August 30th, 2021 - The Mom of Bold Action
Dear TNY,
I’m in OKC this morning and I just finished “The Mom of Bold Action”.
And…
Why is it so hard to tell the truth? It seems like a simple thing, the truth. But why is it so goddamn hard?
I don’t know. Let’s start with an easy question.
Why am I in OKC?
I came for the survivor tree.
As you should know (and you had better know), in 1995 McVeigh and Nichols carried out the now third largest act of terrorism in the United States. They built a 5,000 lb ANFO LVIED, and McVeigh drove it downtown and detonated it, killing 168 people and injuring over 600 others.
These are numbers. What do they mean if you aren’t connected to them? They are side characters in your story, right? TV players. Faces in history books. Isn’t that how modern advertisements make us think? We are the central character in a story that’s just for us?
Sonder, my friends.
I think there are connections. Everywhere.
Did you know that I used to be in the military? Did you know that my chosen profession for six years was Explosive Ordnance Disposal? That means that I was responsible for making shit not blow up OR blow up, whatever the requirement was for the situation. I actually worked with the guy that did the post blast examination of the detonation site where that Ryder truck came from together on 5th St.
And then there is Elizabethtown, a movie in which a character played by Orlando Bloom is about to kill himself (after a fiasco of losing a shoe company almost a billion dollars) but then must travel to Kentucky to deal with the death of his father. That movie is a blankie for me. I’ve been watching it as comfort food since my divorce (2012 was the beginning of the end (the Mayan calendar ended a cycle on the 21st of December, 2012, which is days before I got kicked out of the house (also, just remembering those times makes me want death))). Anyway, Orlando Bloom’s character comes through OKC whilst on the final roadtrip with his dad (‘s ashes). To try to connect again, because it’s never too late.
It feels like it’s too late to connect with my dad, as he has been dead for six years. Yet, I wear his old welding hats every day and write essays about how I wish I could still talk to him.
I sent the first draft of this letter to a writing mentor, concerned it was going to make me sound like the Unabomber (it’s vastly different now) and he said that although he didn’t know who Orlando Bloom was, his son, also deceased, had years ago wanted to go to Orlando Bloom’s house and take a shit on his front doormat because he was getting all of the chicks.
Do you know where Orlando Bloom’s character went before OKC? The Lorraine Motel.
You know where I was a week or so ago? The Lorraine Motel.
Do you know who was at the Lorraine Motel April 4th, 1968? MLK.
Can you imagine being so afraid of your tiny “perfect” world changing in a way you don’t like, so much so that you shoot a motherfucker who was just trying to give every human being an equal chance to have their own tiny perfect little world? He did nothing other than try to get the world to see that we are all the same fucking person. We’re all tied up together. One separate but equal consciousness. And he got blasted for it.
Sometimes those bindings that hold us together get all twisted up and you can’t see right anymore. Up is down. Good is bad. Children in a daycare become corpses being held by firefighters at the epicenter of a blast so massive it could be felt 55 miles away. Children, I might add, who were likely devoid of any of this adult pollution that we fucking spew on everything.
And yet, McVeigh had two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream for his last meal. That’s almost…almost…whimsical, if it wasn’t all so horrific.
It just doesn’t make any sense.
I’m listening to “Invisible String” by Taylor Swift. This particular song is about how all the shit she went through in life so far, which seemingly had no connections within it, had a greater purpose of linking her to this guy she’s with now. She stated that she was always connected to him by this invisible string, pulling her out of all the wrong arms and into that dive bar where she met him. And that’s love, right? That single string? Is it that simple, just one thread? From one Taylor Swift to one Idon’tknowwhatthefuckhisnameis, and that’s what’s holding all of us together?
I say no.
Connection. It’s so much stronger.
You don’t shoot MLK if you have love, right?
You shoot MLK if you have love, right?
Do you see? A disagreement of loves. A continuity error in the flow of connection.
The human animal is a fucking monster. A monster which can become so convinced by its beliefs that it cannot retreat, or reconcile, and commits acts which humanity cannot reconcile. A person can, for instance, believe reconciling is blowing up a building filled with other equally sentient persons. To make a point. About some other people that died. And they died trying to make a point about some others that died. And on and on and on and on. For what?
Taylor Swift is right in that she is connected by an invisible string to this guy. But she is wrong in that it’s not one string. It’s MLK’s a million strings. A billion strings. Trillions and trillions of strings, all of us, bound to each other. We are all knitted together, goddamn it, by all this filament we can only side-eye to view.
So I say again, why is it so hard to tell the truth?
Getting warmer, I think.
I don’t know what to say about this Saunders piece. The pacing is good, as always. It moves along swiftly and keeps the reader engaged. It’s…funny? Specifically the inclusion of a second old dude. But the scaffolding is still apparent. The introduction to Ricky was 1) the addition of a character that would be used later as a forgiveness reference point and 2) a dramatic pause to allow the reader to forget the dad was out running after reading the essay on “justice”. And while I found it funny, there needed to be two old men to make the bat/dilemma scenario work. The kid needed the bad lung for the forgiveness beam as well. This structure made parts of the story predictable. To me.
What the hell am I even trying to say?
It’s fine. The story is fine.
Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Just a guy who’s both lonely and alone. I went to the survivor tree today. The vacant lot is now a reflecting pool where a building used to be. The 168 chairs, the smaller of them representing children, a blow so hard I had to sit down and cry for a while. All of their 168 lives, each as vivid and visceral as my own, filled with individually imagined paths worming their way across time and space, each likely containing an expectation of long life. When in reality, all those paths poured right down into that hole, a central terminus of sorts.
The day before MLK was shot, he said during a speech that while he would like to have a long life, he’d already been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. He could go now, knowing the outcome. He said these words without knowing his path would end on that balcony a day later. All his threads cut from him at once, and, strangely, stitched to each other in his absence, threads upon threads filling the recently vacated void.
I saw a woman yesterday. She had just gotten in a car accident. Older. She had blood down her forehead and was seated in the car as I drove past, her little dog running around while someone was trying to catch it in a blanket. This lady locked eyes with me. A bunch of people were trying to help her and she just followed me with her eyes, the whites of them a solid ring around her irises, I’m sure shocked out of her mind.
What she may not have known, or maybe she did know, is that there is no help. We’re so fucked. All of this is so beautiful and it’s not fair that we have to go through it so unequipped.
I spend a lot of my time looking at the beauty of the strings. The magic of them. The horror.
McVeigh.
That old lady in the car.
MLK.
Taylor Swift.
Orlando Bloom’s character from Elizabethtown.
Orlando Bloom himself.
Saunders.
Me.
What the fuck am I trying to say, here?
It’s agony to feel like you don’t matter. To lose sight of the strings. Makes you shoot a man in the face. Blow up a building. Push a kid down. Hit an old dude in the knee with a bat.
Maybe that’s what this story is about. Maybe this stupid letter (by me) is her stupid letter and should be ripped up and thrown out.
I don’t know if that’s the truth.
I don’t know much at all.
I write these letters.
And I don’t know shit.
Maybe the truth, the real truth, is that all of us, forever and ever amen, are all unfathomably interconnected and the Truth lies in the strings that connect us all, not the individuals themselves. Maybe the best stories are like an operator of an old time phone, tracing each thread, it’s thickness and braid, it’s hue and tone, all of the trillions of connections, a great meshwork binding us all with far more commonalities than we can see. Keeping us whole when we feel broken. Standing us up when we fall down. Spreading wide when we leap so that we don’t ever have to regret jumping because we’ll always be caught. If we’d just see them, all these strings, we’d never feel unwanted or unloved again. We’d never be alone. We would all ache from the love that we felt. And we would prop up our fellow beings.
But, who knows. Not me.
I can tell you what I do know. I’m tired of being alone. I’m tired of not mattering. I’m tired of weeping over these connections and having only myself to tell about them.
Quiz Kid Donnie Smith once said, “I don’t know where to put things, you know? I really do have love to give, I just don’t know where to put it.”
Amen, brother.
A Fucking Men.
So maybe it’s here. Maybe I’m supposed to take these words and put them here, for you. That, also, is agonizing.
But what’s that Dave Grohl said?
“If everything could ever be this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again
The only thing I'll ever ask of you
You've got to promise not to stop when I say when”
So, bring it on. You haven’t stopped when I said when before. Let’s keep going. We’ve got some love to give.
Nick
