April 19th, 2021 - Alvin

Dear TNY,

I’m listening to Lofi Girl and just finished up with “Alvin”.

And, well, it’s short.  That’s cool.  I like when you try this experimental shit.  So thanks.  Please do this more often.

I, uh, yeah.  It’s…sure.  What else to say?

Um…

I spent all morning reading about a new exhaust manifold for my rig.  It combines the manifold and the catalytic converter, thereby deeming it a “catifold”, which will allow me to purchase replacement parts off of the shelf if need be.  If I go through with it.  But the parts on the van currently work fine.  So…why?  Unclear.

I read the story twice.  I’ll be the first one in line to say that I’m too dumb to get it.  Or maybe it’s not supposed to be gotten?  One does not know.  I like the dream aspect of this story, and the handrail (as in, the thing we can cling to as the reader) of the flights.  Some of the details are excellent.  The man fell as if shot by a gun.  The baby playing backseat to the cheat-grief (goddamn clutch, that one).  But again, regardless of details, I’m not sure this story worked on me.  I say that very specifically:  On.  Not for.

I had a bad sunburn on my upper left arm about a week ago which was the reward for using the window of my rig as an air conditioner whilst driving from western Colorado to Portland, where I happened upon a thin stripper named Max who has firsthand knowledge of the finest stripper in the land, Luna, not because of her stripping abilities (which are fine, no complaints here) but because she, in a place which seems devoid of it, is vulnerable, and sees your vulnerability, and eschews the stereotypical exchanges of the club environment, instead opting to provide a dance that is, strangely, lacking dance material and instead replaces it with a hug as she whispers into your ear, “You are a beautiful human being,” while you cry.  The sunburn is shedding skin, snakelike, which is dusting the floor beside me.  Must clean.

It is not clear to me if the man has actually arrived at a sunken building.  He may still be in the dream on the plane.  I’m okay either way.  That is the difference between confusing and ambiguous.  I’m happy about the ambiguity here.  I wouldn’t be if it were just confusing.

There is a man who lives on the Oregon coast; he is currently sitting in his “palace” or “command center”, which is, naturally, a library converted from a janky toolshed once deemed the “spiderhole”.  This man is a wizard.  You, TNY, will never know the magnitude of his beauty.  I am certain Luna would.

Overall, I was not mad at this story.  It’s certainly not your norm, as I stated earlier.  I’d be happy to see more things like this and fewer writers looking for apartments in New York.  Or anything about New Yorkers; we just don’t need that shit anymore.  I read a quote the other day that really summarized how I feel about you guys’ insistence that there isn’t anything more important than NY bullshit.  It’s from a guy named Michael Patrick F. Smith, written about oil workers in North Dakota.

“New York City reaps the benefits of labor done thousands of miles away on the desolate plains of North Dakota.  They get it from me and a group of the toughest, meanest motherfuckers I have met in my life. Men they wouldn’t like, men they look down on, invisible men they will never see in a state they dismiss as flyover. They owe it all to the hands. All of it.”

Today I passed an ungodly amount of fetid waste whose physical appearance could only be described as “shaggy”.

Unlike your pampered asses, TNY, I’ve worked.  I’ve been the aforementioned guys.  Worked with them. But, you know, their stories aren’t worth telling, right?  Oh the hypocrisy of being “inclusive”.

I know a guy who jizzes into his wife’s slippers because he knows that she’ll wear them later.  I think, in the right light, that’s sadly sweet.  You probably do not feel the same.

I’m currently writing an essay exploring how King Kong is my dead dad is me is my dead brother is, kinda, the bees knees.  Every time I play pinball, I miss my dad.  Sonuvabitch refused to get on an airplane to see me when I lived in Seattle, because he hated planes, so we never got to play pinball as adults.  I would have loved to see his Kong-ass hands crushing beers and beating on the buttons of a mechanical box of amusement.  But those hands got burned up in a people-oven and now they are powder inside a bag inside a plastic box under the ground in a hole I dug with posthole diggers, somewhere in northern New Mexico, a stone’s throw from a local Geocache (shh, it’s in the fence post) and directly next to my brother’s oven-dusty hands, same bag/box/ground combo. So instead of actual, real-time, present-tense, father-son pinball, I’ll glide through my electrified fat, with the help of some green Chartreuse, and locate the memory of my father insisting that the short-lived arcade in Aztec, New Mexico stayed open for just a little bit longer because my 8-year-old self was currently kicking the dick out of a pinball machine called “Fire!”, my father next to me, saying, “good job, good job, good job.”

Yesterday I was so high I almost pissed myself.  What can I say?  I’m on an adventure.

Speaking of Copenhagen, “Alvin”, I was on a roadtrip with my sister weeks after my dad passed, and as we drove out of Copenhagen and into Sweden, we were asked for our passports at the border, asked to pull forward and off to the side and wait for the dog, asked to get out of the car while a seemingly pleasant hound worked around the car, eventually sitting, asked to please drive into the building over there, into the open garage bay, asked to empty our pockets and surrender our passports, asked to get into separate windowless rooms inside the border control building, asked to remove our clothing and stand naked whilst our bodies and clothing were surveyed for drugs, asked to put our clothing back on and wait, asked to collect our things, go back to our vehicle, and put it’s contents back in order, asked to drive away and have a good day, asked for forgiveness as the garage door was closing, the border control agent’s head tucking just underneath it for a moment, saying, “sorry,” for making the mistake of believing we had drugs in our possession.

I’ll read “Alvin” again.  I’m not upset by it.

Nick