December 5th, 2022 - My Wonderful Description of Flowers

Dear TNY,

What a weird world as I am in Moab, briefly, and I just finished up with “My Wonderful Description of Flowers”.

I will refrain from saying whether I thought it was good or not.  I’m just going to randomly cover some ground as the story does.

Also, has it ever struck you, TNY, that the tone, diction, structure, etc of these letters is directly affected by the piece I just read that I’m writing to you about?  It has struck me.  Like I’m some kind of copycat.  Whatevs. Influence is all around us.

The title is too self-congratulatory.  Get over yourself.  I think, for me, it’s the “my” that’s making me want to strangle the author.  Like, you ain’t a fucking miracle worker.  Go fuck yourself.

I found the pacing of this…comforting?  Like, it moves through time very strangely, much like I imagine human memory works (and I say “imagine” because I must imagine how it works outside my own, as I can only be familiar with mine and this is how mine works).  It’s not linear, instead relying on events that only the individual has the encryption key to, having experienced them all and only they could put them together thusly.

Concerning plot causality, for lack of a better phrase, my guess (and that’s a bad thing, right, because shit should be ambiguous and not confusing, and I think “guessing” lands in confusing with this piece) is that the husband left with the kid over what he believed to be an infidelity, but was in fact some random messages and a stalker?  And that doesn’t make any sense to me.  I was never given any evidence to believe the husband had reason to distrust his wife.  So it doesn’t make sense that they are just gone and won’t respond to messages over this incident.  It doesn’t ring true.  Now, let’s say that the narrator is an unreliable one and she is trying to convince herself that these messages were innocent so as to not face the consequences of her own actions.  I could believe that as a device.  But I didn’t detect any lack of credibility in the narrator, so I don’t see that one either (that is unless one counts the structure of this story as the defining evidence of a lack of credibility, in which case I already said was what I thought made it sound like memory, because that’s how mine works, in which case we now face the reality that this woman, if she is supposed to be unreliable, is lacking sanity and I have now established I did not see her lack of sanity as I am also lacking sanity; AND I’LL OWN THAT IF IT’S THE CASE YOU FUCKING PANTSPOOPERS!!!).

I found myself somewhat lost in the objective narrative (but in an ambiguous/good way) about halfway through this piece and I was okay with that.  I started relating to it like an abstract painting (listen, toots, I don’t know about no fucking modern/postmodern/cubist/period blood painting shit; I was raised in Brokefuck, NM by parents who didn’t have time to teach us anything about anything but God (and they, and I mean she here, did a bad job of that because it didn’t stick to any of us), so I’m likely using the wrong word with “abstract” but as you might have guessed I don’t care).  I like the colors in this painting, and the flow of the brushstrokes were intriguing.  They all matched, as in it was a homogenous thing.  Congruent.  But did I get it?  Nah.  Did I emote?  Nah.  So, was it just a pretty thing to distract me from ugly things?  Maybe.  But I think Art should do more.  Otherwise it’s just some colors in a badly framed print on the wall of a hotel room to distract you from the fact that people are fucking behind that wall while you, sadly, are considering another round of Whac-A-Mole™ with the only mole you’ve got.

So, she takes the fucking train way out of town?  Cool, I actually like that aspect.  But it feels overdone, you know?  Like, I understand movies aren’t literature, but every tenth movie has some person just escaping their fucking problems by going.  Hell boys and girls, that’s my life.  So this should do it in a new way, right?  If it’s to succeed.  And it kind of did.  I wasn’t mad at it.  But then she follows some lady?  And then the lady drives off?  And then she’s in some field where, weirdly, there’s no service?  Come the fuck on, this shit is East Coast as fuck and you and I both know that unless it’s bumfuck Appalachia there’s service everywhere out that way.  And then she just leaves her phone on the ground?  And she doesn’t even know if the husband is gone for real (unless she is unreliable and she actually fucking knows, bruh, and that knowing is brutality)? I didn’t buy all that shit. 

I did like the idea of cutting open bodies and having landscapes inside.  That’s novel and I might steal that shit too.  But I felt like it could have been tuned up.  Something just a little bit bigger, you know?  Like that giant purple geode in NY’s Museum of Natural History.  But, as a concept, good (oh, speaking of stealing, I did steal that dumptruck of a face line, slightly modified, for an essay of mine in which I discuss the tenth anniversary card I made for my ex wife while simultaneously discussing that I blew our fucking marriage up, like a chump; thanks for the material).

So there you have it.  A review of a story.  I need to get my shit together today and start rereading all the letters I sent you this year for the year in review I’ll be doing from Hawaii.  And I need to change the radiator cap on the van.  I think it’s gotten a hair tired and it’s letting too much fluid into the overflow.  Should be a pretty easy job.  I already have a new one.  Plop ‘er in there and then drive around until the old boy is hot, bleed the air at the radiator and then park it, allowing it to suck some of that fluid back in.  You guys know, right?  You can do all that writing/editing bullshit and fix the world like I can, right?  No?  THEN GET YOUR FUCKING ASS IN GEAR AND BE BETTER HUMANS, THE WORLD IS FASCINATING AND THERE ARE AN ENDLESS AMOUNT OF THINGS TO LEARN AND TODAY IS THE DAY YOU FUCKING PUT THOSE WEAK-ASS, ONION SKIN HANDS INTO THE DIRT AND GET FUCKING GRIMY BITCHES!!!!

Or don’t.

I’ll see you next week, you sex-panthers (60% of the time, it works every time).

Nick