October 3rd, 2022 - Shelter
Dear TNY,
You’re on a string of garbage with “Shelter”.
A New York Jewish man traveling to Israel for inane corporate bullshit and lamenting his stale life back home? How fucking original. Very off brand.
Fucking wankers.
I’m so tired of this exchange we have. Same shit, different Monday.
Too much interiority for the MC. If I can’t form empathy for him, then I don’t want to be in his head. It’s basic math. And maybe you think he’s like Anders from “Bullet in the Brain” and that the empathy comes later, well it doesn’t. Or maybe he’s like Humbert Humbert and even though we shouldn’t have empathy, we just do. Nope, not that either. Just a dumb motherfucker that I don’t care about so why would I want to listen to his fucking bullshit. Also, motherfucker doesn’t pay Nava’s mom back and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t wire the money to the jewelry store either, so he can fuck off.
Too much New York (it’s pronounced “diversity”; that means areas beyond your tiny fucking island of false self-importance; maybe stop ignoring the people you want to vote for someone other than Trump and tell their stories in a way that creates empathy; Christ knows we need it or we’ll just keep hearing more of the same far right rhetoric).
Lack of characterization (for everyone but the MC; and the MC in this story is a yammering, uninteresting corporate toolbox, so we could use a little less of him overall).
Nothing really happens (yes, a baby is born, but we mostly miss that, right, because she’s crowning but then all the sudden we are in the hospital with no description of the actual birth (the smells, the sights) nor do we see how they get transported, what happens with the umbilical cord, placenta, etc, so yeah, nothing really happens because even though a man who is dissatisfied with his beige life takes drugs, gets robbed, gets involved in a birth, acts like a fucking idiot thinking the birth means he found a new life, but then runs away after that doesn’t work out, the poor storytelling makes it feel like NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS (which is a feat, considering); I should be more clear: there is no transcendence, nor an intentional lack of transcendence on the MC’s behalf, thereby making this story just words on a page and not Art in any way whatsoever, and now it exists as more evidence that your little fiction experiment is a waste of time).
This is a common type of story for you, one that we can define as: Someone once told this author they could write and they believed it and formed self-worth. Whoops. But then again someone once told you you could edit and you believed it. Whoops #2.
Anyway, who gives a fuck. Another squandered narrative.
I’m going out to work on the van, which, frankly, is upsetting. It’s basically done, but because of four small dabs of RTV which I did not place between the windage tray and the block, I’ll be breaking the engine in half in the van. Why didn’t I put them there when the engine was out and accessible when I put the windage tray on in the first place, you might ask? Because I wasn’t instructed to. Now, I will take ownership of that to a certain degree. Some things are known to some, and I don’t know enough. Fair. I’m not a mechanic. But there was guidance provided, from a few different sources, and amidst the many detailed steps, including a 20 minute video, no mention of RTV was ever included. And when I called this mistake out, after I discovered an oil leak because I was able to run the engine enough to get the oil warm and lubey, a self-contained triumph of its very own, I was informed that yes, RTV will always be needed in those four spots to prevent oil leaks and that a note would be made to the video for future viewers. Which, you know, will get me my hour and hours and hours back as well as my money.
There will always be beer and cheeseburgers to make shit better. And maybe a story you printed 60 fucking years ago might make things better too. When literature was good and not just a fucking Rothko with a required plaque next to it to tell the reader why it’s important and what it’s about and what to think about.
Fuck off.
Nick