September 29th, 2025 - Unreasonable

Dear TNY,

Today is motherfucking Monday and I’m on it, baby!  And by it, I mean “Unreasonable.”

I can’t quite pin this one down.  I do like how sterile and clinical the MC’s voice is.  It matches the occupation, the scientific content, and the MC’s approach to…what’s that called?  When someone approaches life a certain way?  Like, I have some tools and strategies, and as a problem approaches I deploy.  Well, whatever.  That.  The voice matches the “that” and it suits the story.  The daughters are pretty cardboard.  The plot is pretty cardboard.  The bees and bee science is nifty.  Bogdan is not cardboard.  It just…it doesn’t quite spark, ya dig?  I see the themes, the correlations, I see where all the color is supposed to be, where I’m supposed to go.  It just doesn’t get there all the way.  This is in that tough place to edit where it’s apparent to the reader that things are not quite there but what’s missing is the je ne sais quoi.  I cannot help here.  It wasn’t annoying to read.  The daughters were definitely playing the victim card, but the story doesn’t holistically present as our now far too frequent “victim” story.  Overall, a decent job, I just don’t know how to help.

I got told this week, by a person I have prioritized so fucking high in my life, that I should stop this endeavor.  FTNY.  Remember when I told you guys that I was lying since, like, February?  I wasn’t lying outright, you see.  Just not telling a full truth.  Well she went back and read all that shit and said it was negative.  That I was focusing so much on the negative all the time that, STUDIES FUCKING SHOW, dwelling on the negative makes people sad.  Which increases my drinking, which makes me sad, which increases my drinking, etc.  You see where this is going.  And as I watched those words exit her lips, I thought, “Try reading all the months where you weren’t in my life, for starters; read last fall and winter and see how profoundly you damaged me.”  Or, “Try reading some of the stuff from when I was in Hawaii and depressed because my girlfriend treated me like shit.”  Or, “Try fucking reading the whole thing without a preformed opinion about it.”  I didn’t say those things.  See, I was in the big talk with her when she said this, in which I was trying to help.  The talk that will have zero effect in the present.  I expect the seeds I planted, if they ever grow, will take two to five years to resolve.  And it will take times of strife to water. That much like a flood, it will wipe clean everything she built around her to convince herself she were safe and doing the right things.  Strife destroys the superficial.  It destroys safety. It destroys the construct of your life.  And presents this:  You have never been in control, this life isn’t what you think it is, and you should live it by the laws of the four things people say when they die:

Please forgive me.

I forgive you.

Thank you.

I love you.

The rest of this shit will not fucking matter one iota at the end.  So why live by any other metric?  Note, none of those things are said in a vacuum.  We all need someone to register that we exist.  This whole thing is a big social experiment.  Sometimes I feel like I have my eye on the prize, that prize being a good death, meaning that I lived right, versus a good present, meaning I’m prone to self-centered thinking. 

But I’m trying to give these days.  Failing.  Always.  But that’s life.

I’m not depressed because I focus on depressing shit.  I’m not depressed because I drink.  I’m not depressed because it’s a choice. In fact, let’s look at a list.

I’m depressed because the last two major relationships I’ve had were with narcissists (almost 3 years!).

I’m depressed because I blew my family up and fucked over the woman I grew up with.

I’m depressed because you publish shit stories every week instead of work that creates empathy and I see the attitude it engenders in humanity.

I’m depressed because when I look into the faces of people I can see they don’t see and there is no way to get them to see and all I want is to impart upon them the moments I know can change their lives, and they will get greedy for it, like Bill Murray in Scrooged, whose 75th birthday was yesterday.

I’m not depressed by the state of the world, per se, but by the fact that all the animosity created by the state is suffocating the beauty I see in us, which could end the suffering. 

I’m not depressed by all the amazing adventures I’ve gone on with my kids, but am depressed that I didn’t get more, because who doesn’t want more time?

I’m depressed that she can’t see, even with all the information right there, and you play her, “If We Were Vampires,” and she cries and you think it’s getting in, but she doesn’t digest it into her bones the same way and the selfish tendencies resurface and she forgets that beauty like a melting snowflake.

I’m depressed that I’m stuck, but I know why I’m stuck and how long it takes to get unstuck and that I will eventually get unstuck, but it’s just taking some time.

I’m depressed because I lied in this endeavor for a few months, which I never do, for no fucking reason.

I’m depressed because I get accused of a lack of foresight because Ben drank himself to death and I’m on that path when I plead with people to understand he died of a fucking broken heart, that the world was so beautiful to him and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get people to see it and he ate everyone’s pain around him, to try to carry their water a little longer so they wouldn’t have to, to be that guy, the guy you call when you have something you can’t tell anyone else about, the guy who is never in the shallow end of the pool, who has been underwater for so many years.

I’m depressed because, get this, I WATCHED AN AUTOMOBILE COLLIDE WITH MY BROTHER AND KILL HIM, and I’m past the immediacy of that, having processed it wrongly for years and finally gotten to the place where I speak his memory into existence, it’s still just a hard thing to live with.

I’m depressed because my children are so spectacular it’s hard to know they exist at all, laughing and making jokes and living their lives and it’s so goddamn beautiful I don’t know what to do about it.

I’m depressed because I finally ran out of money, and even though what I bought with it was ten years of the magic hour, like that moment just before the sun sets, but for ten fucking years, I now have to work to survive, which has been depressing to me, like you, for most of my adult life.

I’m depressed because there’re people I love in my life that 1) need this list to even come close to approaching why I’m depressed and 2) won’t understand it anyway.

I’m depressed because I have let go of way better partners (and hurt them) that I could have had really happy lives with; I let go to try to help others that show no signs of ever wanting to actually live.

I’m depressed because living is hard. And solo. But you know what’s great in it? Showing someone on a road trip from Tacoma to Phoenix all the beauty the world has to offer and seeing complete and total recognition of sight.

But you know what?  I’m actually fucking happy. People who know me would tell you otherwise. But my real kinfolk would tell you I am, in my heart, the nuclear fusion of a sun, warm and happy, because I get to do this living thing at all.  I grew up to be, no shit, big and strong and capable and smart and caring and kind and generous and wild and sometimes a little scary but it’s just passion shooting out because everything just shoots out of me; when I tell people how hard it is, I get the same answers, you are the most resilient person I know, the strongest person I know, the most reliable person I know, the most beautiful person I know.  I grew up so afraid.  Of not fitting in.  Getting beat. Not being enough.  Talking too much.  Knowing too much.  Being too fucking much.  But the reality is, I came in clean.  I survived.  The world punishes so many.  I got punished.  And I punish myself.  But I win because I sometimes see the Truth.  And sometimes there’s narcissism.  Sure man, I’ve got some of that.  But I can talk to you all day about shit I have fucked up that I did on my own, no one helped me, and it wasn’t seventeen things that happened to me along the way that made me do it.  I own this god and this monster.  And I carry both their water.  And yours too.  And so many other people’s.  But I also have people carrying mine.  I’m not the hero here.  Or the villain.  I’m both. 

So are you.  You are a fucking diabolical villain.  And you also save the fucking day.

I’m depressed because I see the Truth.  It’s fucking lonely these days.  Everyone is the victim.  So easy to point fingers and find your fingerpointing alliances.  But there’s no Truth in that.  Just echo chambers.  And coddling.

But fuck that.

I will not go gentle into that good night.

I will get unstuck and rise up, and I’ll fight for what’s right:  The light within the darkness, the grace, the kindness, the hugs and face touching and the fucking 40 years together, even though I don’t have that many left.

And maybe I’m full of shit. 

Right now I just don’t care.  Big daddy Chiappone once said when I claimed Richard Ford, unlike Carver, gave us some universal truth instead of just bleakness, that hope lived within Ford’s work:

Interesting.  To those of us steeped in relativism the way I am, that presents a problem. By stating the truth as he does, he risks (as you inadvertently pointed out) picking a truth the reader does not agree with. It will then sound “wrong.”  Your claim that he gets it right, hinges on there being a right. A single truth.

Later, he said:

I was just thinking that it is the best reading response I may ever get.  Ford would be happy to know that his stories still resonate –twenty, thirty years later. And, even in my soulless, relativist’s brain I can understand that it’s because there are universal truths (some big, some small) and when you get one or two down on paper, they make sense to readers and always will. Let’s hope all of us write something that lasts like that.

See, what Rich was reluctant to admit was his own light.  He saw it, but then dismissed it with relativism.  Because when you see it, sometimes you shirk and you tell yourself, “Who am I to see these things?  To bring them to others?”  But he saw it.  And if you read his story, “Water of an Undetermined Depth,” you’ll see that he too was a bringer of light.

These stories, these critiques aren’t depression.  They are trying for something bigger than all of this.  To save lives. To construct an approximation of the unnamable and indescribable sea of Jung’s Collective Unconscious.  To turn “see” into “feel” and to feel the place, with your heart, where all of us came from and will go again.  FTNY isn’t a negative endeavor.  It’s an attempt to call wherever we came from on the phone.  With the line tapped directly into the heart.  Hoping for someone to pick up.  And sometimes they do.  And I don’t have to feel so alone in all this.  And if I write fast enough, and precise enough, you don’t have to either.  But you have to set your shit down, give up on what you thought this was all about, and just be.  Live with those four phrases before death, and let it all come in.  See if you can hold it, you know?  Not hide from it.  Not evade your chores.  Let it wash through you.  And let’s see if you are depressed afterward, knowing what you saw and how hard it was to get there. Wondering if you’ll ever go back.

You know why I’m depressed?  It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been and I can’t stay.  I have figured out how to extend my visa there, but I can’t stay.  But it’s right there.  Always.  Blowing leaves in autumn across the sidewalk when walking nowhere in particular.  Holding a lover’s hand for the first time.  Closing your eyes and losing yourself in the task of searching through a lover’s psyche to find where they keep the cache of unrealized orgasms.  When your children tell you that you are a good father.  When you are alone and put your phone down and realize that anything you will get out of it as attention isn’t as good as what you just realized about yourself.  When you yell at god in the shower because he made this game too hard but then when you are drying off you thank him for giving you the ability to see.  When your 1988 Vanagon Syncro tells you when he needs help, but more so when he carries you when he knows you don’t have the time, money, or patience to fix him.  When sneaker waves, automobiles, or Fishhook streams take our loved ones away and replace them with ideas bigger than our own existence, and the holes of grief that we have bored in our hearts are filled with something more fierce and precious.  When someone says yes when no is what was expected.  When a random woman from a writing program you attended now has your book about many things, including how you masturbate, and you know she’s going to see, laserlike, right through that shit and unbox the packet of love you made for her and assemble it differently but beautifully on the other end. 

The phonecall FTNY goes to isn’t a guarantee. Almost always no one is home.  Regardless of that, it takes a toll.  Exacts its pound of flesh.  But even if I fuck it up 49 times out of 50 every year, it’s more than I expect to get. More than most will get. Honestly, even if I write only one true sentence, it was worth the millions that I needed to write to get there. And FTNY is a way they get written.

The job is to feel.  To stare at this shit and not flinch.  Well bud, here’s some fucking truth.

I’m looking and I fucking see you.  All of you.  And no matter, as Hair Wall would have said.  I love you all anyway.  You’re all fucking spectacular, even when you are fucking up. 

Even when I’m fucking up.

There you have it.  No more lying.

Nick