August 3rd & 10th, 2020 - Heirlooms
Dear TNY,
It seems to be another double issue and it’s “Heirlooms”.
Honestly, I appreciate getting next week off. It’s tough times here. My kids are leaving after more fucking months than I have ever strung together since before the divorce, and they are probably going to go back to school, physical fucking attendance, and will get the ‘ronies because middle America cannot bear to part with tradition even though absolutely nothing in this world stays the same and this fucking disease, as benign as it is for most, doesn’t give a fuck if you support Trump, Biden, Jesus Fucking Christ, Osama Bin Laden, David Letterman, or Kim Jong-un and this country is so fucking stupid, so proud, so lazy, so lacking self-awareness, so fucking full of itself for no reason, so very much a sad, old white man, the kind that would write the ten commandments to keep his neighbor from fucking his wife because fear fear fear fear fear every fucking thing instead of embracing vulnerability, which is embarrassing and beautiful, and as the glorious Wayne White says, beauty is embarrassing, and wonderful, and hard to watch and is anything but fucking Ford Truck Month and wearing American flag boxer shorts and eating McDonalds until diabetes renders your legs into something other people cannot unsee, all of that, having never served your country, having never put yourself in the shoes of others, leaning on someone else’s effort and claiming it’s your own, your culture, your rights, your everything, but actually you’re fucking Karen, all of you, every fucking one of you, man, woman, or otherwise, and while I’m on point here, is very much the same as calling for defunding of law enforcement when, in fact, you expect them to show up at your beck and call for whatever your emergency needs may be, so ready, though, to fucking shred their performance at a job you have never taken the time to understand, like really fucking understand, to know what it means to carry weapons and be charged with protecting humanity, mostly from itself, while being hated for doing that very thing, and have to make life and death decisions every fucking day, no no, you’ve never even really thought about that shit, and because a handful of cops shit their pants we all have to wear diapers, and yes, there is systemic racism in this and every country, but you all have learned nothing if you think you can solve it by being just as ugly with your fucking riots and looting, and once again, the West Nickel Mines shooting being a silent, shining example of how to act in the face of adversity, but you, you never take the time to think about anyone’s experience except your own and, oh, whatever the zeitgeist may be, when really both sides of this fucking argument, that being are you blue or are you red, are so fucking far off the reservation they all fail to recognize that the thing they are fighting over, America, has packed it’s fucking bags and doesn’t want anything to do with them anymore. I digress. My kids. I work so fucking hard to show them how beautiful any afternoon can be, unfolding like a fiddlehead in early spring, finding yourself atop a mountain, perched on the eastern side of an island in the Salish Sea, so clear and so fucking perfect you can see Vancouver in the distance, over a hundred miles away, the glass and steel shimmering with heat and looking like little toothpicks stuck into the horizon, watching turkey vultures and bald eagles ride rivers of air pushing up and out of the valleys, gaining force, building some kind of avian elevator, the birds’ outstretched wings capped with long, finger-like feathers at the end, which they flick around with the barest of effort, their raptor heads always looking, always turning, for something I cannot ever hope to see below. We sit, my sons and I, laughing about absolutely fucking nothing, looking at the ocean, a great blue mirror way down there below us, blinding us like a second sun. All of this, and now that they are about to go home, presents given, birthday party imminent, they are on their fucking new cell phones playing Pokemon Go, and I haven’t seen them this excited all summer.
I don’t fucking exist. I’m on another plane. I’m a conversation you might have overheard once and laughed at how preposterous I sounded, but you can’t remember what I said, just that I was an anachronistic fool, chasing after invisible butterflies in the wind.
And to be clear, they don’t need to cut their hair. Because your order isn’t as important as the fact that one day they will be dead and every one of those hairs will be gone; let them be their full, terrifyingly beautiful selves.
“Heirlooms”. The amount of dialogue in this story is excellent. The built in tension between the mother (in-law, essentially) and the son’s lover is leveraged accordingly. The relationship was subtle, well-used, and showed signs of a careful authorial hand. Overall, I did not get mad.
But, it was one of those stories where I thought, who gives a fuck? I don’t really feel like much work was done to hit this story out of the park. It’s got all this potential, and it’s wasted because in the end, I wasn’t moved at all. Strangely, actually, I felt that the weird behavior on Mike’s part, near the end of his father’s life, was actually because he was cheating on Ben and it had nothing to do with his father. Maybe that’s because we aren’t given very much about why Mike cares so much about his father, so we don’t feel his feels. This is a problem because we need Mike’s relationship to his father to carry us through his relationship with Ben and ultimately get us the connection between Ben and the mother. But maybe I missed it, who knows?
This fucking world has left me behind anyway.
Nick
