July 28th, 2025 - The Chartreuse
Dear TNY,
I won’t spend too long on “The Chartruese” which is what you shat out.
A woman, who appears to be fucked up (drug addict?), waits for a FedEx man to deliver a dress. And then she gets the dress. That’s it. That’s fucking it. Tired language and phrasing. Plot is as mundane as they get. And it’s set in La Jolla for fuck’s sake. How are we supposed to feel empathy for these characters? Or in this case, just the one. We don’t. I don’t feel a fucking ounce of empathy. So fuck this story and fuck you.
You know, the last time I cried was this week. I was watching a video of Jacob Collier sing “Fix You” with Chris Martin and he conducted the whole crowd as an instrument. For a minute, none of those people in the stadium had problems. They didn’t disagree with each other. No one fought or stole or plotted. They just sang. All as one voice. No politics. No war. No agenda other than beauty. Like cells in a larger organism, all bent on making the optimal holistic result. I’m sure they went home and that faded. They stole a coworker’s lunch again from the fridge. Put a secret camera in the waiting room bathroom and recorded people doing their business (this was an act done by my sister’s childhood best friend’s husband who was incarcerated for it). They returned to molesting their daughters. They committed genocide. They looked upon the eternal call that we all face, day in and day out, the call to be better, and they quietly whispered, “No.” But for that moment, they were all perfect together. And that made me weep. Alone. In a bed in someone else’s house. A bed whose frame is 5” higher on the head end than the foot for reasons unexplained. That Henry, the world’s best golden retriever, sleeps under every night. Yes, you heard that right. This big ass dog who looks like he’s wearing a ghillie suit low crawls under the bed and sleeps below me. Often smelling a little musty, as he frequents the man made stream in this Shangri-La I’m at right now. And guys, it’s intimate. Me. Henry. The bed on lean. The stars visible through the skylight above the bed. The knowledge that when I get up in the morning I’ll get a chance to cook for my youngest son. The overwhelming realization that I’ve had an astonishingly good life. I cried.
And before that, I cried when I got into a fistfight with two dogs last week. I was out with Henry and my son, walking towards one of the best trails I’ve ever been on. It’s an old growth forest on Fidalgo Island in the Puget Sound. One part of the trail wriggles through prehistoric ferns, winding through the corpses of once mighty trees, now rife with mushrooms and burgeoning plant life. On two separate occasions I happened to spy owls. Goddamn owls! In the daytime. Great birds with wingspans over 4’ yet they make not even a whisper as they flap them to soar up to a perch to watch me. And no human sound can be heard in this forest, except my ragged breathing because I’ve wasted my body with the time I’ve been given. Ever astonished at how a man can drink a sixer of 8% beer each night and speed hike four gnarly miles each day. But here I am. Eighth wonder.
Anyway, I’m walking Henry with my son next to me and two dogs rush out of their yard and across the road, course set directly for Henry. He’s a gentle giant, so he doesn’t react. One of the dogs, the Frenchy, starts to instigate with the barking and feigning and charging. The other dog, a half-pit looking breed, hears this action and carpes the fucking diem by charging Henry and biting his neck. Now, gentle he may be, Henry doesn’t take any shit. He snaps back on that dog’s face, causing it to double down. And now they are roaring and gnashing and trying to lock on to each other’s necks. The Frenchy is the hype man and won’t shut the fuck up from stage left. But he gets tired of that and attacks Henry’s hindquarters while the mouth melee is still in full swing up front. Me, holding the leash, all of this happening in about 1.74 seconds. So I do what no reasonable person would do and I jump in, kneeling down and sticking my hands right into the bite fight, where I get bit, natch, but in the process I wrestle both of the bigger dogs to the ground and use my armpit to hold the pit down while prying their faces apart with my hands, ultimately getting Henry away from the pit that is now breathing heavily underneath me, lifting me up each time, because I’m not going to give this motherfucker an inch. I call to my son to take the leash and get Henry away, the Frenchy now taking the lead aggressor role even though Henry is capable of swallowing him whole. My son, mind you, when I lock eyes with him: arms slack, mouth ajar, vacant stare. I think I scared the shit out of him. He yards Henry back and the Frenchy is attacking still but gets shook off. Then a lady appears, I hear her behind me. She fetches the Frenchy and I say things, loudly, I’m not sure what, maybe mean things. I just don’t remember. And I feel this dog beneath me struggling to breathe, but I hold. I wait until Henry and my boy are backed away and I get up, letting the pit free, but it stumbles so I push its ass, just trying to get it away from me. The lady says, “Please, she’s blind,” in reference to the pit. How was I supposed to know? Then the lady gets the pit and we both exchange words that I cannot remember. It was that shocking. She has both dogs now, by the collar. My son hands me the leash. And the woman is crouched down and she says, “I do not have the words to express how truly sorry I am.” I don’t say anything. We walk further down the road, maybe ten feet. And I hear how winded I am. I’m exhausted. And I feel the scrapes and cuts. I hand the dog off to my son and I find the blood. And then I feel ashamed. I’m the monster here. See, it doesn’t matter if they attacked first, which they clearly did. It doesn’t matter that I broke it up and likely saved those two dogs some real pain, because from what I could see, my gentle giant was the one to bet on. It was that I was a monster. That I am a fucking animal, guys. Savage. And I apologized to that woman, over my shoulder. That I didn’t mean any of it. That I was so sorry. I mean, do you guys even know? I was fully prepared to curbstomp that Frenchy and I was this close to killing the pit with my bare hands.
My son and I walked in silence. And I quietly cried next to him. I’m just a fucking kid, man. I can’t handle any of this anymore. I’m not made for this place.
Home. I just want to go home.
Strangely, I’ve been writing this letter in my head for a few days (late again, I know; please forgive the fact that when I thought I was once healed from the pain I experienced last fall, I am, in fact, actually losing my mind this time). And I knew I was going to bring up “home.” And then, this fucking story has only one positive thing about it, that being this:
“You were home, huh?” Number Twelve smiled. The word “home” such a joke. For both of them. The idea that she was home here, that Number Twelve was home here. That either of them would ever be home again.
Let’s disregard the disdain for grammar in the sentence, “The word ‘home’ such a joke,” for a moment. And get down into the idea.
You can never go home.
What is home, anyway? Is it a place? It certainly leans that way. Or a person? An idea? A concept? What is it?
I have been trying to write an essay about home for a decade. Because I just want to go there. I don’t work here. I feel like I might work at home. And I’ve come to believe that home is an individual thing. It’s specific to the person. And I think for some of us, the fucking lottery winners, home feels like death. Like the siren’s call, you know where you are supposed to go. Ben went. My father has gone. My brother is there. Almost like Return of the Jedi, all three lined up waiting to meet me. With my grandpa. And my dog Bob.
Thing is, I don’t know that death is home. I used to think it was the feeling of being loved in the womb. That’s something you can truly never go back to. But not everyone was treated well in the womb. So maybe it isn’t that either. I think, right now, home is an Etch A Sketch. What I want to go home to is the ability to shake a little red rectangle, freeing it from its dark grey lines, and begin anew. There’s so much pain in this drawing I have rendered. So much failure. So much of this fucking monster and I’m tired of him. I just want to shake all of this off and look at that pale grey screen and try again. Going home is starting over, no fuck ups this time. No failure. No pain. Only light and grace and kindness and selflessness and love and love and love and love. Man does that sound nice.
But this drawing I drew, that’s so dark and filled with so much pain, it’s also been…spectacular. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that this summer. I think the summers of 21 and 22 are the best I will have in my life. And did I get what I wanted from this life, even so? I did. I felt myself beloved on this earth. I was in Chuck with my sons and we found the seams of reality and we ripped them wide open and we engorged ourselves on the liquor of absolute freedom. We touched the ether. For more than a moment. We played in it like kids in a kiddie pool. No woman, no relationship, has or will ever touch that. I got to do what you all wanted to do. And it was better than you can imagine.
So, why would I want to shake my drawing away? Maybe home isn’t an Etch A Sketch. Maybe it’s me.
Maybe I’m home.
Maybe the point of all this is to figure out how to be okay with yourself. To accept that you are a fucking monster. You guys don’t even know the things I’ve done. The people I’ve hurt. What happens in the shadows. But today my oldest son called to ask me a very stupid question about banking. And I answered and then explained to him how to find these answers on his own. I realized after the phone call that all of this, all of these fucking things I have done for them was in the blind hope that I would be that phone call. When shit got bad, I’d be that call. And. I. Am. It. I did it. He calls me all the time. About everything. I did not fail. I have succeeded beyond expectations, which is astonishing given the odds and the obstacles overcome.
I think home must be like the movie About Time. The guy can travel back in time in his own life and he struggles so much of the movie because he’s trying to fix everything. Save everyone. Make every day perfect. And by the end, he lives each day twice. The first time he makes mistakes and it isn’t perfect. And then he does that day over, but because he knows everything that will happen his perspective has changed and he makes it a perfect day. Home is the end of that movie, when he stops going back, and he just lives each day like it is the last one he will get, seeing that each fucking second is beautiful and a gift and so full of hope and love and all you have to do is see it. Just see it.
Nick
