June 22nd, 2026 - Mutter
Dear TNY,
I’m back, baby! “Mutter” is your fiction for today.
And I like it? I don’t? I don’t know.
I started writing a paragraph preparing you for what’s coming in this letter. Then I deleted it. I realized that 1) you don’t care 2) you already know what’s coming because I write the same shit all the time and 3)…meh. Who cares!
Let’s start at the beginning.
Approximately nine months before the day of my birth, my father labored under the effort of moving his genitalia a little further in and then a little further out of my “mutter” until such time he blasted a hot load of dadjizz inside her.
Just kidding, we won’t start there. But that shit made me laugh.
And have you ever thought about that? Thought about how the human form looks during sex? I think about this a lot, as you can imagine. As with almost everything, there’s a spectrum. On one end, we have the likes of Hegre-Art and on the other we have homemade, badly shot, sometimes gross (I try to be pretty open-minded about fetishes and sex; I draw the line at poop (well, you’ll see shortly that maybe I don’t?), porn. Now, I am well aware that porn isn’t what people look like when they have sex, it’s just a word to describe the filming of sexual interaction (and yes, by recording it we alter it; the observable cannot be observed without changing it, I get). Yes, there are other words that could be used here; it is also a spectrum. What I’m trying to do is provide visual context in a graspable format (throwing a fucking blanket over it, goddamn it, to give it some shape, which you’ll see as a fucking theme through this whole piece), a feast for the eyes if you will, for the ease of conversation. I think we’d all like to believe that Hegre is what we look like. I think maybe at one time I wanted to believe that. I no longer want to, and I don’t think it’s realistic. And also, not fun? Instead, as I have grown older, I tend to find our “failures” more beautiful than our successes. I’d love for shit to be slow motion, hair perfect, no sweat, grinding like it's dancing, but dancing that comes from the portal inside ourselves that has access to other dimensions and brings forth some kind of ancient maneuvering that the ensconced don’t even fully understand while it’s being channeled through them, but the reality is that sometimes you have to wafflestomp in the shower (wafflestomp. verb. after a collection of feces has been scooted over the drain on the shower floor, having been washed from a person recently engaged in buttstuff, one uses one’s heel to press the material through the shower grating, generally of a square pattern, such that to press the human Play-Doh through said grating would create a waffle pattern (it should be noted upon further reflection that this act is more akin to the classic spaghetti maker Play-Doh toy, and not the actual making of waffles) and you chuckle about it together (just kidding because you never tell them about poop stuff, guys, because the surest way, for most, to ensure buttstuff doesn’t happen anymore is to let them know about the poop; trust a motherfucker on this one). It’s the “ugly” that makes it beautiful, in point of fact. Not that it can’t be beautiful, per se. It’s like a real conversation (which sex most definitely is a conversation) full of clunky phrasing, mistakes, filler words, gracelessness, misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and so many other things that make it look less tidy vs a conversation between to characters in a film, which has been edited, lit, soundtracked, nuanced, rehearsed, and put together such that we become so engrossed in it that we fail to see it isn’t real.
So yeah, what I sometimes think about is my hirsute father, lover of the visceral, savage manimal, laboring over my mother, not just for my creation, but for all my siblings (and hopefully for recreation as well), but particularly my brother as my parents were both so young, not even thinking about any of this beauty at all, full of hope and wonder, especially because of my mother’s youth, her whole life in front of her, both people sweating and having secret little conversations that will never be heard outside of that time and place, whisperbullshitting, as it were. Golden. And yeah, I bet it smelled and looked feral, knowing my father, and it was “ouch, ouch, you’re on my hair” and it was his toenails being too long and scratching flesh and knowing both my mother and father it was an MLB sized catcher’s mitt of pubic hair on my mom while my dad stuffed his huge beard into that bush; I wonder if they ever caught hold like Velcro or had that thing happen that has happened to me on handful of occasions in which I find a really long beard hair of my own just to realize that it’s two hairs, one somehow tying itself to the end of the other, nearly doubling its length.
Thinking about my parents having sex isn’t a fun thought. Nor is it fun to try to find beauty in it. But I did and I cried while doing it because I miss those people. My dad is dead and my mom grew up and became Dunning-Kruger (another theme!!!). Either way, I would be doing a disservice to mankind if I didn’t write about it. Like it or not, your dad absolutely railed your mother, and they were young like you used to be, and maybe even in love too, and had so much promise, and joy, and maybe for a few seconds, minutes, or hours, they were excited someone was excited they existed and wanted to share and be shared. I mean, think about how most of you feel about sex. It is not so hard to imagine that your parents felt that too.
Anyway, big tangent there but I’m keeping it (another theme!).
This story is an anomaly for me because it’s still kind of the same shit as it usually is: nothing fucking happens and no transcendence is achieved (actually, upon editing, I’m discovering that I definitely transcended but I needed to write this whole document first). The ideas the main character is ruminating on are things I was literally going to fucking write about anyway, just maybe not in this letter. Or any FTNY letter. So I’m not going to say I like it. But I do think it has some really amazing points it’s trying to make. We should talk about them more than talking about my parents fucking, because I didn’t want to write that shit and I’m glad it's over, but I had to write it because that’s where the narrative wanted to go.
First, the short space. I thought the following sentence was a really erudite way of saying the same thing that the road manager for AC/DC said:
Still, I can sympathize with the desire for a firm peg or two on which to drape the amorphous fabric of one’s existence so that it can approximate a picture with meaning.
And what the AC/DC guy (Barry Taylor) said:
God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.
This is both an unbelievable concept and a really simple one. Simple, because words are the names we give to things so that we don’t have to fucking describe them in detail all the time. Like, orgasm, red, warm, crooked, heavy, raw, elated, majestic, grit, pressure, be, adrift, etc. In this way words are like math, but with alphanumerics. The full formula of what we are trying to address might take up two chalkboards, even when written in fine print (note that I’m still using words to talk about words because with words…wait, people exist without words and still communicate, it’s just different, but in all cases, we have representatives for ideas, not full ideas), and the elegance of math is that it can be simplified to bite sized pieces, each piece representing so much more. This sentence isn’t just saying that, though. It’s looking at existentialism as its target. And that puts it square in the realm of, for me, Love. For me, I feel the word love. I hear the tones of it. The gravity. The color of its face, you know? The way it sings to itself when it’s doing dishes like no one is watching. The way it tries to fart silently while pooping in a stranger’s house, only to be foiled by the grotesquery of Taco Bell shits loudly ricocheting about the porcelain bowl like the .22s that travelled through JFK. They way love looks like everything you see, all day long, woven like an incredible fabric holding all of this together just for you, but with the evolutionary advantage of making you believe it’s all for you (evolutionarily because it behooves the species to think it’s special; in that way it preserves its kind). That all of this was made for you, if you look hard enough. And if you do, you’ll find it everywhere. The movement of fingers to the beat of a song I can’t hear in someone else’s headphones, dancing alone on a beach on the north end of Marrowstone Island shortly before skinny dipping, a random phone call on Saturday before the main onslaught of mushrooms kicked in in which I talked to my ex-wife on the phone for an hour and told her how much I loved her, a really good grilled cheese sandwich, the beauty of the life of that cow that made that milk which became that cheese (not that, for the cow, it was a glorious romp across verdant pastures that rise up to evergreen covered foothills, granite crags capped by snow being the backdrop, the cow only knowing wonder enrobed in a life without fear; no, we know that cow had a shit life, literally, and was murdered unceremoniously to be consumed at McDonalds; what I’m saying here is that life is beautiful and so full of love and that cow, whatever “that cow” even means because what is and where is its consciousness, that cow hosted, get this, over a fucking quadrillion living things inside itself all leading lives we don’t understand, a whole universe inside a cow, this cow living here in our universe, one of approximately 1.5 billion cows here on Earth, which, Earth and the Milky Way and all the other galaxies we struggle to comprehend, they could all be inside one cow right fucking now, we have no way to prove we are or are not in the microbiome of said beast, so it could be turtles all the way down baby!), petrichor, the hairball the MC imagines in the coffin…I could keep going but I’m already running long on this post.
I’m just…I’m not trying to say anything, really. I’m just running around in this space. Making observations. This one being that taking gigantic ideas like “love” or, as in the MC’s case, the last of all California Condors (ever) which extrapolates to all birds dying and then all animals dying and all things dying and all of this will be over so fast, and throwing a blanket over it to give it shape is not only a good thing, it’s a necessary thing. One of our smartest humans already knew of this idea when describing that literally everything, every fucking thing ever that we can understand at this time is moving at speed (unless absolute zero decides to spontaneously occur naturally in the universe, which it does not (fuck, here we go, tangent time again: The Third Law of Thermodynamics ensures that absolute zero isn’t possible (at this time; much like faster than light travel, we don’t have math to make this possible yet; when and if it becomes possible, math will have to be rewritten) because in order to get matter to cool, one needs a cooling agent colder than the thing that one is trying to cool, meaning that in order to get matter to absolute zero, we would have to have something colder than absolute zero which is not possible or to have already had matter at absolute zero to do so; more interestingly though, studying this concept in relation to quantum physics shows us that even at picokelvins above 0, quantum fluctuations occur, ensuring movement always exists)). And that by moving at speed, whatever matter it is, that motion has an effect on the perception of time specific to that matter and that matter alone. Everything is in motion. All things, no matter how imperceptible to us, are moving at different rates. Even two atoms right next to each other. In this way, everything experiences time dilation. This is compounded when the matter can be sped up or slowed down. Einstein explained this phenomenon to dumdums like myself as such:
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.
He put an elegant blanket right on top of that shit and it makes sense now!
God have I lost track of what I’m talking about.
Back on track! Not really, I just put some laundry in the dryer at the bar (one beer a day now!) and came back to wonder what unprofound shit I was going to write next.
I wanted to tell you some things that happened really quickly before we step into the next space. I got the epidural last Tuesday. I stopped taking the antidepressants (which were for nerve pain) the day of the shot. It took less than a week, but my emotions came back. I cried again. I got angry. I got sad. I got frustrated. And I jerked off like a mad fiend, my dick working once more, the mangeyser back in action! I actually have a lot to say about this. Wait, I know how that sounds. I don’t mean jerking off is what I have more to say about. It’s more about existentialism. But I’m not going to cover it now. Just wanted you to know I’m back in the game again and should be more me as the weeks roll on.
What I wanted to say, though, if I can summarize, is that the antidepressants didn’t take the sad away, just moved it outside arm’s reach. I could still see it, but it was like hearing Del Shannon’s “Runaway” on transistor radio waves (shout out to The Barenaked Ladies “When You Dream”; wrap your fucking ears around it; I hadn’t heard it in years and you know who is in it…Jesus and quantum mechanics and reincarnation and love, guys, love…I have so much love to give, and I might have finally figured out where to put it, I’m just not allowed…you know, Quiz Kid Donnie Smith said, rather William H. Macy said, “I really do have love to give, I just don’t know where to put it,” and I used to feel that way for so many years, waking up every day so fucking excited to exist at all and then I had it fucking beat out of me by Dunning-Kruger types and myself because almost no one is as good at beating me up as I am (ALMOST), but the reality, much like Ben, is that I am made of love and that putting it EVERYWHERE is the move, not jizzblasting it like my dad did inside my mother’s pusspouch kind of everywhere (callbacks baby!), but to share it with anyone that will sit still long enough, and I’m an adult, not a fucking kid, and I have kids, so I understand that sometimes love isn’t nice, love isn’t kind, sometimes people are so unaware that communicating with them is fucking impossible and yet you keep fucking trying because LOVE so if you want to talk about kindness, try sitting with my mom, or me, or some of the ladies I’ve dated while we all try to sell you the best snake oil because, get this, we don’t want to be wrong and it has nothing to do with whatever it is we are talking about, well fuck all that my guy, you know what’s more important that winning…NOT winning; ugly is beautiful and beauty is ugly, and there it is, we are in a parenthetical phrase but the next section brought itself to our attention so we might as well talk to it, there’s a part of this story pasted below and I’ll figure out how to edit all this later, this big steamroller, this “I just took time to text Katie”, this “special place in hell for someone who writes a critique longer than the piece”, this love, guys, this fucking love).
Here’s a section from the story, the second space:
That would make sense, because, if something can disappear, then it’ll need a verb to call itself back into existence. By contrast, something like the soul, God, etc., in being impossible to get rid of, knows no such shift. It can’t be made to happen, since it’s always already there. What’s more, if the soul, God, etc., can’t be made to happen, then it never has happened, actually, which makes me wonder—does it happen by not happening? Might it happen by not showing up where it should? In that case, perhaps everything I hold dear—e.g., my mother, her voice, both rattled by this bus—can be understood as being in an unrelenting state of abandonment by the soul, God, etc. Beauty, then, arises from the pain and struggle of experiencing oneself as a site of divine truancy, and ugly is that which pretends to be directly equivalent to the soul, God, etc.
What I wanted to write about today was intelligence and Dunning-Kruger and the human condition (took forever to get here, I know, and we aren’t really going to cover it in depth). What I wanted to do was draw you greedy little bitches a chart that showed you human intelligence as a statistical bell curve, not based on IQ but on kind of a combination of IQ and EQ but also experience & wisdom but it was me that was being the greedy little bitch because the curve became 3D data modeling and I was having trouble drawing it as you can imagine. I talked to my youngest son about it and it was an animated conversation that involved some very astute observations on his part. But I’m not writing that right now. What I’m saying here is that this author is right. I was using “intelligence” as my constant and he’s using “the immutable”. Either way, the dichotomy is there in the argument, which is what I’ll address here. Because we talked about this before.
If you say you are smart, you aren’t.
If you say you are a good person, you aren’t.
If you tell everyone that you are beautiful, you aren’t (here’s the thing about me saying I’m beautiful, as I am wont to do from time to time: Every single fucking time I went on a writing jag about how I found my own beauty, it feels beautiful while it’s happening but then ugly afterward; but it was ALWAYS because I let someone else convince me I wasn’t and if I have learned anything about Dunning-Kruger, it’s this: Never argue with stupid people because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. Now, I would argue that “stupid” should be switched out with “ignorant” in this case, but whatever. Additionally, the quote is often attributed to Twain, so we’ll go with that but it’s not a sure thing from the research I did).
If you purport to be close to the constant, you aren’t.
In fact, the smartest, most empathetic, most calm and collected people, you’ll rarely, if ever, hear from them. They have no desire to show off. To engage with people who are maybe a few deviations lower than them on the bell. Not because they don’t like people. I think it’s hard to be around people who tell you how smart they are all the time, or try to prove to you they are smart, when being smart doesn’t fucking matter all that much. Smartest thing a person can do is say, “I don’t know.” In fact, I’d posit that people at the opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum get along better than people who are on the same side together. As in, Einstein would get along better with Forrest Gump than with someone in the standard deviation of one on the intelligent side of the bell. But I will say that I live in dread that maybe I’m Dunning-Kruger on the dumdum side and I just don’t know that yet, so this whole argument is a wash because I could be a big stupidface. But, guys, it might just be the same as the good person/smart test. If I live in dread that I don’t know enough, then I’m not on the dumdum side. By questioning it, I’ve already arrived outside that pocket.
Anyway, that’s a subject for another time.
Back to the story for just one second to revisit two sentences. The part that really makes me feel understood—makes me feel fucking seen—is this: In that case, perhaps everything I hold dear—e.g., my mother, her voice, both rattled by this bus—can be understood as being in an unrelenting state of abandonment by the soul, God, etc. Beauty, then, arises from the pain and struggle of experiencing oneself as a site of divine truancy, and ugly is that which pretends to be directly equivalent to the soul, God, etc.
Goddamn. The human condition is, was, and always will be that the struggle is beautiful, not the optimal experience. Because true optimal human experience is suffering. Anything else is pretending.
I’m going to wrap this shit up because I’ve been going on forever. I just want to say, I’m fucking back. And we’ll see how that unfolds.
Goodnight and good luck.
Nick
P.S. As if you needed more! I wanted to say that the photo for this post was taken somewhere in Seattle on a long walkabout. On that day, I felt sad about it I guess. But I don’t any longer. About a year and a half ago I had my spirits read by a ladyfriend. I don’t know if it was real or not. I don’t actually need to know if it was real or not, though, much like descriptions of my parents having sex or whether we are all inside a cow or not, one in a quadrillion. Much like the daywalker story of old, which I am sure I have told on this platform, what the spirit lady said, who also had the same first name as my ex-wife, was ghosts man. She said I had more spirits around me than anyone she had ever seen. They filled the room. They were crowding to get into the house and took up every room before crowding outside in the cul-de-sac. I was surrounded. Awash in company. Always. Now, why can’t ghosts occupy the same space? I have a corporeal body but they don’t, right? So why couldn’t they all pack inside the room with me? Or into a fucking thimble? I don’t know these answers. But maybe more importantly, I am not alone. I am a ghost. Half in, half out baby! Bringing you news from the Collective Unconscious front! Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!
