April 13th, 2026 - Rate Your Happiness
Dear TNY,
Well, I made it through “Rate Your Happiness” and I don’t have anything to show for it.
That shit meandered for 7500 words and not a goddamn one of them meant anything. Characters just talking and talking, not really saying anything of depth. I don’t care about the impending breakup. I don’t care about Bruce, even though he was the most likable character. I don’t care why Louise passed out and I don’t care about her lackluster relationship with her father.
Fuck man, I don’t fucking care. You know, last week’s letter, I was so optimistic. So much so, I made the choice to repeat the thing that made me so optimistic. And it was fucking working for a second there. I got to Portland on Friday and am still here. I leave tomorrow. Where am I going? I don’t know. I’m nearly out of money, I’m sick again, second time in as many months. This one is really phlegmy too. Started with a fever and bone ache that was banging. But that faded quick. Lost my voice for about two days. But…
Who cares. I’m just filling up this page for the sake of filling up the page.
I wish I was a robot.
If I was a robot, I would change some things. First, the nerve bundle that currently exits my L4 foramina on my left side, that’s being squeezed by a herniated disc, the disc bulging rearward, causing shooting pain down my leg all the way to my toes, often times cutting sensation off to my foot, leaving it pins and needles, having provided said pain-then-tingles since February of 2024, having caused myself serious strife by choosing to carry four 60lb bags of water softener salt from the garden section to the main registers in a Home Depot in San Diego, not because I was trying to prove that I was strong, instead saying the phrase to my partner at the time, “I don’t want help, I want to be heard,” as I had been asked by a handful of employees if I wanted help or a cart, as well as said former partner offering help, but, see, I did need help and a cart would have been nice and I could have avoided this incessant pain that keeps me up at night, particularly the last couple of nights in the cuddlefest that has been occurring, me waking in the night multiple times, not wanting to unravel myself from my cuddle buddy as she’s crushing the sleeps, yet I can’t find a position to put my leg such that my ass doesn’t throb, yes, it would have been nice to avoid all of this pain, but at that time, in that Home Depot, I couldn’t foresee the pain in my spine and leg, instead I could only focus on the pain that was happening right then, which is that I had gone unheard for a very, very long time and that had been addressed to no avail so I reached a juncture where I pointlessly carried too much weight from area A to area B and then area C, stupidly believing that maybe I would be heard, as if the salt journey would be straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, but actually broke mine, when I should have realized that the trend of not being heard could not be affected by weight of any kind, and that trend would continue without slowing down, in fact, speeding up, to this very day, so if I was a robot I would remove this useless, green bean bundle of pain, unthreading it from its nooks and crannies, and I would thread in some Dyneema sheathed fiber optic cable to relay messages and commands back and forth across the leg landscape and I would disable the pain packets option of transferrable data as I am tired of feeling anything.
And speaking of not feeling anything, I would take this vortex based, swirling, thick-walled muscle heart that has beat too many times to count, and, to me, seemingly too many beats to bear, this incessant asshole who keeps ensuring I live through the night, my adroit little buddy, even though in January one of his four corners decided it had had enough of this consistent beating bullshit, instead opting for a shuck and jive type maneuver, a jig of his own, off kilter and asynchronous, quivering like my often bunched and shivery chin due to the influx of anxiety I have been facing as of late, I would remove this grizzled heart and replace it with something more modern, with carbon fiber butterfly valves and UHMW chambers, 316L stainless fasteners and springs, AN fittings, and Bluetooth connectivity for routine diagnostics, again forsaking the pain packets as I am tired of my heart hurting all day, every day, not from the AFib or PVCs, as the beta blockers take care of that, instead from carrying the weight of grief from loved one’s who have transitioned the next plane, pain from the anguish I have caused in others and cannot seems to reconcile, and pain from the callousness and cruelty perpetrated upon me, so this new-fangled heartbox would continue the job of its predecessor without the unnecessary task of hauling around all my shit.
I would replace my skin with a stainless alloy woven into a microscopic mesh for flexibility sake, such that things like when the impending skin cancer appears on my back and/or shoulders, if it hasn’t already, or the rosacea on my face, or the errant ingrown hair or zit appears, or, god forbid, another case of the molluscum contagiosum, I can grind the surface clean, starting over from scratch, and then buff it to a fine sheen using gradually declining grit sizes with polishes and pastes until even the most detail-oriented observer couldn’t identify the exact place on my nose where the little pustule had formed due to stress, chocolate, hot beverages, the sun, did I say stress because STRESS, alcohol, spicy foods, and/or stress had caused it to form.
I would replace my left knee with heretofore unseen technology, think something akin to transparent aluminum (if you haven’t seen Star Trek IV, get your life right), and utilize bleeding edge cabling technology to stitch the new joint into my organic framework.
And with each bone that hurts, I would custom order 3D printed, metallic bones to replace them, leveraging the MRI scanner I will have installed in the palm of my right hand which will automatically put the order in with the manufacturer as soon as the scan is complete such that this customer won’t have to wait all that long for the new, pain free bones to arrive.
And the brain. Oh boy. I would first install a temporary port below my left ear such that on a rainy Saturday, when there’s nothing else to do, I would post up in a cozy chair and watch something long, like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, while my entire existence was uploaded to an AWS DB, copies of which would be distributed to multiple data centers such that it would not be possible to lose all copies of “me” at one time, and after the upload, I would then dump “me” into a quantum computing chip with solid state RAM and ROM backups and replace my decaying grey matter with the next wave in human evolution; this swap would then allow me to remove painful memories with laserlike accuracy, not unlike sending in a SEAL team to recover a POW, but instead, in this scenario, the SEAL team tracks the target, ascertains the protection of the asset, executes an expertly crafted extraction plan, securing the memory, that memory is then taken back to the aircraft carrier where the team originated from, is led to the stern of the ship, and is summarily shot in the fucking head, the now husk of a memory kicked off the back of the ship where it falls into the waste data below, never to be thought of again, never to come rising up from the deep all day every fucking day, me, a prisoner of this fucking memory since August of 2023, an inescapable and all-encompassing, FAT FUCKING SUFFOCATING BLOB OF A MEMORY, that oozes and creeps and overwhelms all other fucking function, leaking into every recess of the organic ROM, threatening to the snuff the skin and bone machinery of the current version of my robotics, but this will no longer be an issue after the upgrade because Alan Turing, our esteemed and wonderful computing wizard, started us down a road that will eventually result in the death of “me” and I’ll be reborn as the non-feeling, non-empathic, non-human wunderkind, no longer burdened by love, magic, optimism, promise, wonder, kindness, anger, frustration, infatuation, swoonery, goofiness, humor, darkness, tenderness, tardiness, pain, discomfort, grief, schoolgirl crushes, appreciation, the undeniable urge to dance, to laugh, to hold another, to touch and be touched, to intentionally stay up while your partner sleeps so you can hear consciousness slip from them like their soul and fall through the bed, past the frame, where it leaks down through the slab below the house and trickles through the D1 and down through the cracks in the bedrock, past the aquifers and pockets of petroleum waiting to be discovered, further still past the bones of creatures that haven’t been seen since the Flying Spaghetti Monster created this planet, in his name we pray, amen, down down down, deep into the magma and out of the magma before this partner’s sleep spirit falls into a large cavern and slowly drifts above The River Styx before gliding through the dank air, lit by bioluminescence, until the spirit lands on the dead side of the river, where it will convene with friends and loved ones for the remainder of the evening before being washed clean of those memories as it ascends back through the earth channels to the master body before morning, but before all that, while the spirit is away, there I am, in the dark, laying next to her, listening to the sound of air passing in and out of her temporarily abandoned bio-machinery, just the life support functions running, and if I wait long enough, as the breath calms and the body relaxes further, the eyes that I cannot see because of the lack of light begin to flutter and change, and then there it is, a little baby freight train starts its engines, akin to The Polar Express, but for sleep, and it’s me and me alone in that moment, unburdened by any feeling at all, unable to understand that Beethoven himself couldn’t arrange tones as beautiful as what’s unfolding here for my robot self, a self that no longer fucking cares about anything at all, especially baby fucking freight trains.
Nick
