January 20th, 2025 - Ming
Dear TNY,
Of the +6000 words in “Ming”, I made it through about 300.
What an absolute pile of trash this is. It’s like the writer doesn’t even see me. Like they are playing with dolls and narrating shit for themselves. There is only telling in this story, no showing. And the telling is third grade level.
You know, I keep getting told that I’ve lost my way. That I just need to get things back on track. You know who’s lost their way? You. I don’t even want to waste another breath on this. I skipped around in the story. It includes poetry. I’ve done that schtick. So did Tolkien. You know what the resounding response is to that? The reader doesn’t read it. They just skip it. Dumb. Fucking. Cunts.
Now, time to lose my mind.
It was February, 2016. I was on the edge of a cliff in Bears Ears National Monument. To be more precise, I had gone there with a southwestern backcountry writer of note, a wiry man from Paonia who smoked weed all day non-stop, and a river guide. We had found a narrow pathway between fallen boulders that included a jump-or-die scenario to get our personhoods onto a finger-like plateau that jutted from the normally undulating cliffband. This entry was an exceptional way for the natives of the area, a thousand years ago or so, to defend their home, and that’s what we found out there. A native American community in decline by about a thousand or two years. Kiva. Grain storage. Water storage. And an incredible lookout about 60’ below the top of the plateau, notched into the soft band of the layer cake that is southwestern geology. That band? About 300’ off the ground. We had to crawl a crumbling dirt slope above a certain-death fall to get there, and we sat in this little hovel, stone built, on the edge of the world. And we weren’t even the first to discover it. There was a man’s name and his initials carved into the soft sandstone over the doorway. And the date scrawled in was 1935. None of us died getting down there and all of us almost died getting back. But we saw shit. We looked out the window of that 36 sqft station and saw more miles than I can count.
Later that night, after we ate our food and I stuffed myself into my sleeping bag with all my clothes on because it was so goddamn cold and none of us packed warm enough gear, so I pulled the drawstring of my bag tight to my face so that my eyes, nose, and mouth stuck out. Wait, I skipped a step. I had a small bottle of weed tincture…
Sorry, my son just texted me and I took the time to text back. He wanted me to know he was making our chicken burrito recipe and we talked about ingredients and other shit and I told him that I lobed him (it’s an inside joke to say lobe instead of love) and that he was a beautiful human being. In case I don’t make it through the night, you know? I might not.
Was about to get back to the story but just kidding. Had to take another break because he called me to ask about the chicken. And then he had a small yelling match with his step dad about getting more green chile. But! He texted me after the phone call and said, “Thank you for the advice.” My life is complete.
Anyway, I shot myself full of this tincture, not knowing the dose. And I got all cozied up in the bag, my face the only exposed flesh. And when you are out there where we were, which is a place that’s far from places that are hard to get to, so it’s really far out there, there are no lights. And it was a clear and cold night and the milky way came out right overhead. And I shook and shivered in my underinsulated den but I watched space. And it was the first time I realized that I was on a spaceship. That I was still, held to the ground, feeling motionless, but I was on a spaceship zinging through space and that the window seat I was in at the moment was fucking brilliant.
I’m having déjà vu right now, but I’ll keep going. The brain zaps from quitting the antidepressants cold turkey are fucking killing me.
So this spaceship I’m on, in that moment, made sense. But now, as I’m writing to you, TNY, it makes less and more sense simultaneously. See, I’m falling. You’re falling. Every person you have ever known is falling. All the Himalayan cattle, the flamingos, the lobsters, the plateau I was sleeping on, this bar top, my sister out with her son looking of monkeyshines, all the bullets fired in the civil war, Pablo Escobar’s body as it was laid in front of those men that killed him, my boy Chuck, dinosaurs that had fat and other things we don’t know about because they don’t fossilize, the Taco Bell I hope to eat later tonight, my dead brother, now and when he was alive, and Ben, always always always Ben. See, the earth stops us from falling. But we are falling toward the center of it all the time, on this here spaceship. We are stopped from falling in this place by a crust. But this place? It’s not stopped. It’s falling. It’s falling toward the sun. We are falling at about 67,000 miles per hour. So when I was up there on that ledge, before the wind came in later than night and brought the sideways snow and cold that almost killed me, when it was just still and beautiful and I saw out my window in my window seat, I was travelling 67,000 miles an hour. Falling, really. Not travelling. Just falling linearly with speed. And that sun? It’s falling. It’s falling toward Sagittarius A* at about 450,000 miles per hour. So that you can maybe, maybe, understand how big this all is, it takes about 230 million years to do one lap around Sagittarius A*. And that super massive black hole? It’s orbiting something. But they don’t know what other than the mass of the other galaxies and their mass, all of them dancing around for 13.6 billion years. And there are too many galaxies to count, all swirling around, falling toward the same thing, which is this thing called gravity created by mass and it’s bending of spacetime and there are so many unanswered questions it hurts to talk about.
And in the middle of all of those objects with mass and movement, there’s fucking nothing. There is literally nothing holding all this up. There’s a fucking vacuum and huge objects are hurling themselves around other huge objects and we can’t, for the life of any of us, understand why any of this is doing this. Just that it does, and we can predict, to some degree, how it does it, but not why it started or where it came from. Did you know that until April 2019, we had not been able to get an image of a black hole? We only knew they existed because we could see how they affected the things around them. Like wind here on earth. No one can see wind with their eyes. We can only visually perceive it by how it interacts with other things. And this is reminding me of the Parker Probe, which we shot at our own sun. The sound of it is wild. Because they didn’t use microphones to record it. They recorded the changes in plasma waves, the oscillations, and added sound to each frequency, then the computer spit out audio that sounded like a fucking tornado here on earth. Guys, this is all happening while you sit here taking a shit.
Also, at the micro level, there is more space between the components of an atom than there are physically measurable parts of an atom. Like the distance between the nucleus and the electrons is massive at that small scale. And atoms make up molecules. And molecules make up us. There is more space between the atoms that make up us than solid matter.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know where I live. Like I live. I don’t know where I came from. I don’t know where I’m going. I know that I’m getting there by falling, but that I’m mostly dead space between spaces, so I’m not really anything at all. That we, whatever we is, is mostly nothing and the universe is mostly nothing. Like, if we took off right now in one direction in space, we’d likely never hit anything because it’s all so far apart, and if we shrunk down super fucking small, like tiny tiny, we could take a magic school bus ride through me and we’d also never hit anything.
Nothing. Nothing is holding this all up and nothing is holding it all together. It’s just a series of balls (balls because that’s what gravity makes almost everything) that are attracted or not attracted to each other. Go down as far as you like. Go up too. It’s the same in every direction.
Okay, maybe I’m getting to a point here. Maybe. What I’m trying to say is that in all that shit that no one thinks about and just expects is happening, because they have so much other shit to worry about, I, ME, exists. The filaments of my consciousness just appeared. And I’m sitting here typing this shit to you. And you don’t even know. That what is me, my ephemera, is not quantifiable by the laws of nature. It cannot be weighed or measured, unless it’s those 21.3 grams from MacDougall’s study, which is unverified. I don’t exist. You don’t exist. No one has ever existed. But this feels real, right? This feels solid and you can plan around it?
No. We are space being flung through space with illusions as gravity.
Also, my son just texted me a picture of the finished product and it looks great. Chicken burritos!
The reality, the thing I’m trying to talk about, is that I’m electrical signals that are misfiring inside meat that’s mostly air (when I say air here I mean the absence of matter) on a planet that is mostly air as it flies through a solar system of mostly air and that system is flying through a galaxy that’s mostly air and that’s swirling around the idea of spacetime that’s mostly air. Nothing is holding us together. Nothing is holding me together. Other than mass. And in all of that amazing wonder, I exist and have thoughts and can type to you now.
And this ephemera fell for a girl. And this ephemera understands that nothing exists and it’s all just a wild illusion. But I had the free will to fall. To fall…knowingly. And I fucking fell. And it was bad and painful and terrible and I don’t fucking care. I don’t care from sun up to sun down and I don’t care in my sleep. I don’t care if everyone says no. I don’t care if she says no. I’m operating with a different set of rules here, as you can see. I don’t care that I’m now suffering through what’s colloquially call the brain zaps. I don’t care that they are giving me twitches like Tourette’s. I don’t care that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t care that the medicine doesn’t work and I don’t care to try more. I don’t care that people are worried about me. I don’t care that when I move my head my face gets jolts of overwhelming feeling, like power surges. I don’t care that when she unblocked me she didn’t talk to me. I don’t care that every fucking thing says do something different.
Me? I care about what this fucking unmeasurable ephemera says. It cannot be sway by opinion, podcasts, books, friends, family, editors, gravity, strangers, balls of matter, supermassive black holes, regular black holes for that matter, planets, slugs, pickles, stinky fingers, Jesus or any of his disciples, literature, food poisoning, or my son at 5 years old telling me a little girl showed him her front butt. I, me, am not mass. I’m an idea. And that means spacetime has no hold over me. I will not be told what I’m doing is insane, especially from people who subscribe to normalcy. Especially by people who don’t understand the scope. Especially by anyone or anything that doesn’t understand that we are free because we exist outside the laws of physics.
I am free. I am free of all of your other human bullshit. Me, the idea of me, is only tethered here in this body of mass in this universe of mass, but my identity is not bound by anything or anyone.
And that, J, that is what I’m fucking talking about. That is what is in love with you and always will be. It cannot be contained by the simplicity of this society. It cannot be defined or measured or packed into a tidy box. It will not accept your currency or any currency. It will not bow to anything other than maybe the wind, another invisible culprit. It won’t be started nor stopped. It will only always be. That energy was here before anyone got here and it will be here after we are all gone. It cannot be destroyed. It is akin to quantum entanglement, at that level. That’s what we did. And it cannot be undone. Nor should it. How parochial to think that love is anything different than that. How quaint. How fucking human. How much everyone complicates it. How even Einstein let it go, could not define it. How…in my art I say that all things I make should resolve unto themselves, be complete, but whole and fair and create no questions they cannot answer…how much like that my love is.
Of course I’m alone.
Of course I’m isolated.
Of course this is how I’ll end.
What are people even doing anymore? Why is anyone doing anything that isn’t this? Why would I want to live in a world where simple people try to define the undefinable?
I’ve gotta go. The brain zaps are on top of me. I can’t move without waves of horror. Or glory. My electricity is on the rise. Who knows what can happen.
But remember, I lobe you. I lobe all of you more than you can ever know. Because I cannot contain it in these words. And I’m good at these words. They just fail to create a feeling as big as I need to do to tell you how much I lobe you all. And the more I understand it, the more it kills me. When I wake up I try to hold you all in my mind for what is always the briefest moment. I cry. Every day. Because you’re all so astonishing. The way you touch each other’s faces, plan quinceañeras, adopt dogs, make food and drink for each other, in the quiet moments express your deepest fears and then cuddle, kill one another for reasons or no but damage the child inside you to do so, drink yourself to death, make Art, hold your children’s hands, jump for no reason, sing when no singing is wanted, lie to save yourselves, show a new love you are interested by putting both hands in your back pockets and smiling with your head cocked to the right, hold the hands of those that die on you too soon, eat drunken street tacos and talk about bad tv and stay up all night, ride horses and feel their bodies beneath you, cut your parent’s cancer hair off, take giant loans out that you can’t pay back because you need to buy new farm equipment, believe and believe and believe. You guys always believe. So much. Whether it comes true or not. Your belief is agonizingly beautiful. You believe that you are, when all evidence says you aren’t. That’s a fucking miracle and I lobe you for it forever and ever amen.
And none of you exist. You live in bodies made of elements that are mostly space as you fly through space and you, the you you are, it’s nothing.
God what a fucking place this is. I’m happy I got to spend time here. It’s astonishingly beautiful. I cannot…
I cannot…
Lobe, forever and always.
Nick
