September 2026

Why I Want To Fuck MrBeast

Hello! This issue marks the one-year anniversary of Psychic Focus Newsletter. My focus did not feel very psychic this month, but I'll walk you through my process anyway.

Angel Boys Knife Play, marker, pen, and colored pencil on paper, edited digitally, Sept 2026

A couple weeks ago, as a reward for going some pitiful span of days without smoking weed, I took a bus to Cathedral Park so I could smoke weed and swim in the slimey, shimmering frack water of the Willamette. I brought my copy of J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition to reread for the first time in a few years. The haunting phrase "Why I Want To Fuck MrBeast" had been involuntarily ringing around my head. I was relieved to find that this was not an original thought (though, apparently, I would not be alone), but a mutation of Ballard's short story "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan". It is written in the format of a surreal scientific report analyzing a series of psychological studies on Reagan's homoerotic sex appeal.

Drawings of cars in the time it took them to drive by, 11x15", marker on paper, Sept 2026

While I was reading, I heard an absolutely horrible noise. I looked up to see a man doing full 360° back flips with a jet ski. He kept doing them over and over in the same place, like he was glitching and couldn't stop. After about 20 minutes of this spectacle I'd had enough. I imagine he is still there, Ezekiel's wheel forever turning.

Guy doing flips on a jet ski under St. Johns Bridge, 5.5x8.5", pen and colored pencil on paper, Sept 2026

I packed up my stuff and walked to Burgerville. As I enjoyed my burger, I thought about my relationship to MrBeast. I'd managed to live in blissful, Beastless ignorance until my first Beast exposure at the very end of 2024, when I was forced by my own politeness to watch the first two episodes of BeastGames while visiting my family in Texas.

I decided I should watch three of his youtube videos to gain a better understanding of his complexity. The demented claims of his clickbait titles were incredibly overwhelming to me and I struggled to choose. I ended up watching one where he fills his friend's house with slime and then buys him a new one, one where he saves 1000 animals from dying, and one where he builds a 10 million dollar city to end child labor then attempts to shame his viewers into buying Feastables. I don't feel like I've gained a better understanding of MrBeast and is inner life is now even more unfathomable to me.

Table at my stupid job 2, 5.5x8.5", colored pencil on paper, Sept 2026

7th and Thompson, on three different days in different weather, 5.5x8.5", marker and colored pencil on paper, Sept 2026

This brought me back to an idea I had a few months ago. I'd found this AI-generated guide to drawing car crashes, which I am almost definitely the first human to actually read. I remember being so confused by its existence that I looked at the source code to perhaps unveil some larger conspiracy. Unfortunately, the notes I took regarding my discoveries were sparse and cryptic:

• Storm-0501 is a ransomware hacking group that targeted Microsoft Azure's cloud data

• I don't have a good enough understanding of ____ to know whether this is sinister or completely irrelevant

• ____, but this was just giving me advertisments for thermal spas

I type "____" when I'm moving too fast to bother stopping to figure out how I want to phrase something, with the assumption that I'll be able to go back and fill it in later. In this case, I truly have no idea what I was talking about. So disregarding all of that, Car Crash Drawing Realistic is a tutorial that mostly just taunts the reader by asking over and over if they are ready to draw a realistic car crash scene without ever revealing how. None of the illustrations offer any step-by-step instructions. The second illustration is identified as a Conceptual Stick Drawing of two cars giving each other Frontal Head.

Alice and Elise's living room, 5.5x8.5", marker and colored pencil on paper, Sept 2026

I borrowed the guide's format to write a terrible clickbait article involving MrBeast with the title "They Are Training Cockroaches To Administer Injections", news that someone's roommate who I'd never met before walked in and announced while we were eating dinner recently.

Continue reading here.

The story was originally gonna be much longer, but I put off writing it until today. At this point I feel like one of the orphans working on the Sustainable Content Farm. But I think the rushedness actually kept me from being too thoughtful or self-indulgent in the text, which helps it feel more like authentic slop at a glance.

Sustainable Content Orphan Cry Farm Data Mine Content ..., 1500x1200px, digital collage of DuckDuckGo image search results, most of which appear to be AI-generated, Sept 2026

Further Research

• Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara (book, 2025)
• Mark Fisher's analysis of Ballard (blog post, 2004)

Playlist of the Month

1. "Miss In Love With Her Own Fate" - Scout Niblett
2. "Magic Carpet Ride" - Pizzicato Five
3. "dupontpavilion + $wagzilla - walked in clean (rich loser + kimbra)" - tyg [link]
4. "RAIN3OW STAR (LOVE IS ALL)" - Bladee
5. "Hole In The Earth" - Milord [link]
6. "hatsune miku - banshee strikes [nightcore]" - stillkhary [link]
7. "The Cyclone" - Sacred Holes [link]
8. "Love" - the sound chalk makes [link]
9. "Utopia" - Goldfrapp
10. "Sunshine" - Asake
11. "Let Me See The Colts" - Smog
12. "cleo victoire (for joey)" - nouns [link]

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