March 4th, 2024 - The Spit of Him

Dear TNY,

Another Monday has come around and I just finished up “The Spit of Him”.

It’s only so-so.  The pacing is good.  After he arrives at the couple’s house, the author has taken care to ensure that we don’t get dialogue heavy by sprinkling details about what’s happening around the people talking.  It’s well crafted in that way which makes the dialogue flow by.  Even though the story is about 4k, which is short for you, it reads even shorter.  Also, the writing was plain and not trying to show off.  The tension was well played.  I was compelled to keep reading. 

Which leads to my gripe:  The ending is just a deflated balloon.  We appear to be given all that we need to know about the kid’s dad killing someone while drunk (or at least injuring?).  We get that the people in the town are upset about it still (as they should be).  We get that, even now, the kid’s dad is a degen (maybe even from upcountry (that’s a Letterkenny joke for those of you who didn’t get it (while I am sad that Letterkenny has ended, I’m also a little relieved as I think that time and place in my life is over now too, and we can move on together; but I’m pretty sure that show is going to resurface in my life just like Miss Fire does when Wayne catches Marie-Fred with another guy in the bathroom and he drinks all day in the shed watching reruns on VHS))).  It seems we get all we need to get from the story and thankfully it isn’t all exactly spoonfed to us.  BUT!  It fucking goes nowhere. 

I know I’ve said this before, but when the story is doing so well, and the reader is fully engaged and ready to transport, it’s so much more of a letdown when the fucking ending doesn’t show up.  It feels worse than when a story is a shit-covered asshole from beginning to end (I was watching a homemade porn once, more than ten years ago, one in which a dude’s buddies are in the room filming him with a girl who is apparently with it, mentally, and enjoying what’s going on, and maybe she truly is and I’m not here to judge that but my gut, based on humanity’s record of mostly failures, is that she got herself into a bad situation and going through with it seemed like the safer of the scenarios (on this topic, I was having a discussion years ago with a former girlfriend about the insanity of how many women have to give handjobs or otherwise to get out of a situation and how I’ll likely, and most men will likely, never be faced with the scenario of having to give a handjob or otherwise to get out of a situation (although one time in the shower I did invite a girl in and gave her a handjob, as it were, because I felt bad for her for how the evening went, really, for everyone, and I thought to myself, I wish someone would be kind to me in this way and realized that I could (for better or worse, who knows) be kind to someone in that way (and am in no way comparing that to the horrors of the “getting out of a situation” situation, even if that’s what it looks like))), so this guy in the video is on top and she has her legs wrapped around his back and they are filming her face which, again, seems to be indicating that this is all okay, and the camera guy goes around to the back of them, where the hairy parts meet, and we, the viewers, are presented with his member sawing in and out of her but the thing that I could not take my eyes off of and is still seared into the folds of my deteriorating brain, is that he must not have wiped his ass after taking what looked like a pretty messy shit and with all this work he was doing his furry buttcrack was glistening with sweat, which was remoistening the sullied area, such that what looked to be a near complete circle, radius unknown, but likely about 2.47 inches, Imperial units appropriate for this level of ‘Merica, of obvious shit had formed, the specific brown of which is known to you and me, because familiarity, so to describe the color other than that would be gratuitous, so sometimes that’s where you find yourself, not the girl in the room that we hope was legitimately having a good time, not the boy pumping away in the likely ever-ripening room because each aforementioned pump wafted more of his make into the air, not the buddies who are circling the bed and chanting words and phrases (I watched with no sound, but this fact cannot be denied based on video evidence), one of said buddies holding the camera and capturing it all, not the parents of these children, because let’s be honest, they are fucking kids when it comes to maturity (I say that knowing that I’m not much further down that maturity line (I mean, look at this content as an example)), not the team of people who manage the website it was hosted on (must have surely been efukt (don’t go there; EVER)), no, sometimes you are up at four in the morning while your wife at the time is asleep, you are online in the guest bedroom listening to her light snores in the other room while you are trying to fap away and with your dick in your hand and your arm moving soundlessly, you suddenly are looking at a sweaty, shit-slick ass that you don’t know at the time will forever be burned into your retina, something you can’t unsee, and about that time, because of no fault of your own (kind of entirely your fault?), because you are jerking off, remember, you inadvertently come, thereby making the memory that much more disgusting when you revisit it, but back then you closed out, cleaned out, rose up, shaved, showered, and off to PT with your EOD coworkers, “fighting” for the “rights” of “Americans” both domestic and abroad).

That has got to be the biggest digression I’ve ever written on FTNY.  You know what’s fucked?  I could write hundreds and hundreds more just like it.  My memory is just packed with shameful memories.  Or, really, not shame so much as…interest.  Like, I’m watching myself through my eyes and saying, “What is this disgusting, weird little animal doing now?  Why’s he doing that?”  But I say that, like it’s always bad, but as I typed it I remember post-divorce in Alaska, I had climbed up the biggest tree I could find which was at an elementary school that was off for the summer, and I was smoking tobacco out of a pipe that my sister had given me as a gift for officiating her second wedding (the pipe has since burned up, smoked it out, kiddies!) and there was a good-natured windstorm afoot and the top of the tree was swaying back and forth quite a distance, clear blue sky overhead, and a little boy walked into the park, probably eight year’s old, and climbed onto a swing and started swinging to beat the band, only catching sight of me way, way up the tree on the upswing portion of his flight, his perspective shifting upward in that natural arc, and he waved to me and I waved back and started crying because my children were removed of my person a few months prior, and I was alone and was deep in the trenches of realizing things about myself and my life (at that time I was in the count of days when I was last hugged, and it was many, many days) and the little boy jumped out of the swing and ran over to his parent, who was just now walking into the playground and pointed up to the tree, to me, and the parent knelt down next to their son and looked up, and the boy waved and the parent waved and I waved back, tears running down my cheeks, so happy to fucking be seen, man, to have other human beings recognize that you fucking exist.

So it’s not all bad.  It’s not all good.  It is, though, all. 

Using a lot of italics in this one.

I guess, I wouldn’t say the story is life changing.  I wouldn’t say the story is a great story.  I wouldn’t even say that it’s good.  But I did blast through it and I wasn’t mad at it.  I just wanted to…I probably just always want to be up in that tree, you know, with a little kid and his parent waving at me, being seen. 

What a fucking shitshow I’ve become.  Jesus.

Nick