Hierarchy Of Nonsense

Pointless Stories during a Pointless Time

Why Pointless Stories?

Because we live in a pointless time!

On a more serious note, why did I choose to start this blog? Simple! I have never been good at verbal communication. The only way I know how to express my feelings is through writing.

Through the stories on this blog, I want to achieve the following goals:

Get better at exploring themes like existentialism and absurdism in my writing.
Write morally grey characters (it is fun to have assholes for protagonists!)
Try out different genres.

All the artwork (except the one above on the title card and the one on the Poetry section) I am using is by Rebecca Hu, who worked on these background designs for Scavengers Reign. Her portfolio is here.

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SHORT STORIES

Pixelated Kisses

PART 1: SUNSETS The orange hue of the setting Sun cascaded through the slits of thin, wispy clouds and drooped onto the verdant hills behind them, glimmering on the red-clad, rusty bridge. June sees the woman first in this Memory. Her hair was a series of gold deadlocks tied neatly into a bun, poised like a ball of yarn on top of her head, with two free strands gently swaying down her face. Her hands covered her wide smile; the blue on her nails complemented the green in h

Dex

Nov 4, 202517 min read

Shoes That Break Hearts

It was a moonless night, which was suitable for the purposes of Carrot Vines. Not that Vines was up to some kind of mischief. In fact, Vines was the sort of un-mischievous, uneventful man who tended to perish first in stories dealing with natural disasters. If the novel were to deal with avalanches on snow mountains, Vines would be the character sipping on a hot cup of cocoa, busy correcting alphabetical mistakes on a vague receipt, because it would be too much trouble to ru

Dex

Jul 4, 20258 min read

The Grave Digger

It had started small and simple – just a couple of knocks, as soft as the whistle of sand seeping down an hourglass. It had started small – in the beginning, Edgar ignored the knocks, blaming it on air creaking in from a shallow crack in the attic. And simple – but the knock got louder and louder until entire oceans were crashing against the shore around him, scratching his frail skin, pounding his withering consciousness. It had started small and simple – yet here was poor E

Dex

Dec 16, 20247 min read

The Banana Slug's Cosmic Joke

After I have killed myself, I would like to be cremated and then have my ashes flushed down the toilet. It is a long story, and it began around fourteen billion years ago when the Universe decided to go pop in the aptly named Big Bang. For a long time after that, the Universe remained dark, and if I had my way, I would have made sure that it stayed dark. Unfortunately, the Universe slammed into puberty at the age of a hundred million years and began spurting out stars. Eventu

Dex

Jun 23, 202411 min read

Words for the Dead

“Chai ya paani?” the clerk asked me, drumming his scrawny fingers along the rough, unpolished edges of the metal table separating us. He ran his right hand along the faded red stripes of his shirt and slowly slipped them inside to rub his chest voraciously. His other hand, meanwhile, amused itself by rummaging through the teeth he flashed at me in his broadened grin. Seeing the quizzical look drawn over my face, he quickly repeated himself. “Tea or water?” he asked. “Coffee

Dex

Apr 1, 20248 min read

The Perfect Story

I must write a good story. No. I must write the perfect story. My words have to – they will – mean something, and I will do anything to make sure that my voice matters. Even if – “I find the lack of consequences appalling,” a malevolent whisper stings me. My fingers twitch bitterly against the cold bottle of whiskey tottering in the grasp of my right hand. My eyes rummage through the crowd of critics swarming in my living room. If not for my agent Gabbie’s incessant demands

Dex

Feb 1, 202413 min read

2 3

Pixelated

I AM WRITING ANOTHER BOOK!
(P.S. The link to my first one is down below)

This time, it's an extension of my short story 'Pixelated Kisses'. I first had the idea for the short story while watching 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', and then being slammed by an overwhelming sense of dread and anxiety at the possibility of forgetting the person I was dating at the time. It dawned on me that most of my relationships have put me in this uncomfortable bubble of thinking, where I obsess about the worst possible thing that could happen. Now, I had two choices: I could do the healthy thing and go to a therapist, or I could write about it. Obviously, I did the latter.

As soon as I finished the short story, I knew I would eventually write a longer version. For three months after I wrote 'Pixelated Kisses', I kept pushing the actual task of beginning to write it. When the person for whom I wrote the short story broke up with me, I wrote down how I felt in a journal for an entire month. In one of my entries, I'd scribbled the question 'Will music remind you of me?'. For me, the whole point of writing this book is to probably expand on that question. I mapped the storyboard and polished some of the ideas between January and April. Finally, after listening to Noah Kahan's recent album for a copious amount, I started writing the book towards the end of April.

This book is not complete yet, but I'm planning to upload a chapter a week below. I'm doing this to remain consistent with my writing habits and to commit to finally self-publishing the chapters once I finish. The storyboard right now has 28 chapters. I'm currently writing the 7th chapter.

Chapter 5 (Empty Hearts)

While according to several city guidelines, June’s neighborhood does legally classify as a ‘residential zone’, anyone daring to venture into its vicinity would agree that this neighborhood is technically a flat, humid swamp where the plastered edges of crudely designed buildings stick out like sore spots. It seems to June that a few draggled architects over the last few years had flanked a cauldron bowl of inch tapes and compasses, chanted vivaciously around it in their fancy

Pixelated

Dex

2 days ago6 min read

Chapter 4 (Shame)

June feels warm, her ears red and incandescent, her palms on the verge of blistering with an impatient innate desire to touch and be touched, to trace the vivid, blue veins popping under the pale contrast of his right chin, to have her fingers pursue the rough edges of his palm, to know why they are roughened, to know every little secret he has to offer and to whisper her own back to him. She wants his head to rest against hers, while she runs her fingers through his brown ha

Pixelated

Dex

Jul 117 min read

Chapter 3 (Broken Wristwatches)

Leaning against a glowing billboard at the subway station after work on a Wednesday evening, June pulls out her notebook and scratches the tip of her pen against the rustic-brown pages of her leather journal. She writes about the sandwich she ate at her work today – Mediterranean, cheese-less, slightly sour on the tongue, and the wrong amount of dry. She writes about how she was up before dawn, before the Sun embossed its thin slits into a wavering pattern on her curtains, le

Pixelated

Dex

Jul 58 min read

A Hierarchy Of Nonsense

I FINALLY WROTE THE BOOK! It's a completely different story that just happens to share the same title as this blog.

Here's the excerpt:

*************************************************************

To the cockroaches, the lizards, and the rats I saw in my bathroom; the Uber driver who gave me an existential crisis for asking me about my future plans; the unfortunate AC transit passengers who saw me pretending to be my characters; the nail cutter that broke when I tried to cut my toenail – somehow, you are all part of this novel.

*************************************************************

This story is no fairytale, although it does have fairies and creatures with tails.

This story is not about a strong warrior unless one counts our protagonist being at war with the morphological features of what makes a human.

This story ends on a cliff with lots of different hangers.

Most stories make sense. This one hardly does.

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POETRY

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All My Stories

All Posts

Dex

Aug 27, 202313 min read

The Loveless Love

George Kampton Henry was raised in a rainforest by penguins. Before the reader rages at the idea that penguins cannot actually exist in rainforests redolent of beetles, baboons, and bears, the reader is encouraged to consider that it is equally unlikely for George Kampton Henry to exist in a rainforest. The penguins, with their fragile, waddling structures, already remain a blotch on the concept of evolution because it is obvious that they are utterly incapable of surviving i

Dex

Jul 28, 202313 min read

The Bus and The Books

There is a deep ache in my heart, for it sings verses of a poem I cannot understand. I wish I could explain this rhythm to you. It’s like the fog that shelters a dangerous bloodhound ready to tear its victim to shreds. When I close my eyes in the darkness of the night, I hear this deep ache screech out my name. And it hurts, but I don’t know how to live without this melody of tragic verses. What if I am an incomplete poem? What happens once the poem ends? Who am I if not mise

Dex

Jun 24, 20235 min read

Martian Invaders and their Pet Dinosaur

Lief woke up with a startle at 3:00 am and found his body awkwardly stretched out on an apologetic mattress. As Lief’s body coiled itself together and the motes of sleep crust parted way for his red eyes, he noticed that his ceiling was having a stroke. It was reverberating mightily to the beats of an unknown melody. While the punk ceiling seemed to be having the time of its life, the same could not be said for the poor spider writhing in a tiny junction between the ceiling a

Dex

Jun 8, 20237 min read

Lonely In Every Universe

Kilgore was commanding an army of shampoo bottles to wage war against the brethren of treacherous soaps frothing in their dishes when it struck him that he was truly lonely. In fact, two days later, after proclaiming the battle with the soap, Kilgore would find himself mocked by three radio hosts wearing black T-shirts pockmarked by curry stains and adorned by the image of an angry man fingering a donkey. This would happen after Kilgore told them about how amidst his bottle w

Dex

Apr 27, 20239 min read

Men and Flies

Maby Gaby was not a happy man. He was a perpetually disturbed and a uniquely depressed patient of a burdensome life that had recently decreed a grave condition upon him, the symptoms of which had rendered him both – mindless and jobless. The day still haunted him. It was a Friday evening when the company representatives had summoned him like a djinni from the wishing lamp that was Maby’s diminutive cubicle. As Maby bustled into the room, a broken lamp hanging on a noose, thre