March 1st, 2021 - Good-Looking
Dear TNY,
I can’t even explain what a strange turn my life has taken this week, and you give me “Good-Looking”.
And…it’s not great.
We all know I don’t prefer summary. This story is all summary. So I’m not going to be able to get into it as the reader. Which sucks. Because I have been asking for a love story forever. And you finally delivered. It’s just that you delivered a turd bag. Regardless, I’m not going to cover why summary doesn’t let me touch the story, which, deconstructed, doesn’t let me touch love. I’ve done that a few times and I’m too fucking tired to do it right now.
I think my real beef with this story is that it’s…whelming? Underwhelming? Sadly, I think there are some special ladies out there (and possibly my sons) that would say that parts of my life have looked, however briefly, like this guy’s life (but I’m not good-looking according to me; I’m also a turd bag). I say that to say that it should have been an autoconnect for me. But it wasn’t. And part of that is the summary, right? Sure. But there’s more wrong with it than that. For instance, there’s a fucking line from Dazed and Confused in there. There really aren’t any risks taken. And there is all this musing about love, openly, which disarms the ability for the reader to muse on their own. I’m going to expand on the latter two because nothing more needs to be said about stealing McConaughey’s line (okay, maybe I’ll say one thing: DON’T FUCKING DO THAT SHIT).
Risks. I think a story has to take them. I think a life, for that matter, needs to take risks. Others would disagree with me. My ex wife is virtually risk free. And, like most of us, also not happy. So I would say the risks, and the potential good and bad outcomes, stand a chance of keeping us interested. Interested in living. Interested in a story. Interested in connecting with the characters in the story. But, the whole time we watch this dad character, he doesn’t take risks. Sure, his ring is off, he’s encouraged to flirt, etc. But he tells his wife this shit. He’s hiding nothing. And the one time he goes on a “date”, he brings his kid and talks about his family. It just doesn’t feel risky. And without that risk, and it’s potential for good or bad outcomes, as I said it earlier, then the story never feels like it’s going to offer you the surprisingly inevitable. Only the inevitable, devoid of surprise. And that surprise, that’s the only reason to keep living.
Recently I got the opportunity to talk someone back from an early life termination, and her major question to me was, “How do I find a reason to keep going?” And my response to her was exactly this concept of surprise. That you might get 364 bad days a year, but you are going to get one that will just sing. You don’t know when. You don’t know where. But it will just happen for you some of the time. And that’s enough. See, TNY, it’s the potential that makes living interesting. And the risk this girl was taking was giving up and calling it on life when there is always so much more on the table. This story, it doesn’t have anything on the table. It’s just a table. No surprises.
God, what a ramble. I hope it makes sense.
And finally, love musing. I love love. I love musing about love. I love a good love story. I’m a sucker for it. I’m here for it, actually. That’s all I want to do and all I want to talk about.
So I say all that to say that this story doesn’t pull it off for someone that is very interested in the subject matter.
Love is such a massive concept, but it evades capture. Like, we all understand a toilet seat. We can point to it. Define it. Touch it. It has concrete existence for us. But love is manifested out of ourselves. Hopefully, it’s backed by the Collective Unconscious, but we can’t even know that because each individual experiences love differently, and each love they experience is its own entity within their existence. So, it could just be narcissism. It could be selfish. It could be selfless. Genuine. Altruistic. It could be some shit in between.
Christ, what am I trying to say here? I’m trying to say that everything that we do that has meaning has to do with love. Art is defined by love. Art is about capturing the wordless concept of love. Whole love. Complete love. Love for all of this, all at once, past, present, and future, forever and ever, Amen. Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” is an excellent example. You have Anders, an unlikable douche, and he dies, that’s great, but as he is dying, and we watch his life unfold, we see all of him, the good and the bad, and the richness of his life, the depth of it, allows us to, by the end, flip our script and LOVE him. And by loving him, we love everyone, even the bad in people, because that’s what fucking beauty is, ladyface. That embarrassing beauty, that kind that comes from a dank place.
Still rambling…
This story doesn’t ask the right questions of love. It doesn’t talk about love with any depth beyond the surface of the concept of it. It doesn’t even show us love. Somehow I was left feeling apathetic about a fifty year marriage. That’s a botched edit, guys. Because I should fucking care about that shit. When I got married a billion years ago, I was jealous of the old couple that was left on the dance floor after they kept asking couples to sit down if they hadn’t been together for ever-increasing time gaps. Like, look at those old wonders. The deejay, saying, “Okay, everybody. Sit down if you have been together for less than 50 years.” And the long haulers who aren’t quite there laugh and smooch and sit down, but there is this one old couple badly waddling across the hastily constructed dance floor in a hotel conference space. They are poorly lit and a little fat and their skin is hanging down and the song is “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by our boy Elvis and these two angels who have somehow reached across the impossible divide of human connection and built a goddamn bridge, A GODDAMN BRIDGE, DO YOU HEAR ME, so they could cross back and forth over the fucking immeasurable idea of separate but equal human consciousnesses and the whole world outside this conference room in this here Hilton is war and drought and famine and fucking brutality and they are just holding each other, right here in front of us, like no one is here at all, two masters of the universe, superheroes all their own. Gods. These motherfuckers just sparkle.
I want that so fucking badly. I want that in my life. I want that in this story. But it’s not there in either. The musing in this story, as in talking about the thing instead of building it from scratch and allowing me to discover it myself, ruins the construction of the nebulous concept of love, thereby taking away any reason for telling this story.
Okay. I might be done. I was up until two last night doing some hard beers and I’m a little jagged. And I know I’m rambling. But the good news is you’ll never read this. Ha. Pretty sure no one will. And that’s cool too. Why? Because one should do a thing to do it well, to see it through. Not to do a thing because someone is watching.
Alright you tittyfuckers, I’m out.
Nick
