If you’ve been picking up my stories week after week, you’ve probably caught the subtle Easter eggs scattered throughout the Manic Expression collection. Most have been quiet nods—nothing that pulls you out of the moment. Today, though, the previous six stories all collide.
Keeping Out the Real World: A Manic Expression Story is a short, comedic piece starring younger versions of Will (Bloodshot), Matt (Faded), Frank (Debt), and Peter (Pine Avenue). Set in 1999 when the four friends are just nineteen, it follows one wild road trip that sends each of them down the paths we’ve come to know.
What Keeping Out the Real World is about: Matt, Will, Peter, and Frank are high-school friends struggling to find their footing as adults. They head to Santa Barbara for a concert, then hole up in a cheap hotel room with plenty of weed and booze to keep the real world at bay. But when shocking news hits, each of them is forced to confront the same big question: What is life about—and what am I going to do with mine?
The long, strange road to this release: Keeping Out the Real World began life as a short film I shot in college around 2000. My friends and I rented a hotel room, used real alcohol and weed, and made a ten-minute movie on the cheap. The result… Well, it wasn’t great.
By 2006, while assembling the stories for Manic Expression: A Collection, I saw an opportunity to resurrect that failed student film. I replaced the four nameless stoners with younger versions of my recurring characters, used a pivotal scene from Lapdog Destiny as the crux of this story, and explored how these four became the men readers meet in their later stories.
As is probably obvious, these four characters are the ones I relate to most. They’re all pieces of who I was in my twenties—young men without parental support, trying to figure out how to survive. The romantic (Peter). The artist (Matt). The fighter (Frank). The burnout (Will). Putting these four versions of myself in a smoky hotel room, half-drunk and very high, trying to figure out the meaning of life, felt like the perfect way to tie their stories together.
Nearly three decades have passed since we shot that terrible student film. I hope Keeping Out the Real World has evolved into something deeper while still capturing that wild, exuberant spirit of youth right before adulthood swallows you whole.
Grab your copy today!
I’d love to hear your thoughts—what was a moment from your youth that changed everything?
Look for Manic Expression: A Collection – Reflections (the complete set of all seven stories from Phase One) on sale this Friday!
James Daniel Walsh
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