January 27th, 2025 - The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea
Dear TNY,
“The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea” is cockamamie baby fingers.
First things first, a little tech complaint. You’ve made it harder to get my stories for free every month. I tried half-heartedly to get past the paywall today, but quickly switched to a new browser, Safari, and it worked fine. But that bitch-ass browser doesn’t allow for full copy and paste so I had to do it in chunks. Upsetting. I hope I won’t have to do that often. Anyway, fix your shit so I don’t have to go through hoops anymore. Because I’m certainly not buying a subscription. Wait. Better yet, just give me a subscription and I’ll keep doing these pointless critiques until an untimely death at the hands of marauders on the Steppe in Outer Mongolia.
Secondly, I changed up my listening tunes to Ólafur Arnalds. If you haven’t yet, wrap your ears around his business. It’s like living inside love, but also swimming through the melancholy that comes along with love, to the true seers anyway. The melancholy that’s predicated by the truth that someday it, the love, will end, and that end could be death decades in the future or it could be next week when she says she can’t tolerate the shit splatters on the underside of the toilet seat anymore. But the end of this love, this life, can be beautiful. Because that’s the price to pay for existing. For everything. Rocks. Air. Stars. Face mites that fuck on our cheeks while we sleep. These bodies, in that our consciousness will leave them one day but that they will also die, the vessels themselves, decaying and feeding things just beginning. Everything ever is always dying. And it’s fucking sad. Yes it is. I ache for those I’ve lost, both lives and loves, but some days I get access to a pocket in my brain that is free from distilled sadness and is only made of the complexity of full-value love that knows it was a wonderful privilege to have met them at all. To have lived at all. To have paid the price for existing the moment I came to be, just like those that have passed, that price being an inevitable death. That’s how Òlafur Arnalds’ music feels.
Onto the story. Firstly, what fucking war are we talking about? These kids are writing letters, not emails or texts, so it seems old. I was thinking WWII maybe? And they have anglo-ish names, so I thought they would be from the U.K. This fact also backs the WWII theory. Plus the name of the girls’ school seem English. St. Alwynn, amiright? All U.K. and old. But then we have some kid who was always wearing headphones? And “Prince songs” were mentioned? So what fucking war is this? Because if it is WWII (which I don’t think it can be) then the U boats would have blown their asses up. And if it’s now, why would they be communicating with letters? But the big takeaway is why don’t I have these answers? Why am I asking fucking questions, huh?
Bad. Writing.
On the subject of headphones, she called the dude a technophobe. So why the fuck was he wearing headphones? Lame.
Also, and my favorite, ruby-dark sea. One, it makes no fucking sense. The sea isn’t ruby colored or ruby-dark. Unless you are colorblind. This is possible and has been explored extensively by many historians and medical researchers. How do I know this? Because our late homeboy Homer used the phrase “wine-dark sea” in The Iliad. And people have been speculating about the lack of “blue” in his epic, especially because much of the journey involved a massive blue body on this here earth, the sea, that he describes as wine-dark. I say all that to say this shit is a fucking ripoff and it’s upsetting. Get your fucking act together.
Next, and this isn’t an issue, I just think it’s funny. Ghislaine isn’t a common name in the U.S., but it has become a little more noteworthy on the heels of the Epstein filth. I can’t remember if this was a comedy video I watched or a conversation I had, but I’m going to lean toward conversation. So the POV will be that it was a conversation I had, don’t sue me if I’m wrong. I was talking to a guy recently who told me that he had a girl on his team named Ghislaine. And he heard her pronounce it once and promptly forgot about it. So he didn’t know how to pronounce her name. I think I told him it was gill-ane. He said that’s what he thought, but he couldn’t shake that maybe it was jizz-lane, but that would be absurd. And he didn’t ask her or anyone for months because he was embarrassed. So he hired another employee and asked them to ask her name when they met her because he couldn’t remember. New employee came back with data. Jizz-lane. I thought that shit was so funny. Hell, this could have been a dream. Or a TV show. Or me actually having this conversation. Parts of my brain are Swiss-cheesed up so I can’t remember right now. Anyway, I can not NOT think of that when I see that name. So I chuckled throughout this piece.
And finally, nitpicking aside, this story is fucking dumb. It’s a pointless parade of unmemorable characters grappling with adult feelings with barely a backdrop of this ruby-dark sea and, even further away, wartime and sock knitting. And oh yes, philandering and boys writing letters to multiple girls. It’s not fucking anything. Girls cheat. Guys cheat. Sometimes we never cheat. Sometimes we always cheat. Sometimes there is war, and sometimes not. Sometimes we are on boats and sometimes we never get on a boat. Sometimes we fret over lovers (see: me) and sometimes we don’t. None of this shit matters if you don’t write it well. And that’s what we have here. Real shit that happens without any real depth or meaning or beauty. It’s just a story. Like any story. It’s pabulum for the masses. And it makes me want to use, as an argument, this scene from The Gentleman, the Guy Ritchie Movie. Here it is, I’ll explain the significance and/or connection below:
(Scene opens with Coach waiting in line for food at a burger joint and four youths walk in, seemingly a gang, and demand service).
Coach: What's the smell of wee in here?
Youth 1: The fuck is this joke, man?
Coach: Don't stand near me son. You got your mouthwash muddled up with cat piss. Take two steps back and wait your turn.
Youth 1: Fuck off old man, or I’ll wet you.
Coach: The only thing you can wet’s your underpants, son. Now, back two steps.
(The youths talk shit and then Youth 1 pulls a knife and tries to stab Coach, who slaps the knife out of his hand with ease).
Coach: Now if you’re going to stab, stab, Trigger. Don’t, you know, dance. What are yous, like a Four Tops tribute act or something? The foreskins! The redskins! Whoa, whoa, whoa, here come the indians! Bit of the old northern soul, is it boys? Putting the gay back in Marvin Gaye? I'm on fire over here, lads. Come on, I need some back and forth. Come on. What do you got for me? What do you got for me? Now make it quick. Make it funny.
Youth 1: Fuck. You.
Coach: Geez, that's disappointing. No, no, not that. Go again. Go again. Now make it sharp. Cut me with it.
(All four pull out knives and close in on Coach, who still has his hands in his pockets, they are all talking shit).
Youth 2: Fucking do him, lad. Fucking do him.
(They charge Coach and he slaps them about, disarming them all as if it was nothing).
Coach: Yous are embarrassing yourself here, lads. Kids stab. Girls shoot. Boys punch. Grownups fight with their heads. That's where the real battle is. Up here, in the gray. And wake up, lads. Life’s quick, you're slow. Life’s hard on the bonetop. Come on down the gym. Let's see what we can do with yous.
End scene.
Now, why did this story remind me of this scene? Because you, TNY, are the youth gang. You have so much ego, so much self-importance, so much bluster, and a gang of fellas there to support your actions, even if they are fucking dumb. Which they are. Yet the coach, he sees right through all the superficial posturing. He sees the real battle. And he’s trying to get them to see it, but they are bitches, just like you. Because like the youths, your stories don’t make it sharp. They don’t cut me. And that’s really frustrating. Because that’s your fucking job. Your job is to change the empathy level on planet earth so that it’s a better place. And you continue to muddle your mouthwash up with cat piss. It’s terribly disappointing.
Now, am I right in this scenario? Am I the coach? I don’t think so. There are many more well-versed at literature than I am. I’m just vocal. And chaotic. And stubborn. And driven. And I believe. God do I believe in so many things. The power of writing being right up there at the top.
You know what else I believed in? The jewelry box. It is, essentially, done. I sat alone in my mind palace and I designed a thing. It changed a lot, sure. But that’s great. Because the changes were all on the fly. None lessened the quality. In fact, most of them increased the quality and the detail. But I’m finding now that the box is winding down, and people are finally starting to see pictures of things that I talked about so passionately months ago, they are beyond staggered by the spectacle I have created. And I’ve started receiving comments. “I never imagined it would be this beautiful,” or “my God, that’s astonishing,” or, “Holy shit it’s fucking spectacular, I can’t believe you made all of that,” or insert your own variation on that. What I’m hearing is that I did something that no one else could see or do. So they expected something different. Likely lesser. And I don’t take that as an insult to me, actually. I think it’s more Curtis White’s The Middle Mind. All of these people have been conditioned to believe that things like this can’t be done, so that’s what they think. They are beyond the realm of people skills. And that may be true. The world, mostly, seems to have lost its way. Particularly in America. But I don’t concern myself with these things. I took the challenge knowing full well what it would be and I could see it clearly the whole time. Now, I see it as, “Make one mistake-riddled jewelry box (which, if I’m honest, is in the 90th percentile of perfect but is by no means perfect and was a huge experiment that I’m glad worked out, but it’s not fucking OH MY GOD or anything) and put more empathy back into the world, one person at a time.” I can’t fix everything. But I can make people feel seen and heard and beautiful (one small caveat here: one person doesn’t believe that, and that’s okay because that’s not definitive, it’s a lack of information on her part and I can’t change that if she chooses not to talk to me; you can’t work shit out if you don’t work at all). So it’s me, then, that is the anomaly. I was told it was unusual. That’s the best word I think I’ve heard so far. Unusual. To see something done like this.
And that’s what I’m thinking about right now. Unusual. I’m unusual. And the consensus, its mindset is squarely the usual. So I’m outside that pocket. I saw a shitty little apothecary chest and I turned it into what most are saying is functional art. Maybe even Art. Because, and this is the part that I do believe when others tell me, I have the vision. I can see forward in time, back in time, take things apart, put them back together, change them, blow them up and stitch them back again, I can do all of that with objects that exist. And with things that don’t exist, like this box. I’m not limited by what I have seen with my eyes, but by what I can see with my mind. And that vision extends further from objects. It’s just math sometimes, predicting behaviors, particularly human. I predicted she would talk to me in January. In September. I predicted my undoing in 2012. I predicted what would happen to me in Hawai’i the day I landed in February of 2023. I have predicted many of the pockets of time that my ex-wife possesses. Fuck, I predicted how Amazon would approach a problem they had me work on for two years before I quit, and I got a call two years later by a former employee and she said, “their plan failed and they are moving on to yours; the documents still have your name on them.” I predicted what would happen when I left San Diego and that was verified two weeks later. I don’t have a gift. It’s just data, behavior, and reading and listening to a lot of people’s stories about their lives. We are all very similar. Most of us believe in beauty and truth and doing right, but we get petty and broken and selfish and the band keeps on playing. But if you look really closely, you too can see the apothecary box and envision the art within. You just have to stop thinking about you and all your other shit. Make it about the box. Make it about The Wizard of Kindnesses’ library. Make it about your partner’s orgasm instead of your own. Make it about this fucking unbelievable symphony of beauty that you are surrounded by all day, every day, instead of your own shit. I fail at that, boy howdy. But I try.
So, I was unblocked. We talked for a day or so, approximately ten messages. I was blocked again after a severe miscommunication. Which is unfortunate. But that’s the jam. There’s no working it out. Just absence and silence. The theme I’m struck with right now is “continuing to make space out of a deep sense of love for the both of us.”
There are three people in every couple. Me, you, and the third. The Us we make. And the more I thought about that phrase, the more sad I got. Sure I passed through anger and frustration. But I’m now solidly in deep, deep sadness. Because, in the sense of that unnamed and incorrect US Army Major in Vietnam said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” That ain’t how love works. That’s how war works. To heal herself, she actively chooses to destroy me and the Us. It works for one person, I get it. It will lead to healing for her. It won’t heal me. And it won’t heal Us.
I wish she could see the jewelry box like I see it. The vision. To see forward and backward in time. To manipulate the objects, the timelines, the trajectories of narrative that flow around me like water in a stream. I wish anyone could. I’ve become so alone. Isolated. I have found myself not even wanting to tell stories anymore. My experience seems to be more of a hindrance for me than helpful. I once hired a woman at Amazon that had a Ph.D. and my question to her, before we hired her, was, “You’re overqualified for this job; how do I know that you aren’t going to run off and take the next thing you get?” She said, “I thought about leaving that off of my resume because every interview I’ve had has said I was overqualified and now I’m unemployable.” Hired her on the spot in 2013. She still works there today.
I’m just so exhausted with this world. You guys want it one way and you are getting it. Who am I to stand up to that? Why would you listen?
Well, from now on I’m going to try to not talk about that relationship anymore. It is clear. You don’t choose me. Heard, chef. This is…wait for it…the most substantial heartbreak of my life. Because it goes against how I believe the world actually works. Like, this is an act of defiance against the plan. That is no longer up to me, though.
I have been listening to a lot of podcasts about math and science lately. And I got into one recently that made me cry for hours after it was over. Not because it was sad. But because I felt seen. It was about the idea of mathematics and the rules we made to make math work. See, I thought that math just worked. But no. Math, the rules, all the little players within, they operate on some fundamental principles that we made up. All equations have to work backward and forward. Collapse and expand to the same places every time. And logic has to function. But under those rules there’s one very simple equation that cannot be pushed. In fact, we just don’t do it. Older calculators, the kind with paper and clacky-type buttons, they will meltdown if you put it in. And that is any integer, any number, divided by 0. Because the answer, as close as we can guess it, is infinity. But infinity isn’t a number. It’s all numbers. It’s the type of infinity that exists between 1 and 2. And the type that continues off into the ever expanding horizon. And, it can’t work backward and forward. Because if you did happen to solve it, then you be saying that solution multiplied by 0 is…what? 0. So any number you punch in at the start will expand to infinity, but can only become 0 after that, if you retrace your steps. And if 1 divided by 0 is infinity and 2 divided by 0 is infinity then that means that 1 must equal 2. So it’s all infinity.
Now we are getting into unified theory here. Which is that all things are one. Not 1, but one. Like, if every value is the same, then everything is the same. Which is what I’ve been writing about all along. That all of this is the same thing. It’s what we—what I—call Love. That mathematics, as a tool, can be discrete and differentiate and be lovely and helpful (did you know that children know math at birth, but only logarithmically, like they can’t tell 9 from 10 but they can tell 10 from 20 and 1 from 2, and this was backed in tribes that don’t contact the civilized world and how they count, because they don’t use numbers, they use logarithms; mathematics is a tool that humans have imposed upon ourselves to help us understand the world but it is not our innate relationship with the coding of the world). Unification requires that you leave the rules of mathematics behind and you try to find the unifying factor in us all. That all of this, it’s all one. That I am you and you are that rock and that rock is this pinball machine and it’s all from the same place. I don’t believe in religion, but I do believe that something is out there that asked this to be. Whatever this is. And that’s what I look for every time I sit down to write. It’s what I look for in human behavior and jewelry boxes and mugs and spoons and dancing and whisperfucking and music and trying to trick my nephew Kleeze into believing the dirtman is real, and my old 1969 beetle and his owner now, a lady by the name of Sunshine up in Alaska and how she used to keep the chickens in her titties all winter long, and the Philly cheesesteak I had yesterday, and the way that when J touched my arm in August of 2023 I felt the streams of consciousness tighten around me, which you may not even see but trust me they are there, the filaments of this business snaking around me, you, and all of us, tightened…fucking straightlined…and the all of the future played out, all the moments, a million possibilities amongst billions of them, all vibrating (unified string theory, bro!) and I knew I was home and all I wanted to do was make it work. It’s all the same thing, guys. We spend so much time these days picking sides on everything. Trying to be unique. Fucking unusual. But it’s all the fucking same thing. Almost no one, on their deathbed, says, fuck it, I want to be alone. Like how do we find each other here? How is it that we know? Like, we fucking know. Sure, we can talk about dopamine dumps and our body trying to eat and reproduce, but the reality is that there’s something behind all of this that is unanswerable. That’s why I write. That’s why mathematicians keep looking further. That’s why they don’t do anything divided by 0. Because they know that leads to a place of not knowing. Why do you think humans have been telling the same stories over and over again? Why do you think that most religions share common tenets? Why do you think Jung found the Collective Unconscious? It’s one thing. And I call it Love. And I have it, so much of it. I’m overwhelmed by it. Consumed. Awestruck. Giddy. Terrified. Filled with wonder.
But, we aren’t meant to do this alone. There is no alone. There is only Us. We know what we are supposed to do. It doesn’t come from external prodding, consumerism or zeitgeist or fads or fucking social media. It comes from within. What you need to do is in your gut. Always has been. All of us have had that feeling, made choices, and knew something was happening.
So that’s why I’m sad. That’s why I cried in the podcast. Because math is trying to find the same thing Einstein was that I am that Van Gogh was that Keith Haring was that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was that Faulkner talked about in his Nobel speech that Jesus preached about that Allah promises that Jung documented that Homer spoke of that the whales likely sing about that tiny seeds buried in the ground know how to execute on in their fucking cells, at the genome protein production level, that fungi across the earth listen to, that migratory animals feel in their bones, that our dreams connect to and disconnect to every night, that my father’s face in that sunset light in the high desert of Colorado…it’s my face and it's my son’s face and it’s your fucking face and it was Napoleon’s face before that and that beaver that my father baited with corn behind the house when I was a kid to shoot it because the dams were flooding the yard, and it’s Macklin, yes Wizard, it’s Macklin, at that house at two years old on the Christmas tree farm saying that it was calling to him. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. And it makes it all make sense.
Goddamn am I losing my mind. Or maybe I’m getting closer to getting it. The closer I get to death, the more it makes sense, that’s for sure.
Regardless, for me, I cannot understand the universe or fix what’s happening here on planet earth. I know my reach is limited. My mom would say I have short arms, as she once referred to herself as having when she reached out to Bill Fucking Cosby, pre rapelord, to try to promote her book. Saying he had long arms. So what I can do is live as art. And hopefully one day live as Art. Who knows? It’s a lofty fucking goal. But what else are we supposed to do here?
What I know, J, is this:
I choose you.
I choose Us.
You choose you, which is not me and not Us.
I choose to fight for it.
You do not.
Understood, deeply, that this is your course. I will acquiesce. I’ll make it about you. Again.
I wish it wasn’t the case. But this is what has happened in this modern world that eschews unification and seeks individuality and uniqueness. But, according to math and love and all the gods and the way that carrots deathscream to the other carrots and that trees talk to each other and salmon make the calcium for them to keep doing so in this neck of the woods…and how dividing by 0 makes everything one fucking beautiful thing, one secret thing, one tiny kernel at the center of all of this…a vote for me, from you, is a vote for you. And vice versa. We could bend infinity. We could ride this stream, as we have, every time we’ve been here before and all the times we’ll be here after. Just a thought. Sorry about the miscommunication.
Fuck, I cannot be sane at this point. My brain is fucking fucked. But, some early mornings when I fall asleep and dream before I have to wake up, I go to the place. The place. It’s really great. And I wish I could get more time there. But there is here. So maybe I should stay longer, wherever I am.
I’ll try to be like Coach with this shit. Even at the end, after he swarmed the youth, he still invited them back to the gym to see what he could do with them.
Another week in the books. More bullshit to go.
Nick
