February 12th & 19th, 2024 - That Girl

Dear TNY,

Time is a peregrine falcon deeply diving (maximum speed of 240mph, sweet baby Jesus!) and I just finished “That Girl”.

I didn’t finish it just now, I should say.  A more appropriate phrase would be “I just finished cooking link sausages, necessary to fortify my procrastinating self into writing this letter, and before those meat tubes I wrote submission status update request letters (as a weekly subscriber (forcefully) to my writing, you can imagine how wild my letters get, especially after being stuck in limbo for over four years (I’m looking at you, Oxford American!)) to Oxford American, New Orleans Review, and JuxtaProse with the hope they would give a fuck.”  So now, sausaged and coffeed up, I’ll address this coming-of-age story.

Just kidding, I took a hot second to write an email to the Wizard of Kindness.

Just kidding, I drove out into the world and came back and made a parts list for a folding table leg that is…a lot. It’s hours later and I’m wondering who I am as a person. A monster? Likely.

But I’m back for you, baby! Watch as these thumbs slide down your waist and onto your hips, into the waistband of those panties to shuck them like an ear of corn! Before you get all sexist and say I’m misogynistic, we don’t know who is wearing the panties. Maybe it’s a dude with a huge hog! Maybe it’s a two-spirit named Teddy with a crotch full of motorcycle crash scars! Scars need touching too!

Anyway…

This is a medium story, at best.  While I liked that it was dialogue heavy, I felt some of the dialogue was forced.  The best example of said force being the “friend” shit.  It was just too much to believe. Who says “friend” like that, non-ironically?  And the setting, particularly era, was confusing to me because we have Roger picking a lot of older music, so I thought maybe the 70s, but then we get “This is How We Do It” when Shirlee is having pipe laid to her, and I’m like, is this the 90s?  And I was also confused with some of the imagination jumps into and out of Theo’s head.  One in particular, about stabbing a molester.  I read that a few times and I understood what the author was trying to do, but it wasn’t as clean as it should have been.

I guess what I’m chewing on is that these individual points (dialogue, setting, interiority, and others) were all okay, I was in the story for sure, but they weren’t clean enough to be what I’d consider good.  Like, I was describing this story to my special lady and I said it sounded like a first year MFA story, in that it clearly (ish) follows a very tangible plot, it’s got lots of dialogue and scene, and the language is simple so it’s not a struggle to read.  But, it doesn’t come to life.  It doesn’t fizzle and pop.  It’s just bland, but readable?

Otherwise, it’s fine. Just fine.

Me?

Oh, I’ve been in a real funk these days.  I miss doing shit for myself, is what the conclusion is.  Like, I miss freediving and carving and hiking and running and writing more and, weirdly, reading.  What it sounds like is that taste of life I had in Hawai’i, a life that was just me existing, doing shit I wanted to do with my time, was good for me.  That I wasn’t fixing other people’s shit or working for a paycheck to survive.  I was living.  And, Christ guys, I was freediving with fucking sea turtles and monk seals and ulua and swimming through lava tubes and living an incredible life.  It was a fucking privilege, man.  Truly.

I was told recently that a future like that is still possible, it’s just going to take a minute. But I struggle with that.  Sometimes when my life gets hard, I lose track of all possible futures and can no longer see the ones I was excited about.  And that’s where I am now.  I can’t see past the deck.  I can’t see past the table.  I can’t see any good out there.

But if I close my eyes and try to calm down a little bit, put the sadness away for a minute, I can shoot to the right out of Pupukea and go far, far from shore all on my own, tracking the sea turtle with the fishhook in his flipper, an underwater shellbird flying below me as I fly above him, showing me the way, where I watch him meet up with another turtle and they dance circles around each other, holding supreme eye contact the whole time, me hoping they are in love, before they drift off somewhere I’ll never understand, but I take a big fucking breath, carp in a little more air, and then kick down into the darkness of a lava tube where so much life lurks in the shadows, twitching and jerking to safety as I keep descending, until I get to 50/60 feet having squirted out a downspout of the tube into open water, and just chill the fuck out, below it all, almost all noise walking offstage, along with all the bills or projects or money or emotional turmoil or relationships or regrets or desires or yearning or frustration, and I can just be. And, I know this sounds weird, but it’s where I can finally breathe.

Actually, I was talking about war yesterday and I’ll tell you what:  Being 50 feet underwater has the kind of laser focus that working on an IED in Iraq does.  All the other bullshit goes away.  You’re just in it.  The Main Motherfucking Vein, BROTHER!  And, depending on a lot of different circumstances that are outside of your control (that you don’t worry about because you’ll never know if you fuck up), you’ll either live or your won’t.  It’s real life that’s fucked up, man.  The drudgery.  How boring all of this is sometimes compared to swimming through a huge, deep sea cave having no clue whether you’ll make it out the other side or not.  Or stalking a bear alone in the woods, miles and miles from another human and no one knows where you are, woods so tight that you know for sure you can’t get your rifle up in time to make the necessary shot, or watching the vehicle behind you blow up (weirdly, while listening to Sarah McLachlan in your headphones), or, and this is a first thought for me, being inside the dust cloud that transformed your life, before you found out that your brother was cartwheeling through the air above you, a beautiful dirt angel of his very own, soaring in slow motion for every fucking one of us. Or, as my late and lovely friend Ben used to say, and this has been modified only slightly to meet this document’s needs:

It’s noticing the umbral dashes trailing the rocks strewn across the evening face of the sidewalk. Or picking out the brassy, "yank yank yank," of a red breasted nuthatch as she calls across the human transportation noise. Or the absolute refutation of Facebook meme happiness and all those who would follow that false idol. Or it’s fucking passion, it's akin to the "WHUMP" of a gasoline fed fire, but one in your soul. It's entering your soon to be lover's apartment for the first time. It's sitting down to a page and beginning. Finally, it is a reason to move today's scheduled suicide to a more convenient time…tomorrow.

And sadly, me thinks he couldn’t see it anymore. Which is why the drudgery is so dangerous to fellas like us. It’s the silent killer.

I wish he had made it to Hawai’i. I would have wrestled him into the ocean (he had such fears) and held his hand while dragging him out to the turtles and the convict tangs and the humuhumunukunukuapua’a and he would have cried. He would have wept like a baby and said thank you more times than it can be said. He would have lived. Fuck, you should have seen him touch a horse. It was like God was talking to him.

I’ve got a buddy that took 13g of mushrooms two nights ago. He went places. Those places were inside himself. World building. Gender exploration. Intentionally addressing worst fears. All sorts of things. He had a transcendent experience. After writing all of this bullshit, which I am sure it is, and in saying that I enjoy drugs too (some, and when I want to do them vs when I get pressured to), writing, if you are telling the truth, is a portal into yourself. We are all just telling ourselves a story and hoping we believe it. I currently don’t believe my story, I think. It’s not my story. There are likely as many paths into oneself as there are oneselfs. I’m psyched he found one. I think this is one for me. So, of all the things I said, I should do this more often. Writing. Because it’s for me. It is me. And it makes me feel beautiful. Guys, I’m beautiful on this earth. Right here. In this chair. Crying to myself as I move through these words like water. I. Am. Beautiful.

Well, look at that.

Man, I’m really going through the grinder these days.  More grist for the mill!

Nick