March 25th, 2024 - Neighbors

Dear TNY,

Here we are again and you’ve served up “Neighbors”.

I have beef because it did not pull off what it promised, which was to be a banger throughout.  I enjoyed the pacing.  I enjoyed the weirdness (when I say weirdness, I don’t mean it was wacky across the board; it had one out of place object and the rest remained normal, thereby heightening the weirdness).  It was a good piece.  Solid.  Well built.  Didn’t fall over itself to inform us that it was written by someone who loves the sound of their voice.  It was a craftsman’s (or woman’s, you doinks) piece.  Get in, get to the point, get out.

Which is where I have beef.  It wasn’t refined enough to go from good to great. As we know, that’s when a story can get upsetting.  With a shit piece, also known as a “TNY story”, we aren’t overly mad about it because it’s homogeneously garbage (but we’re mad, TNY, at the amount of garbage you publish, thereby ruining the artform and leaving unpublished voices behind that could change humanity).  From a piece like this, we want the greatness we can sense within it (or as my special lady says, you shouldn’t date someone’s potential; I say this is the kind of potential you do end up dating because you see that greatness). 

While the wife cheating reveal in the beginning did get us to the house where everything happened, and it was included in a tiny paragraph at the end, that end paragraph doesn’t sing. “We moved to San Francisco in 2013 because…” would be all that’s needed logistically, if that’s the purpose.  If it was my choice, though, I’d work that last paragraph more, because what it seems like the author was trying to do is similar to the last paragraph from “Why Don’t You Dance?” by Carver, in which the girl sees no one will understand what she is talking about so she stops trying.  And that, if pulled off here, would let us see that there’s still so much distance between the husband and wife.  Fuck.  Between us all.  Which would juxtapose nicely against the feeling he had in the garage, that sense of everything being all of us in the darkness all at once (likening it to the Collective Unconscious, more on that in a second).  As it stands, the tiny paragraph isn’t strong enough, so it makes the start of the story obese for logistical exposition. 

The rest of the ending needs hard compression.  It should end at that tiny paragraph as everything after adds nothing.  Especially if what you are aiming for is the Carver ending, that we’ll never really understand each other even though we are all the same thing.  The trip to the house is pointless, particularly because he doesn’t go inside.  The ending meanders past the peak of the story, which is the garage door opening and no one is there, and leaves this reader turned off because so much could’ve pushed to transcendence, but it didn’t.

This piece has that “What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Love” quality, or the idea of that anyway.  The idea being it’s the thing behind the thing we are trying to say that’s important, but we can’t articulate it. It starts with something small and easy to connect to and expands to the existence of everything, the Collective Unconscious, the je ne sais quoi that remains the single point of Art (OR FUCKING SHOULD BE).  It could have been a brilliant piece.  The editor at your prestigious shitpile fell short and didn’t get us there.  Failed the author.  Failed the public.  Failed the canon.  Failed to get all the shit out of their asscrack while wiping because, let’s face it, they were hungover and sore from whatever blacked out, nighttime athletics happened and it was hard on the lower back to twist in the manner needed to aggressively scrub with some highfalutin TP at the tarry remnants of an overpriced and underwhelming New York dinner.

Goddamn am I elitist.  But, for like…trash?  I don’t even know.

On this end I’m with my youngest son doing a solo journey as my oldest is now part of the capitalist machine, slinging burritos for the esteemed Bell of the Taco nature.  What a world this is.  My youngest, flying by himself in a world of weekly plane rages that divert or windows flying off, my oldest making “food” for others, driving around, saving his money for secret little things grown in his fertile young mind.

Me? I’m moving through time and space.  As a former partner would say, that’s bad when I say that.  And it can be. It means I am neither happy nor sad.  Just kind of apathetic for where my life is going, hoping that if I do the work in front of me like a good little boy, that on the other side of it will be a shiny gold brick with my name on it.  And by brick I mean opening my eyes and hearing a million birds singing, feeling my partner against me, still asleep, hearing the light rain that sweeps in most days, getting up and making coffee, writing a little, and then going out into the warm day that is unfolding, my adult children in it, maybe with children of their very own, us going out into the water together where I will still worry about them getting too far away from me, but it’s only because I’ll always love them more than myself.  More than anything.  Knowing they will have made every second on this fucking horrorshow worth it.  And we’ll swim.  Like underwater angels.  My partner in the middle of it, in awe of the wonder around her, trying to outswim us all.  Everyone laughing.  And at the end of it, my sons will ask me to make them tacos, which they do better than I do in this future, but they will want me to do it because they love me and it’s my touch they want, not the food.  To be near me as I want to be near them.  For just a little longer.

So, for now I’ll keep my head down, do the work.  Try to be a good man.  And the rest will hopefully fall in place.

Later.

Nick