A long time ago now, during a time in my life that feels so radically different to the one I wake up into now, I sat down in a public library with a rucksack that contained half a watermelon, five apples, and an orange or two. I’d just gotten back from using the public bathroom. It was the kind of public bathroom located in a leaky basement of an old, poorly built, poorly lit building, somewhat dilapidated to the point where, upon returning to my seat in the library, I’d always trail behind me the smell of piss.

I want to make it explicitly clear here that it wasn’t me who smelt of piss, but the lingering smell of the public bathroom, no doubt, that seemed to travel back with me. At the same time, it might have also been the tissue paper stuck to my shoe. Just joking — there was no tissue paper stuck to my shoe, but I thought that would sound funny, so I wrote it.

Look — what’s important to this story is that I smelt like piss at the time… Well — that’s not really all that important, but the memory of smelling like a public toilet is the madeleine moment that recalls the memory of me sat in a library, watching William Gibson joined in conversation with the author Carol Anshaw. I watched this interview not in person, of course, but through a public library computer via YouTube.

It’s not smelling like a public toilet that upsets me when it comes to this valuable memory. I’ve resorted to writing “smelling like a public toilet” here instead of “smelling like piss” because the word piss has become a somewhat literary word, paradoxically speaking, which you must use sparingly — perhaps only once or twice before the word loses its emphatic power. It is not so much smelling like a public toilet that reminds me of this conversation with William Gibson as it is the more fateful moment upon returning to my seat in the library, where the person sat maybe two or three seats away moved computers — moved away.

This was heartbreaking for me. At the time, I wanted to approach them and say it’s not me — it’s the toilet in the basement. But over the years I’ve returned to this moment and wondered if it wasn’t so much smelling like piss that made the person move away, but rather the more likely scenario of me pulling out half a melon from my rucksack and eating it with what felt like a very small teaspoon.

In retrospect, I want to tell the person that I needed to eat the watermelon because it was surpassing its best-before date. I had cut the melon in half the day before — in my apartment kitchen — and was now eating the leftovers for my lunch and — just to clarify — it wasn’t me who smelt like piss, okay, it was the leaky bathroom in the basement of an old building.

Eating a melon is perhaps an unusual thing for anyone to do in a library, but it was especially unusual for a person like me, who was practically subsisting on Batchelors Cup a Soup Minestrone with Croutons. The words “practically subsisting” make this sound like I wasn’t happy about it, but even when you are not happy you can be grateful. Certainly, I was grateful to be in the position of having hot soup. I think we live in a world where people take hot food for granted, because hot food — especially in the most rudimentary and convenient forms — is an incredibly beautiful thing to me. Sometimes you have nothing else in life to look forward to, and sometimes something as simple as boiling water poured over instant noodles can save your life. Given the opportunities afforded by wealth and nepotism, I suspect I would have made an excellent food writer, and whilst there was, sure enough, a toilet that smelled gross down here, there was also a hot water machine and coffee machine and vending machines that, of course, I enjoyed looking at for very long periods of time.

No matter how you feel about one-time-use convenience, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or microplastics in our bodies, we live at the same time as the luscious blue font on a Cup Noodle Seafood. I suspect the future will be more interested in how we felt about Cup Noodle Seafood than how we felt about a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin. I wish talking about Friedrich Hölderlin’s Bread and Wine would come as naturally to me as talking about the aesthetic contributions of my local high street’s vape shop — Lord of the Vapes — but alas, I’m fucked up.

People laugh about this, but I suspect it was my meaningful relationship with the hot water machine, specifically dispensing hot water into Batchelors Cup a Soup Minestrone with Croutons, that launched my interest in everyday aesthetics, because every day I’d find myself held by little loops of pasta floating through steamy water in a singular moment where the soup powder became liquid. Even then I knew someone had designed those tiny loops of pasta, and I wondered if they knew how I felt about their design choice. I wanted them to know I appreciated how they appeared to me in the leaky basement of an old building where I probably had no business drinking the water — even if it was boiling hot. I wanted the person who designed those pasta loops to feel seen. I wanted them to die knowing that someone looked down into a cup of soup in the same way people looked up at the Sistine Chapel. Perhaps I have overstayed my welcome with this point. Perhaps I have started to sound pretentious about it.

As I return to this memory on occasion, it occurs to me now that perhaps the person two chairs down from me in the library moved computers because her computer wasn’t working. Nevertheless, in my paranoid mind at the time it was 100% as a result of my giant watermelon.

What’s important to this story is William Gibson joined in conversation with the author Carol Anshaw. I don’t want to go back and watch the approx. 56-minute interview with William Gibson, but as the video sits behind the document I’m typing into right now, it seems my mind is calling me towards watching it a second time round — ten years later — not because I really need to watch this again, but because I want to be factually correct about everything I might write about William Gibson joined in conversation with the author Carol Anshaw. I realise now that I have written more about the experience of smelling like a public toilet than I have about “Technology, Science Fiction & the Apocalypse”.

There is also the issue of my mind currently geared towards procrastination, which is an unusual feeling for me, no doubt coming as a result of falling away from “the discipline of writing” during the liminal period between Christmas and New Year. In trying not to think too much about writing or ideas, I have made the mistake of opening my X account and coming to read Reshma Eyafé’s post that read: “When I begin reading anything Alex Mazey writes, I enter into a culture I didn’t know exists. Upon completing anything Alex Mazey writes, I ask myself, ‘Does this culture even exist beyond Alex Mazey?’ In other words, Alex Mazey is a whole culture!”

The opening of William Gibson’s interview begins with Carol Anshaw reading something William Gibson once wrote: “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” In light of this, I wonder if the culture I write about is not so much unique to me as it is not very evenly distributed. I’ve returned to this interview as of late because in a blurb for Rival Streamer, Bram E. Gieben wrote: “Alex Mazey isn’t just a poet or a theorist, he’s a Baudrillardian chronicler of our hyperreal life and times — a William Gibson of poetry and ideas…”

All of this puts me in mind of a time in my life when I had come to watch William Gibson’s interview after having my early writing compared to Gibson’s Bridge trilogy. The things that I was writing about at the time were also written in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, a book that — like many young writers — impressed me greatly. I mention this now because the page of Clay Easton recounting his sisters pretending to drown in a swimming pool appeared below Reshma Eyafé’s X post, with some comments complimenting the tightness of Ellis’ prose, whilst others trashed it as pointless and insignificant literature. I didn’t really care about any of this commentary, but it recalled the desperation I used to feel in a library where most days I’d sit down with my cup of soup — smelling like piss — trying to write bad prose about a life I had that didn’t really exist.

Again, I can’t clarify this without watching William Gibson joined in conversation with the author Carol Anshaw, but I’m 95% sure it’s here where William Gibson talks about someone accusing him of having a “rich internal life”, and him coming to terms with the truth of that assessment. I’d say that having a “rich internal life” is something I share with William Gibson. And so when Bram E. Gieben wrote (in reference to Rival Streamer) about me being “a William Gibson of poetry and ideas…”, I felt seen in the same way I’d always wanted the designer of Batchelors Cup a Soup Minestrone with Croutons to be seen.

Certainly, perhaps six to twelve months prior to writing Rival Streamer, I understand that I might have been suffering from what I now consider to be a kind of maladaptive daydreaming. It really wasn’t that deep — but I now wonder if my experience with this has something to do with the emerging problem of “AI psychosis”. I’ll add that this period of daydreaming occurred over approximately six months in 2024, until Jesus Christ visited the daydream world I was entering to tell me that it was becoming unhealthy for me. I don’t know if this was the real Jesus Christ — or a part of the daydreaming world I was conjuring at the time — but it was a presence of Christ significant enough to dissuade me from ever entering that daydream world again.

Perhaps I will write more about this experience one day. Until then, I’ll say that everything that appears in Rival Streamer came after this experience in 2024, with writing accompanied by profound moments of synchronicity that I’ve already written about elsewhere. It would be a lie to say that this is all unconnected, but let’s just say it creeped me out no end to imagine the sociological work I thought was approaching some kind of “diagnosis of a culture” was actually approaching a diagnosis of a culture that didn’t exist beyond me. At the same time, perhaps I could say that in writing about a culture that is unique to me, I’m also writing about a maladaptive, atomised culture that is ubiquitous to many. Perhaps this is what I mean when I talk anthropologically about the existence of the “bedroomed lifeworld”, or those spooky “bedroom poems” that talk tentatively about “the greatest feeling I ever / felt in life happened in a / dream I had.” Either this “whole culture” I write about is unique to me — or I am more than likely embedded in a culture that is not yet evenly distributed.

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“A glitchy aesthetic experience, a full descent to the surreal edges of our meta memetic present. Mazey is a collector of uncanniness, a lyricist of today’s algorithmic hyperreality” — Alessia Vadacca

“A blistering blast of high-concept cyberpunk verse paired with chopped and screwed visuals, filtered through hauntological artificial intelligence systems. RIVAL STREAMER is artfully littered with allusions to immersive RPGs, lonely PlayStation sessions, liminal dreamscapes, glitching Twitch streams, science fiction tropes from Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and the disaffected raps of $uicideboy$, Lil Peep and Drain Gang. Alex Mazey isn’t just a poet or a theorist, he’s a Baudrillardian chronicler of our hyperreal life and times - a William Gibson of poetry and ideas, conjuring spectral visions of the dystopian present.” — Bram E. Gieben

“glitchpunk imminence / temporal ruptures / I am interested in talking to the future / imposed warp affronting AOE tectonics / lemurian activism / imminence after the future is waste / baudrillard after the orgy / (title in alphanumeric quabbalah emerges creation from entropy before anthropomorphisation re: numogram / also 88 pages so...) / consider if #cuteacc “emancipate image” production perpetuate it self not u / what it is / will be to “truly live” digitally / that is how the city may come to be defined / AI alarmism focusses on conscious machines but mazey’s text accounts for unconscious humans / that we might eventually just switch off to merge / dear peter thiel / alex is ur rival streamer” — Richard Capener