January 1st, 2024 - FTNY, Year Six in Review
Dear TNY,
Well, I don’t know what to say. It’s that time of year again. We’ve rounded the corner on another year of this project. Yep. Six motherfucking years! That’s give or take 300 letters. Boy howdy. What an insane person I am.
Honestly, I don’t even want to write this letter. I did all of the prep work for it. Read every letter from this year as well as last year’s review. But I’m sitting here right now feeling…conflicted.
I just don’t know what the fuck to say. Yours truly had a banner year in wild life experiments. On one right now. Is it going to work out? I think that may be the wrong question. I think life stops working out when you stop the experiments. Stop learning. Stop seeking. Stop trying. Stop fighting.
But that’s my year. How was yours? I can tell you that from the stories you published, it was a bad year for you. Maybe the worst of all the years I’ve been reading. Most of the stories were such duds that I couldn’t help but eviscerate them. The upshot for you is that I did read 91% of them all the way through. Which is an unusually high percentage.
Though, I’m here to tell you that I think that, at least partially, I’m using FTNY as an excuse to write about my life. Or write about my feelings. Or write in general. And maybe I don’t want it to be about me, or don’t want to feel it’s about me all the time.
I can’t even pick out a story this year that was the best. There were only ones that were just okay. Not frustrating. Not pointless. They didn’t dazzle, per se. They just didn’t suck ass.
So that leaves me wondering what the point of all this is. You don’t change. I don’t change. Maybe I should quit? It’s six years of my fucking life, man. The amount of time I have spent on this project is beyond absurd.
Yuck. There it is again. Me making it about me. I’ll try to make it about you.
What did you do this year? Well, I think it was 49 stories. Most of them bad, though we already covered that. The good ones weren’t that good, we covered that too. I didn’t even take the time to pick apart the themes from your failures this year. Unlikable characters came up. Lack of authenticity. Nothing fucking happens. Beige. Cardboard characters. It really was just a who’s who of the same old shit you keep doing.
In fact, the only thing that was intriguing about reading all of this year’s letters was how happy I was in Hawai’i. Not in that relationship, per se (I was until I wasn’t). But the fixing aspect of my life. I do agree with that woman from that relationship, though, that I only show parts of things in these letters and those things don’t completely reflect her or me or anyone, really. Each letter is just a snapshot of a time/place/feeling/story. They aren’t holistically representative. What was nice to read was how much hope I had before I went to Hawai’i. Which, truth be told, was because of that relationship, but it also was for my future self. I was pumped about the fixing of myself that I planned to accomplish with exercise, woodwork, and writing. And I did all of those things.
What was not good to read was that in the middle of all of that stuff my best friend died.
I can say “best” now. He was my best friend. He understood me in ways I might never be understood in again. And our closeness, similarity-wise, and his eventual end, are still shaking me to my core to this day.
Fuck, I made it about me again.
Have I become a narcissist? Maybe a covert narcissist. That’s more likely the case. I got accused of this during a conversation under a tree in Upper Palolo while my kids were asked to manage themselves during the largest chunk of time I get during the year because the person I was dating didn’t understand how important that time was to me (or she wasn’t able to put my needs over hers; unclear). She would hate that last sentence, but it’s the truth. But I did listen to her and have been processing that information. I did some assessing. While it might be possible she was right, I think she should have understood that I get so little time with them that that shit could have been addressed later.
Currently, I’m told I have a touch of the ‘tism. Which is fine. That’s self-diagnosed as well, so not the first time I’m hearing it. In fact, the first time was predicated by my oldest son having gone through ‘tism testing when he was little, after which my wife (at the time) and I agreed that maybe he was okay but I might be fucked.
But my response now is the same as it was about my oldest son (and myself) then. What does it matter? I knew in my heart’s heart that no matter what, I’d love him unconditionally. The label he was given, which was none, would never matter to me.
That’s the kind of love I’m into.
I had that thought when I was driving home from Home Depot the other day. That yes, maybe I have X. Maybe I have Y. Maybe a fella named Franklin has X, Y, and motherfucking Z. So what? What’s next? How do we fix it? We zero in our focus? Yes, we look at “poor” behaviors and how to eliminate them. And that’s when the whole argument fell apart for me (because I love to tear shit down, because I’m a bad person). If we look at certain behaviors, or patterns of behaviors, then we can see a “disease”. And that “disease” gets a label. And then we document all the bullshit that that “disease” does. So then we look for ways to get away from that “disease”. Changes we can make in our behavior.
And my question to you, and to everyone, is toward what? Because what it sounds like is that there is an expected “rightness” in humans and all behavior that isn’t “right” is “wrong”. Who’s deciding that? It’s really easy to establish the wrong. But by doing so, making the lines around wrong, we are saying everything not in those lines is “right”. And that’s got to be impossible. Can’t all be right. Can’t all be wrong. Can’t all be anything or everything. And I was told this morning that we shouldn’t be looking at a “right” as a whole, just more of “let’s move away from certain behaviors that are hurting you specifically, not try to find some perfect form.” Which is understandable if one departs the holistic context and burrows down to problem areas, particularly at the individual level.
Either way, folks, this is either a pragmatic look at the subject matter or it’s a covert narcissist justifying his current behaviors. Who could say? Maybe it’s both!
The thing is, I’m trying to be better. I’m trying to change. To do good works….
Ah, fuck all this. This is supposed to be about your magazine. And it isn’t. I’m a self-centered twat. The next sentence I wanted to type was: I don’t ask people what’s going on in their lives because I’m a self-centered twat. But then in my mind it followed it up with: Most people are boring as fuck (to me) and I’m not interested in what’s going on in their lives, and that’s why I don’t ask. These fucking fundraisers for Montessori schools or how’s so and so’s relationship or religious proclamations or wars or any of this human bullshit. Just…it all seems so pointless. I seem so pointless.
I was once giving a tour around a garden hidden inside a forest. The tour was by a four-year-old girl. Her mother said: She knows more about these plants than I ever will. So this little blonde girl grabbed my hand and took me into those Idahoan woods and she tickled every leaf and flower of every plant and told me its name, real and scientific, and then told me the health, life cycle, “fruits”, and all these other details that were astonishing to me for anyone to know, let alone someone of that age. That might not have been pointless. She might not have been pointless. This barefoot four-year-old in a dirty white dress giving me a tour of her garden inside a high, high fence in Idaho (for the deer). That felt pure.
And maybe that’s humanity. It’s just a sea of pointlessness with bright flashes of brilliance. Maybe that’s what I should focus on. Forgive your monotony and your insistence on ruining literature, expand that forgiveness to humanity, and focus on the bright flashes. Maybe I wouldn’t be so angry and resentful. I really don’t know.
But who fucking knows? I don’t know what’s what anymore, that’s for sure. TNY, you are the enemy. I am the enemy. Alcohol is the enemy. Religion is the enemy. Humans are the enemy. Hydrocarbons are the enemy. Elon Musk is the enemy. Donald Trump is the enemy. Hillary Clinton is the enemy. Bernie fucking Sanders is the enemy. Earthquakes and tidal waves and hurricanes and asteroids and seas under seas and children lying about being molested and molesters lying about molesting and nuns and priests and dudes named John Wayne Gacy & Ed Gein and guys who act like them and women who bop from dude to dude for money and dudes with money who abuse and belittle women and so much information that one can’t help but wonder what the fuck anything is anymore. It’s all the goddamn enemy.
Or, it’s just us. It can be that little girl in the garden, or holding hands behind the headrest of a car late into the night, already falling in love with such tender touches, or your kid doing something so considerate & kind and upon receiving a compliment for doing that, he states that he had a good teacher, or being given a cheesecake on your dead brother’s would be 44th birthday, or a Guggenheim Fellow writing to tell you they think your writing is amazing, or a homeless man shucking and jiving across the street, loudly wailing and staring your kids down, and then suddenly snapping back to normal and saying, “Ah guys, I’m just messing with you, I’m fine,” and then laughing as we laugh too.
It could be everything, everywhere, all at motherfucking once. I just need to choose the right things to focus on.
Year six. Bad stories. Multiple gigantic life upheavals. So much sadness. So much hope. So much love, honestly. And so much goddamn swimming. Maybe that’s the fucking answer for me. Go swimming.
Goddamn, this letter was supposed to be about your stories. Whoops.
Here’s to another one, pal! Year seven, here we go!
Nick
P.S. I’m wildly in deep, deep love! And so sad! And that’s okay! I’m excited about my life! And I swam in the Pacific on day one of 2024!
