September 14th, 2026 - New Shoes
Dear TNY,
“New Shoes” is yuck.
It’s the same argument I have made for many weeks in a row. Hell, years. Why should I care about this story? I can only think of two reasons that it’s worth my attention. One, it’s short. Less than 4k words. I applaud you guys for keeping the stories brief for the last little bit of time. I couldn’t appreciate it more. The only thing worse that a story I cannot care about is one that is also long, so it’s an agonizing amount of time to not care. And two, and this reason is specific to me, each week (almost) you give me a reason to write something. And writing, supposedly, is good.
The MC in this story is cardboard until the very end. And the ending wipes his “likeability” away whilst simultaneously making him an uninteresting character. Not having dichotomy about being chosen to leave and support the family would have been unusual. But in the end, the author chose stereotypical dichotomy and made him like everyone else. Which is fine. Right? But if you haven’t looked around lately, everyone is the fucking same and it’s fucking BORING. Right now is a strange time in history, actually, because so many people have been convinced of their uniqueness, their special path through space/time, their uncanny ability to find/do things that are special out in the world. And they fucking want you to know it, too! Yet, just scroll any dating app or watch any of the short form video platforms on the webs, and golly don’t they just all look fucking similar. In fact, I’m sitting at a very strange coffee and bagel place in Maine, and it’s almost empty. There’s me, a couple of bros that came in for bagels and left, an overweight white couple that are turbo nice, and a married couple with a small child. The owner is turbo nice as well. An eighth of a mile away is another place just like this one, yet the line is out the fucking door, and the only customers are aged somewhere between 20 and 40 (no kids), they look like they care about not looking like they care, and they are either all talking over each other at the tables or all on their phones.
Yes, I walked 15 miles to school every day, in the snow, uphill both ways.
Anyway, this story doesn’t have dimension to it. You can see the author introduce the MacGuffin and not even hide that it’s a MacGuffin. Then the MC has some fucking identity crisis because of it, followed by a big ball of who fucking cares existentialism (one paragraph), and then ultimately shows his independence by buying some expensive fucking shoes that no one will care about, even him. He really showed his brother, yeah? Fuckin’ A Rudy, he did!
Where’s the truth? When will you publish something true, my guy? What’s the fucking deal, here?
I was thinking about truth yesterday. Amongst other things. As well as bears. I went for a long walk to Sunday River to see a covered bridge. This walk was mostly off the main roads, instead being a gravel track through some dark woods. It was beautiful, in fact. But I was aware that bears could be about. And I recalled that recently, a lady who is a friend got into an argument with a man about the debate on whether or not a lady would rather meet a bear in the forest or a man. This man she argued with, he took a bad tact and my friend obliterated him. Rightfully so. And he apologized at a later date.
So I get women’s position in choosing a bear. At least I think I do, right? It’s an odds game. There are greater odds that something bad will happen if you meet a man in the woods than a bear. What could happen? In a bad case scenario, the bear or the man could kill you. But the bear would never rape you. And the amount of bear sightings that result in a negative outcome is far fewer than the amount of man encounters that result in a negative outcome. Now, both of those numbers, the negative outcome numbers, make up the minority of outcomes of running into either party. But ladies aren’t concerned about positive outcomes here, because the negative outcomes are so negative that they are hedging their bets on the best-case worst outcome.
And I can understand that, right? That’s not hard to understand.
Other factors were not in play, like is the woman lost? Starving? Out for a hike? What time of year is it? What’s the gender of the bear? What are the surroundings? Has the nuclear apocalypse happened? Are their rabies zombies or fungus zombies and do they run fast or slow? Etcetera. These things would have an effect, I believe, if a person was honest with oneself, but I get that’s not the object of the question (the object of the question to further divide humanity, not unite it, natch; I say that knowing that it upsets all parties involved, not because I’m taking one side or the other).
If I were to meet a bear or a man in the forest, I would choose the bear. I have very little to fear from the man, as he likely wants nothing to do with me AND I have a good chance of fighting him off. While the bear, with the most likely outcome, would run away. So it would be cool to see a bear (I have seen many before and it’s always cool). So I would base my decision on what would be the most likely outcome and how cool would that be. It’s a totally different decision-making process than women have to make and I understand that. So I get why they make their decision, I get why it makes men mad, and I get why men can’t understand why they would choose the bear (because they, like so many people these days, do not have a well-developed sense of empathy).
So then I thought about it…well, I hoped that I could look at the inverse. I thought, what would I choose between a woman and a bear? I wanted to see what this would produce. Now, as with the original question, I will not include any other circumstances like weather, capabilities, anything. I will only use my experience to inform the choice. So first step is to think about the odds. Odds are that neither entity wants anything to do with me. That means that if I were to run into either one, I don’t matter to them at all and ships pass, no harm no foul. This is a data driven position because I have walked by quite a few solo women on the trail and a handful of bears and nothing occurred. So choosing either one will have the overwhelming odds of not changing my life, positive or negative. Now, when we play the long odds, it means that either party could take interest in me (the bear being the least interested party, in that there must be fewer bear attacks than romantic spark-ups throughout history). Oddly enough, based on my history, if either party is interested in me, then the outcome is the same: they ruin my life. But that makes the decision making protocol that much easier. Because I have never once heard, and I’ve heard a few in real life and read even more, the story of a bear attack and not thought it was cool. Especially if the person survived. Not that the outcome was cool. At all. But that being attacked by a bear is at least a good story.
So, I too play the long odds just like the women. I pick the outcome I could live with even though it isn’t the most likely outcome.
But truth. I think the truth is that we both want to meet someone nice and have an incredible interaction. For some of us, we even hope that it would be sweep you off your feet love. But that is so unlikely. In fact, the negative outcomes are so bad that even meeting someone and having an incredible interaction is off the table as a conceivable option, that we mostly choose bear attack. Not because we want this, because it’s what we can live with given our experiences.
And how fucked is that? Makes me not even want to go in the woods. Not because of bears. But because of women. I don’t talk to you at the grocery store or the hardware store or in the parking lot or at the bar or in a nursing home (what?!) or at a restaurant or at a stoplight or on an airplane or anywhere, really. I leave you the fuck alone. But that’s not the answer either.
I don’t know what the answer is. And that’s the solution. Believing you don’t know.
Any motherfucker out there that does tell you they know what the answer is, be prepared to hear a wrong thing.
Shit is complicated. That’s what I know.
But I’ll tell you what, if you are a lady and you want to go hiking and you don’t want to worry about encounters, I’d be happy to go with you and ignore you the whole time. I’ll just walk close by and intervene if necessary. Then at the end of the hike, I’ll Irish goodbye. No worries.
In other news, and I’ll try to be brief, I drank the other night. After having taken two months off, I saw some La Chouffe and had been meaning to conduct an experiment, so I did.
When I first stopped drinking, within two weeks I was acutely aware of if someone had been drinking or not because I could smell the alcohol in the air. That was not present when I was drinking; couldn’t smell it on anyone, could occasionally taste on someone’s breath. My first theory, then, was others’ experience with that smell. I am sure that I had that smell when I was drinking more, but only to people who didn’t drink often, as it requires abstaining to get a heightened sense of it. And my core memories of that smell are all positive (in fact, my biggest memory of that smell is that when I was married, I knew that sexytime was on the table if that smell was present on my ex-wife, which was a plus). But I was able to see that if someone was not really a drinker AND came preloaded with negative core memories of that smell, that I would be responsible for causing those memories to surface, even if I did nothing other than smell like that.
And then Friday night’s incursion brought more data that I had suspected would be the case. As I had not had alcohol in my system for some months, the drinking hit differently than it had before. It was more acute and it felt strong. I still appreciated the taste of beer and its ability to wash boredom away, but what I didn’t like was how sharp the high was and how it felt less manageable.
Even while drinking I thought to myself, if you take this experience, which isn’t all that pleasant and couple this with the smell thing, you can make some educated assumptions. If someone is not really drinking, likely because they have negative core memories with it, then their experience, internally, of drinking, is vastly different than mine. Someone who doesn’t drink will look at me and believe I am defined by their experience. That it’s sharp, outside my control, wild, dangerous, etc. But that was not my experience. In the same way that an unpracticed hand struggles more with everything, drinking mellowed with practice. I was never out of hand, I rarely got drunk, and I was in control for the vast majority of time. Any negative perceptions of my drinking behavior came from the viewer, not me. I asked around after I came up with this theory and found it to be true.
The data showed that I failed to understand, fully, that someone’s judgement of my actions could have nothing to do with me at all, but instead be entirely based on their other interactions in the world. And we all do this, right?
Like, I think most women want to choose the man, but based on their other interactions in the world, the bear is the better choice. And when I say “most”, I mean slightly more than half of the about 4 billion women on earth. I’m not referring to you or your specific use case. I mean, most of those women aren’t American nor did they learn English as their first language, which is how this letter is read. Just so that we are clear what I mean when I say “most”. Because we are talking globally, I do think the reasons would be super wide ranging, though, from the traditionalist all the way to “I have hope for humanity even though it fucking blows, so I’m going to choose humanity even though I don’t like it” way. I think that most would want to choose the man, or man, or fucking mankind (as that’s how I think some people see it), but I don’t think most would make that choice based how humanity runs itself. Which is inline with the overwhelming data that we are a species against itself.
Yeah. It seems that experience is the enemy of empathy or hope, as experience shows time and time again that life will crush you and your dreams, regardless of ideas like “rights” or “fairness” or “safety” or “this shouldn’t be how things are”. And sadly, in order to have empathy and hope, you have to be vulnerable. You have to take risks. It could be with your finances, body, emotions, heart, belongings, spiritual beliefs, and a million other things that you might not be willing to put on the table because you might lose them. And those risks may play out well 99 times out of a hundred. Or 999,999 times out of a million. But you fuck one goat, am I right?
Guys, it’s from a joke. That makes me remember my father. And hopefully invites some levity to a conversation that isn’t all that hopeful.
I don’t know what to make of all this other than this: I can only control me, and as long as I’m here I need to keep trying to be better, and to do so without worrying about what the zeitgeist is because good is good and right is right and love is love is love is love; my moral & ethical compass feels appropriately adjusted in these measures.
I think I’m willing to change my bear/woman answer. I want to meet a woman on the trail, and not judge her based on all my previous interactions (I want to hope, you know?). And I want that woman to feel safe while hiking because she has a pet bear, trained, and it’s in love with her and takes care of her when she’s out. And I want to be afraid of her, not just because she could sic the bear on me, not just because she could break my heart. No, I want to be afraid because she might not be real. That she could disappear in a puff of smoke at any minute, like a ninja. That her and her smelly armpits and grey-streaked hair and her grubby toes and her gentle touch would vanish as she was so fucking wonderful that it is impossible that she could exist. Now, if we are Vegas-cooking these odds, that’s the least likely thing I could run into. But if I’m betting on hope, and I’m being vulnerable, then that’s the choice. I’ll get beat up to find out, every fucking time. I’ll choose the wrench. Because a bear-toting woman is the way. Always.
Nick
P.S. Grom would choose a woman that is a bear.
