Blast | November 20, 2025

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

Crockett Doob’s “SOCIAL MEDIA PROXY” and “LUKEWARM MESS” are both critical and humorous in their exploration of counterfeit social media lives, polyamorous relationships, monogamous relationships, and lukewarm tater tots.

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SOCIAL MEDIA PROXY

I am aware of social media. I’ll see “doomscrolling” on the bus, or kids dancing towards an empty bench, or a bearded jogger speaking so authoritatively into his phone that I hope he’s speaking to the masses and not just one person like that.

I am aware of Zuckerberg. I saw on PBS News Hour (back when it was one word, RIP Newshour) his deer-in-headlights routine for the Senate Committee hearing, apologizing for bullying, eating disorders, et al.

But I’m still not on social media.

Mostly because when I started getting the “Are you on Facebook?” question, I was easily in the worst depression of my life—though there was nothing easy about it; although, I was living with my parents rent-free, eating their cheese, and watching cartoons. Okay, so that does sound pretty easy, but it wasn’t!

Depression is no joke. Although it can be funny. Like my ideas of what I’d post were laughable (see?):

Besides the cheese and cartoons, my hobbies include “trying to stop” drinking, screening calls, and plotting suicide.

I must’ve also had some intuition about this concept of “stalking.” Like how detrimental it would be to see pictures of acquaintances smiling, accomplishing things, going rock climbing—I imagined a lot of rock climbing—all to convey:

happy, have shit together

When I sobered up in 2009 and semi got my shit together—not really, and I wasn’t that happy either—but anyway, re: Facebook, my friends told me, “You dodged a bullet.”

Okay. We’re going to jump all the way to 2024, before DT’s second inauguration and Zuckerberg was there with his new hairdo.

Through my literary pursuits, I stumbled upon a website that said this:

“Stop Hiding.” (Meaning join the online literary community.)

This haunted me. Was I hiding all over again? Yes. I mean I thought I was finally putting myself out into the world, but according to this website, I was still at my parents’ house, eating their cheese.

I brought this up in therapy. “I’m trying so hard to be a writer. Do you think I need to join social media?”

Being a good therapist, she said, “You already are a writer,” then didn’t answer me one way or the other.

But she’d brought up this proxy thing before, and this seemed to fit into that. Like having proxy emotions—shame about what people think rather than fear of abandonment—or proxy relationships—I’ll get to those—and with social media, I was doing things like reading about it in books.

To butter up agents (and this does work sometimes; you can steal it if you want), I’d read one of their authors’ books and compliment the shit out of it in my query letter. And a lot of these books were chock-full of social media!

So close enough?

No. That’s still proxy.

And then I realized my last big relationship ended thanks to social media, by proxy.

This was my summer of poly (2022). I was suicidal again. But no more cheese and cartoons this time; just writing two novels a day and having stressy sex with two women, respectively. Polyamory, though advertised as “all about the love,” had become exactly what I feared it would be: war.

My “teammate”—I couldn’t call her my “girlfriend” because her husband would get jealous, so we settled on “teammate” because when I had suicidal thoughts, I’d rat myself out to my team of close friends, and my poly-lover said, “I want to be on your team,” which was supportive but also connoted suicide every time she said it, but at least now we had a title—so my teammate was back on social media. She’d quit—inspired by me!—but now was back, for activism purposes.

But she hadn’t taken down old pictures of her and her husband, and her other lover, her girlfriend, was jealous. Now, the girlfriend—who was too jealous to meet me—had recently been groped by the husband when he was in an alcoholic blackout at his birthday party—which I was not invited to, though he and I had met, just the two of us, on a park bench, like in the M&M’s commercial. But a few weeks had passed since the birthday party scandal, because my teammate wanted to tell me about how, though the girlfriend was initially jealous of these Instagram pictures, saying she felt “outside the marriage”—

“Hmmm, I wonder why,” I said, which led to us fighting, meaning my teammate had two fights with two out of three of her lovers about this, but when we resolved our fight, she wanted to finish the story about when she and her girlfriend resolved theirs.

The happy ending was when the girlfriend said, “I want to be part of your family.”

My therapist was often talking about “a resounding yes.” This was my resounding no.

Two years later, my ex texted me. She overexplained why she’d googled my name, said she found herself in one of my stories but wasn’t pissed about it (?), then congratulated me for doing “rad stuff.”

I brought this up in therapy. This “dream text” from my ex. As usual, my therapist didn’t say what I should do. But right then and there, she googled me and burst out laughing.

“You look so happy!”

I’d never done it. But now that I did, I saw I’d become exactly what I feared when I first heard of Facebook:

happy, have shit together

Smiling pics, accomplishments. No mention of listlessness, of empty days, months, years. And although some of my stories reference depression and suicide, it’s surrounded by kinetic humor, some of my best writing.

“You know what this would be good for?” my therapist said. “Dating apps.”

***

LUKEWARM MESS

Three guys sitting around a table, talking about our love lives. We’d just left a group therapy about this and had been encouraged to bond after.

So here we were, bonding away, sitting in a cafeteria-like restaurant in Brooklyn, waiting for our food.

The new guy sat across from us. He was small, muscular, wearing a tank top to show off his arms. He told us about his ex, his heartbreak, how he was still in touch with her even though she was on another continent.

“I’m back on the apps,” he said. “But the apps suck.”

This was exactly what I feared when I started going to these groups: sitting in dark restaurants, listening to musclemen complain about the apps.

But who was I to judge? Just because I didn’t do the apps, I was no better. I was in my own pickle.

“To me, it’s about doing something different,” Alex said to my right. I liked Alex. He was more senior and seemed like he knew what he was talking about. He had a history of pursuing unavailable women, but now he was in a serious relationship. “Like if I always go fast, I try going slow. Or if I’ve always done the apps, I’ll try not doing the apps.”

“Or vice versa?” I said.

Alex hesitated. “Well, you’re not there yet.”

“So what’s your story?” the muscleman said to me.

I told him about the Christian. Alex already knew about her.

“Our values are not aligned,” I began.

“What does that mean?” said the muscleman.

“Like she said she’s against abortions in all fifty states. She also said that after Trump’s first assassination attempt that if his personality changed, he’d be born-again and so, if he got elected, we’d all be saved.”

Raised eyebrows.

“Yeah, I know. So that was my moment, like: crush over. But then . . . she started paying attention to me again.”

Alex snickered.

“How do you know this person?” the muscleman asked.

“Work,” I said. “Which is a pattern for me. And she’s younger, which is another pattern. And she used to be homeless and was living with her ex to stay out of the shelter system, which is . . . also a pattern for me. Though that one was a lot older!”

“Who?”

“My ex who was living with her ex and was on the verge of being homeless.” I sighed. “She had another guy pursuing her, too, besides me. That was my first love trapezoid.”

“You’ve had more than one?” asked the muscleman.

“Yeah. With the poly-married woman. She had a husband and a girlfriend and then, yeah, me.”

“But hey,” I said, looking at Alex, “at least this time, it’s not a love triangle?”

“Unless you count Jesus,” Alex said.

“Anyway,” I said, turning back to the muscleman, “now she’s in Maryland. She left where we worked to work at a halfway house for Christian women.”

“That’s cool,” the muscleman said.

“Yeah, it is. But on her last day on the job, she asked me for my number.”

“And you gave it to her.”

“Right. So, of course, now that she’s two states away, we’re finally texting.”

Our food arrived.

The muscleman had ordered a burger with fries. Alex had ordered the “Hot Mess”—a fried chicken sandwich with coleslaw—and I copied him. Mostly because I liked the name. Alex had ordered a side of tots, and I copied that, too, even though I don’t really like tots; they’re just fun to say.

“Damn! These tots are cold!” Alex said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or lukewarm. Like they’ve been sitting around all day.”

“Should we take them back?” Alex asked, but neither of us moved. He ate another. I did, too.

“So have you and this Christian girl hooked up?” the muscleman asked me.

“No, no. Like I said, she’s in Maryland.”

“So?”

He had a point.

“Well, we’re not there yet. I don’t even know if she likes me. Actually, she went out of her way to say she doesn’t like me. Or what she said was, she didn’t want me to think that she liked me.” I sighed again. “Then she compared me to a prophet from the Bible.”

“So what do you talk about?” the muscleman said.

“We don’t talk. Just text.”

“Okay, what do you text about?”

“I mean not a lot. Music, mainly. It’s pretty formal.”

“Dude, that sucks!”

I hated him briefly, then ate another tot.

I turned to Alex. “Hey, instead of the ‘Hot Mess,’ they should call this the ‘Lukewarm Mess.’”

Nobody laughed.

I didn’t think of it then, only a few days later, that what I had cooking with this Christian in Maryland was the real Lukewarm Mess.

***

Crockett Doob lives in Rockaway Beach, NY, and does not surf. He plays drums in a vacant courthouse, works with autistic teenagers, and edits a documentary about a cemetery. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, The Good Life Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Fiction Attic Press, and Does It Have Pockets. You can find more of Doob’s writing and contact information on his website: crockettdoob.com