July 29th, 2024 - Abject Naturalism
Dear TNY,
Fuck “Abject Naturalism” and the literary scene it rode in on.
Let’s dispatch this bullshit critique first before I devolve into a tirade of self-pity.
This story is a quintessential example of what’s wrong with the literary industry today. It’s about a writer living in Brooklyn (honestly, I think this is where it is but I was so turned off by the fucking complete unoriginality of this cocksucker that I blanked it out (also, if the reader is blanking anything out in your story, calling it a cocksucker, or turned off by its complete unoriginality, every single person, from the writer all the way down to you, Mr. Remnick, has fucking failed; I do wonder what it’s like to produce more fiction in a year than most publications ever will, yet have that work be so fucking obviously terrible and a waste of everyone’s time that I can’t think of a single person who even remotely comes close to enjoying it) who is struggling with writing/living/who-fucking-cares and in the end nothing happens, nothing changes, and to impart that absent narrative to us, the author fails to include even a single positive, noteworthy sentence. There was a negative noteworthy one, though:
Amalie my anomaly, her mother thought.
Fuck you. As I was reading this, I was reminded of an article that I read about how there isn’t any room for people like me in literature anymore. People who bleed passion and take risks (and fail!). People who care. No, the only people who are allowed in literature right now are the people who can afford to pay their way in and who also have the time to dedicate to something that makes no money at all. Now, I could call up the demographics on that, but I don’t think it takes a rocket surgeon to figure it out.
What else is there to say that I haven’t said about your fiction? Nothing changes. I fight and I fight and I fight. I change. I evolve. I move. I try. I fail. God, do I fucking fail. I try again, but differently. I move further and further down the road toward new ideas and ideals. You stay exactly the same.
Fuck you. Again. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. I’ve wasted so many hours reading your shit and writing these fucking letters. Thousands of fucking hours. You don’t fucking change. Actually, you may be getting worse. I have a friend who reads your shit and can’t get past the first couple of paragraphs anymore. And he is way more kind than I am.
But, this appears to be me. I keep trying way past when I should stop.
I’m just wasting time now.
On this day, in 1983, someone was born. I’d like to tell her happy birthday today. It’s, in fact, completely blanketing my mind. I am overwhelmed by her. In all ways, good and bad. My blood is her blood. My breath, her breath. So close, as Neruda would say, that her hand upon my chest is my hand, so close that her eyes close as I fall asleep. So overwhelming that it has superseded the horror that on this day, in 2023 my friend Ben passed away from a broken heart, and in doing so started a chain of events that led me to this woman. I would love to say anything to her, but I cannot. Because she is not a safe place for my heart. I said as much on Wednesday, my birthday. And instead of hearing it and thinking, “Holy shit, I love this man so much and I have no idea how I hurt him this badly, I need to fix this,” she responded with, “Perhaps you are not as safe a place for my heart as you think you are.” I’ve been down this road before. You tell them things, they punish you for it. You don’t tell them things, they punish you for it. You get asked to tell them things because if you don’t tell them things then you harbor all these negative feelings and they need to get worked through. So you tell them those things and they punish you for it. You go back to not telling them things again. You get punished for it.
As far as I know, all humans are always punishing all humans. Myself included. We are all broken and terrible to each other.
A couple of days ago, my youngest son started playing Satie on guitar. It was the same song that I listened to on repeat while I wrote three separate obituaries for my friend. It’s actually in the obituary, a mention of the song. And I listened to my son play, hearing it from the other room, and cried for the loss of my friend. I texted his widow about it. She’s trapped in Reno under the cyber attack shit. Glad her son isn’t with her because of it. All of that frustrated me. And I can’t articulate why? Maybe it’s because I don’t want her to be in Reno, minus her son, stuck for hours waiting for a flight; I want her to be putting together a puzzle in the morning over coffee with my dead friend, who is no longer dead, and I want her to look up at him and his grumbling nature, and say, “Hey, I really love you and our life together,” and even though I know that he’ll push the comment away, tell her she’s wrong, tell her he isn’t worth loving, she’ll understand that he is and she won’t let that shit hurt her, and then their son will wake up and they will go down the river that we threw him in and check on the eagle nests and the footprints that those thirty or so people made last year on this day will disappear, never having existed in time. But that is not what will happen.
Anyway, as I listened to my son play, I was transported back to reading the obituary at Ben’s memorial, which was, as described in these pages, the best worst day of my life. She, my lovely, touched my arm three times. We cried at the river together. She gave me her phone number and willed me into joining her at the lakehouse. She touched my hand and we slept in the same bed together. She’ll never know what I’m thinking or how much I love her or anything close to that because she won’t read this. She’ll do what the things, people or otherwise, tell her she should do and she’ll ignore all of this until it doesn’t hurt anymore. Distract herself, as she is way better at doing than I am. She’ll be, and is likely better for it, a human being. Totally understandable. But I am not and will not react that way. I will obsess about this, and her, for a long, long time. But that’s me, right? I’m still writing to you. You don’t care about me. You won’t change. Neither will the lit industry. I’ll just keep pouring my fucking life out with hope in my heart. Not perfectly. Oh dear God, no. Not even close to perfect. Almost no patience. With anyone. And the more I love something, the less patience I seem to have. Great!
I just want to die these days, guys. I know these letters don’t make sense anymore. They used to be so beautiful. Now I can’t think straight. Can’t keep the train going.
I was thinking about pornography last night. I’m a 43 year old man and I’m looking at porn and jerking off to have access to the drugs that my brain makes that are necessary to keep a human being semi-happy and alive. I don’t watch porn and believe that it’s what sex is, you see. Not at all. I search and search for something real, the way the cigarette smoke wafts in front of the camera from the cameraman behind it, while a black man with a half-hard, condom-convered dick is railing a woman who is obviously on some kind of drug, and her chest turns bright red before she’s about to come, which she does often, and the elastic corner of the bottom sheet on the mattress has been worked off, exposing the faux silk and blue texture of the inexpensive bed beneath, the tool box open and strewn next to the bed, tools spread on the floor, all visible when the man behind the camera bends down to grab some lube for the two being filmed, the empty cardboard boxes, one for a Hoover XL, in the background, the way that she lightly grabs the back of her lover’s neck while they both look at where their bodies are coupling and uncoupling, her chest going red again before she squirts once more, none of it landing on the dark blue towel that they have laid out for this purpose, both changing positions after this orgasm so that now I can see the white birthmark on his left asscheek, the borders looking like that of a country, more smoke from behind the camera, this time the cameraman’s exhalation audible in a rare quiet moment in the video, before the woman arches her back again, her feet astonishingly lovely despite the filth they have picked up from the floor, maybe because of their filth, all the blood rushing to her head as she doesn’t breathe, straining so hard, the cameraman circling the bed, a sheet in the background that’s been hung as a substitute for a door to this bedroom, wood paneling along one wall, before she breathes again, the Caucasian hue coming back to her neck and the tops of her breasts and she collapses down again, they shift again, and it goes on and on like this and the reason that I watch it is so that I can remember that this really happened, it was not someone’s job, it’s not a production, it’s not faked; it’s grainy, poorly filmed, and filled with small moments that no real pornography would be, like after he fucks her ass, at her request (she says, while it’s happening, “My ass is your whore,” which makes me cry sometimes as I imagine her a little girl and know that she does not see this in her future, that she can be this woman and that girl at the same time, that all of us are little girls or boys, trapped in these adult vessels, trying so hard to be what someone else wants us to be, including ourselves), and after he pulls the loose condom off, flipping it to places unknown, he comes on her asscheeks and for the briefest moment we see errant feces in her buttcrack, which he quickly grabs Chekhov’s towel to wipe up, but it has not escaped the amateur’s lens which means it has not escaped me, and behind that camera is man in a house with these two people, a world away, a time distant, and I’ll never know when or where, and here I am, alone, in the dark, crying, still masturbating, and I put the phone down and close my eyes and cry some more, harder now, and continue masturbating until I climax to one lone thought: A life better than this. And when I complete, as the chemicals in my brain are ebbing and reality is setting in, I say, “I just want to fucking die.”
It should be noted that this is a true story and that I recalled that scene from my mind palace (I have not seen this particular film in years). Maybe, and I’m going out on a limb here folks, it is difficult to live with recall like this. It is difficult to be this observant.
Say what you want about the use of pornography. It’s documenting something. It just depends on how you see that something. Like this story. This story is the worst kind of pornography. There’s nothing real in it. And it has the same effect on empathy that production pornography does: Obfuscating, obliterating, and overwhelming the Truth.
I’ve gone on a tangent. You don’t care. No one else cares. Ben, he cared.
I’d love to say I can get concise on my point. I cannot. I don’t work anymore. I’m falling apart. I’m eroding. I can feel it. You can sense it. It’s all unraveling.
Happy Birthday, buddy! I will love you in the True way for the rest of my life. With the lens wide open, taking in every single detail, good and bad, the full fucking scope. I will note your every flaw. Every triumph. Every hand gesture. Every sleep sound. Every grammatical choice. Every choice made or unmade. I will be unlike anyone you have ever met. And I’ll do it from over here.
Please, please, please fix this so I don’t have to be over here. I want us to be in a new place that isn’t here or there. Somewhere else. Our place. Home.
But then again, after reading that shit, I’d be too scared to be with me too. Well, I’d understand the fear. Because I’d jump right in with you, again. Always. This is the shit that will matter 40 years from now. Not the superficial shit that surrounds us in these modern, selfish lives.
Well, we seem to have come full circle here, back to “A life better than this.” It won’t be.
What a waste of time all this is.
Nick
P.S. It is not lost on me that the title of this story is what I witnessed in that video I described, what I’m saying is this story is so shitty and such a waste of time because it didn’t and can’t do what that video does. At least to me, which appears to be the problem. I’m the fucking problem. One of my therapists, we both laughed and how absurd understanding is. That the more understanding a person gets, the closer to what the Buddhist’s call Zen (it has other names), the more isolated they are from the rabble. The more alone. And maybe that rings true. If you get it in this cycle, then dying is the right move. Because the lesson was learned.
Fuck that. Here’s the deal, as plainly as I can put it: Every single detail of understanding aside, all pretenses and intelligence and ego dropped, I am a human being who loves and needs love too. And I’m telling you, TNY, and whomever is listening, I am not receiving love, and I’m dying. And I’m not going to listen to my friends, family, or any number of self help anything that tells me how to handle my emotions which none of them will ever understand, in the same way no one should listen to me. This is my journey. This is your journey. We were born with the knowledge to do this. I need to have the courage to captain my own ship, even if that means understanding that I’m going to hurt myself with the way I love. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I just want to be heard but it feels like that’s an impossible thing. Which reminds me of a quote, from the late Ben himself:
I really thought someone would be able to live with me, handle all my faults, accept my failings, and we would raise a beautiful and lovely family all on our own. But that seems an impossible thing.
His widow (he died before she could get all the way through the divorce proceedings with him) asked the line I wrote after this line be removed from his obituary because she didn’t like that I said that it wasn’t impossible (she believed it was). I believe it was impossible with her, likely. And as he was dying, which took a very long time, years in fact, and I heard about it all the time, he never once didn’t love her. He never once didn’t cry about her when he talked about her. He sent secret pictures he’d taken of her, doing everyday things, saying how beautiful she was, her, in shorts at the lake, or sleeping on the couch under the fuzzy grey blanket, or in the front yard, or anywhere, really. He saw everything. All her good. And all her evil. And he loved her with his entire heart. I understand him more every day. That it may be impossible to be with someone that sees. A seer. Because everyone wants the litany of things you can see that are socially accepted as beautiful, no one wants what you see that is socially excepted from beauty. But what’s not understood about Ben and I think goes misunderstood about myself is that ALL of it, together, is what’s beautiful. A texture so rich and deep and lovely, colors of equal parts bright and dark. All of it, and the fact that someone is willing to share that with you, and to continue to be vulnerable even though you eviscerate each other, that’s what’s beautiful. The whole fucking person. Two whole fucking lives. Together. Despite the pain. Doing it anyway. That’s fucking beautiful.
And maybe that’s the problem. To see a whole person and their faults and love them anyway. To know it can be done. And to watch someone look at you and not understand that. To be chipped away, little by little, as you say in every permutation possible, “Please stop hurting me.” And yet, we don’t.
Fuck you. Fuck you, everyone. How can you leave me alone like this? And yet, I know exactly why. Because of all of this. Because this is terrifying. Truth is terrifying. I’m scared every day. All day long. And I do it anyway.
