December 12th, 2022 - A Sackful of Seeds

Dear TNY,

Monday.  “A Sackful of Seeds”.  Whatever.

I have a really hard time understanding why Salman Rushdie had the fatwa, was attacked multiple times, gets published, was married to (and subsequently divorced from) Padma Lakshmi, and pretty much anything else regarding him.  I mean, I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but fuck Salman Rushdie.  There’s nothing here.  Almost seven thousand words and he didn’t say a goddamn thing.  I just scanned it.  Can you even imagine?  If you were having a conversation with someone and they said seven thousand fucking words and none of them meant anything?  But this shit gets published in your magazine, TNY?  I mean, I’m sorry the guy lost an eye and nearly died this year, and that violence was wholly unnecessary, but I think that speaks more to the inherent weakness in the attacker’s beliefs, that they allowed this bozo to anger them because he said some bad shit about their god?  Whoa, Charlie.  As the wizard once said, cool your tits.  He ain’t worth the effort.

But, do what you will, humanity.  People are batshit anyway.  None of us are good.  It’s all just terrible shit.  Here are some fine examples.

I watched an older white woman, self-proclaimed feminist, once say, “If she dresses like a whore, she should expect to be treated like one.”

My friend woke up four hours before his wife this morning.  He stayed in bed beside her while she slept.  He was under a poncho watching YouTube videos on his computer with headphones on; she doesn’t like the sound or light.  When she woke up, he said, “I love you.”  She said, “You’d love any woman who would allow you to lay next to her,” and she said it with sincerity.  Then she left the room.

My ex-girlfriend’s friend just had her husband walk out.  They have two kids.  Both with long-term illnesses that require constant care.  And this woman has to give this man 50% of her assets and pay him alimony.

Last night a middle-aged woman who is going through a divorce (20 years, 5 kids) cried while telling me she can’t be with this man even though he wants her to, but that she also desperately wants her best friend back and she doesn’t know what to do about that. 

My sister’s husband once said she was white trash and will always be white trash.  They have been together almost 20 years.

In 2001, on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Iraq, I used a robot built by Northrop Grumman to unwrap barbed wire from around a German Shepherd mutt such that I could pull an improvised explosive device from the slit in its hollowed carcass.  The blood was still flowing and bright red.

Once I told my ex-wife, after I cheated, that I didn’t love her anymore and hadn’t for a very long time.

The woman who used to work at the coffeeshop down the street, she once told me that as a little girl you never imagine you will grow up to be a prostitute, but then, later, when your heroin dealer comes to your shitty one-room apartment, that you’ll let him do whatever he wants to you as long as he gives you the drugs up front so you can take them first.

A friend from high school murdered his roommate with a pair of scissors.  This friend is not in jail and never will be for this crime.  The situation was so terrible for him it was deemed self-defense by the judge.  He never told me what happened before the murder.

In Port Townsend, Washington, in the rain, I saw a woman run from a café and stand next to the sea wall and wail into the ocean, her knuckles bright white and tears running down her red cheeks.  I watched, unable to look away.  After a time, a man came up to her, calling her name as he approached, at which she began frantically trying to remove the tears with the sleeves of her soaked wool coat.  She put a smile on before she turned around to greet him.

The first woman I dated after divorce asked me to remove the word “we” from my past because it reminded her that I had a family somewhere else.

A friend who is a retired cop once pulled a little girl from the bottom of a vault toilet in Rocky Mountain National Park.  Her kidnapper had second thoughts and abandoned his venture.  She was down there yelling, waist deep, until someone came along and called the police.

One of my crew in high school suddenly stopped coming to school in the fall of my junior year. I found out from his neighbor and the newspaper that his parents took his and his sister’s virginity and continued said events for years, having compiled hours of film documenting this, all of which were seized in a raid.

While my brother was dying in the hospital, after a driver fell asleep and assassinated him with a boat of a sedan, my sister, 10 at the time, was back at home looking through all of the photo albums one last time, and like a reverse camera, putting all the memories into the photos such that when she was done, she had no memories of my brother.  To this day, she cannot recall anything about him that she wasn’t told.  She hates this part of herself.

My mother was driving myself and my father back from his chemo treatments, him lying down in the back of the van with an IV bag hooked in, and my mother said, “I don’t want to have a funeral for him, I don’t want anyone telling me how sorry they are for me.”  I looked back at him and he was awake and looking at me and said nothing.

I just told the barista, who gave me a free coffee because I was crying, that I always tell the truth as I did then, when she asked if I was okay and I said no.  But I lie to every single homeless person that asks me if I have any spare money.

A female friend of mine once told me she woke up in the forest with no memory of how she got there or how long she’d been there.  Her pants and underwear were around her ankles and she was lying in a pile of leaves.  I asked her what she did next.  She said, “You get up, put your pants back on, and go home.”

I have two friends, a woman and a man, who caught their spouses (at the time) cheating.  The spouses were both cheating with the friends’ siblings.  They both filed for divorce.  The ex-spouses then married the siblings and they all still attend holidays together.

I have slept with two women in the same day, neither of which knew about the other, and I did not use protection.

A friend in Tennessee called me on a random Tuesday sometime in the late morning to tell me that her ex-boyfriend had died in a motorcycle accident and that she needed to tell someone that she trusted that she was filled with joy because she no longer needed to worry about the man that scarred the roof of her mouth with the front sight of a Beretta 9mm.

On my father’s last day, while he was hooked up to all the machines in the hospital, my mother held his hand and said to him, “See, the sex wasn’t that important, was it?”

A good friend’s son revealed to us that there was a girl in his class, high school senior, eighteen years old, that had starred in a porn shoot.  The clip was sent.  In it, there was a man behind the camera degrading her, saying that he’d make sure she’d wish she had never done the shoot, and that he’d ensure she’d regret this for the rest of her life.  The male in the film throatfucked her until she threw up bile in a red, plastic dog bowl.

One of my best friends from high school lost his virginity when he was eight years old to an eight year old girl. They did it because their friends paid them $50 dollars they had gathered up between them. The friends watched the whole time. I asked him if he thought that damaged him emotionally. He said, “No. But I think the kid they paid to fuck the dog behind the shed killed himself later in high school.”

The kid, who did not die, that was hit by the car along with my brother, drank himself to death while his wife pleaded with him to stop, at least for their children.

While cleaning out the spare room of a house I owned in Alaska, I found a journal from the previous owner. A single woman. And for pages she chronicled how her boyfriend physically abused her, at one point kicking down the front door of said house and rushing in to throw her outside in the snow. She finished that entry by saying that she was glad, though, because she replaced the door with the one she always wanted. Red. Ornate glass. It was on the house when I bought it and is still on the house today.

My aunt threw herself into traffic, at night, on the I5 freeway as a form of assisted suicide. The car that hit her broke her femur, jaw, and a substantial amount of ribs but failed to end her life. That unassuming driver will walk around for the rest of his or her life, unable to forget this incident.

A man I know came home from his job demoing houses with a bouquet of flowers to surprise his wife. She was hosting a party in the backyard for her friends. He stood out of sight, but within earshot, and listened to her talk shit about him for a very, very long time, still holding the flowers.

My father’s first marriage was to a woman who told him she was pregnant and that it was his. They married immediately, a big production. Nine months later she gave birth to an African American child. My father is not African American and neither was his wife.

An ex-girlfriend invited me over once, and told me I could stay the night but that I needed to sleep on the floor because the great dane slept on the bed with her. I was given no bedding. I stayed the night.

I could go on, but now I feel sick.

I wanted to tell you that there are spectacular parts about us too.  That within us we hold such great beauty.  The stripper that insisted I get a dance from her and once we got into the room and she pulled the curtain tight, she just hugged me and I hugged her and I cried and cried while she told me I was beautiful.  That the woman who asked me to remove “we” from my vocabulary, 10 years later told me that to be loved by me was magic.  That a woman I dated, after she heard that I used to keep “secret” Diet Cokes around, to hide them from myself so I’d forget they were there, began buying them and hiding them so I’d find them.  That after I wrote the first story about my brother, my dad printed off 20 or so copies without my permission and gave them out to all his friends, saying, “This is my son!” That, also, after I wrote that story, he told me that I did my brother proud; that I told his story well.  That after writing to an author of a story you, TNY, published this year, to tell her that it was magnificent, she wrote back to say she was in a dark place and that my letter reminded her of why she wrote.  That my oldest son said he’s friends with the autistic kid in school because he’s funny, they have the same kind of humor, and the other kids are mean to him. That, in the Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment” sense, as bad as I ever feel, I know that I did get what I wanted from this life, even so…to call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

But, I’m not feeling very beloved right now. Or beautiful.  I’m not feeling the world is very beautiful right now either.

I’m stealing this line, and have written it to you before, but it bears repeating as much as possible:  I really do have love to give.  I just don’t know where to put it. 

But, I’m also awful. 

And maybe that’s everyone.  Maybe everyone is fucking terrible.  I might just be one the few who will air his dirty laundry.  I don’t even know why.  Doesn’t make me feel better.  All these words and am I really saying anything? Anything at all? To anyone? Who even reads this?

What I’d like to say, to whomever is reading this, and maybe even secretly to myself, is that you are not alone. You are not alone in this life. You are, against all odds, special. Complex. Ugly. A terrible dancer. A wonderful dancer too, for that matter. You are loyal and you betray the people you love. You have a bottomless pit of evil inside you. Yet, you love to give hugs. You smell fantastic, even when you smell unclean. The way you look at me is astonishing, like you know we are in this together and that I have the strength to do it. You have hurt and will hurt the people who are most important to you in this world, scarring them for life. And it might take time, but you will forgive the people who do this to you. You are open, generous, cheap, sad, mean, cowardly, tender, sassy, superficial, demented, loving, vibrant, depressing, petty, clever, brave, selfish, funny, and spectacularly beautiful. You glow, honey. Immaculately. And you are not alone.

So, I think what I’m saying, or trying to say, is more important than what Salman Fucking Rushdie has got going on, that’s for sure.  Fuck your parables, guy.  They aren’t going to make anything better.  Go outside and hug a motherfucker.  Make someone feel less alone.  We are dying out here.

I guess, on that note, I’ve got to pretend I’m okay today.  Pick my son up and take him to the optometrist.  Pretend I’m not waiting for someone to text. To call.  To come see me.  To be excited I exist.  To take me to the fucking optometrist.  Hold my hand.  Touch my face.  To love me.

But it’s okay, man.  It’s really okay.  I know it’s not going to get any better than this.  And that’s fine.  Right now the world outside this window in Fruita, Colorado is pretty wonderful.  It’s not spectacular in the way that Ansel Adams would shoot it.  It’s just, it’s alive.  And real.  And crawling with hope.  Maybe misplaced hope.  But goddamn if it isn’t heartbreaking to watch these leaves blow down the street and the people walk past on the sidewalk, wholly unaware of their immeasurable beauty.

Until next week, when a middle-aged man breaks down again.

Nick