September 28th, 2020 - Face Time
Dear TNY,
This week’s sampling is “Face Time” and it’s underwhelming.
Fuck, though. How rarely your stories are anything but underwhelming these days. How many ways can I say that? I’m struggling. Because I’m underwhelming. I’m sitting here trying to think of new ways to describe why this story doesn’t work. New ways to call you dogshit. But, man…I’m tired. The editing in this story, which I’m guessing you didn’t do because as far as I can tell you don’t edit, isn’t very tight. The narrative feels broken. Like, it doesn’t have that creamy feel where every word is the right word and is in the right place and all the sentences are exactly as many sentences as were needed and each one leads us to the surprisingly inevitable next. It seems like a rough draft scribbled in a hurry to capture an event that, later, wasn’t really cleaned up. So, topically, one can connect. But emotionally, meh. I’m constantly being jerked around by a story that doesn’t feel finished so I cannot fall into the groove.
But whatever. What’s the point of this FTNY endeavor these days? Some weeks, I feel like I could fight you forever. You, a monolithic skyscraper, windows shut tight, busy inside dismembering and dismantling one of the last things I’m passionate about with the sickening industriousness of The Holocaust. Me, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk outside, not even armed with a megaphone, shouting and shouting and shouting, people passing by hoping I don’t lose my shit on them. I’m that homeless guy that I’m afraid of, I guess. And, funnily enough, someone suggested that maybe you, TNY, are afraid of me. Ha! I’m fucking nothing. I’m bumfluff, bud. I’m an email you throw away every week without reading.
Anyway, weeks like this, I just don’t want to do this anymore. It feels like there’s no point. I smash my face into your skyscraper every week for what? I’m the one with the bloody face. You show no signs of even recognizing that I exist. Which is fine. I’m not special. I’m not golden. I am just another meatbot with one long tube from mouth to anus that I use to process foodstuffs for energy such that I can put my seed into another meatbot and make more meatbots (did and have and they are the most interesting and wonderful people I’ve ever met and I love them so much that it aches every fucking day). No more meatbot making, though. I got snipped so I would never be in the position of watching someone else raise my kids again. Nor did I want to put any more children through a split-parent upbringing. Super fun in new relationships, by the way, when I find out they are into me and/or love me, but unless I want kids they need to go somewhere else. Like, that my only value is seed. On my best days, I understand and know that it’s a hard choice to make, the one to have or not have kids, and one that I don’t have to make anymore. On my worst days, I rage against the idea of trading a real human who is right in front of you (me) away for some fictional people who don’t exist yet.
I’m fucking tired, guys. Do you know what it’s like to want to die every fucking day and know that you can’t? That you have a short list of reasons that you stay alive for. And those reasons are people. But to just be so tired as you keep moving through time and space. So tired of trying to convince a magazine they have lost their way. So tired of trying to convince an industry, that being publishing, that what I have to say is important. But it isn’t important. Because I can’t even convince the people in my life that I’m important, you know? These reason-people, they need me alive because their lives are important and my passing would create an inconvenience. No human value. That’s my slogan these days. It’s why this relationship that you and I have is perfect, really. Because it plays into exactly what I’m talking about. I talk to you. You never talk back. I have no value to you. The value you hold to me, though, is that each and every week, you give me a reason to do something. Sometimes I can say nice things. But it’s mostly just bad.
Speaking of bad, I wrote you a letter midweek last week. And oh man, I never sent it. It’s…brutal. I ripped you apart for discrimination and running a passionless magazine. I praised Phoebe Waller-Bridge and offered to hold her hand if she would be into it (still an offer, Phoebe; I think you are one of the most brilliant writers of all time because of how you treat vulnerability; but I know you’ll never know that I exist and that’s cool too, I get it). I regaled a story of being in Iraq and having to throw used toilet paper into a bin in the corner of the stall and that that’s where you, TNY, selected your stories from. I mean, did you even know that? That I served? I can’t imagine anyone at your office ever served or has any idea what it’s like to be in another country, in a war that you don’t believe in, disarming IEDs. You strike me as a little too pretty for that. A little too WASPy. And talk about human value. I knew every day that I made a difference because the people I worked with were there instead of in a coffin covered with an American flag being carried into the back of a C130 on their way to Dover AFB to be X-Rayed in case they had ordnance in their body. This country is fucked and I’m over America and Americans. How entitled. How prideful we’ve become. Proud of what? America’s Got Talent, box stores, McDonald’s, and The New Fucking Yorker? But you find reasons to fight, right? Like keeping people alive when the entirety of your existence is an affront to your beliefs. Like doing the work in your life so you can at least have summer adventures with your sons so they will grow up to be better than you ever were. Ah man, I started writing that letter here. I’m sorry.
What I wanted to say was that that letter, it was just the rage against the dying of the light. Because that’s what most days feel like right now.
I have these dreams. They are super real, first person POV, no distinction between the real world and the dream world. All five senses engaged, no distortion in any of them. I dreamt once that Kate Winslet used her dream world to meet me in my dream world to tell me that she knew we were made for each other. She said she would find me in real life, and that it would be hard because I’m a normal and she isn’t. And that I couldn’t go find her as that would be stalker level shit and no one needs that in their life. I agreed. When I was living in my van in the forest and attending a wooden boatbuilding school, I had these dreams where the van slider would open and a woman I knew would slide into bed with me in the early hours of the morning. I’d rustle a little and question what was going on. And she’d say, “Hey. It’s just me. Don’t worry. I love you.” And I’d actually hear it, you know? Not the way that you hear your thoughts. The way your ears hear the world. I’d feel her skin on my skin. And I’d ask her if it was a dream, like last time. And she would touch my face and say, “Shh. No, honey. I’m really here,” just as clear as any person out in the world. And then I would settle in and it was so nice. But nope, I was alone. I had that dream so many times that when I would ask her and she would lie, I’d pretend to believe her just so she would stay in the dream a little longer. And I always left the door unlocked just in case.
Last night I had this dream about a woman that I met earlier this year before the world broke. And meeting her, it was good. Like, TNY, it was GOOD. And this dream was fucking frustrating because even in my dreams, I’m still trying to convince her that I’m worth it. That we are worth it. That it could be great. And that’s it, man. That’s my whole fucking life. Convince this girl that I’m shiny (and if it’s not her, it was all her predecessors (short count, guys; I actually get really attached and, fuck, I don’t know, I love love)). Convince you, TNY, that you’re wrong. Convince my ex that my sons should be on an adventure and not in public schools. Fuck, convince her of anything regarding their parenting. Convince some reader at a magazine that my stories are worth publishing. Convince my mother she’s a selfish asshole that uses Jesus as a backstop for all her personal validation (don’t worry, guys; she doesn’t read the FTNY project or anything I write, for that matter, unless I send it to her). Convince my Democrat friends that Trump came out of a vagina just like everybody else and, although his actions and personality are deplorable, he wants love too. Convince my Republican friends that the Democrats aren’t going to take the beef away. Convince the old man at the bar that he needs to wear his mask whether he believes it does anything or not; it doesn’t matter if it’s an affront to his personal rights, it’s the ticket that allows him to give this bar his money and they need it. Convince myself that today’s scheduled suicide can be put off until tomorrow. Convince convince convince. You know, when I bought my house in Seattle I was told to write a fucking letter to the seller with pictures of myself and my kids to tug at their heartstrings about how much I needed this to sponsor a better life for myself and my sons. To buy my life back. I had to try to convince them to take my fucking money. I couldn’t do it. I wrote a letter to the house instead and talked about how broken down it was, but it was not beaten. And that we could work together to make it its former glory. That didn’t work. The realtor wrote the heartstrings letter it worked on a later house.
My best friend is a van. And I can’t even convince him I’m worth it. Last night I dreamt the ball joints that I installed failed prematurely and would need work again, and I only found this out because he would no longer track appropriately so he shredded the tires. Again.
I’m getting the real world and my dreams mixed up. Sometimes you, TNY, write to me in my dreams. Sometimes my van fails in real life and shreds the tires. Sometimes the women talk to me in my dreams. Sometimes they stay silent in real life. Sometimes I dream that I get the email from the agent with regard to my book, that they want it. That it’s brilliant. Sometimes a story gets picked up in the real world. Sometimes I dream I’m on a road trip with my boys in the van and sometimes that’s actual reality.
Sometimes I don’t want to die. Mostly that’s not true though.
So I’m tired. And I have so long to go.
Please publish a good story next week. I know I say for the betterment of humanity and to preserve the artform and to make more empathy in humans. And I truly believe that.
But next week, send a love story. Please. For me.
Nick
