December 28th, 2020 - Acting Class

Dear TNY,

Whoa.  I don’t even know what “Acting Class” is.

It feels grown up.  It tells a story. Ish. Is it literature?  I don’t know.  I don’t have any expertise here.  Or anywhere, really.  Maybe in self-loathing? 

Anywho, that being what it is, I thought it was good.  My interest was far higher in this than most of your other work.  It is an excerpt, though (sorry, I usually don’t look at shit like that but I happened to see it this time; you know my staunch policy that the work you publish should stand alone and it bothers me when you publish pieces of something just because the author has a larger work coming out; I don’t care about the market or the industry or making money or blah blah blah; tell one exceptional standalone story a week, guys).  And I think the narrative bookends here make no sense because this is an excerpt.  We have strangers in a car going somewhere for no real reason we can determine and then they leave the class at 3am, and we get nothing about that either.  So, there’s no real arc in the bigger picture.  No real conflict inherent in the bookend narrative (minus the tension created at the start by not knowing where they are going or what they will be doing). 

But the good in this comes from the mini stories happening in everyone’s mind.  Two of them stood out to me as very interesting.  The first is obviously the dog story.  Jesus did that come out of nowhere.  The best part about the strangeness of that story is how it characterizes the guy who thought of it.  And the other story that was really good was the giant green kid.  The confidence to have so many whys and none of them answered.  I like that.

Man, I don’t know.  I enjoyed reading this.  I certainly wasn’t moved.  And I don’t think you should publish excerpts, as stated.  And they make me NOT want to buy the larger work because I hate when you try to tell me what to do.  But I’m an asshole and a curmudgeon and I’m sure that I’m not your target market. 

In fact, I’d posit that I’m nobody’s target market.  I was recently…interacting…with a stripper and, although I fully understand and respect what her business is and what product she is selling and what the experience is supposed to be, I offered to pay her more money if she would put her clothes back on and allow me to make her sandwiches that we could eat at a picnic at the beach.  Because I’m dumb.  God am I dumb.  Just a giant-ass, raw heartstring walking around getting beat up and then lashing out or crying about it (or both), and it’s mostly me doing the beating. 

I mean, I wake up every day thinking I can save the world while simultaneously believing, fully, that I have no human value whatsoever and am not worth anyone’s time or attention, not even my own. 

So yeah, more of these types of stories would be good.  I’d be into it.

Also, this is last story of the year?  It’s marked December 28th.  I forgot how I did this the previous two years in review, but I think maybe I’ll just do a mid week year in review for 2020.  I’m just sitting around doing nothing anyway, waiting for my sister to have a baby.  Drinking my life away.  Huzzah!

Later, you motorboating sonofabitch.

Nick