June 13th, 2022 - Trash

Dear TNY,

I’m not sorry it’s Tuesday when I’m writing this letter about “Trash”. 

I’m in New Orleans on my huge summer roadtrip with my kids and, well, I had better fucking shit to do yesterday.  Although, if I’m honest, I cried in the National WWII Museum because it seemed like it glorified our triumph.  And that really pissed me off as I was walking around looking at all these “heroes” while each little alcove had some soundtrack of explosions playing atonally against the other alcoves nearby, rendering the environment to be something that would alarm anyone, and I thought, “Fuck you, these guys just wanted to go home.”  And that’s the truth. For both sides. Glorious, regular people fight for someone else’s fucking ideas and it isn’t pretty.  War isn’t glory.  It’s dudes who are stuck.  They want to do well by the men beside them (yes, women, but this was WWII for chrissakes) and they want to stay on the front because if they leave then some other schmuck takes their place and if that guy dies it’s their fault. But really, they just want to go home. 

But make no mistake, I think they were heroes.  I think they were real fucking heroes.  Nobodies that did extraordinarily courageous things when faced with terrible conditions.  But I don’t want to see that in a museum.  There were kids dressed as soldiers for fuck’s sake.  I wanted to shake them, ask if they had seen their friends blown the fuck up.  But, that’s not my place.  And this is also America, where the politicians are so fixated on preserving a “right” (I remember that time that God so gave us the ”firearm”…), so kids get shot in the face in front of other kids because thoughts and fucking prayers don’t do a fucking thing and being red or blue matters more than fucking reality in this shithole of a nation, that no fucking veteran should be proud of. Like, I “defended” this for what? 104 oz whalebone slushies and the right to push conspiracy theories as truth? So that Marjorie Taylor Greene can represent people? I think our boy Isaac Asimov said it best, with regard to this country of fucktards:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

You know, I’m done with America.  What a fucking shitshow.  I’m here because of my kids.  I like other countries that don’t have the audacity to think they are number one.  This fucking country is a shell game that a lot of countries have figured out, especially China. It’s just us that seem to be in the dark about it.

Anyway, this story is like reading a manual on how to slap the reader in the face with your purpose/ending such that it can be seen a million miles away, thereby taking every bit of fucking meaning out of said purpose, so that after ~2400 words the reader is glad of one thing: that it was ~2400 words.

The MC has no real characterization.  The “husband” is translucent.  The “mom” is, and I almost giggled to myself about this, like, the stereotype of a Korean mother, from my experience anyway with my Korean friends.  And I don’t even think any sort of nationality was included.

It was just shit.  Nothing happened.  The pigeon shit was hamfisted.  And everything else was flat.  The only thing I enjoyed was the minimalism of the sentences.  And the length of the piece.

That’s it.

So, I have to go now.  Other shit to do.  Like live a full fucking life instead of this fucking waste of time that is your “literature”. Fuck you fucking sideways you fuckbiscuits.

Nick