October 5th, 2026 - Narrow Escape
Dear TNY,
Here I am on a Sunday, sitting with “Narrow Escape”, and musing about life.
I read your italicized blurb right from the jump, as you put it at the beginning of the story, so I see this is not a short story, but the first chapter in the novel. That’s good in that now I know it’s not a short story and if I were to have mistaken it for such, I would have stated that it was incomplete, that it didn’t transcend, that it was, essentially, not a round object and therefore, bumf. Instead, I looked for quality of writing instead of quality of narrative arc, so that was helpful.
I appreciate the prose here. I can’t speak for the precision nor the exactitude of the translation, but I can say that the vocabulary, compression, attention to detail, and narrative melody are all homogenous and one can tell there was effort and choice at the line level. That is respectable to say the least. But that’s about all I can evaluate because this story isn’t meant to go home. It’s only the start of the journey. In fact, according to you, the novel is unfinished anyway so not even the whole work goes home. This is just a sample. I also went back and looked again, at the end of the story, and discovered that this fellow won the Nobel Prize in literature. So we have our normal players. It’s a translated work. It’s non-American. It’s by a Nobel Prize winner. And it’s part of a posthumously published work that will be coming out (in English) soon. Yes, we have arrived at the usage of your pages as advertisement for an industry instead of for hosting good works.
And that’s fine, right? They are your pages. It is your prerogative. Me complaining about how you use your magazine is about as effective and purposeful as when our politicians use thoughts and prayers to combat gun violence in America. That is the way with complaining, though, right? It doesn’t mean shit unless one puts some action behind it. My oldest son is a big fan of this. He will complain about work schedules, having to drive all over the state, his coworkers not showing up or calling in really late such that he’s already put in hours of driving to only sit in the parking lot and wait for someone to show up. He’ll complain about his living conditions or that his car is broken or that he’s not allowed to do certain things at his mom’s house. The list goes on. Yet, it seems like he’s waiting for permission to change any of it. I believe he’s trying to move out. I cautioned him though, letting him know that no matter where he goes, what job he gets, what car he drives, what life he chooses, he’ll be there waiting for him. That life is a series of old, fat men shitting directly on your head and that the low level of anger that he has will never go away because the shitting will never stop. And moving out or changing jobs or buying new shit to replace old shit, none of that will stop entropy or Murphy’s Law. It is only changing one’s mindset that has the ability to soothe. To expect it all to go to shit, and to be okay with that, that’s the way to handle existence. And then when it doesn’t go to shit, to be aware of how precious that pocket of time is, and to appreciate every millisecond of it while you are in it. But he’s fucking 19, you know? He doesn’t know a goddamn thing. So explaining this to him is wild. Because he can’t see it.
I think back to when I left home and not once did my parents ever have that talk with me. Nor did they even know how to help. Neither had signed a lease. Secured a cell phone. Bought a fucking house. Gone to college. Did significant military time, as I had chosen. Fuck, they didn’t even have a bank account until I was in high school. So much of what I did was outside of their wheelhouse. And to be honest, my mother doesn’t know how to handle any of this shit to this day. My father, near the end, did begin to pass on the odd kernel of wisdom. In fact, when I blew up my marriage, my wife at the time made me call every one of our family members, both sides, to tell them what I did and that we were going to get a divorce. Brutal, I know. But deserved. And everyone yelled at me and called me a piece of shit and I cried profusely, a scared little boy of my very own, having done a horrible thing, believing every fucking word they said. My father, though, listened quietly and then said, “Shit happens; don’t worry about it. Six months from now it won’t feel like this.”
He was wrong, of course. It took a year to feel slightly better. But to this day, it is one of the larger mistakes I carry. Sometimes I get absolutely buffaloed by those memories and there is nothing I can do about it.
I’ve never been good at making mistakes. My mother noted it in my baby book. That since birth I’ve been fucking awful at failure. She said even as a baby, if I did not get something the first try, I would stumble or be unable to do what I wanted to do, and then I would get sad and angry about it. My first word? A whole fucking sentence. I waited to talk until I could communicate. This doesn’t feel like a surprise, though. Either the talking/communicating or the anger at failure. In fact, yesterday I melted down again.
I’m using old tabletops to do a lot of the woodworking I’m doing right now. They came from a ski resort in Vermont. I run it all through a thickness planer to take the finish off and reduce it to the dimensions I require. This causes the blades to dull more quickly than they would otherwise (that and everything I have put through the planer is hardwood). This planer, it’s new and it has a helical planning head with 28 individual blades, each about the size of thin Chiclet, all attached by a Torx-headed, hardened steel screw that’s threaded into a precision machined, aluminum cylinder. The blades have two sharp sides and two flat sides such that when one side gets dull, one can loosen the fastener, rotate the blade 90°, retighten the fastener, and Bob’s yer uncle (you have a sharp edge again). I had to do this already as the blades were fucked from finish and paint that I had ground off thus far. In doing this, though, I overtightened many, many of the 28 fasteners. Two blades broke in half and a half dozen of the fasteners on the remaining blades cannot be removed. Not with an impact gun and not manually (in fact, I tried manually and the impact-rated Torx bit shattered). So, I’m fucked. I made a mistake and now I have to fix it, likely to the tune of $600 for a new planer. The old one can be fixed (drill out stuck fasteners, order new fasteners, new blades are actually already on order, and hope the threads in the aluminum aren’t shit, but if they are, drill bigger, tap, and run helicoils or time savers (just so you fuckers, TNY, know, not only can I write circles around you but I can also fix…a lot)), but it will take time and mail order parts (he said “mail order” like it’s the Sears Roebuck catalog), and I have shit to get done before October calls it quits. So, I melted down, naturally. Non-productive to anyone, including myself.
I packed my mini backpack with cheese, weed candies, a weed vape, cigarettes, a lighter, a hoody, a beanie, and a liter of water. I then proceeded to death march 11 miles (I measured) through the mountains on two slices of ham. First up Barker Summit, then over to North Peak, down a steep fucking chute, onto a back road for a utility culvert, popped out in a clearing and walked up a steep incline to a wealthy neighborhood on the far side of the mountain, followed a road down from the very top of that past houses I will never live in or be able to afford, wound up on a strip of tarmac narrow enough to not have a yellow line down the center, peeled off that onto a dirt road into a little housing community where I hooked up with a secret trail that took me to a covered, wooden bridge built in 1873 where I finally put on the hoody, drank some water, and watched a young couple dressed for a wedding take photos with their wedding photog, and then I foot-wheeled it in the rain to the convenient store where I bought all manner of goodies and was given a free large pepperoni pizza before I made it back to the house.
I thought the whole time while I was out. Hated myself. Called myself a fuck up. A loser. Useless. A piece of shit. And I am and have been those things. Like all of you. If you think you haven’t, you aren’t very self-aware. I’m sorry that you aren’t. Although, in this case, ignorance is bliss so my jealousy is rampant. But as I was sitting on the bollard at the bridge, watching the soon-to-be-married couple pose, I was thinking about the absolute agony these meltdowns are. How fucking horrific it is from the inside. The only way out is death. But when that isn’t available it feels like one is going to explode or implode simultaneously. That you might just fucking tear right the fuck in two. But that bride was looking at her dude, and her dude was looking at her, and I thought, they don’t know anything. Once, I didn’t know anything. And once, just last year, I felt like this, this horror, every second of every day. Yes, folks. I felt like I was going to implode and explode at the same time, and there were no breaks. There was no beginning nor was there an end. It was only middle. Like waking up in a dark, train tunnel of pain, too far from either end to see light, and having to live like that. It was…I don’t even like thinking about it. It was so fucking difficult. But yesterday? A measly six hours. Full story, from happy to meltdown to content peace was only six fucking hours. Do you guys have any idea how much progress that is?!
I bet some of you do. I bet some of you have sat right here, just like me, and thought of all the ways you could and would kill yourself just to make the pain stop. Not because you don’t like it here. In fact, it’s because of how much you love it here. It’s that the pain is so overwhelming and so ever-present that you can’t experience the world the way that you once did, full of color and vibrancy and beauty and love, it’s all gone and all you have is pain. And that’s no way to live. I have so much empathy now for people who have been there. I have empathy for those who beat it and chose to stay with us. And I have empathy for those who left, who could not take it anymore. Anyone, absolutely anyone, who criticizes or judges someone who has killed themselves has no business letting that beautiful person occupy their shitty little brain. If you haven’t ever been so fucking desperate for the pain to stop that you didn’t consider killing yourself, you have no fucking room in conversation. So get the fuck out or try harder in the empathy department. Like, just imagine how visceral your experience is, how full ON it is for you, all the happies and colors and sads and wonder and joy and love, and imagine that as someone else who can’t experience any of that shit because the pain is so great and they’ll take any exit to get off that freeway.
Life can be so hard. And no, not fixing the planer, not fixing the truck (which appears to have died as well, but that isn’t related to me). It’s not what apartment you live in either, like my son. What job to take. What job you don’t take.
It’s about you. It’s about living inside yourself. Occupying a machine that is overwhelmingly beautiful but staggeringly insufficient at existing. But it's pay to play, right? A former partner just told me this week that her dad still talks about me. That he was always blown away by how smart I was. How fast I was. To understand everything, even new material. He had never met anyone that smart and wondered what it would be like to be that quick. And I told her to tell him that it’s terrible. Isolating. It is, definitely, pay to play. And it’s a steep fucking price. But that’s the thing with hard stuff, it isn’t fun while it’s happening. Often, the fun is later, afterward, when you look back on how hard it was and how grateful you are to have not given up, to have done the hard thing. To be on the other side of it.
And living inside of yourself, for some, is fucking hard. Some people figure it out. Get Zen. And some people see the darkness and opt out by moving into the light. I do not. I was telling my therapist this week that I didn’t know what we should talk about anymore because I pretty much have it figured out. It’s basically going to be good sometimes, so I should be present for that, to take that all in. And then it’s going to be bad, and I should allow myself to feel that, to try to understand it, but to breathe and wait because that’s going to pass too. That life will oscillate between two pieces of punctuation, forever and ever, Amen.
This is everything?
This is everything.
And that once strategies are developed to handle both cases, one has the path forward.
He said this was correct. We reached the point in therapy where he no longer has advice to give. He doesn’t know the answers to the questions I’m asking. Because no one does. It’s the informed blind leading the informed blind. As it should be.
So, my strategy.
I once stated that I was evaluated extensively for PTSD. I do not have it. Because a key symptom with PTSD is an inability to revisit one’s horror to process and remove them. But I go back all the time. I go back to memories constantly, both good and bad. And that’s what I did yesterday.
I was walking along and I almost dropped my cigarette and I remembered watching a talk show with Slash from Guns N’ Roses and he dropped a lit cigarette in his boot whilst talking, then, calmly and without stopping the story he was telling, he removed the boot and shook the cig from it before picking it up and continuing to smoke it; the host commented on how it looked like that wasn’t his first time doing that, and I flashed back to when a friend and I were in LA at a radio station where he was being interviewed for an on-air wedding to a stranger and I was not allowed in the building but I sat outside in the car and watched Slash sit at a picnic table, by himself, and smoke a cigarette (he did not drop it into his boot).
I remembered after the first date with her, after I had gone back to Hawai’i, that we videochatted every single day, so much so that I had to charge my phone at least twice a day; I remembered when she would call I would look at the phone and see it was her, and as soon as she came on I thought, this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I remembered being with my brother and a couple of our friends, in our mid teens, at the cliffs behind my house. We found a mattress that someone had dumped in the desert, so we dragged it up the steepest hill we could find, which was obnoxiously steep, and three of us jumped on (a fourth tried but the mattress took off so quickly that he bellyflopped on the ground, the death ride going on without him). The mattress immediately turned sideways such that we all were laying on it horizontally, my brother at the bottom, Dennis in the middle, and me at the top. It was instant velocity but a brief ride as we flew off of a cliff within 50ft. My brother dropped off the cliff, got bent in half by the weight of the mattress, and the other end of the mattress went kinda trebuchet and catapulted me into the air. I remember being away from everything, like swimming, little bits of sand and dirt around me in midair as I tried to grab onto anything to stop what was happening. Then the ground came into view, which was a steep slope littered with Russian olive shoots and small cottonwoods. I flew into them like Superman, but instead of having my arms out front, they were wrapped around my face. I smashed into the ground and slid with the trees ripping flesh from my forearms and face, the waistband of my pants scooping up mud as I went. I continued this way until right at the water’s edge as there was a ditch at the bottom of this cliff where I came to a stop. I was only just assessing my damage when I heard a noise from behind me that sounded like a meat car accident; it was Dennis, who was rolling like a boulder down the hill. He rolled right over me, kicking me in the side of the head, using my body as a ramp to launch into the ditch, the only one of us that got wet.
I remembered my wedding, the chaos of all the attention, getting carried by my father-in-law, over his shoulder, around the room until he smashed my face into the steel seatback of a rental chair; and I remember my father’s best friend Roy who came in from work, a machine shop, in blue coveralls, his curly hair long and boingy, dancing with my new wife, his grace like the tender touches of a first lover when you are young and you don’t understand anything. Afterward she said he was easily the best dancer of anyone that danced with her.
I remember after meeting K on the ferry from Bellingham to Haines, and later, when she came pounding back onto the deck of the boat at 4AM, her getting off in Juneau and not going the whole way up, to unzip my tent six inches and slip in a receipt with her name and number on the back of it; and I remember going to visit her that first time, her kissing me in the grocery store, me, having a twinge of fear that someone would see us and suddenly recognizing that I had had so many secret relationships that it was a relief to not have one then; and I remembered at the park on my last night there, after jumping off of the swings together, she held me really closely and I said, what do you want to do about this, and she said, I don’t want to stop doing this. I didn’t either.
I remembered my youngest son recently sending me a photo of The Pugilist at Rest and telling me it’s his favorite sculpture right now. Which made me cry because it’s one of my favorite sculptures.
And this caused me to remember how I found it, which was a writing mentor who made me read the book of the same name by Thom Jones, the titled story being a masterwork.
I remembered seeing the Winged Victory of Samothrace in person over twenty years ago and crying, unable to articulate why I was so moved but being moved nonetheless.
I remembered the moment I learned that you can look at someone abuse you and watch them turn into the scared little kid that is actually hurting you and seeing why and how they got to that place and knowing there was nothing I could do in that moment to make it stop because it wasn’t about me at all; rather, it was about their pain and there was nothing I wanted more in the world to take it away from them.
I remember Bob, my dog, from when I was a child, running down to the Animas River behind our house, with my brother and I, and he would swim through to the swift current to the other side to be with us, and all three of us would jump off the rocks and float in the murky green water and not one of us knew what was in store for the others.
Guys, I thought of so much yet I didn’t even touch the wealth of memories that I have and can call up at any time, in such rich detail, that I don’t have to be here. I can be there. I can watch my father scream at me when I’m sixteen years old, and slow it down, me realizing I’m taller than he is and seeing the spit in the corners of his mouth, him pointing a gnarled finger at me and me, just now, seeing how furious I was making him by smiling. I can see his face in the last video he sent, saying that he loved us so much and that he just couldn’t hang on any longer. I can see The Wizard of Kindness’ face as he is laughing and telling the story of him and his youngest son’s last time skiing/snowboarding together, riding in the back of a stranger’s pickup to get to the top of the hill again, seeing how many runs they can do before the sun went down, and The Wizard putting his face into his hands and weeping openly, sitting in the chair by the fire, in the near-dark of that night, maybe the exact right amount of scotch deep, having no idea how beautiful he really was. I can hear my oldest son crying on the other end of the phone, telling me that his friend was going to kill himself so he called the police, my son handing the phone over to a policeman who told me everything was okay and that my son saved this boy’s life. I can see my ex-wife’s silver fillings on the backs of both of her teeth, next to her two main upper front teeth, as her head is cocked back, her, open mouth laughing and smiling and I’m slinging her around on a teeter totter swing in Anchorage, Alaska, me having already cheated on her, her and I having already divorced, her having already hated me for it, her having already moved and me having moved and her just there to pick up the boys after our first big road trip, and me, being present in that moment, watching her glorious wonder beam amber light like the sun for anyone who was looking for it, if only they’d glance over.
I remember everything, good and bad. And that’s why it’s so hard. I remember it all. And some days, it’s so bad, so much of it is so bad, that I’m hit with, “This is everything?”
But yesterday, as has happened so many times, that phrase got softer and softer and softer, and by the end of my walk it was, “This is everything.” And only I was waiting there to see how truly fucking lucky I’ve been.
Nick
