Eight Years Gone: Thoughts on Creativity, Ambition, and Prudence

by Dominic Raths

A Letter from the Editor:

Hi. Seven years ago, on September first of 2015, I printed, cut, stapled, and distributed the first issue of Maladjusted Limited. I was using a shitty ink jet printer that cut through ink at a ludicrous rate. I think it ate up an entire cartridge in the process of printing the forty single sided pages required for the very meagre twenty copies comprising our first issue. Since I was dead broke at the time that was a fuckton of money. Regardless, I drove around town dropping them off at local coffee shops, record stores, used book stores, and co-ops. And on September fifteenth I made the run again with the second issue, this time printing at Kinkos and using my FedEx package handler discount. I found a few copies of the first issue left over- people were terrified to pick it up. It was an ugly little thing that looked like it was assembled by a kindergartener; I cut and folded two pages of paper in an origami style booklet sixteen pages long that was a little smaller than a package of cigarettes. The first issue was especially rushed and scant on material. I remember I put in an advertisement for the upcoming Low album, that's how desperate I was for material. The quality of craftsmanship and the struggle for material didn't really get better with time. And for some reason I upped the amount to forty copies an issue, then eventually a hundred. There were several extras every time I made my rounds and I gave those to Patrick who ran Trashfuck Records out of Detroit. He put them into packages as bonus items. So if you made an order from him you probably ended up with several spare copies of Maladjusted. Stubbornness and masochism must be the reason that I made it a twice-a-month publication because there were always extras and I never had enough submissions. I ran the magazine for a whole year, only missing four publishing dates, amounting to twenty issues total. I immediately ceased production after the anniversary. I remember a few people got together at one point to try to keep it going with me in an honorary position of editor. They wanted to up the size. They wanted it in color. They wanted it professionally printed. I was disgusted and offended by the thought. This was my hideous child and they wanted to turn it into some sort of financially viable publication with legitimacy? Over my dead body.

That was a long time ago. It is currently October of 2023, so over eight years have passed since I started Maladjusted Limited. This month, personal confidant, friend, and contributor to the original run, Michael Kilcorse, expressed interest in reviving the project. Back then he had no car, no phone, and was on enough substances to make a pharmacist scratch their head. Now he has successfully penetrated the web development market and is living achingly comfortable in Akron with his partner. I know Mick well enough to realize any amount of comfortable living will stress him out so he has decided to pad his resume and resurrect the most stressful and thankless project I have ever undertaken; inviting me to revisit the halls of dead end emails, disintegrated relationships, and questionably personal submissions that is the history of this magazine. I would have spit daggers at the thought of it being an online publication back then. But now as I approach thirty I am a lot less attached and territorial over the project. I feel like I can be more lax about the sanctity of art and expression. I feel like the things that mattered so much when I was an angst ridden, over caffeinated, sad sack of a twenty two year old just don't matter as much now. I'm still pretentious, but I now realize that holding too tightly to control will suffocate you and those around you. Part of me wishes I had the energy to still be that way, but I'm perpetually exhausted now. I just don't have that level of rage in me anymore. That is an admission of defeat. I'm fucking boring now.

This whole affair has me reevaluating my past. Why do it at all? Why did all the details matter so much then? Why did it have to be a little pamphlet of other peoples poetry, art, reviews of underground music? Why make it free? I think there were layers of reasons around it all. I've always been a creative person and a stubborn person. I did not want to learn how to create, I just wanted to do so freely in an honest way. I wouldn't call myself an artist. I felt weird about making money off of art, which for me was an emotional expression that was too personal to put a price on. I still feel that way. I think I wanted to surround myself with people who felt the same and needed a public platform to express that feeling on. I wanted to find that tribe. I kind of did, but I also was absolutely not working on myself. Instead of confronting my demons I ran with them and for a while Maladjusted was the vehicle in which I drove around with them in drunken merriment. Turns out you can't do that forever; the fuel burns up and when you have nowhere to go you're stuck with all the bad decisions. So hopefully eventually you stop finding projects to distract you from your miserable, self perpetuating state and start picking up your life. Over eight years, and after a lot of other fuck ups, I did that. And here we are now, facing the old demon with fresh eyes.

What are we doing different now? Making it more legit. Stressing about it less, no more hard deadlines. Publishing it maybe seasonally? Hard to say. We're playing fast and loose right now. But we still want to be heard. And we know others do too. We aren't doing this to be edgy or clickbaity. We just want to exist, which is a very human need. Art and the written word are still sacred things to me and I still want to shout at the rooftops about the things I think are important, that make me feel in this callous and drab world. I want to tell some artists to keep going, and others to try harder, and the ones that are in it for the wrong reasons to fucking stop or get their head right. I want this to be a passion project for us, compensating people as necessary, never using unnecessary ads, barely breaking even. If we have to make it more legally sound, so be it. Let's just fly this freak flag as high as we can with what little we have to offer. We work our normie jobs to support our loved ones, put onions in the soup, and make art. If that sounds good to you, welcome aboard.

Dominic Raths

Editor