This is our first guest appearance on Talking Squid. It’s by Ben Peek, who is getting people to hate him as a viral marketing tool, so Talking Squid suggested he start with himself. As you will see, Mr. Peek has issues. Oh yes, he has…

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It isn’t easy hating oneself. In fact, it is a lot of work.

You’ve always got to be ahead of everyone, that’s the problem. Take the time a girl told me that I was an egotistical maniac, only interested in myself and thus totally shallow and unintelligent. Well, like, yeah, tell me something I don’t know. The girl in question didn’t quite seem to understand how I could agree and not do anything about it, but once you accept that you’re a shallow, egotistical maniac out only for yourself, you don’t have to bother with making yourself a better person. You’ve accepted something bad. You’ve embraced it. You get all zen with it and you live with it, and late at night, sure, late in the lonely night, you say the bad things to yourself you wouldn’t say during the day. But even that is work, because you’ve got to be consistently up on your insults to yourself, constantly trying to find new ways to belittle yourself, so that when you see your name popping up over the place in a vague insult by people you don’t know, you can just roll your eyes and say, “Uncreative fucks.”

There’s so much to hate about myself that I don’t know where to begin, really. No, wait, I lie. I’ll begin with the autobiography I wrote and which was just published by Wheatland Press. This is why I’m here, on Talking Squid, after all. I’ll have you know that I wasn’t even thirty when I wrote it. What’s worse is that I’d never fucked anyone famous and I’d never done one week of jail time. I called it Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth and it is the autobiography of a man who has been nowhere, done nothing, and met no-one.

That’s the tagline, in fact. I have no shame.

How do you get such a book published, you’re probably asking? Well, the answer is simple: I’d bagged my fellow writers out so much that a publisher who had never heard of them, and who lived in a different country, asked me to write it for her. The bodies of people I didn’t really know were all around me and I was victorious. It was quite the thrill, actually. Her email to me began with, “I don’t know who these people who hate you are, but obviously that means you’re brilliant. I want to offer you some third world children as payment to write a book.” Eventually I bargained her up to a kilo of cocaine and my own jet which, let me tell you, is pretty good for a guy who has only published a few short stories. Luckily, I’d planned well. Destroy your peers! Raise yourself on their bones! You know how it goes! Sure, I’m a bit of a fuck, but everyone likes success. Also, it doesn’t hurt that I’m good looking.

Still, if I had to pick what I hate about myself most of all, it would be the insane level of quality expectation that I place on the fiction I read, and how I used that against people. I simply assume–without pause–that quality is important, and that I am totally within my right to judge fiction out there. Even more, I have never once doubted my taste. It is perfect. What about girlie fiction, I hear you ask? What about it, I say. If the word fuck isn’t used eighty two times, it’s not literature. Science fiction? Spare me. I can watch the movies. Books about famous people? Only if they fuck people I know. What’s more irritating about myself, however, is when the work doesn’t meet this criteria of mine and I use my vast and amazing intellect to tear down the work of those beneath me. In short: they have tainted me with their badness and must be punished.

Of course, the down side is, after being so harsh on myself, it means that I never hit the standard required. I mean take that time I came across those two talking about how much they hated my work and they would rather die than buy it–

–and, wait, no, wait. I shouldn’t lie. No, come on. That’s not right. I didn’t join in. Lets face it: they were idiots. I’m brilliant. Fuck anyone who says otherwise. In fact, I made badges and sent them to them, but they never wrote back with thanks.

Sometimes I hate myself so much I have to hurt myself but then I’m touching myself and I feel all good and then I’m loving myself.

Later, I feel used.

Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, written by Ben Peek, illustrated by Anna Brown, cover by Andrew Macrae. Buy it from Amazon, buy it from Wheatland Press.