19 Comments
Feb 10, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

I really like this story for a two reasons. To begin with, it accurately captures the feeling of being a young man in 21st century America. Turning to the Internet in search of masculine role models (Jordan Peterson), the dead end service sector job (thanks NAFTA), the struggle with substance abuse (2020 was a record year for overdose deaths), the supplanting of traditional religion by the paranormal (remote viewing website) and so much more. You really took a perfect snapshot of working class millennial manhood.

In addition, I love that you let the narrator keep his dignity. Yeah he’s poor, yeah he’s a drug addict, yeah he’s got an unglamorous job. So what? His life has a purpose. Even a deer wrecking his shitty car didn’t keep him from getting to work. He’s curious about the world (idiots don’t reminisce fondly about their high school science teachers or have a detailed knowledge of constellations, or study the geography of lottery ticket probability). He has a code of honor (“until it’s paid for a thing is worthless” and his riff on the immorality of taxing jackpots because they’re “miracles”). He’s not an anti-hero, just a real hero.

Expand full comment
Feb 10, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

As I made my way in the world today, your story was an invisible companion, on my mind throughout. It may have been the cashiers I encountered, the Jeep Cherokees on the road, me, driving my beater, but most likely it was America’s shattered soul where so many of us are doped up like zoo animals just to get through our day. Our powers, real or imagined, are of no use in the new America where we’re saturated with an endless barrage of modernity and consumerism, where too much of our lives are lived in front of screens, where our enlightened leaders saddle us with the convenient indictment of being unsophisticated or just plain old backwards. I want to go out back of the store tonight with my cashier brother and gaze upward and tell him to not lose hope, to believe his powers are of use, that he too is touched by fate. Or maybe I want him to tell me.

Expand full comment
founding
Feb 9, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

I loved the way you "paced" his thoughts mirroring the roller coaster of his drug use and life. I felt both his delusion and his clarity of thought. A sneaky, beautiful snapshot of someone we have have superficial contact with as we live our daily lives. Bravo!

Expand full comment
Feb 10, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

My mom loves to play the lotto, a week of hopefulness for a meager dollar. This isn’t exactly the same but it’s not exactly different: I can’t bear to not have a package (no matter how small, usually a book) on the way. I rarely care how long it takes.

Expand full comment
Feb 10, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

My favorite part: “ Jackpots, the way I think of them, are miracles, and miracles should be left alone, untouched. It’s like taxing true love. It’s like taxing a record fish.”

Expand full comment

Come on, Walter. When's the next novel?

Expand full comment
Feb 9, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

Media illusion that meth is produced mostly in small batches by enterprising smart people. Supplies are kept consistent with metric tonnes manufactured in China along with fentanyl sometimes in the same chemical companies, packed and sealed for transshipment in container vessels. No need to go through Mexico as the CCP influence over unions and Port Authorities assures easy customs.

While Aderall is just a starter its profits are nothing to sneer at, the goal is millions of adrenaline-numb paranoids who shy away from a fiight. 4th generation warfare.

Expand full comment
Feb 10, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

This: 'You might think that emergencies should not be in there because they don’t necessarily occur, but the website on manliness argues that they’re certain and that you learn this as you age. It doesn’t say if you learn this lesson gradually or all at once, but it hints that it comes suddenly. And then you’re in awful trouble. Unless you listened.'

Reminds me of the moment in Mission to America where Mason is talking to the writer Edward, debating whether things happen suddenly. Mason held that everything happens suddenly, one thing after another. 'There was no other way for them to happen. Life was suddenly after suddenly -- so many suddenlys in such quick succession that people wrote made-up tales to stop their onslaught, to rest in the illusion of some smooth flow.'

I loved that part of Mission to America (and so many other parts), and it tickles me to see a similar idea here in this random/not-random short story. Random/not-random like improvisational jazz.

Expand full comment
Feb 10, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

Really good story, Walter. There’s a lucidity within the narrator’s haze, like a light through fog.

Expand full comment
Feb 9, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

Very good story. I loved the "website on how to be a man." Sort of sums up all of our existences when we are young. It all adds up, doesn't it? Back in the day, I'm sure I visited sites dedicated to how to be a woman. Because it's all so mysterious. Except for the north star. Thank you for your story.

Expand full comment
Feb 9, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

The smell of Band Aids and a Spinal Death. My kind of story.

Expand full comment

More please

Expand full comment
Feb 9, 2021Liked by Walter Kirn

“... They’re useless to me, but I have them.”

POW, right in the kisser.

The ghostly otherworldly night, the haze of the waxing and waning high, and the mysterious inhabitants, written as if in a trance. Great stuff, Walter. Your talents are our gift. I thank you.

Expand full comment

Feel the hard cold, smell the candy and gum wrappers, see the stiff folds of the man’s Burberry trench, luster on the buttons. Exquisite detail. Almost a prose Van Eych.

Expand full comment

Good story.

I used to buy lottery tickets a lot, four times a week and dream about cashing that big score and never having to work again. I also worked as a cashier in various convenience stores across the upper mid-west for many years but never smoked any meth, no sirree-bub. I kinda won the lottery by getting the fairly well-paid union job I've had now for a decade. I don't buy lottery tickets any more, it's just another government con. Much like winning the lottery the job I have now is both a curse and a blessing. Goddamn, I've hit a deer with my car once too. Driving stupidly fast through the Minnesota woods at night turned me into a killer on the road. I guess I was lucky I only had a busted rear bumper. Poor deer not so lucky.

Expand full comment

Beautiful writing here. Put me right in the scene. This was especially nice: "I knew it from his walk, the tight, slicing stride of a man of destiny."

Expand full comment