October 7th, 2024 - Stories About Us

Dear TNY,

Another “Ladies” story on this Monday in which I find myself in Hawai’i; this one is called “Stories About Us”.

And like all the “Ladies” stories by Segal, it’s shit.  I cannot comprehend why you would publish any one of them.  They are completely worthless.  They go nowhere.  Nothing is at risk.  There’s no tension.  Just words on a fucking page, seemingly designed to bore us to death or infuriate us.

I also had an issue with the first quote in the story as well as one of the women complaining because she hadn’t heard back on her story in four weeks.  Give your balls a tug, you fucking babies.  I have four stories awaiting publisher decisions that are over a thousand days out.  The most is 1,822 days as of this morning.  I’ve got others out for more than a year. Out of all 739 submissions I’ve done, the average time before I hear back from a publisher is 15 weeks.  Fifteen fucking weeks!  This is the game, you cunts.  Who complains after 4 weeks?  The entitled do.  And yet, this shit got published.  Yuck.

I don’t even really want to write about myself this week. Rather, the depression.  I left Phoenix.  Today is my last whole day in Hawai’i.  Then back to Washington.  I have shit to make.  Some purpose.  I take my meds.  It’s hard to orgasm because of them.  I’m rolling into a future, I guess.  But I told the therapist last week that it’s one I don’t want.  But here I am.  Surviving.  I’m told it’s what I’m supposed to do.

I’ve talked to a few people this week that reminded me that I’ve lived a fucking privileged life.  It’s really astonishing.  I was showing pictures to a friend yesterday of all the trips I went on with the boys.  She asked me why I couldn’t be her dad.  And that my kids are beyond lucky.  And that I light up when I talk about them and all we’ve done together.  And…she’s right, they are beyond lucky and I’m really proud of all the work that I did so we could just fucking play.  And I’m even more proud of the play.  We fucking played.  Eat that, world.

Also, I’ve been talking a lot about isolation lately. And that because of the above work and play, it makes it really fucking hard for people to understand what this isolation was and is like. So they cannot form a proper empathetic response to my situation. Because they cannot comprehend it. All those hours alone, kids somewhere else, working toward pure adventure. How can anyone relate? They can’t. So they get frustrated, mad, surprised, upset, whatever you want to call it when I get so fucking sad when I have to be alone. Like, guy, get it together, it’s just alone. No, it is not. Try to understand the pain and the reason for it before providing your poorly thought-out advice. Try being this alone maybe. I mean, which one of us has the most unique situation and ingredients regarding alone? Spoiler alert: Not you.

Later.

Nick