October 30th, 2023 - Upstate
Dear TNY,
I’m writing this shit on a Monday (recently that’s been more difficult to accomplish) and the story you gave me was “Upstate”.
And it’s fucking trash, baby!
What a tale of beige, upper-class, white problems. Oh the tension, TNY! You have the mistress and her older man, his divorce and their secret no longer a secret. His older children being snotty and doing rich, white things. And the MC and her man stay at an AirBnB or VRBO, somewhere quaint where they encounter problems that aren’t real fucking problems at all, like restaurants closed on Mondays, the vacation rental manager appearing on the property, sleeping a little too long in the evening because they drank too much, etc. Honestly, the most realistic detail in this whole piece is when she bleeds on the rug a little bit while they are fucking and then they try to clean it off. It’s a problem you never see in literature but you do see in real life, so I welcomed it. Everything else? Straight fucking shit.
Oh, and the descriptions in this are trying too hard. They are too clever to be taken seriously. The one about the Garbage Pail Kids really got me. Because the paragraph of information following the Kids bit did not in any way describe those Kids. I mean, that’s such a vivid and unique product line, how could you fuck it up? Aeons? Everyone says eons. Get out. Like a dog’s mouth? Fuck out of here already. Collecting garbage in garbage? A nesting doll of trash? This fucking story is a nesting doll of trash.
And the end with the hammock snapping and the ambulance and the AirBnB lady being more of a concern than Paul’s issues? It’s just so fucking terrible. This sounds like some shit that the author wrote that either 1) happened to her or someone she knew or 2) was an idea she had at an AirBnB so she wrote it down and thought: I’m fucking great at this writing thing. Nah, bruh. This is a dickmeat sandwich.
I know I’ve written a hundred letters that sound like this. So I will likely start wrapping it up. This is just another example of an author who thinks they are precious writing a story which is so fucking boring I could die, and you, TNY, publishing it to sell books for the publishing house. None of this matters. You aren’t pushing an artform. You are wasting everyone’s time. One more New York story about boring fucking New York people doing boring New York shit and complaining about the most mundane problems on planet earth. Way to First World it, baby!
Just so that you are 100% clear, I don’t think anyone will care about Kate, Paul, the rental, the rental lady, or really anyone else. The one person I had any feelings at all for was Paul’s ex-wife, and my feelings were: I’m glad she got rid of this douche and I hope she got everything. But, now that I’m thinking about it, I think she is likely also a waste of space because of how shitty her son was and how superficial she allowed her daughter to be. Fucking lamecakes all around.
In the meantime, I went to a Burning Man event this last weekend, but more like Burning Man light. It was a learning experience to be sure. And…I’m okay with that. I learned a lot about myself. I was a brave boy. And, while heavily drugged, I conquered the red house of horrors escape room (not that it was a horrorshow, to be clear, only the task made it horror-esque) by cooking grilled cheese sandwiches at lightning speeds with red utensils (finally a spatula was located!) and red cookware on a stove that was a hairsbreadth from detonating! And who knew acid and grinding, intense, loving sex make maybe the best combination around town? I certainly didn’t. But I do now, baby!
Huzzah!
Later, you sacksashit.
Nick
