January 18th, 2021 - Blushes

Dear TNY,

Jesus Christ is “Blushes” bad.

I don’t even know where to start.  Like, what’s the fucking point of this?  It’s not interesting at all.  It’s just the wandering thoughts of a guy driving to work.  So one could compare it to The Mezzanine or Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker, but the intricately delved-into and woven minutia of the latter two examples, as well as the abundance of well-crafted sentences within them, make far more interesting work of everyday bullshit than this story does.  This, “Blushes”, is just an old man’s useless bullshit devoid of any original or fresh craftwork and it suffers from the same ailment as most of your work does, TNY:  Nothing Fucking Happens. 

The goal of literature is to approximate the experience of being—fully inhabiting—someone else and the feeling/emotions of being that person (thereby hopefully initiating an empathetic response in the reader as they may, without words, experience the transcendence that we are all one, all of us at once, and we are terrifyingly beautiful in our trying).  And yes, sometimes everyone’s real life is bullshit.  I get that. Mine too.  Hell, most people’s lives are mostly bullshit, especially if one is a slave to commerce.  I think that’s why we see so many people who talk about trying to live their lives instead of just being alive. 

So in light of all that, why would anyone want to take a break from their own life (that has GOT to be more interesting than this old bitch-ass doctor’s) to read about this life?  I just don’t see it.  Like, I woke up this morning in my van that I strategically parked behind the bar and, as I accidentally got way, way, way too high the night before which rendered me feeling semi-hollow this morning (even after my typical jerk to a life better than this one), I sauntered over to the gas station for some coffee and a faux sausage McMuffin and then drove out to the State park to take a coin operated shower (in which I threw up some of that faux breakfast because of an aggressive tongue brushing and had to push the throw-up matter down the shower drain so some other patron of said shower would not end up with pre-chewed sausage nugs between his or her toes) where I conducted my every-three-day ass cleansing.  And I consider this boring maintenance.  But this boring maintenance is a goddamn Ben Hur level epic compared to this old guy’s badly told, pointless yammering.

It sounds to me like the point of this story is to illuminate that the author feels the flow of his or her voice is mellifluous, and we, the reader, must also feel similarly and shall continue to eyeball this not-a-goddamn-thing-happens horsecockery because of said voice.  But, alas, this ain’t fucking Nabokov.  It’s just junk. 

So if the voice is hollow, and the craft is tired, and the narrative/plot are uninteresting…what’s left?

Later.

Nick