September 7th, 2026 - Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub
Dear TNY,
Jesus Christ “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub” is bad.
Like, what are we fucking doing here? This is literature? This is a story about the absolute boredom of human existence now, right? Do we think cave paintings would have been about this fucking drudgery? No, we don’t think that. Because we found cave paintings. They appear to be about trying to understand existence and also fighting large animals or each other. Sometimes, it’s about trying to understand existence whilst fighting. But this? It’s not this.
Grom hobbles into a cave to be alone. To sulk. He uses the soot off a blackened log to crudely render a portrait of Fro wildly gesticulating whilst high on the stinky plant, a gift he gave to her because she stays with him if he does, even though she’s chaos after ingesting it; Fro, in this drawing, accidentally tripping over a log near the fire and dispersing the coals such that it had to be recorralled and coaxed back to peak performance before she asks why the sloth bear meat, which had begun to turn, wasn’t cooked yet. Then he tries to draw his yearning for a better log to sit on as his log near the fire is uncomfortable. All logs, for Grom, are uncomfortable. Grom does not understand this nor can he express it. So he draws an orb in his picture and remembers the sun and how when Spring comes, the low, green plants upcountry will bloom cyan flowers with small, black speckles which he will fetch for Fro and she will thread their fibrous stems through her matted hair, and dance around the fire once more. A ray of pure light, right there before him. Grom is desperate to touch her but has no idea how or why. He wants to draw another picture of how maybe one day Fro will feel about him what he feels about her, or what he feels for the flowers, or how the water in the stream comes from nowhere and goes somewhere else, and if he stood creekside long enough, it’s possible he could see all of water flow by. He stands before a blank cave wall, sooty finger outstretched, torch casting amber light like a bubble in this dark space, and he waits for imagery of how to convey this to strike him.
I was actually trying to make fun of the banality of this story through cavemen and then I found myself more engaged in my fucking story of cavemen than the actual story you published. Yikes.
The thing is, I get it. This type of story does it for most people. And most people is, well, most people. The Wizard of Kindness once reminded me, of all the journeys I have gone on, and taken my kids on, and how it’s still not enough, that most people get out to the lake a couple hours from their house maybe two weekends a year. Most people. Did you know that most people are happy? I read a study years ago that surveyed global populations and it included wealth, job, family, and all manner of details. And the goal was to see if anything could correlate to happiness. And you know what? Nothing did. Yes, there are “happier” countries than others, according to an annual award, most of which are Scandinavian, but I think that has more to do with culture than individual reckoning. The study said that across the board, no matter what the situation was, just under two thirds of people were happy. Goddamn. Almost half the people on earth are unhappy.
I think the only two ways to be smart & happy are well-cast spells of illusion (which have to coincide with a rampant lack of self awareness) or traversing the bell curve and arriving down on the other side, in the flat zone, same as the dumb dumb side. That both ignorance and total Zen acceptance are the only way to happiness. Intelligence without illusion is just face-raping.
Most people. It’s an idea that has been plaguing me for weeks. Years. What is most people? Why don’t I feel part of most people? What is it that they have and I don’t? What is it that I have and they don’t? And I was installing flashing this week on a siding project and it all hit me at once. I had wanted to die for the better part of my two week absence from writing to you. For lots of reasons. And as I was pushing this piece of flashing under the siding, it hit me. I saw myself the way that others in my life do. People of trusted opinion (The Wizard of Kindness being one of them). See, I did it, mentally. I got to the place where I feel proud of what I have done and what I can do and the direction I know I’m going in life. I have value. I have self-worth. I know what I can do. I know what I am. My issue is that I don’t feel like the world cares about that, though. Which is evidenced through the vast majority of interactions I have being on the phone. I don’t know if you guys know this, but to me you are all letters on my screen. When I’m real high and lots of texts are coming in, your voices all sound the same. While you stay in one place and talk to real people, I don’t. So all these voices come like text generators. And the longer I’m away from you, each of you, the more your texts just become you and the real you disappears. Then I feel like in order to interact with mankind, I must interact in a way that feels very ChatGPT. While you turn away from your phone to live your life with your community, I turn toward my phone. While you thrive, I die. Yet, when I turn away from my phone, alone, I am on a fucking adventure the likes of which most of you will never see. Grom desperately holding a shaky, sooty finger up to the cave wall indeed.
But my value isn’t in my skills. It’s in that I’m not most people. Instead of working to enmesh myself in a life that took all my freedom away, I worked against that. Now, we all complain. I complain about a lack of people. But, I get lots of, “I wish I could do what you are doing,” and, “holy shit that’s awesome,” which is funny to me, because most people can do it, they just don’t. They want to complain about it. And it wouldn’t be what they thought it was anyway, just like everything else. That’s human.
My value is in perspective. I think almost everyone acts out of fear. Whether they admit it or not. Most people don’t adventure because they are afraid. And I’m afraid of not living my life. That’s what most people don’t understand. I’m afraid all day long, every fucking day. I just have the courage to beat it. Sometimes. But there’s no shame in staying home, though. I long for home. But I don’t think that’s my job.
See, what I realized while doing the flashing is that I’m supposed to be out here throwing myself at life and then suffering. Suffering is the job. Because suffering is how one has access to the human condition. And my job is to roll in that filth, to experience it as a human with human limitations and human patheticness and human compassion and human empathy and human selfishness. My job is to big (sic) human. And then process that. Try to understand it. Try to grow from it. Document it. Tell stories about it. See, I was informed that there is an extremely steep cost to live like this. And that has taken its fucking toll for sure. I was told this week that the work I’m doing is the type of work that will likely not be appreciated in my lifetime. And as I saw me as the people of trusted opinion saw me, I saw that my value was not in what I could do but how I could see. And articulate. And how the choices I have made and stuck to allowed me to strip off a lot of the superficial bullshit of living and dig into the meat and gristle of what it means to exist. To yearn. To fail fucking repeatedly. To hurt yourself intentionally. To love. To do things for others that abuse you. To embrace weakness. To expose one’s heart to the world and let do what it gunna do.
And I was faced with a question of running that someone posed to me once. That I’m running from shit I need to face is how it was put. There was some speculation of unfinished business with trauma in my life (which turned out to be more of a projection than anything else). But I think the thing I was running from is my value. It’s a lot of fucking pressure. Because at the end of the day, all the shit you say I am, whether I’m special or not, it doesn’t matter all that much. I’m still one of you. I’m still a fallible human who cannot escape myself. I’ll never know what it’s like to be you. The relief of not being me for a minute. I’d love to. But you’ll never know what it’s like to be me, or have that relief of not being you. This thought, this running thought, it hit me the other day like a brick. I’m running from something I’m afraid I can’t do, which is to be me, even though I’ve already been doing it. And I’ve been doing it all along. Trauma, drugs, alcohol, love, joy, sadness, depression, injuries, wealth, broke, mad, happy, it doesn’t fucking matter. My proverbial legs have been on the same path the whole time. It reminds me of that scene in Constantine after Angela, the detective, is drowned in the bathtub such that she can see again, like Constantine. And she says:
Oh, God. Oh, God, all those people. Oh, Isabel. I've always known. I've always known where they are. I've always known where to - where to find them, where to - where to aim and where to duck, and I've always known where they were. I've always known that it wasn't luck. Always known that it wasn't luck. I've always known, I've always known that I could see.
I’ve always known.
And that makes me really sad, actually. Because the job is so isolating. It is so lonely here. And if power is what I have, all that power and I can’t make it less lonely. You watch how people move and sway, you fall in love with humanity every day, you predict their behavior and your own, you watch the sky and trees and water and buildings and flowers and shoes and 18 wheelers and snails and rocks and everything else breathe in and breathe out and you see the seams behind it, at the end of your vision, like you can almost squeeze past it if you could catch it fast enough. It’s as if you are almost not here at all, but instead are there, looking back on here, wondering why such a gift should be so fucking painful all the time.
But then, and this doesn’t happen often, you remember it isn’t about you. That your job is everyone else. To marvel in their beauty. To articulate their feelings in ways they cannot do for themselves. To validate their existence. To see them. To take their presence and highlight it such that they can see themselves the way the rest of the world does. Sometimes that’s bad. Not everyone is nice. Not everyone acts beautifully. But they all have the potential for it. You know how you can take your fingers on your extended hand and pick someone far away and imagine you are pinching their tiny self down? Do that with time. Watch someone you love absolutely destroy your life, right to your face, and while they are doing it rewind their clock with your time pinch and see a little them, maybe five years old, crying, unable to understand their feelings, their trauma, their sadness, or their beauty. And watch that kid lash out at you. Disregard you. Throw you away. Neglect you. Berate you. Rob you. Use you. And know, in your own glorious heart, which is big enough to hold them all, that they don’t know what they are doing. That they are in an amount of pain that is unknown, even to them. Watch them kill you, and feel for them the whole time.
That’s the job. And I can’t seem to run from that.
But what I think that most of us have forgotten is that none of this, nothing you do, nothing any human has ever done, is important without the presence of another. That all your perceived specialness, uniqueness, your brilliance, that the entire list of reasons you feel make you fucking awesome…none of that matters without another. And even if there are others, there’s never a guarantee they will feel the same way you do about you. In fact, it’s almost sure they won’t.
But that’s also the job. To remember that everyone one of them matters, even the shitty ones. The accumulation of their beauty is too much to bear, honestly. Another thing I struggle with. But if we don’t look, we don’t see, and then we forget. And when we forget, we find out we are a lot closer to alone than we think we are. Every fucking one of us. Come sit with me for a while and find out.
Now, how’s that for an ego? Fucking Christ.
Nick
