April 10th, 2023 - The Ferry
Dear TNY,
“The Ferry” is this week’s offering.
(Before starting, know this was written to “Love Sick Doctor” by Thunder Jackson, an MDMA grindy, lovemaking song if I’ve ever heard one, in case you wanted to emulate the groove I was in on your end)
First, let’s talk about the weather. We had a National Weather Service Advisory throughout yesterday and last night. Rain. Every window in my rental unit is louvered such that as the wind came in last night, bringing the rain, a tornado spun to life in the living room, picking up and dancing with receipts I’d forgotten to throw away and rolling dust bunnies of dryer lint and chest hair up and down the hall, like dementia sufferers who can’t remember which room they needed to be in but that they needed to be somewhere. Then the rain came. And the best description for this level of rain in this louvered house with single panel walls and a thin, thin roof, comes from my special lady: It sounds like we are in a waterfall. A statement as true as gravity and/or a greasy cheeseburger, an ice-cold Diet Coke, and a handjob orgasm as the cure for a hangover (however brief that cure may be).
What I’m saying is that shit is wild, TNY. That living is wild. That being able to witness, having the cognitive capacity to understand one’s own consciousness such that one can modify “eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, reproduce, sleep” into “eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, witness, sleep” is fucking wild. That in the witnessable universe, to us humans, there are approximately two trillion galaxies, each galaxy, around the size of The Milky Way containing approximately 400 billion stars, the distance across each about 100,000 light years, all of this creating a concept so large that even the finest of us cannot understand it, and that this is only the witnessable part of the universe, as there are likely larger portions, just that we cannot see the others yet because the light from them has not made its way here for us to witness. That we live in an infinite universe. INFINITE. And somehow in all that I’m reading a story in your magazine, with the birds outside, hundreds of them, speaking languages I do not understand, all of them hiding somewhere from the deluge last night, but popping up like clockwork just before sunrise, and the sounds of humans too, the “BEEPBEEPBEEP, pause, BEEPBEEPBEEP, pause” of an unattended smoke alarm somewhere in this neighborhood at the top of a steep fucking hill, between two ridges who shed car-sized stones upon occasion, rolling them down on us from either side, through our yards, our sheds, our living-rooms, and our lives, to remind us how small we are, on this volcano, more than a thousand miles from what most would consider substantial land, which is, again, one continent of seven, on one planet of ~9 around one star of 400 billion stars comprising one galaxy of two trillion that we can estimate within our visible range of understanding.
Oh, and that’s just outward. Inward, the end of theoretical understanding, as explained by current quantum mechanics, is the Planck length, 1.6 x 10^-35 meters, which is only the smallest known distance until such time that quantum mechanics can resolve itself further down the rabbit hole, beyond the realm of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, into some new place of potentially infinite smallness.
So here I am, a being made of beings (more than three pounds of gut biome alone!), not entirely sure where my “consciousness” lives inside my meat, sitting at this table, which, if all that we know is a giant skyscraper, this table and I would be somewhere in the middle of said skyscraper, an infinite number of floors below me and an infinite number of floors stretching above me. And here I am thinking it’s astonishing that I can defecate in a pristine, glossy white bowl and press a lever, watching my make get whisked away to parts dark and unknown.
I’m glad this spaceship has coffee.
“The Ferry” isn’t bad. It is, I think, a personalized (to the author) version of what some of us go through every day. The curse of fascination. That everything has meaning and nothing goes unnoticed. That details are everything. But obscure, little-noticed things. That’s just a superficial critique of the topical nature of the story.
Craft. I think the narrative’s floatiness lends well to the idea that the MC has trouble staying on task, not getting distracted, as it were. The narrative wanders into and out of memory and present tense, as well as wandering into and out of focus points in the present. The mechanics of this story fully support what I believe to be the thrust of the piece. Which is good. But does that allow for transcendence? I’m not sure. I found myself lost a few times because of the floaty aspect, so that’s not good. But it’s almost like that doesn’t really matter because of the nature of this piece. The guy, I assume it’s a guy, is also lost. So, the author has engineered that feeling in me. Good, if that was intentional. And I did find the end to be…novel? But I did not emote, if that makes sense. I liked that it took her a while to acknowledge anything he said in the kitchen about the messages, and then, upon hearing them in reverse, a luxury he did not have, she got a completely different story.
I don’t know what I’m meandering about. Likely suffering from the disease I get from reading, which is that sometimes the story’s language bleeds into my own.
I found the story to be worth reading. But, again, was not left feeling any emotions. So, I guess how one defines the purpose of art matters in this case. My belief is that the art needs to tell a story and that telling a story needs to involve feeling and I didn’t have feelings for this story.
I did want to mention babies and nurseries, as was covered by the MC in this piece (the OJ scene was good; I appreciated how the nurse was adept at taking care of crazy people like the MC (and myself, if we are being honest)). Growing up, I thought all parents squirted out babies at the hospital and then the babies were removed and brought to a glass room in clear plastic bins with little pink hats and little blue hats and everyone, including the parents, watched them from the outside, for what reasons I had no clue but I did not question it for a single moment because that’s what movies and TV said. Fast forward to my first child and I collected him after he was squeezed from my then wife’s abdomen, like pus from an angry zit, shooting out of a C section slit, a strange door as doors go (where is the handle, even?), the doctor literally standing on a stool and pushing down with his full body weight just below her ribcage, and I carried him to another room where the blankets I had wrapped him in were removed and I bathed his skinny, shaking, old-man-looking body in a sink under yellow light, prying his limbs away from his trunk to get birth residue from his nookiest of crannies, before I rewrapped him in new, clean, warm blankets, and I asked if I could go with him to said glass baby room, and was told yes, that all parents can go if they so choose but most don’t, so instead of leaving him under a heat lamp for the required four hours, like the unsold burritos at the Safeway in Farmington, NM that my dad (RIP you motherfucker, I miss your furry fucking face and would love to have a beer with you and tell you that you weren’t full of shit, that you were right about so many things, and that you were capable and beautiful and brave and I thought you were such a pussy for crying at every commercial and crying about cartoons and crying about sports games and now I know you were so fucking strong and your heart, both pre and post stents, was of unicorn rarity, and I didn’t know what I know now, but you knew that I didn’t know, yet you loved me all along and I was still perfect to you despite everything, and that I appreciate every fucking second I had with you, good and bad, and that you are loved loved loved forever, sir) would circle at 4:55PM, waiting for 5PM for them to succumb to half-off pricing, that instead of the burrito-vulture-circling, I held my son, cocooned in blankets, with his slit-eyes and a tiny, blue, sub-dermal vein across the bridge of his nose, white acne speckling his cleft chin, something approximating a babyteen androgynous Spartacus. He and I swayed back and forth in a rocking chair, the stationary type for safety reasons (can you even imagine if I fucking rocked into and subsequently spilled someone else’s baby onto the floor?!?!). I was 25 years old and I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t. I don’t think I ever will.
Fuck, what am I even writing anymore. I wrote an essay over the last week which is as meandering as this. Maybe I’m just stuck in the flow. Who knows.
That one is about how my kids don’t fuck up at school because they know if they get kicked out that they have to come live with me. That I am the punishment. That the children of a father whose love is enough to fill all the spaces, big and small, in every room of the aforementioned skyscraper, both infinitely up and down, mind their Ps and Qs so that they don’t have to live with him.
Folks, living is wild. Hold the fuck on. Or let the fuck go. Just do either or both with abandon.
Well, enough rambling.
Later, tater.
And here’s a kiss on the forehead from my ocean-soaked mopstache©.
Nick
