June 24th, 2024 - The Buggy

Dear TNY,

Here we are again, week after week, six years in, and this morning’s story is “The Buggy”.

And yeah.  Here we are again. Truly.  Right fucking here.  The continual onslaught of breathing and eating and sleeping and working and walking and loving and breaking down and crying and touching and scraping by and seeing the wonder of orange wildflowers on a June day, as if you had never seen wildflowers before, and making the kind of love that causes you to wonder if we have access to portals within us that each other unlocks so we can hold hands, the hands inside of each other, and put down all of our bullshit and walk into the next plane, even for a moment, together, the halves of us restored whole, the way Greeks talked about being born as ball people, four arms and four legs and two backs facing outward, and Zeus, so petty and vain, tearing us in half because he was afraid of our courage and hope and strength, damning us to a lifetime of despair, yearning for our ball-counterpart, some saying, Plato himself in fact, that this an immature idea of love, but not me, not anymore, because I had said those things once, when I was selfish and immature had less data than I do now, not knowing then but understanding now that Occam’s Razor asks for the simplest solution, the most elegant, and goddamn if it isn’t right in front of us all of our lives, right in front of me, and always has been, a river of it, a wide array of information absorbed into our wet computers, reflected and refracted and bounced off satellites and packaged up as organic 1s and 0s, pushed through our synthesizer, compressed, tuned up and tuned in, spitting out the same message over and over again, no matter how many variables or exponents, the division and multiplication, or differentials or regressions or Fibonacci sequences, the data, realtime processed through the collection portals and spit back out through these fingers, right here, with “Jacob and the Stone” by Emile Mosseri on open loop for an hour, this formula conspiring to once again land on Love, that Love is all that will matter, all that ever mattered, and all that we can hope to have matter in our lives, and the meatbot on this end, dying more every day, knowing the answers, knowing the math, knowing the touch and the ball people and squirrels outside this window, the one I sit overlooking on most mornings, at this dinner table in this oversized house in Walla Walla, them, chasing each other around the cottonwood in the day, retiring for sleep in the night, when the two raccoons emerge from the stumped branch up high for their evening walkabout, the wind coming through continuously for both parties, in and out, like the air in our lungs, or like the tide, a gift from the moon, an often overlooked celestial body, it’s just a dry rock, right, just a mirror for the sun, just leftovers from an impact before the concept of humans, ball or otherwise, could have been felt anywhere, this lone orb, a dusty, quiet, unassuming ball of matter being the reason for sustainable life on this planet, it, and an atmosphere and water, all working in unison to bring about rhizomes and plankton and krill and yellow-tailed amberjack and octopi and cacti and the owls who live in them and bats with white nose disease, dying off in unquantifiable numbers, only handled in percentages, the individual counts too high for the human mind to comprehend, and bees too, and the water changing, and birds who can’t find home anymore, humans who can’t find home, me, who can’t find home, and home, who can’t find me, I am…guys…I am…I am made of Love and I am the size of the universe and can hold an entire life in my hand, to care for it, to love it, to watch it shine, to carry it when it cannot carry itself, a poem that was two pieces of glass emulating an open book at my mother’s house between two ficuses on the east side of the dining room in the 1957 single-wide mobile home that was birdshit/duct-taped to my childhood stickframed and stuccoed house, Jesus being the man of the hour in said poem, two sets of footprints in the sand sometimes, sometimes just one, our boy, the OG carpenter and beard champion, in my mom’s mind’s eye, his skin white as the sheets I have stained with a seemingly never-ending stream of bacne, when Jesus’ melanin levels could not have allowed for white, tan being the only skin tone available in his locale, but whether it was tan or white or, in the Charlie Murphy True Hollywood Stories sense, the darkness, it’s still Love, it being Ganesh or Buddha or The Flying Spaghetti Monster, so you see, there are and always will be humans looking for answers, making up stories, trying to understand what it means to be here and defining ourselves with the data around us, often creating bias and/or preference and looking for data that matches what we want to see in the world vs the way it really is, especially now, with an endless supply of information at hand, when really, you can stop, we can all just stop, because whether you experienced the following scenario or not, and I’m sorry if you didn’t because this world is fucking terrible to so many of us, if not all, but that scenario, at least the way I see it anyway, in its simplest form (Occam callbacks, baby!) is being baby Joel from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in the kitchen sink being washed by his mother, a giant person looking down on us, touching our face and saying how beautiful we are, us, so weak and fragile and absolutely incapable of handling life, but this God of Love saying, “Oh, what a beautiful baby you are, what a lovely little baby you are,” the rest of this existence being a drained sink and selfishness and inconsideration and turmoil and watching everyone, observing this all, the tiniest details revealing who we are and what we are really after, but, I guess, and I mean I don’t guess, that sometimes you are sitting on the couch in the living room with your son and the specialist of ladies knowing that they don’t know, don’t see it, hoping they will one day, but being okay that they don’t, because it’s probably better if they don’t, to be honest, as you tell stories about all the miracles you witnessed, the temperature of the water in West Virginia, or the shallow sand of the Alabama coast, or the rain coming in through the hole in the wheelwell of Chuck as you drive through Kansas going from nowhere to nowhere, and these people in this living room might see it as just some dude rambling about bullshit but it’s not, I got to live, and I saw, I really saw it, I was there, as my good and dead friend Ben used to say, in reference to a brick in the basement of my old Seattle house, a man carving his name in the red, pre-fired clay, “William was here, 1924,” and yessir, you were, us moving through space time together, Willam and Ben and I, beginning and ending, beginning and ending, always fighting so hard to stay, just for a moment, inside that column of dust in the lone beam of sunshine, Sagan’s pale blue dot, all of us and everything we’ll ever know, right here, on this fucking spaceship, ripe with everything we could ever ask for, abundance, as it were, more than we could ever need, and trying so desperately to figure out how to not ask for more, not squander these gifts, how to say, aloud and to our darkest selves, “My god, Love, enough now, this is enough now, thank you.”

This story is good.  The risk, the device, the whole thing has tension set from the beginning and it works.  I like it quite a bit.  It was the human condition in a single scene. That’s what we are here for. 

I don’t have much more to say.

Nick