fire for all I knew, but from where I stood I could tell it was far behind my apartment, so no harm done. ”

Yeah. Whatever. It’s not precisely how everything went down, but I was honest as scripture and pasted directly from my notes on that morning. That counts for something... And it also says something – a very loud something – about my clairvoyance. I’ll revisit this prediction in a later Bum Diary piece I plan to call Burning Down the House!, like the Talking Heads tune. All of that was to say, don’t doubt the prophecy I lay out here… Even if the crystal ball is smudged, the levels of danger are still unprecedented. So, listen closely, if only for the sake of The Children after you…

Something… or maybe the lack of something, I can’t remember, was going terribly sour in my abdominal region at around 11PM on New Years Eve after a few shots of very low-stakes alcohol; the gastric response was unfounded and therefore quite disturbing. These bowel maneuvers felt much like jealousy; incessant, uncontrollable and weasley. This internal torture became so terribly unbearable that every sound in the room — my friends’ varied tones of voice, the seizing television screen, the low hum of the air conditioner, the murderous scraping of loose poster corners on the walls and the collision of all the fabrics in the room — compelled me to excuse myself to the bathroom.

I spent the last half-hour of last year, and a few minutes of the infantile New Year, in my bathroom, protected on all sides from the outside ruckus. I was struck with some irredeemable blues and hadn’t an inkling of a clue why. The only person there for me to confide in was the full size shower curtain blasted with a suggestive photograph of Jungkook from BTS, but that young Korean patriot-soldier offered nothing but looks and a vehicle for my soliloquies on the kicks I had the last twelve months. Maybe like Korea, the U.S. needs another Uncle Sam-type PR stunt to solve our own problem with our military’s dwindling enlistment number. Let’s see… Who has that kind of starpower? Timothee Chalamet, as it stands presently. And I don’t wanna just see him on posters or shaking hands with Purple Hearts: We need Tim on Instagram Live through multiple tours, preferably front lines among the bulleted mess, shellshocked beyond madness. The people crave authenticity, Private Chalamet… He’ll really embody that Bob Dylan angst afterward.

My own madness had, clearly, taken a tight hold. My porcelain refuge, however, gave me some time to hash things out between me and myself… After some time, the firing had momentarily stopped and the conditions for a short truce had been arranged between my conscious and unconscious minds, letting the smoke clear just enough to reveal that this inner frenzy on New Years was spurred, in part, by how uniquely impressive the year before had been. Impressive in my mind, and upon my very soul.

It was quite difficult for me to remain in any state of unhappiness during last year, as I was occupied by a general contentment that maintained my mental homeostasis far longer than it ever has been maintained. Many of the days were born warm and died out cool, without major interruption from the more violent elements, and they were welcome surprises from Mother Earth when they did inevitably come, as they do. I sashayed from coast-to-coast to pedal out work for publications of varying notoriety and quality, wrote a few verses of my own and always ended my tenures of work with at least one brother-in-arms and a mean story to tell. Sacramento, San Francisco, New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., good ol’ Riverside and even Tokyo were left with a little piece of me. I was full of joyous ecstasies and had no mean gripes with anything or anyone, which led both logically and emotionally to the question: “What is there to complain about?” My answer, Reader, is the potential absence of this rose-colored feeling in the coming days, weeks, months and even years.

I mourn the fact that easy-living 2024 concluded so suddenly, but that’s not to say there hasn’t been something particularly depressing about the state of things outside of my individual experience. I suppose I’ve been a student of Emersonian philosophy as of late: My understanding of Emerson’s work is that spiritual wealth and education are to be extracted from our individual Experience: Life is to be lived, not analyzed or considered. It’s an individualist philosophy at its core, which is probably a symptom of its Post-Revolutionary American environment, but of course, in these twisted times, tending only to the individual while all the outside ruckus goes on is as Evil as causing the ruckus yourself.

Things have gotten quite ugly, and I mean beyond the day-to-day ugliness we already suffer. Our inevitable downward spiral into nothingness has transcended conjecture and entered the realm of sad fact, although some still wrestle with that change of status. There are as many in denial as there are in the know, and that is a dangerously imbalanced kind of balance – the Good Guys aren’t winning as much as just staving off and delaying the forces of Old and Evil for as long as they can. Unfortunately, Old and Evil has prevailed at precisely the wrong time… A time where the distinction between Good and Bad has become more muddy and intractable. Nobody knows who is who now, so everyone just tosses out their best guess with lottery-like odds of making a winning choice. Everyone is a mix between the two options that are always being pedaled, anyway, so no guess rings particularly better than the other.

The evil Meanies openly declared their gross mischief and were somehow allowed to keep marching this year. Instead of putting up any kind of fight, the general population tended to flex their fingers to point at one another as the real problem. I suppose this is more a historical truth than a modern development.

I’m reminded of an episode of the original black and gray Twilight Zone from sixty-some years ago called The Monsters are Due on Maple Streets that I saw during childhood. In the episode, a town falls dark, without power or explanation for the outage. Soon, suspicious neighbors start to sense foul-play from within and become more beastly toward one another in the pursuit of whatever monstrous Truth they’ve cornered themselves in. At the end of it all, it's revealed that an alien force actually orchestrated the tragedy from behind the curtain by predicting human nature and its tendency toward paranoia and fear, distracting the accusatory neighbors in order to actually take over, right under their stubborn noses. Hm.

The good thing about all these bad things is I think it may finally force some change… Somewhere down this long line, at least. I have a dumb kind of faith that we can all manage to get it together, at least for one brief moment of collective clarity. Despite all our paradoxes and destructive habits, I do believe humans tend to fight for Good once the Bad is sorted out and identified. I might just be a romantic, though, but who knows? It’s an unsolvable, goddamned puzzle with too many pieces to ever begin forming a clear picture in proper time. Until then, we’ll keep playing the wait-and-see game.

Division looks worse than ever, our leaders are some of the most poor-spirited living Scrooges in the world, we have a Death Machine smack dab in the Middle East and we even got ourselves the greediest Lord of all the Kingdoms for the second time, pointing at Canada and saying “mine!” like the whole Native country is a children’s toy… And that’s not even half of our issues…

The most twisted and comical part of it all is that the Arts, during times like these, tend to flourish. At least there’ll be some rare, burnished beauty to talk about in writing it all out. My job is saved. Hallelujah… Everything might just turn out alright for those who can bear to repeat themselves over and over.

I guess these grim considerations are what kept me in the bathroom sitting next to Jungkook for so long, all lonesome in my fluorescent bathroom. But still, I couldn’t help but crack a smile everytime I looked at him. Jungkook’s being there was a glaring signal of the time I forgot I was in; a strange, humorous time that I wouldn’t trade for another, at least as a paid writer. Here’s to living at all. Hip Hip, but no Hooray. That’s the best we’re going to get… Nonetheless, I also think it’s the best we can ask for. There’s still beautiful people and things around and stories to be told about them.

I'm rambling like an old man now… I’ve grown foot fungus in the process — this has escaped letter length. Let me wrap it up all beautifully. I have a whole year to talk about this mess, anyway.

My final geriatric point will be that Bum Diary has been fun to do… It’s a nice outlet for the kind of writing I prefer to do rather than have to do. I think some people really like the damned thing, and not that fake kind of liking that people do just because you’re friends or they like you or you have something for them, but a nice, genuine kind of like. I’m happy some people have resonated with or wanted to write for it — infinitely thankful. It’s small-time stuff, but that’s the only time it’s really fun, so-be-it. At least we can write our sorrows out here, and maybe excavate those rare pockets of beauty while we still have some around to dig up.

There will be more beautiful things to see no matter what. But, then again, what do I know? I’m only a strange, off-kilter mystic without any crystal ball.

With Love,
Christopher Buchanan, Editor-in-Chief

the bum diary

about

stories

letters

instagram