Creative Writing: The Format's Life

When everyone’s asleep that night, Nate camps on the rug in the bathroom, six pills of his father’s pain medication and two thirds a bottle of vodka in his stomach. The vodka tastes like battery acid and leaves a burn in his throat and the pills make him nauseous and give him the sensation of being stabbed in the abdomen and this is the first time Nate truly feels like he wants to die. Like he needs to die, to escape this, to escape everything.

His mother finds him the next morning curled around the toilet, throwing up bile and blood since there’s nothing in his stomach and he remembers sirens and his father’s terrified voice and tubes and charcoal and eventual silence.

He doesn’t answer the doctors questions of what happened, they know, everybody knows, and when he gets home, all the alcohol is gone and his dad’s pills are hidden away.
An actual, legitimate record deal, to make a real album. Nate expected that to bring him joy – it didn’t, or at least not a lot of it.

In 2003, Nate spends most of his time in a recording studio as he and Sam set out to release The Format’s first full length record. Nate expects this to bring him joy – it doesn’t, or at least not a lot of it.

This is what he wanted, ever since he hit that first terrible note, but it just doesn’t do anything.

Whenever Nate isn’t in the studio, he’s sprawled out on the couch in his pathetic, joyless apartment with a bottle of cheap red wine, staring daggers at the television, watching but never absorbing what he’s watching. Chances are, he’d already seen that episode of Friends.

Nate feels sorry for himself, but then again that’s not much of a development. He sees these people on the screen, this close knit group of friends and even though they’re fictional, he feels sorry for himself because he has