April 6th, 2026 - Enough for Now
Dear TNY,
Monday, and I barely made it to “Enough for Now” as I just got back from a whirlwind drive. I drove four hours to Portland yesterday and four hours back today. I needed meds from Tacoma so I snagged those on the way back. But the point of the trip was to visit a friend. And you know what? I’m not fucking sad right now. It was a restorative trip. Really, kind of mindblowing. I forgot, for a lot of reasons, that I have high value. That I’m the prize. To people that want nothing from me. And have a lot of experience with determining value. And yet, for them, I still float to the top. It was a big fat lovely favor and I won’t soon forget it. I’m super grateful. I need to figure out how to pay it back.
***BREAK BREAK BREAK***
Last night I finished this critique but I didn’t get it posted because one of my favorite bartenders wasn’t busy so she clocked out to eat dinner with me and have a beer and we talked about life and our children’s pubic bushes and how scary things are, in general, when you are made of all heart. She stayed way late and I made her laugh so much and I made her coworker laugh so much as we talked about sex and pornography and love and abuse and joy. Here are some sentences that are funny to me:
I know where my body begins and ends.
I hate it when I’m getting all turned on by a video and then someone’s feet sneak into view and ruin it for me.
I don’t want anything in me that looks like it can come out of my mouth.
If you really wanted to honor Turd Baby, you would have buried it.
That’s just a sample, folks. Maybe it was a “had to be there” type situation, but guess what? I was.
Also, today isn’t yesterday, which it was when I read this story and wrote this critique. And I want you to know that a miracle occurred overnight. I woke up with a future. I don’t want to die. It took 24 hours of being with someone who was genuinely nice to realize that for better or worse, I have been pretty fucking abused for the last three years at the cost of other people’s insecurities. And I let it happen. But I don’t have to anymore. I have value, guys. And I don’t want to not be here right now. Will this feeling end? Of course. As my buddy would say, there’s no rollercoaster that just goes up. But goddamn, as minor as this is and as many worries as I still have, I feel hopeful today. Maybe even a little bright. Let’s not make a huge deal about this. I just wanted you to know. And I want you to know there’s a little angel down there in Portland with the capacity to save lives. Just by existing. Not by action or words or anything else other than glowing, like the sun. A fucking miracle to behold.
***BREAK BREAK BREAK***
We’re back to the regularly scheduled programming!
This story is dumb. The main character is unlikable and unrelatable. So I can’t form an emotional attachment. Which means I can’t transcend.
Hold up. Let’s talk about this. Last week I got a text from a fella who read the post and he asked, “Why do you expect fictional characters to act as you would act?” That’s a good question, because it is rather limiting in what fiction can offer me then (and if we tease that out we can get to people; why do I expect people to act as I act, which would be a wild way to pass through life, but I will expand on the answer as to why I don’t do this in a second). I thought about his question for a bit and offered a shorter version of this response:
I don’t expect the characters to act the way I act. I expect the characters, no matter how bad- or good-acting, to have some sort of characteristic that is redeeming, relatable, etc. See, in order for the reader to emote anything other than apathy, there has to be something to attach it to. Most of your characters, TNY, don’t have that. This woman is the same. This woman is not a main character. This woman is a lineless extra in a bad movie. Hell, I find Humbert Humbert more relatable. The thing about a bad character or a good character, they have to be interesting, make interesting choices, do interesting things. Even if we hate them, at least we are emoting. So yeah, that’s how I treat the whole “people” argument too. If you aren’t real enough or fully fleshed out enough to be interesting, relatable, etc, I can’t hang my emotions on you, so then I’m watching bad TV play out and the work won’t do anything for me. It’s just lifeless, grey turds floating in a generic Home Depot toilet.
Just like this story.
Things I love about this story:
Love the way that she had a fantasy about the Chinese prisoner but was upset when Joost had fantasies about women (they may have been different fantasies but her lack of self-awareness and inability to recognize that he has the right to those fantasies just like she does was very…SoCal; also, how insecure is this girl that she’s threatened by his fantasies, yet she keeps going on an on about wanting to have sex with him and keeps saying she doesn’t fucking care about him).
Love when he called her out for reading his journal because it was an invasion of his privacy and she, in her mind, didn’t fucking care that it hurt his feelings and then she was a sociopath about it.
Love this set of lines: Were all men sexually gross? Why was everything so gross? Was that what it meant to be an adult, that you just accepted that everything was gross?
1) All humans are gross. All sex is gross. Everything is gross. Grow the fuck up and get fucking messy you fucking snob. Roll around in our filth and transcend reality. Or, you know, be shocked that you never liked cunnilingus until the guy you are calling gross did it to you. What a dumb fuck.
2) All this does, for this reader and I image others, is establish that this person is, drumroll please: FUCKING UNINTERESTING
3) I have met some women in my life that would take offense to not being called gross here. But double standards are the way of TNY.
Love that after those lines, she thinks this: The thing is, another part of her brain chimed in, I didn’t know that the last time we had sex was going to be the last time. And that’s just kind of not fair.
It really is astonishing how week after week you can stillbirth these victim stories and no one calls you out on it. Of course she gets to call him gross. Of course she gets to call all men sexually gross. Of course in her next breath she can be pissed off because she wants to sleep with him again but can’t because she ran away over him having fantasies, to then end up alone, pondering the grossness of men, to then meet up with him again (her still holding on to her own fantasy while simultaneously shitting on him) where she proceeds to have the thought that she refuses to feel guilty about reading his diary. And of course no judgement is weighed on her or her actions by the story, only by Joost which she refutes in her mind. And of course your readership, some of them anyway, will relate to this. Coughcough-cat person-coughcough.
Because I am the center of the universe. Only my story matters. Everyone, no matter how complex or independent, are all subservient to my godlike passage through this construct, which was manufactured to support me and me alone. Because I don’t know the word sonder. Because I can’t form empathy for another if their hurt feelings were caused by me because that would mean I’d have to admit I fucked up. And that’s not possible because nothing I do can’t be justified, no matter how many people I hurt along the way.
So as Snake Plissken from Escape From L.A. said, “Welcome to the human race.”
This is what we are now, people. Get on board with it. Start your self-care routine. Shed everything from your life that doesn’t serve you, unlearn self-sacrifice, devotion, and love, and let’s skim across the surface of existence with no insight, self-awareness, empathy, or ability to do anything for anyone else. And most importantly, no fucking effect whatsoever. Let’s get shallow, baby!
As for me, while you’re swimming in the kiddy pool dunking your swim diaper into hot piss with the rest of your peers, I’ll be night swimming off the coast of Marrowstone Island, the bioluminescence exploding to life around me, along with all the other fish which dart below the surface, visible in these conditions like I have x-ray nightvision, and even if I’m alone, which I wasn’t when this actually happened, my depth will trump your shallowness for the rest of my life. No matter how many people you recruit into your shitty army.
Manifest that, fuckdick.
Nick
