August 17th, 2026 - The Blight
Dear TNY,
“The Blight” is your offering for this week.
And I…liked it?
I’d like to explain why, if you’ll permit me.
Yesterday was a bad one. And so were a lot of the days before that one. And there are reasons. Lots of reasons. Let’s call it the accumulation of loss combined with a keen awareness of self and other; put all that in a blender, throw in a dash of mania, and then pour that onto ice cubes of frozen isolation. What surfaces from that are days like yesterday in which I wanted to die.
As a result, I played a game with my phone while I was working. There rules were as such:
Turn 1: Pick the phone up from its position, which is face down on the high bench that I built in the “garage” I work in (face down to keep the dust off the screen).
Turn 2: Flip the phone over and look at the screen.
Turn 3: See that there’s no one there; no messages, no phone calls, no fucking nothing.
Turn 4: Place the phone back on the high bench, face down to once again protect from dust.
Turn 5: Rotate body and take the two steps toward the project, and say aloud, “Of course no one is there, you piece of shit,” or something like that, and return to work.
Turn 6: Reach a point of work stoppage, put the tools down, and do Turn 1 all over again.
In this way, a motherfucker can tear themselves apart. And I have.
I spoke to S yesterday for hours. Why? She was doing her civic duty to keep me alive. She will hate that I used “civic duty” when she reads this. Yet here I am: Alive. We talked about all manner of things. But I think I was clear in impressing upon her how dire this all feels for me, like end times. That I can’t keep up with the suffering anymore. And she was quite polite about it, listened, and talked about her own life as well. Ultimately, she is convinced that I am beautiful and have many gifts. That’s hard to take. Especially from someone whom I know I have hurt. Yet, she says it all the same. And she kept focusing on a known truth, that once one sees, one cannot unsee. And I have seen. I have seen the abhorrent behavior of others. And the abhorrent behavior of myself. I have seen how fleeting this life is. And how much it actually doesn’t matter at all. And how every tiny little detail matters so much (like in this story; they matter because they are disappearing). We talked about sex, in that regard, and I was once again informed how rare it is for someone to not only understand what sex actually is, that being one of the greatest singular pieces of art (and remember that great art=transcendence) that can be produced, and that it shows in a gallery only for the few who are participating, and it cannot be recorded or viewed, it’s transcendence known only to the participants, and it disappears without a trace when it’s done, the knowing now returning to the unknown again, ready and waiting for the right people to come along and find it together; yes, not only is it rare to know that, it’s even more rare to be in the art and slow it all down, as if this warm and wonderful moment was made just for you both (or more, I guess), and to take inventory of its artfulness while it’s happening; to understand in the moment how rare a thing it is to lose track of where your body ends and another’s begins while it’s fucking happening is, in its own way, a small miracle.
And then I finished the show Sugar. And there’s a lot that can be criticized in the show. But what I have taken from it is John’s appreciation for life. For humanness. For being. And how hard it is when you look around and you see everyday beauty everywhere. And we can talk about beauty the way that people talk about fun. I don’t mean type 1 beauty. I mean type 2 and especially type 3 beauty. Beauty where it absolutely should not belong, like a weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Or photos I once found in a used book, Polaroids of a man’s wife (in her underwear, which were fancy, but they were not very fancy, but I understood (based on the background of the photo and all their belongings within it) that this was the fanciest underwear she owned) and pictures of his two kids swimming. Or C, way back in 2023, sitting on my couch in the dark, a little drunk, berating me for over an hour, picking my life apart, being very, very unkind, but me knowing that fear and insecurity were driving that bus, and having complete empathy for her position, knowing that there was a jilted and damaged little girl inside of her lashing out, and all I wanted to do was care for her.
So, with all of that combined, I read this story of a man knowing that he is coming from together, unspooling as a being, into some sort of meat host for a dying consciousness, and I felt his pain. He knows his time here is done. And even though his daughter would intervene, he knows it anyway.
Let’s start with the phrasing in this. There were some exceptionally written passages. Here are examples:
- Sneak away into the beyond—maybe this was a clumsy translation. Shouldn’t their terminology be more medical than that? Sneaking away into the beyond—like how you might describe a teen-ager dropping acid in the back yard. Groovy and loose.
- Annabel on their wedding night, trying to hold in a fart unsuccessfully and bursting into sobs when she couldn’t.
- Her constellation of self, her preferences and complexes and aversions, her taste for sweetness—he would only ever know a fraction of Rebecca. A shadow moving in another room, spied through a keyhole. A girl who had once loved a ratty doll, a doll now lost to the black mouth of the indifferent universe.
So not only could the author turn a phrase here and provide the kind of prose which swallowed me whole, but he or she (I didn’t look who wrote this, so I don’t know what’s between his or her legs, but that being said, these days one can never know) also did the most amazing thing near the end. When the main character remembered what it was like when his wife had their child and how unnecessary he was and he felt so much love for them both in that moment, but his brain was fleeting and he couldn’t hang on to it. It was fucking beautiful and sad and REAL.
So I was pretty tender, as a reader, when I started this, and then it spoke to me and reminded me that I can see. Still. Even though I have been eviscerated by life (both by myself and others). And even so, I’m still here. And I remember so many details. The good and the bad. And I really felt empathy for this guy and his knowing that he needs to leave the party five minutes to midnight, as he put it. It’s sad. It’s true. And for me, it’s relatable. I felt him in this piece. He came alive for me, right near the end, in that scene where he found love for Rebecca again, his former full self there once more. And then, much like when sex is over, the transcendence slips through his fingers and he’s lost inside himself again.
But I’m not lost inside myself. It’s just dangerous inside myself. And for that, the not being lost part, I am grateful.
And maybe there’s something to be learned from that. For you, dear reader. That life is a series of forgetting and remembering. This character is losing and will lose his ability to remember. Completely. As I had forgotten to remember myself. As I have many times before. But today, I was able to remember myself, as I have many times before. As will you. You will forget yourself. Put yourself down inside yourself, like a hammer or the measure stick while working on a job, things that are right in front of you yet you cannot see them. And then suddenly you will remember yourself again, how beautiful you are, how rambunctious, how sexy, how bold, how brave, how savage, how kind, and wonderful and nice and forgiving and also how terrible, vindictive, cruel, angry, and sad. You’ll remember it all, your full self there once more, and you’ll marvel at your own wonder, your shine & shimmer, noting what a gift it is at all to take it all in, as it’s happening, that you are a piece of art yourself. All the colors, both bright and dark. And you might, if you’re lucky, get to see yourself the way others do. As a constellation of self.
As enough.
Nick
