April 18th, 2022 - Just a Little Fever

Dear TNY,

Another Monday, and today’s story is “Just a Little Fever”.

Is this some kind of “lesson” story?  In the beginning we are hit with a line about bad habits and needing a lifetime to change them (but never being able to change them), and then in the middle, we find that Angela has the bad habit of rushing through things just to get to the end but that Thomas makes her feel at ease to be in the middle of things and she likes that, but by the end she gets a fever and that somehow makes her see Thomas differently, which makes her literally “rush” to the phone and break up with him, falling back on her old bad habits but feeling fine about it, which, based on the first conversation with Thomas is fine anyway, because the body knows what it wants and needs better than a magazine (which, in a meta-sense, is hilarious because the problem with this story is that I’m pretty sure most people know how to better survive living without the lessons of your magazine)?

Is that what we are supposed to ingest, masticate, macerate, and cud up for empathetic transcendence?

I think not, deary.

First, who cares?  It’s not like this shit matters.  Only the drollest humans will find this “lesson” insightful as their own lives contain less interesting shit.  I feel like the majority of people have their own lessons to learn in their own lives, and this shit is a distraction from that (it wouldn’t be if it was a more engaging, interesting, and better story).

Secondly, although the writing was simple, clean, and not impressed with itself, the POV shifting was annoying enough that I became frustrated with the lack of attention on the editor’s part.  About 95% of this story is told from Angela’s perspective, with the psychic distance being fairly zoomed inside of her head.  But on a few occasions, we slip into Thomas’ head, and, weirdly, the waiter’s head.  And there are other instances in which we think we are slipping into Thomas’ head, but then the author says something after the fact to explain that Thomas had said it aloud, rendering the data something that Angela could have heard.  For a fairly clean story, these slips felt sloppy.

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s me.  This type of story is not something I’m into.  It feels pedagogical with regard to “humaning”, which is kind of bullshit because each human is different, and most people don’t like to be told what to do with regard to living.  Yeah, maybe we can learn how to use a lathe from someone or maybe we can learn to drive a rally car with a sequential gearbox, but most of living is just making mistakes and trying to learn from them.  This kind of story tries to short circuit that, which I find upsetting.  It’s like when I was a teen and my dad tried to give me advice about relationships; I thought he was full of shit and those issues weren’t going to happen to me because I was better than that.  But, NOPE.  He was right.  But you can’t teach someone that shit.  They have to walk the path.

So, there it is.

With regard to last week’s insane letter of complete mental meltdown, I’m still here.  I didn’t die yet.  A wizard coaxed me from the van in Kingman, AZ.  I took a giant shit, I packed up my belongings for the road, and I decided I could do one more day.  For him.  And then another.  And another.  And here we are a week later.  I’ve won near a grand from slot machines across three different states, I’ve eaten good food, had bad diarrhea, danced, played some pool, won free games in pinball, been hugged, talked to my kids about Moon Knight, and overall, I’m not where I was when that letter was written.  But I know it’s inside me, like one of those huge catfish my mother would tell me about from her youth, that grew on the bottom of Navajo Lake (and would sometimes get sucked into the outflow at the bottom of the dam, and divers would have to go down and chop them up and pull the pieces out; they were as big around as oil drums).  Sometimes these motherfucking fish inside me will swim to the surface, and it takes everything in me to stay alive.  And sometimes they swim down, and disappear for a while, and I get some time back that isn’t so terrible.  I don’t seem to have divers, for now, so I’ll keep trying my best to make it through.  I hope I can.

And, wink wink, it would go a long way if I had something to do, like a job at TNY.  Just saying, I’m not trying to guilt you into giving me a job by leveraging my mental condition.  But I’m not not trying either.

We’ll see you next week for another episode in the ramblings of a dumpster fire.

Nick

P.S. What the fuck was the deal with the fever? It’s the title of the story, but seems trivial in appearance. And, it feels really fucking basic. Like a Deus ex Machina or Diabolus ex Machina, depending on how one feels about the break up. And that’s lamecakes, guys. Be better.