April 1st, 2024 - Allah Have Mercy
Dear TNY,
This must be an April Fool’s joke because fuck this Monday’s story, “Allah Have Mercy”.
Culture doth not Art make. You have once again sacrificed literary merit to grace your pages with culture. This story is too long and nothing fucking happens. The characters don’t come to life. Neither does the setting. Just words on a page. Rothko’s fucking rectangles. Completely pointless with nothing to emote over. And before the accusations of racism come flying this way, Jamil Jan Kochai is a writer you have published twice since I began this insane project, assuming the role of loudmouth asshole, a David to your Goliath, and Jamil’s work, especially “Metal Gear…”, is excellent. One can have diversity/culture and literary merit in the same document. It is possible. This story, though, does not have said merit and should never have been published.
I found a weird text string the other day. It was titled: No One Reads Anymore Because Places Like The New Yorker Publish the Worst Fiction Anyone Can Write. And I thought, “Hmm, I can probably relate to this.” And I did. Here’s my favorite excerpt:
There is nothing real in American publishing heading into 2020 [… ] Almost all of it is awful. Almost all of it is unreadable at worst, or mediocre, prosaic, safe as milk, at best. Lifeless. A placebo. A blank slate of meaninglessness on which one can project any BS one wishes, which helps people not to think, feel, care, or be invested, and publishing people hate to think or feel or face the reality of life. And this helps publishing people strike their poses and sound the latest notes of their siren song of pretentiousness, which they need to do so that they can feel like they are smarter and better than you are. And this is why nobody reads anymore.
Couldn’t agree more, brother. Today’s literature makes dumb people feel smart. And it makes smart people feel crazy, because they must be crazy as no one else seems to notice what’s happening.
I used to work at Amazon. Say what you want about global domination. But if you can’t look at Amazon and see what they’ve accomplished, although sometimes terrible and disagreeable, and say, wow, no one’s ever done something that big or that way or that complex before, then you aren’t cut from the right kind of cloth. Everything is a lesson. Every motherfucking thing.
Anyway, I worked there in 2013 with really, really fucking smart people. Autists rocking in their office chair with fidgety hands, sometimes squatting on the table in the meeting room, not listening, texting while doing so, and then saying six words of brilliance before leaving the room early. In fact, after I quit, the NY Times article came out and there was a quote that perfectly summed up my time: Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves. And while I didn’t do that intentionally, I’m happy my subconscious pushed me that direction. I remember sitting in a room with Dave Clark, SVP (now famous for listing his time as CEO of Flexport as “Education” in his LinkedIn profile), and the document I had written contained an incorrect number. Dave suspected this immediately and asked his guy on the other side of the table to bring up the worldwide shipment data. This was accomplished in seconds. And then I was proved wrong, catastrophically. At the end of the meeting, he turned and said to my face, “Next time try to be a little bit more precise. Somewhere between 0 and a billion will do.” And I walked out of that meeting wanting to throw up in the hallway. To my credit, it took our analyst a year to fix the query and make it right. The data was complicated. Not an excuse. I am not an excuse. I should have been more precise.
See guys, I never believed in the mission or drank the Kool Aid. I wanted to do a good job. I wanted to do an exceptional job. And that was a place where, like the man says, overachievers go to feel bad about themselves, and it’s because of that you can do an exceptional job.
Fast forward to my second time with them, circa 2018, and they had gone full circle. Amazon is now the place where underachievers go to feel good about themselves. Gone are the days of geniuses squatting on tables. It’s MBAs and a complete lack of creativity. I have friends who tell me I got out before it got worse. That I should never come back. That it’s suicide for someone like me. Well, that’s what you are doing to the literary industry, TNY. Literature is now a place where underachievers go to feel good about themselves, and then the clientele of your drivel read the dogshit you publish and they also feel good about themselves because they are reading literature, baby! In less than a generation you will have taken one of the flagship artforms for connecting to the Collective Unconscious and reduced it to atoms, patting yourself on the back while doing so.
But me? I want J.K. Simmons throwing a drum at me. I want death threats from my first writing mentor, Rich, because I wrote one to many purple sentences. I want editing that says, “If I wasn’t being paid to read this, I would have stopped here.” What I’m saying is I want the thing behind the thing. I want motherfuckers to care. I want to be around and work with people that fucking care about shit. Enough to ask you to be more precise. I don’t want safe as milk. I was at my boat school teacher’s house the other day and I said I should probably stop traveling around in the van and settle somewhere for a little bit. For my sanity. And he laughed. And he said, “Did you ever think that being uncomfortable is what makes you feel comfortable?” Yeppers. He’s right. I care enough about this life, THE ONLY MOTHERFUCKING ONE WE GET, to make myself uncomfortable most of the time with the hope that I can find that precision living. To find that adventure. To power through the bad shit to find the good. To care. I fucking care. And I want to be around people that care. Fucking nerds, baby! I want you to fucking care, TNY. But you don’t. You are comfortable. Your readers are comfortable. Way too fucking comfortable. Well, to be fair, here I am, comfortable in my own discomfort in a town far far away from anyone where I live alone and, as I tell my boys, there are no parents here so I can do whatever I want, and I’m choosing to do remodel work, some of which I don’t know how to do and I’m afraid of, for a friend that I will want to remain friends with after the work is over, another wrinkle of discomfort in my motivation. So maybe I’m a douche, too.
Anyway, I’m rambling.
How am I otherwise? Not good, my guy. I got to spend a week with my son which was amazing. We had a real one. Laughed a lot. The other one stayed home to work and drive his car and be a big boy. So strange that they grow up; from nutfulls of spunk slung about in the midnight organ fight (<—stole that from Scott Hutchison) to beings that have complex thoughts and work the fryer at Taco Bell. I started work yesterday. Remembered how much I know how. Made myself a nice little dinner last night. Watched the new Ghostbusters on the Russian hack channels. Even went running. Relationship? I look around and can’t find evidence of it. Magic begat excitement begat whirlwind travel begat plans & futures begat love and kindness begat work begat information begat more work begat more information begat yet more work begat real information begat questions begat data begat more questions begat more data begat more work begat resentment begat anger begat not being able to find the kindness I once had because I couldn’t find a reason to look for it because of data begat more work and more bad data begat leaving begat missing begat expressing wanting to be in a relationship not a “relationship” begat more saddening data begat words and words begat lowering expectations to the floor begat apathy. So that’s where I’m at. I am sad and my heart hurts, more-so because I’m apathetic about this relationship which was once so bright; and apathetic about relationships in general. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I can’t hold them together. Doesn’t seem to matter whose fault it is, both people feel like shit. Not clear why feeling like shit is part of human relationships. But it seems to be a ubiquitous feature after the first five minutes are over.
So, in summary, I feel like shit.
And my relationship feels like shit.
And this story was shit.
And the status of the modern publishing industry is shit.
And the skills I have worked for in woodworking, the art I make, it doesn’t make any money because people want Ikea so the skills are shit and the Ikea wanting people are shit too.
Basically, it seems I am choosing things that make me feel like shit. But maybe I fucking feel bad because I fucking care. Maybe that’s why apathy feels so shitty because it’s against my nature to not care. But you can’t care someone into doing anything. Six years of FTNY has proven that. Maybe I’ll just waste away in this turn of the century home, fiddling with pipes, a white hot heat roiling within me, a tiny little sun of warmth, radiating an energy that you don’t have, TNY, that being the genuine human desire to do a good job and to care about what I do and what’s happening in this life (at least, egotistically, what I care about that’s happening). Maybe I need to learn how to be a little more precise, somewhere between 0 and a billion will do.
Thanks, Dave.
Nick
P.S. Listening to Frightened Rabbit while writing this, in awe of Scott Hutchison’s lyrics—I am armed with the past and the will and a brick—and in his music I see a man that cared so much. This fella, so overwhelmed with care that he wrote a song called “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and died some years later after hucking himself off the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland. He wrote a song called “Floating in the Forth” ten years before he died, in which he admitted he was saving his suicide for another day. Can you imagine, TNY? No, you cannot. But try. Try to imagine caring so much about everything that life hurts. That you are overwhelmed by love and sadness and depression and joy and the feeling of your heart’s own beauty. Imagine a life that does not look like yours, really. Instead, it’s vibrant in every dimension, even the dark ones. And all of this reminds me of Ben, whose fucking colloquium finished with: Put off today’s scheduled suicide until tomorrow. Well tomorrow came. And my brother and I swimming in the river behind my house, Scott Hutchison and Virginia Woolf underwater always, Ben afraid of the water and it’s darkness so he found a different kind of water, and I’m out with my sons on $5 Walmart innertubes paddling across Lake Crescent because the trail was closed, 3/4ths of a mile over water of an undetermined depth, remembering Rich’s daughter died of cancer and there’s not a goddamn thing he can do about that, reminding me that Sherry, a woman of words, before being accosted by a brain tumor, lost her ability to find her words, and there’s me and my boys up on the cliff looking at water so clear that the rocks that we know to be 40’ down look like they are right there, and we jump into the blue day, the sun a nuclear weapon so far away but it has to be to keep us warm without killing us, all three of us, off the cliff into the air, same air Ben sucked into his dry lips, the ones that moved, even when catatonic, when the woman he loved more than anything put water on his fucking lips, little last droplets for a beautiful soul, the same air Scott Hutchison soared through, finding his own freedom from himself, the same air as the cliff jump in West Virginia where my oldest outjumped me, the landing blowing his goddamn sandals off, the same as the cold winter air in Seattle, in the dark, through the ice, the water so cold my youngest couldn’t walk, the same water he swam in after walking 23 miles on his 9th birthday, his request, him, floating in the dark water saying, “My butt feels better,” the same water holding Woolf’s coat and rocks and body and love, the same water in the pond next to crematorium #1 in Birkenau, filled with the ashes of the dead, where I sat on the worn steps leading to the infamous showers, and cried and cried and cried, the same water rolling in off the coast of Northern France, standing in a sea of white crosses trying to imagine caring enough to volunteer to run into the face of every machine gun bullet ever fired, dropping to my knees because it was too much to bear, the same bear that ran after the van outside of Tok, AK, all my possessions in the car, my sister in the front seat for a ride along, me, joy, actual joy in my heart because I thought I could be loved, the same love that sailed out every window of every house I’ve ever been in, the same house where I said I cheated, the same cheat that crushed a beautiful redhead, the same redhead that said she loved me enough to follow me anywhere, the same anywhere that’s now vacant, the same vacant that Ben now is, just dead ashes in the vial in my backpack in Eastern Washington, in the United States of America, a country founded on occupied land, on one of seven continents on Planet Earth, formed by an explosion a long, long time ago, one that still radiates in my heart, this place in my chest that is filled with so much love, I have so much love to give, I just don’t know where to put it, as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith said, I clapped and yelled his name, and audience of one in a room of many, a conference room in Amazon, William H. Macy with the face like a baseball glove, but your dad’s glove, that you secretly put your little boy hand in when he was at work and wondered what kind of man you would be, back to the river years later and asking your brother what kind of men he thought we would be, him never being a man, actually, trying to swim in a dusty, dry ditch, me knowing now that this, this is the kind of man I will be. I am this man. This is the man that I am.
