November 15th, 2021 - Hello, Goodbye

Dear TNY,

With “Hello, Goodbye” you have done me a huge favor.

Because I couldn’t finish it.  I got all this time back!  Man Alive!

Seriously, I bounced the moment the charades game ended and the story rewound in time to a whole bunch of who gives a fuck.  Then I started scanning and it seemed to be two people talking about more people, none of which mattered because there wasn’t anything at stake or special and there was no apparent conflict or dichotomy or intrigue or wonder or mystery or anything, really, and then I scanned further and there were the same people talking about more people, different people, and still nothing mattered, and then I scanned all the way to the end and, yep, none of it mattered.

This is the first story that I stopped reading in longer than I can remember. I was really putting out an effort to get through your usual yearly dump of garbage stories, and doing a good job with that effort. I say that to say that this story was so bad I could not do that. But is that a surprise? From you? Not really. You know we are coming up on four years right? Four fucking years of reading trash. That’s insane of me to do for free, and to publish content on that weekly. What’s more insane is that you published all that trash in the first place, and told people it was good. Mindblowing.

Anyway, same old shit from me. Today I’m somewhere else, though. Paonia, CO. And it’s pretty good so far. I know you don’t care. That’s cool. You’re pretty apathetic as a whole; I see that with the stories you publish. So, I’ll leave it at that.

To recap:

-        None of the characters were real, interesting, special, or meaningful.

-        There was no story to speak of that would hook a reader (And I don’t mean a fucking runaway train of hazmat, what to do, what to do!  I mean there were two people talking about uninteresting shit; if that is a plot I wanted to see play out, I’d go listen to almost every table of people at the local coffeeshop.)

-        The language wasn’t doing anything new or fresh; it was just the normal TNY bullshit.  And by that I mean I had to stomach the phrase “held between her hands baby-shaped air” which is awkward as fuck and shouldn’t be used by a professional writer in the 21st century or left in by an editor of a “noteworthy” literary magazine.

-        This story sucks.

I know it seems short and sweet, but this is all I can write about a story that held my attention for the first word and then fucked it up with the baby phrase and then threw me away as a reader after the first scene ended.  This is a story in which the author looks into the mirror admiring his/her hair, instead of blowing the fucking mirror up and replacing it with the abyss for us to look into.  So, it’s a lot like human society these days.  It doesn’t bother with questions about what all this means, how to be more empathetic, what is love and beauty, etc.  Instead, this story focuses on some shit that one beige-ass, alive person (vs actually fucking living) thinks is important, and is, like most of today’s humanity, self-centered dogshit.

So, fuck off ya dickturd. 

Peace.

Nick