December 8th, 2025 - Safety
Dear TNY,
Here we are entering the last month of 2025, and “Safety” was our soup du jour.
It’s meh. I understand that some art’s job is to document the here and now such that it won’t be forgotten. To say, “This is a thing we went through!” But, meh. Meh all day here. Sure, I understood what was going on. The story was written in intelligible English. But, fuck…
Fuck, man. How do you not know? Read John Gardner already. Do your fucking job. Here. Here’s a fucking primer, with the fucking page number (The Art of Fiction):
…to build up a complicated argument, we need abstractions. If we wish to think usefully about wildlife preservation, we must abstract the dying white rhinoceros at our feet to dying white rhinoceroses in general, we must see the relationship (another abstraction) between dying white rhinoceroses and dying tigers, etc., and rise, finally, to the abstraction “dying wildlife.” (pg 51)
You have this platform. You want us to care. Yes, ICE is shit. America is shit. This shit is all going to shit. Fuck, you’re shit! But you don’t take the time to abstract the white rhino in such a way that people care enough to understand that shit is going to shit. And who are you selling this shit to, anyway? Who are you trying to convince that this shit is shit and it’s happening right now? Everyone that reads your magazine already knows. What’s the fucking point? To affect change? Not fucking possible you shits, not with your demographic. Fucking upper middle class liberals jerking each other off at wine and tapas parties in overpriced apartments that none of you know how to repair. Don’t you think if you could have changed all this you would have? But you spend your time vilifying the other half, blaming them, labeling them, feeling superior. Ask yourself this: How many stories have you published from a MAGA perspective? You aren’t any better than crackpots in basements reading Russian-authored conspiracy theories and believing them, never seeking contradictory information to self-check. And because neither of you seek to understand each other, the white rhino is going to fucking die. Is dead, for chrissakes. Najin and Fatu, the only two northern white rhinos left, both female, will ensure the species ends. Because you dickfucks want to argue about who is worse, who is fucking things up more, who is to blame. Spoiler alert: Both of you.
This story has two sentences that’re dead on that you could learn from:
That’s why she’s such a good comedian. She goes around reminding us, Hey, we’re not dead.
That’s your job. And you can’t muster the courage, skill, love for humanity, or humility to do it.
But I’m an arrogant asshole, so I’m going to try.
Mr. Rogers told me this morning that the biggest love there is, the hardest one to do, is to love someone that’s mean to you. Have you ever done that, he asked. Loved someone that was mean to you? Yes, I said to my phone, crying, at 07:00am, with a White Claw Surge in my hand, yes I sure have. And then Mr. Rogers said that I needed to include myself in that group. Have you ever done anything mean to yourself? Have you ever hurt yourself? Yes, yes I have. Then a text came in, a picture. Nude buttocks, female, a small brown mole high on the left cheek, trending towards center. I expanded the picture, zooming in on the mole, and noticed sleep lines swirling around it, like someone would have on their face from a pillow, or maybe, hopefully, the shirt of a lover, from a small nap taken in the park, the wrinkles in the shirt leaving watermarks of intimacy. And that’s what I texted back, that pornography itself is never the goal, it’s the currency of intimacy and vulnerability, it is the “defect” that makes the art. Like Oliver Platt’s character in Bicentennial Man, when speaking of making Robin Williams’ character a human face, saying:
Oliver: Now, [Robin], believe it or not, the secret to all of this is actually imperfection.
Robin: Imperfection?
Oliver: Yeah, things like wrinkles, less than perfect teeth, details like fading scars, little pock marks. Look at my nose, see my nose? It’s bulbous and slightly irregular.
Robin: It is.
Oliver: Well, I’m the only one who’s got my nose and that’s what makes me me, and we need to incorporate these features into your design so that you can be the only one that’s you. That’s what makes us unique.
Robin Williams, a man whose wet computer was so fast and whose heart was so kind that he astonished the world, both at large and at the individual level, once even signing and playing with Koko the gorilla, whom loved a tickle from him, Williams, probably an angel among us, choosing to take his grace from us as this place, for some, is too much to bear, opting for a lanyard strung good and tight, a ray in geometric terms, origin high and affixed firmly, terminus wrapped around Williams’ blood, air, and nerve plumbing, but really the terminus being the end of his journey on this plane, sending him on to the next where I hope he found some kind of peace.
So I leave the booty art and get into the shower and think about her. Always her, forever and ever, amen. She is the alpha, the omega. I’ll spare you that talk as I know we are all tired of hearing it (except me). But I will tell you that I stood in that shower under the glare of the red infrared bulb watching the water splash around the entry to the shower, each droplet casting little red reflections and refractions around like twinkle lights at Christmas and then I noticed a green there too, but more like the Collective Unconscious, that the more I tried to see it, the less I saw it, but it was there and I focused intently on it because then I wouldn’t have to think about being there with her, as I once was, in that bathroom, or on that bed, or in that yard, or at this very bar just earlier this year, in which she tried to convince me she was smart, which I wasn’t refuting, as she is very smart, but was only stating that if you go around telling people you are smart you sound kind of douchey, after which we made up and ended up back in the room and had sex for the first time since June of 2024, this instance happening in April 2025, the astronaut shining his galaxies upon us, a party going on outside, and us making a party inside her, like buying one lottery ticket and winning every lottery that’s ever been conducted, like the moment before Icarus discovered he was too close to the Sun, like every one of you reading this, like those moments you’ve had exactly like this, where, like Pablo Neruda says:
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
So I cried in the shower and decided I was the villain. Got dressed. And my son called, the oldest, and I tried to convince him to leave for work the day before he had to be at work, if said work is out of town and drivable, because he has to get up so early in the morning to make it on time the day of work. I informed him of snowy passes, the dangers of night, and the migratory and circadian rhythms of wildlife, such that he might never crash his car into a snowbank, off a cliff, into a family or a deer, him shrugging off the suggestion using his invincibility cloak of youth, meanwhile I’m on the other end of the phone remembering a dream I had where he fell off of a roof he and I were working on, having trusted an extension of tarpaper that had nothing underneath it but dark matter and wind, me, peering down through the hole, his body having contorted to that of a paper test from middle school that one is so disappointed in the score that they wad it up and throw it away, so I raced down to hold him, his body a bag filled with kindling, and instead of laughing or talking or doing the worm in the back of the van, an impromptu dance party once had after Chuck, my van, slipped a timing belt tooth and I imploded as a father, socking his beautiful, perfect, 8-year-old thigh for pissing me off and then being scolded by a stranger, this boy was now none of that, as he is now singing me his final aria, in which the only words were wheezing and gurgling, blood bubbles birthing from his lips, his eyes asking for something I knew I couldn’t give, their fear, even now, too much for me as a memory of a dream, so yeah, my guy, drive there in the daytime, but truth be told I know I can’t protect him from everything and that by participating in Love, whether complicitly or not, I have opened myself to more pain than I am capable of handling. He stayed in bed and will leave tomorrow and hopefully will not die, not now or ever, but even God murdered his son so what hope do I have of beating the system?
And that brings us to The Wizard of Kindness, whom I once joked with about my sons, if they had accidentally died during the summer of 2015, in the year of our Lord—my father’s—death, that if my children died I would punch their dead bodies, out of grief, and Love (and what is grief if not Love, just with no place to put it), and frustration, and, honestly, the absolute horror of contacting their mother to let her know that on my watch one of our beauties died, so that’s what I told The Wizard, that I would punch them. And fast forward to less than a year later when he texted me something along the lines of, “Turns out when they die, you don’t punch their bodies.” Did you fucking hear that, dear reader? Did you fucking hear those goddamn words? The first thing he sent me after finding out his son, his fucking beauty, his fucking angel, died was a joke about not punching his body. Not a joke, though, but, like, a coping mechanism to try to understand the situation he found himself in, a new reality in the multiverse, one he did not want to be in, where his boy’s terminus had been reached instead of the one he was in before, where his boy’s terminus was as close as we can get to infinity in the future. Do you fucking understand this?
This phone call I once gave my mother in which I informed her that her baby son, first born, my oldest brother, had been run over by a car? Do you fucking get it yet? Are you here with us? Get down close, now, nose in the carpet. Do you see this shit? Do you fucking see it?! Do you understand?
Do you know that my mother, once, so ignorantly asked my brother and I, us, teens in this timeframe, on a random Saturday while we were playing videogames, Shadowrun as I recall, her having come into our bedroom and closed the door, then unveiling a pair of underwear from behind her back, like a magic trick, tighty whiteys, her fingers in the waistband, stretching them tight such that the underwear hung like a banner before her, the yellowing of the crotch bursting out at us accusingly, and said, “Why do all of your underwear have stains on them in the crotch now?” Her, not understanding reality, me thinks, and there I am, frozen, desperately trying to hack into the mainframe of the evil corporation’s computer to bring down the giant, no reaction coming, no words for my mother, and my brother, without turning around to look, says, “nocturnal emissions,” like he had been rehearsing in the mirror for years in case the right part came along, so he could nail that audition, and nail it he did, my mother saying nothing, placing the underwear back into her magic cloak, and disappearing quietly from the room, the subject never to be broached again. My brother, from then on, would bleach his underwear in the bathroom sink when my mother would leave us home alone, the shame of it so great to him.
For what? Much like his years of struggle with, and thousands of dollars of, orthodontia, none of it mattered after September 2nd, 1996.
But that struggle. That’s where the beauty is, right? It’s never where you are told it’s supposed to be. It wasn’t in the last year of his life, when his teeth were perfect. It was when he went in for another round of fuck-my-mouth-up, him, having one tooth that curled over like a closed fist from having slipped, twice mind you, and fallen as a child, hitting his upper teeth, first, on the rim of the toilet, and second, on the iced-over pond behind our house, the first house I remember living in, with a giant treefort that our father made for us called “Fort Shrimpo”, this man my mother grew to torture at the end of his life, a grizzled man of claw and bone, missing his wedding ring finger, working his whole life to provide, a man that she deemed so terrible that he didn’t deserve a funeral (which she acquiesced on and then made about herself), that she seemed to have forgotten he was capable of conjuring the phrase ,“Fort Shrimpo,” let alone building it, so my brother’s front teeth, all of them, were pushed back up into his gums twice, all coming back pretty much okay, same for the adult ones above/behind the baby ones, except one, the curled fella, as stated, and on that day, that appointment, they finally got it right and the root had straightened so they snagged off the curled bit of the tooth, drilled and dropped a post in, like one would for a fence, and then built a fake tooth upon it, him getting back into the car a “complete” boy again, all teeth straight and shining.
The struggle is the beauty. In the darkness. The shadows. But also plain sight, right behind all the other things people tell us to look at. It’s S, who called today and we ended up talking about eating dead babies, the best way to cook them, fat content and such. No, not the content of the conversation in this case that’s beautiful, but the fact that she has the freedom to say shit unjudged, her, texting later to let me know that she cried so much at the permitting office that the man brought her two boxes of tissues. It’s Ben’s whole family, Marine friends, and writing friends, fuck, his two young-adult sons, singing “Rocketman” by Elton John, everyone happy, at 1:00am on the night of his funeral, the whole room dark except for the TV glare, K having started the song, a boy who is so shy that he barely talks to adults, choosing to sing with his goddamn soul in front of a room of people, no fear of judgement, instead being the catalyst in a chain reaction that brought whatever God actually is into the room, where it settled in, a warm miasma touching everyone.
And it’s L. Goddamn, L. An ex-ballerina who is, no joke, magic. Real magic. And when she was healthy, which I have never seen her healthy, but I’m sure of this, when she was healthy she glowed like the moon on a cloudless night, at altitude, through air so still you forgot it was there. But now? She’s dying. Her birthday was a few days ago. We started celebrating it at midnight, her dude, myself, and the WW Wizard. We did Jäger shots and she wheeled herself over to the snack station, sitting catty-corner to me, and from 12:06 to 02:14 we bullshitted about everything there is to talk about. Her life, her sick-ass shoes which are designed to be stepped into and have zippers all the way around the toe of the shoe so she can get them on easier. We talked about death. Fear. I made a joke about how she isn’t disabled, she’s just lazy and likes being in the wheelchair. She laughed a lot. We talked about her emergency brain surgery and how the doctor lined the incision up with her part so that it wouldn’t show later. She talked about how her birthday wish was to survive. Mainly, we laughed and laughed and laughed. And snacked. I know I’m supposed to be a writer, but I cannot articulate to you what it was, which was Art. It transcended recording, which I am doing a bad job of now, but instead, right inside of it, I was aware that I was in a motion picture made by Van Gogh in which I saw the brush strokes of who she was, full value and volume, a glory to behold right in front of me. She shined like slow-motion close up shots of the Sun, amber energy swirling, gyre-like, hypnotic almost, scratching an itch left by the indelible mark of where we came from before this and where we will go after. And like a clumsy fool, I told her all of this. Why? Because people don’t talk like that. People are embarrassed to talk like that. But I am not. So many people in her community think she’s an angel. The most beautiful thing. And our hearts ache for her. So I let her know. She dodged that shit like Neo in The Matrix. But this job is, as you don’t know, TNY, to sit some folks down and get them to reconcile with their beauty. Later that day we all went out and she informed us that on her birthday, as a child, she would pray for snow. And said what a stupid prayer that was. How childish it was. Two hours later I got up to go pee and it was snowing. I cannot, guys. I just can’t. I ran back to tell her. All the tears, boys and girls. All the tears. Like all of us, she doesn’t know if she will make it to her next birthday. But she’s closer to that reality than most. And there she was, looking at the snow, crying. Like earlier this year, a moment that I will always cherish, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, when at a birthday party for a young woman, this young woman and two of her friends hopped up on a platform in the backyard, a building project in the works, only floor, no walls, and they began to dance ballet, giggly and graceful, informal and lovely, the imperfections, Mr. Williams, the art on display, and L rolled herself to the kitchen door, overlooking the platform but with too many steps to go further on her own, and watched these young women dance with abandon, with the fumbling grace of newborn mothers breastfeeding for the first time, the grace of my father, his desperate, opioid-fueled last message to his children recorded on the doctor’s phone, the grace of my brother’s toes, curling tight as they unplugged him, the grace of one small, brown mole high up on the left cheek, in a sargassum sea of sleep marks, trending toward center, the grace of Mr. Williams tickling Koko, the grace of two breathtaking northern white rhinos, so alone, so close to the portal that goes to the next place, and the grace of her, dancing just months ago in this town, headphones in and woodworking on the party sander, singing a country song she loves, her voice so…bad, guys it was bad…in her high-waisted jeans, dancing and singing like no one would ever see her, the most beautiful angel I’ve ever seen, put here just for me, as Richard Ford would put it:
…and, for a moment, caught the world and stopped it, as though something sudden and perfect had come to earth in a furious glowing for him and for him alone—Eddie Starling—and only he could watch and listen. And only he would be there, waiting, when the light was finally gone.
This. This is the job. Stare into the face of God. Don’t fucking flinch. Do the goddamn work.
Fuck. Yes. We’re not dead.
Nick
