August 16th, 2021 - Selection Week

Dear TNY,

So I’m on my own again, currently ass-in-chair in Chattanooga, TN, and I just finished skimming “Selection Week”.

Yeah, skimming.  I don’t understand why week after week you insist on making me read all these unimportant thoughts.  What’s the fucking point?  This story is 7600 words and 7000 are just this dude’s thoughts.  Which are FUCKING BORING.  This story starts with upturned assholes, for chrissakes, and makes that boring.  Secret lust?  Boring.  High stakes erotic interactions?  Boring.  Why?  Because the psychic distance is so fucking close that all the MC’s thoughts actually get in the way of the story.  They clog it up.  Keep it from moving.  Fuck the pacing.  I’m sure that this story’s impact could be greater at 3000 words, but I’m still not sure it would be interesting.  I’m just not feeling the passion anywhere in this as well.  Like, it feels like this was an assignment story in an undergrad writing workshop.  “Write an impossible love story in a cultural military setting”.  And the author was like, “Can do,” and then checked all the boxes. 

Fuck, who cares.  You don’t.  The author doesn’t.  Your readership won’t.  A whole parade of I-don’t-give-a-fucks marching off the cliffs of literary abandon, disregarding all the great work established before them in favor of a perceived pretty reflection.

These letters feel fucking pointless.  My whole life feels pointless.  Like, I really don’t matter.  Every avenue I want to go down, they are either blocked or abandoned like streets in a ghost town.  Such that I’m just talking to myself on these streets of this town I’d like to live in, but all the shops dusty, their “foreclosed” and “for sale” and “no trespassing” signs mirrors of my own idiotic desire to want to have a voice in things like “parenting” and “relationships” and “literature” and “Art” and, really, anything else.  Now I’m sounding pathetic. 

But the truth is I’m living right and you are living wrong.  You’re a slave to your ego, your job, your lifestyle, the empty and unearned words of encouragement peppered by your wastrel “friends”.  I talk a lot of shit in these letters.  And in real life.  And I talk to my sons about people who believe in American being great again and free and all these lofty red ideals, yet these people buy everything they see in commercials and they only eat at chain restaurants and they drink Bud Lite and smoke Camels and on and on and on.  That’s the highest level of hypocrisy; because you can’t be a fucking ignorant slave in my book when you represent the worst, sheepish, least free group of Americans (because you do everything everyone tells you and you are just too willfully dumb to see it).  Well kid, you are that group.  You just represent a different set of money, different circles, different ideas of right, different everything.  But you are a slave to the life you have created around you and you are too much of a fucking pansy to back out and recognize how ingrained your entitlement is and let go of all that shit (And how unearned the entitlement is; like, what, really, have you fucking done?  You rode into down on your daddy’s fucking money and had opinions?  Hold my beer while I ROTFL.  You spent your whole career at university talking to puppets with reflective faces, just like you, and your contribution to the real world was as thin as your prose?  Cool story.  Fuck yourself down a well.)

So yeah, I sit here in this café, which has an immaculate shitter and crisp A/C, a godsend in these conditions, and I want to cry.  I don’t have anywhere to be.  I don’t have anyone that wants me, not how I’m living now (because slavery is alive and well in this country, just to the $$$$ gods), I don’t have conversations to attend to that people want me to be a part of, I don’t have a goddamn thing to do, and I can do anything time and money wise.  And instead of backing down, I’m going to proceed.  Me and Frances McDormand, we are going to keep driving down that road, choosing to shy away from the gifts, even though we are broken. Because this may be fucking agonizing, but it’s better than your fucking illusions, you dickballs.

What a rant.  I’m fucking batshit.  It’s no wonder this is a solo journey.

Nick