The writer crouches in a dumpster in a nondescript alley in Brooklyn, hunkering beneath a hot and sticky and seeping mound of used condoms, eggshells, grapefruit rinds, syringes, coffee filters full of artisan grounds, empty antidepressant bottles, and chicken bones stripped bare of all but their stringiest ligaments as if the bones still harbor hopes of movement.

The writer pokes his timid little writer head out of the dumpster, lifting the lid, to watch the circle jerk unfold in the empty lot. Naked Iowa Workshop MFAs are tugging off and fingering, as the case may be, as the unit requires, Dimes Square trust funders who are tugging and fingering New Yorker interns who are tugging and fingering BookTok sensations who are tugging and fingering Alt-lit impresarios who are tugging and fingering tenure-track creative writing professors who are tugging and fingering emaciated literary critics in a sloppy ritual of soggy muffin. It’s a lemon poppy seed tonight, a muffin the size of a human head.

Behind the circle, its honored guests in fact, stand George Saunders in a Canadian tuxedo and a lobster bib and Ottessa Moshfegh in AOC’s Met Gala dress, its blood-red letters still begging for someone to tax the rich. The jerking intensifies. A flurry of hands and fingers, pulling and rubbing, stroking and inserting—a masturbatory royal rumble. The circle spins round the muffin in a fleshy, throbbing shamble, spins and spins.

An edgelord editor is the first to blow, a string of come cast over the muffin like a mucus lasso. George begins to drool with empathy. A literary agent whose forebears were agents to the literary stars who’ve lit up the sky of American letters for the last eight decades gushes over the muffin and collapses in a fit, glad to sleep until the next Sally Rooney rises from the seas of slush like a movie deal incarnate. Ottessa’s stomach growls like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Countless loads trace slimy arcs. The cries of orgasmic initiates fill the Brooklyn night: Lived experience! #ownstories! Craft! Art for Art’s Sake! Bread Loaf! Tenure! Authenticity! Flash! #safelit! Vulnerability! Show, Don’t Tell! Romantasy! YA! Autofiction! Lyricism! A! W! P!

The circle of tastemakers collapses around the sopping muffin, a demented game of duck, duck, goose. The writer lifts the dumpster lid higher to fully see the finale. This is more instructive than an internship at the Paris Review.   

George and Ottessa approach the center of the circle. Each takes a handful of the soggy muffin and holds it over their open mouths, catching its drips like someone wringing a sweaty bandana to extract all its moisture lest they die of thirst in this vast desert. They swallow their respective muffin halves, lick their glossy lips, shake hands, and then depart the lot arm-in-arm to their scheduled reading. Their departure is a signal to the other initiates who now scramble towards the dregs of soggy muffin and devour what they find, licking and nibbling every stray crumb. Nom, nom, nom. They too then rise in unison, a hive, a colony, and leave the lot in a zombie-like shuffle.

The writer in his dumpster waits until he hears nothing but the beat of his own heart, his own stupid hopes, pounding within him. He is hungry, suddenly, starving, compelled towards the site of the ritual in a ravenous trance. His canines are sharp as the best query letter, his tastebuds more sensitive than the best blurb. He walks towards where the muffin once was and out of the corner of his eye sees other would-be writers emerge from other dumpsters, aspiring poets and novelists and critics slithering out of cracks in the walls and pavement, vaulting over warehouse roofs, emerging like Swamp Thing out of the Gowanus Canal, compelled by the same hunger, dashing in desperation towards the lot and the writer wants to shout “no, there’s nothing left, don’t bother, they ate it all, you idiots,” but he has no time to spare as he’s sprinting now, his body running despite what his brain knows—for maybe, perhaps, a crumb remains? A drop? A single, sticky grain?

Jon Doughboy is a writer which means he’s Important and very Serious and his Suffering means more than yours and without him there would be no Discourse and no one would have any Empathy and there’d be no chance at World Peace. See his latest TED Talk @doughboywrites