November 2nd, 2026 - Wall Cano
Dear TNY,
Sorry for the lateness, bud; I have read “Wall Cano” and I have notes.
At first I thought this story was being told from the narrator’s perspective at the age the story was set in, so the simplicity of the writing (that being the phrasing, vocabulary, complexity of the narrative, and the low-level observational powers) aligned with the maturity of the narrator. But it turns out that this was, in fact, narrated by the adult version of this child (at the end it was revealed), so the simplicity of the story belongs to the adult. Which doesn’t work for me. Not that it’s ever a good idea to bring up Hemingway, because he gets trashed by the modern crowd, but what an example of someone who writes narrators that have simplistic writing while maintaining the complexity of an adult mind. It can be done, so then we must wonder why wasn’t it done here. And I don’t know the answer to that.
Once again, I was unable to latch myself onto anything in a TNY story empathetically. Yes, there is loss in this. Loss of a person, sure. But also loss of innocence. These are things that should strike chords in the reader, but to this reader, they are just quality ingredients used poorly. And between the two occasions of having quality ingredients and using them poorly or having shitty ingredients and using them exceptionally, I’ll take the latter all day. If we are sticking to food, as I think maybe we are because I’m piloting this ship, I built this ship, and I care about this ship more than anyone else, then I’d say the latter example across all art is often the best of said art. In the Ratatouille sense, anyone can cook, meaning great food can come from anywhere. Humble beginnings, indeed.
I was late this week because work has gotten stressful. The budget is dwindling. The deadline is looming and there’s no way it will be met. The complexity of the projects is daunting (I must say, I am in charge of the complexity and am forced to question why choosing hard things is a good idea; I understand if the hard things are for me and my budget and my life, but when left in charge of design for someone else’s project, it might have been better to choose less difficult shit; that being said, I was told specifically that the reason I was chosen for this gig was that they knew I would put my spin on everything, that many contractors could do what I do with regard to the building of a thing, it’s the spin that they were after and knew they couldn’t get anywhere else). All week was prep for building a four-person, built-in bunk bed using black iron pipe. I have never seen one, yet it was my idea and I designed it. Figure that one out. Pipe was accumulated, a power vise was secured, and a friend from the military I hadn’t seen in 15 years came up to help. So we embarked on an adventure on Saturday morning, fastening cleats to studs, cutting flanges, and threading pipe and fittings. They were uncharted waters for sure. Yet, we persevered. I got to hear about his young twins and other two instakids. His wife. He seemed happy. He knew his shit. He worked hard. He wouldn’t take money. He kept saying a line about help that reminded me of Letterkenny, “If a friend asks for help, you help them.” I don’t have the words, either on this page nor in real life, to convey the level of appreciation I have for the company, the work, or the miracle he pulled off. But the pipe work is done, the rental equipment returned, and we are back to the regularly scheduled carpentry program.
I never think of myself as a carpenter, by the way. I’m not. I know what carps do and I don’t do that work. I have spoken of this concept before, the master putter-togetherer, and that’s how I think of myself; just, without the master part. Putting things together well is what I aspire to do. Words, black iron pipe, relationships, ingredients, sticks, engines & transmissions, burritos, etc. Stories. It’s all a story. The 2x4s for the cleats were once trees and the dead wood inside them has been harvested, dimensioned, proffered, and affixed to more wood previously subjected to the same circumstance. The iron: mined, refined, melted and molded, cast and carved, and purchased from four Home Depots in the local area to be assembled like LEGO (FYI, LEGO says that Lego or Legos or lego or legos are all incorrect and only LEGO is correct, even when plural (LEGO specifies that one can use “bricks” or “elements” if plural is needed, but I’m going in the British sense of plurality, in which the company itself is treated as a plural). Somewhere in the putting together of these pieces, the story of them, myself, my buddy, and then tangentially the host family, my new miracle mascot buddy, my kids, my ex, K., S., The Wizard of Kindness, and the whole world, that story just pours out into the room along with the pipe and wood and goddamn stinking-ass cutting oil (IYKYK). Through the putting together, a story is made. Our story. And this happens all day, every day, across this globe. Hell, off the globe. You think those last four astronauts that zipped around the moon weren’t putting together a million little things, them riding in a ship put together by thousands of people, stories pouring into stories such that, for a brief moment, humans went further from Earth than ever before?
No, not a carpenter. Likely a storyteller with aspirations of being a master putter-togetherer. Maybe one day.
I’ve been struggling mentally lately. Some days are beautiful, but there’s a lot of other tumultuous chatter in the brainbox. Negative shit. My best guess is that this Northeast job I took saved my life. I beat the rap, as it were, that I was on, the one heading straight to the grave. And I was able to do that because of, wildly, isolation. I thought isolation would kill me. But what it did, actually, was remove me from the majority of face to face human contact. Especially after I moved up to Maine. For two months I have been banging away at this job. I’ll tell you, it’s been incredible. Particularly in the beginning. There was a deadline, but it was far enough away that I didn’t have to worry about it. The same goes for the budget. And there was no possibility for human interaction because of how far away I am, how few people are up here, and how busy everyone’s lives are. This created a pocket of time where I was not judged, by myself or others. I woke up every day, got to work, work that was hard and I was in charge of, I managed myself and the project and put shit together. Then I would knock off every afternoon and go for multiple-mile walks, smoking somewhere between two and four cigarettes, before settling in for the evening, where I would consume 20mg of weed gummies, make myself a big dinner, and watch shit on the internet that would not cause me to think. That’s not to say I didn’t think all fucking day. I did. Not just about the work. About everything. But I lived in this bubble of safety where, for the most part, I couldn’t get hurt. In that bubble I began to really heal.
Recently, things have changed. Deadlines, budgets, and, weirdly, the one that’s most difficult, social interaction. Alcohol is barely a character in my life anymore. I’m not sober in the strictest definition of the word. I drink maybe a beer a week. If that. What I am is in control. And I know what not in control looks like, so I don’t have a lot of fear about going back. I did that thing, it’s not a thing I need to do now. But recently, some of the symptoms I was experiencing when shit got dark are coming back, sans alcohol. the tics. The shivering. The gagging. Which confirms not only my suspicions, but also those of the substance abuse professional I am working with and have worked with for years. The alcohol was never the problem, it just stopped being the solution.
The problem is me. How I process, how I think, how I see, how I perceive, how I move across the fabric of space/time. Here’s an example.
Someone very special recently wrote of my writing: I’m deciding that there is not much that I would consider surprising about your work. It oozes and rushes, somehow both lava and cascading rapids at once. It, much like yourself, is the beauty that mortality leveraged in exchange for pain. Pandora’s reward across the page.
Which is, guys…which is…it’s actually really hard to talk about. When I read this, I thought about how and why it was written (at face value), as a genuine belief, for a millisecond. Then I thought about how shitty my ego was that I was just waiting for someone to see this of me, that I knew it all along. Then I thought about how other people have said things like this to me. I thought about how it was so beautiful that it could not possibly be true. I thought about what a garbage person I was and am to think that I was or am special. As I read the words that may or may not be true, I found myself having arrived at the person I thought I could be and hating that person. That somehow I did it, I tricked someone into saying exactly what I wanted to hear to feed my shitty ego and be a monster.
And then we encounter the ego of thinking that I could manipulate a person, a real life, breathing and sometimes eating human, into forming thoughts as I would want them written and then writing them down just so, sending them off, and, the most difficult part, manipulating them into convincing themselves that they did this on their own, not one of my fingerprints on it.
And then I thought, “Aren’t you tired of not knowing what’s true and what’s not? Aren’t you exhausted by all this yet? Aren’t you ready to let go?”
I want to be. I want to believe those words. And others this person has spoken. I want to believe what K. says is true, that people want to be around me because they like me and my energy and my stories. I want to believe host mom when she says she likes listening to me talk. I want to believe The Wizard of Kindness when he says he looks forward to reading these every week. I want to believe my kids when they say they love me. I want to believe that I’m enough. That this isn’t a lie. That I’m deserving of this attention, time, and love.
It’s just so fucking hard to believe. Not just that, but everything. That my adventure has been so fucking spectacular. That people wanted to give me their time and attention. Their love. That people want to listen to what I have to say. That it’s not one, huge, orchestrated endeavor because people feel sorry for me.
I don’t think there’s a fix for this. Not an easy one, anyway. Just time. And being around people that don’t make you feel like shit every day, or people that don’t understand the world. Selfish people. It’s a slow crawl out of this hole for sure. And the part of that that is hurting me now, the integration, is that…in my bubble I was safe and I loved myself. Did you hear that? I loved myself. But now, I care about if I hurt someone’s feelings or not, if I made the pipe bunk beds right or not, if the woodwork was too complex and took too long, if my military buddy hates me because I didn’t ask enough questions about his family or his life, if mascot buddy can accept me despite my writing, if The Wizard of Kindness is just waiting for the friendship to dry up, if my kids are just tolerating a crazy father, if if if if if if fucking if.
I don’t know when it happened or why it happened, but it feels like the aperture on my lens is all the way open and I can’t close it. And instead of learning how to close it, I’m trying to learn how to hold each grain of sand, each evergreen needle, each flower petal, each ripple of water containing each micro-mirror reflecting the churning nuclear explosion at the center of this system, each fleck of pollen on each bee’s leg, each color in the gradation of colors in a woman’s iris, each tattoo, each strand of hair placed just so, each shape of each tooth in each smile, each heart, slowly unfurling its cloth, and each millisecond of time I’m allowed to peer inside.
Maybe this is what it takes to write. What it takes to make art. Possibly even Art. Maybe this is what it takes to put together. It’s not wood or glass or bone or iron or tile or rocks or phrases or bars or salutations or genitals or lives or anything I can point to and say, “that.” Maybe what it takes is putting together everything we can’t see, the thing behind the thing, the shimmery blue light that comes from the seams where this place was sewn together. Maybe I am an egotistical narcissist and I have manipulated my way into this place and time without knowing how to do any of the things I do, it’s all just one big trick, and I have fucked you all over, meticulously reoriented your magnetic poles such that your compass aligns slightly off, leading you all directly back to me.
Or maybe it’s like a friend said a long time ago, that I think I’m being super sneaky and conducting a great orchestra (that’s the ego right there), but the reality is that I’m like a child hiding a cat that I found in the gutter from my parents, it’s in my room, under the laundry basket, and I think I’m being so discreet and my parents pretend to not know it’s there, but they have known the whole time and love me anyway.
The beauty of that, that last one, is harder to believe. Because if it’s true, then it means that I might not be trash. Which, today, might be a bridge too far.
But then I’m forced to think of everyone else in my life, and their own negative self-talk. And how when I motivate or prop up or support or compliment or believe in them, none of it is a lie. I believe every word of it.
The same as the person that wrote that snippet above believes it. The way that The Wizard of Kindness believes it. K. S. Other K. D. Other S. And so on and so on.
So then it becomes a question of what’s real.
Nothing. Nothing is real. The human mind is capable of believing anything. We believe things that extend from before we were born to well after we die with no discernible proof for any of them. This buffaloes us into a position of choosing the truth. Our truth. Which is neither the truth or The Truth. And in my constant search to find and record the truth, which has been the guiding principle of my writing for the last decade, to always tell the truth, I have to reckon with the fact that there might not be one. And I’m not saying there are many. I’m saying there might be nothing out there and I’m just making all this up. That I might, in fact, be responsible for my own reality. That I’m creating the good and the bad as you are creating the good and the bad. That my perception is my truth and the way I lay my mind’s eye overtop whatever it may be, that’s my truth.
I’m going to try to choose to believe all of you, then. That I might have value. That as astonishing as it might be for a homeschooled kid from New Mexico that has fucked a full lifetime’s worth of shit up in half a lifetime, you don’t care all that much about that. And you believe anyway. There are more of you than me, and numbers matter too. Because if I believe in all of you, and I am dead sure of that belief, and that no matter what you do to convince me otherwise I’ll still believe, then it is possible for you to believe back. And all that feelings hurting shit I worry about, the not enough shit, the writing shit, the bad at everything shit…it’s a truth. It’s my, single-sourced, somewhat insane truth. But it’s not a crowd-sourced, agreed upon truth. That’s your truth. And that has to be truth enough.
Nick
