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Actual Fucking by Parker Greene Issue #23

By Rjyan Kidwell (a.k.a. Cex)

By Amber Drea
Published: March 1st, 2005 | 3:49pm

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#1, summer 2004

56 pages

rjyan.com

While awaiting the release of Cex’s upcoming full-length, Invisible Sidis (named after child prodigy William James Sidis and Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities), his fans can enjoy Actual Fucking, the zine thatserves as the basis for the album.

An instructional travel guide by fictional author Parker Greene (complete with fake author photo and bio), the zine is narrated in second person, telling you (the reader) what to do, think, and say, while it simultaneously reads like a diary of Parker’s experience, hand-written in all caps. She’s the number-one groupie of an unnamed band and follows them on their tour across the country.

Each story is about a characteristic unique to a specific city. The people of Covington, Kentucky, have strange eating habits. The waiting room at the free clinic in Baltimore, Maryland, seems like a “creepy lottery.” And Denton, Texas, is a place where “ghosts can fuck people.” This issue — which has the subtitle “Describe hunger and its causes” — is split into two parts: “I. describe” and “II. And its causes.” The first section is a detailed one-page description of what real physical hunger feels like, but of course, represents emotional hunger as well: “It becomes less like pain and more like a simple acknowledgement of a true fact: There is nothing inside you.” The rest of the stories are contained in section two and address everything from curiosity about suicide to meeting a “real [music] critic” (“You notice his thin, grey lips and then the thin, grey everything else”) in Toronto, Ontario.

Kidwell writes with humor and cynicism, but isn’t afraid to take notice of the hopeful beauty in the world. The last story compares the act of missing someone you love to holding your breath, ending the zine with a sense of aching happiness.