January 16th, 2023 - Hammer Attack
Dear TNY,
Fresh off my excursion to Hawaii, and you deliver “Hammer Attack”.
And, nope. Complete fucking trash.
I started scanning through the text in the first paragraph (meaning I couldn’t stomach actually reading it that soon in the story) and I stopped scanning and/or reading altogether before the first quarter was over. This story is so overwrought, so devoid of a narrative, focused so much on what the author and your dumb ass thinks is important, the social agenda, instead of storytelling, that there is no fucking life here. How can you have a motherfucker hit in the head with a hammer and the story is uninteresting? I’ll tell you: the story is convoluted and full of itself. It’s all about the agenda, the author, the publisher that will be putting out other work by the author, and where this story is being published now. Not an ounce of this is Capital A Art. This is bumf for “elite” readers. But cool story, bro. Way to blow donkey on this one.
As I was scanning away, I thought to myself, “Maybe I’m a broken reader; like, maybe I can’t read anymore.” But, I finished God Clobbers Us All by Ballantine a couple of weeks ago; enjoyed it. I enjoyed This is Water by DFW around the same time (fun fact: purchased it at Faulkner’s NOLA house). I’m reading an essay collection by John Long and it’s killer (Stories from the Dirt). And I started Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig this very fucking morning and was engaged. I think it’s that stories like this one suck so much fat fucking rotdick that they are unreadable to people who actually fucking read. A woman said to me this morning, when she found out that I don’t get paid to write literature, that that was a fucking travesty. And sure, yeah, it sucks. It sucks for a lot more people than me. But I’m actually okay with Dan Brown and Stephen King and Danielle Steele in a certain sense. They aren’t trying to be what they are not (I think King is an excellent storyteller, actually). What’s not cool is that you dipshits at TNY pay for stories like this, which are FPBP (in the truest Holden Caulfield sense: For Phonies, By Phonies). This truly is wasted. Wasted money. Wasted hours reading. Wasted time editing. Wasted trees for pages. Wasted electricity for screens. Wasted fucking life.
Speaking of wasted life, I can no longer keep going down this road I’m on. I will die. I can feel it. I got back from Hawaii and in less than 24 hours I was nauseated by anxiety and wanted to end things. So, that’s not good. The deal is that I’ve made so much time for my kids, but it’s literally killing me. And by “it” I mean the powerlessness of being a divorced dad and wanting a life greater than TV/videogames/couch-time bullshit in a shitstain town where motherfuckers go to wallow in cesspools of their own antiquated ideas, and wanting greater than that for my kids. And I discussed it with them and they are older now, and it’s different than before. So it’s time I blow up this fucking life I’ve been living and do something new. It’s time I take care of myself for a little bit. Stop wasting this life. Drink a little less. Exercise way more. Ground my life. It’s time I swim, chappies. In the DFW sense, I had forgotten that this was the water all along. And goddamn it, I’m going to enjoy it. I can’t be there when my kids grow up if I’m dead. So I don’t want to be dead. I want to be their crazy dad that embarrasses them in front of their girlfriends and wives. And, personally, I want a life. Not the liminal spaces between everyone else’s life. And no one else is going to save me, so I’m going to save my motherfucking self.
So boys and girls, strap in because it’s gonna get bumpy.
Until next time, you fucking posers, aloha.
Nick
