March 3rd, 2025 - Keuka Lake
Dear TNY,
I’m one day late and writing to you from the laundromat in Fruita, CO, having just finished a 3000+ mile roadtrip and I just read “Keuka Lake”.
Dumb. Fucked. Terrible. F.
The intro tries to hook us via curiosity and/or intrigue, but as more information spills out around the disappearance, the less interesting it gets. I thought maybe he did, truly, disappear. Nope. He was driving away, doing something he wouldn’t normally be doing and got hit by a car and died. So I’m trying to feel for Nadia but then she starts spiraling, thinking he was murdered by the man in the truck, and riffs on how no one needs trucks as they are murder cars, mostly driven by men, and then she decides that she wants to kill people, but only mean people, she steals a puzzle piece, she tries to track down an old flame, and then she lies to his secretary about needing a P.I. to investigate her husband’s “disappearance” and “murder”, but not before telling this secretary that she, Nadia, wants to, yes, you guessed it, kill people. Then nothing fucking happens at the end. Sorry, I’ll be more specific. She doesn’t hire the woman, and the seasons change. The seasons fucking change, guys. Boy howdy! I cried so fucking hard when the seasons changed.
Oh, and somewhere in the middle another widow talks about how dating men in their 50s, 60s, and 70s is terrible because they are all bad lovers and then proceeds to shit on men for all the reasons why they are bad lovers. Which, I love a generalization. I’m just guessing here, but Julio Iglesias was that age once and fucked like 20,000 women. They must have been coming back for something. So there’s my single piece of evidence to prove your blanket statement wrong. Also, I have friends of that age who are married and have very happy wives. In fact, I dated a woman once whose grandfather was insatiable and wonderful in bed, according to her grandmother. And he contracted diabetes late in life and lost his leg and was even MORE insatiable after that, again according to the grandmother, which was both a blessing and curse because it was phenomenal sex but there was so much of it. So there’s two pieces of evidence, more than enough to refute the widow’s generalized statement.
Oh, there were orangutans and a speeding ticket. It’s so fucked. There’s nothing to bond with in this. It’s just so fucking stupid.
Wait.
Here’s the only good sentence (in reference to snow): The flakes are as grand and as intricate as shuttlecocks.
That’s it. The rest was a waste of human effort.
Also, maybe this guy wanted to fucking disappear from his killer wife and he got in an accident and his shot at freedom vanished like a fart in the wind. Who knows.
Who cares.
I recently drove through my hometown. It was surreal to say the least. I was coming up from Gallup, NM, across the rez, and I dropped into Farmington, NM from atop the NAPI. Strangely, I never memorized this place aerially, like I have every other place I lived, because this was pre-online mapping programs. But no maps were needed. I knew where I was going by spirit and heart. I took Piñon Blvd through the industrial area and past the hospital where both my sisters were born, where my father was diagnosed with and treated for and eventually died from esophageal cancer; I continued until heading east on San Juan Blvd, through the intersection where Terry and I ran from the police in two different test drive cars from the dealer down the road (and got away); further still past Reilly’s where my father worked for a time, but his boss threw a gasoline soaked rag onto my father’s welding rod while he was running a bead, which immediately burst into flame, causing a small explosion that almost resulted in my father falling off the platform they had rigged on the gantry crane, him, quitting on the fucking spot; I turned right onto Main, past the old Sack N Save warehouse where we bought our roasted green chile every fall, and past the mall and the secret entrance to the stormdrain system underneath, myself and my friends having used a hydraulic bottle jack to dislodge the grating so we could walked, hunched over, in an oxygen deprived environment for over a half mile, in the dark with weak flashlights, hoping to find devil worshipers or a skinwalker horde, but mostly getting claustrophobic and having headaches from lack of oxygen; just past that was a metal cross with my brother’s name spelled out in letters torch-cut by my father, the whole cross painted white, stuck in the ground between a Dollar General and some other store I didn’t recognize, neither of which were there when our boy Alejandro mowed down said brother and a bud named David, me thinking about how the last time I was there my mother was forcing me to pray after I got yelled at by cops because I had collected my dying bro’s shoes from the bushes, the vehicle having blown them off; past that to the furthest bus stop on our route as kids, a wholesaler of earthmoving machines, where Cameron’s family had taken a savage hit, his father driving his two brothers to that stop to meet the bus but a vehicle from oncoming traffic veered, jumped through the culvert, and landed with its grill in their windshield, killing Cameron’s father and one brother and leaving the other brother brain damaged and dependent on caretakers for life; further down the road, the same one that my high school crush used to drive me to school on, right by the spot she got pulled over and cried her way out of a ticket; on by the Vanilla Moose, having moved locations from its original one, where there was a koi pond with a little bridge and even though my family was broke as fuck we would occasionally stop there for soft serve on the way back from a small adventure and if we were really lucky they would give us a quarter and we could buy kibble to feed the fishies; into Aztec past that money savin’ bridge that leads to my high school, a place of a million stories, but also the site of a school shooting in 2017 in which a neo-Nazi shot two students and then himself; along down the road past the bus stops of my small childhood, most notably Jared Harris’ stop, a kid whom no group took in, a wild and dirty child who seemed impervious to pain, once coming out with us into the cliffs behind the high school and we watched him jump off a cliff over 20ft in height into a pile of loose dirt holding its angle of repose, slamming so hard his thrift store Nike Air pockets both exploded; right on past his stop until the corn fields of my neighbor when I was six, she was also six, where my brother and I ventured over during the field flooding and all of us sunk up to our waist in the mud and none but my brother could get free, him running home to fetch my mother, both arriving shortly thereafter and, as I got extracted, my pants and shoes stayed behind and there I was in front of that six year old girl in my now filthy tighty-whiteys, replete with the yellow stain in the front from piss, so I wriggled out of my mother’s arms and ran all the way home, crying, wishing the neighbor girl hadn’t seen me; and I then turned the van right at the sign for the Cedar Hill Cemetery and meandered the dirt road maze to the plateau above, pulling into the small, dusty and crusty cemetery, one gravel road looping its way around, which I followed to find that directly across from my brother’s and my father’s grave was a large, sweaty man in a micro bull dozer expanding the lot northward, noisily, such that when I got out to convene with my dead, all that could be heard was that CAT diesel grunting its way through the bone-dry soil, so I chit-chatted those two fellas up, not nearly as sad as I thought I would be, laughing often, and left a micro-machine that my brother owned as a child as well putting a Chuck sticker on the back of my father’s grave; I even took the time to dump a smidge of Ben’s ashes between my guys, introduced them as I did, and then went to places up the road.
Was I sad? Yes. But not as much as I thought. Those people, they aren’t places for me. I carry their ghosts around with me so I don’t need the place. Driving through that area felt like driving through a miasma of ghosts, though, which was peculiar. Not in a bad way. Just a way.
I say all that to say I believe the shrink is right. I really have processed all of this trauma in mostly healthy ways. I miss them and that makes me sad. But I don’t deny what happened nor do I blame myself. Life just happens. To all of us.
I have since got to Durango and then this morning drove all the way up to Fruita and hung with both of my kids today. Got to play a round of disc golf with my oldest. It was grand.
That’s probably all bad writing, what I just wrote. But whatever. It’s what happened. And now I’m going to set up camp and relax. Tomorrow I fly out to New York to dig out a special lady’s sister from snowpocalypse and I hope I don’t get hurt and we accomplish our mission. But who knows? All I know is I’m on brand and on the mission and that’s got to be the right move.
Anyway, later.
Nick
