Computer help and the best story in full

Thursday 11/20/25

Phoned my mother on Wednesday after not speaking with her for a while to see how she is doing/feeling. People treat me in ways I don't deserve--no one would--to be treated. In a sense, I have no one.

In the case of my mother, I know she loves me, and she is certainly there for me in some ways, but not in others. My work is central to the latter. And my situation, which is too painful for her, I think, to deal with. She wants me to be okay, but because she cannot handle someone she loves being in such pain, a form of distance--and of denial, too, to a degree--takes hold.

But if I write something and share it with people, chances are they won't say a word. They won't even say they got it. They'll act like this never happened. And that is a kind of...well, you needn't be on my side at all to know how wrong and hurtful that would prove. It's not because of what the work isn't. Rather, the opposite, and because it's by me.

But it's ironic--I've had these people in my life who've said this is going to happen, and this, and this, and you'll make a billion dollars with your unique genius and there will be millions and millions of readers of that work, when these people themselves wouldn't read any of it. Or little. While also knowing how this made me feel. But choosing to do it regardless.

The conversation then to have might be, "What does one do when even the people in their life, who are aware of that person's situation and pain, won't read the work, and how that speaks to how little reading anyone is going to do in their lives, and this person needs millions of strangers to read that work to do what they're trying to do, what they're here for?" Sometimes I think someone like my mother wants me to remain alive so she won't have to deal with the pain of me being dead, not because it's what's best for me.

I have nothing to live for. I don't see this changing. Unfortunately, getting up each day and creating the best art ever made isn't something to live for when that's nothing else other than what it is as that work, and it isn't seen, partaken of. I don't think there will ever be a person for me, because people are what they are and I am what I am. That's always been the case, and we keep moving in opposite directions; people as they devolve, me as I grow each day as an artist and person.

Anyway, I try to separate things and sacrifice--including my feelings, how I'm made to feel, the pain another causes me--when I care about them and want them to be well. I know that I can help them in those areas in ways others can't. I checked in, and then spent two hours on the phone trying to help my mother with various things related to technology. Like getting banking apps on her phone, because her browser on the computer isn't up to date enough to access her banking information, which is a different issue to tend to, but I wanted her to have a fix in the meanwhile. This would have taken five or ten minutes if I was there in person, but did not, as I said.

I make a decision to be patient, gentle, and loving. It's a conscious decision. I say one thing, I know she's looking at the same thing I've pulled up on my phone, but she's doing something else, or thinking ahead, or behind, and I'm just waiting. Then we do the same simple thing four or five times, before she finally clicks the thing I told her to click in the first place.

My sister is going over there today, I think, and I had my mother write down the six things to ask my sister about, which the latter should be able to take care of without too much bother, I think, during her visit, but if my mother hadn't written them down--with a few notes I told her to add--she wouldn't have remembered so well and would have been vague and forgotten stuff and there would have gone the afternoon, before my sister left with things still unresolved/unfixed and who knows when she'd be back. My mother's birthday is tomorrow and I'll call her in the morning for that.

You know what's funny? If I wasn't here, like if next week I said, enough, I'm out, there are some people who'd then read the work and have at themselves for how they treated me and what they didn't say. Didn't do. It would be a huge regret. But I'm here now. I'm right here. That's not actually funny, but you know that's not how I meant it. Isn't funny at all.

I think I'll probably have a Christmas story this year, but if I do, I'll probably send it to fewer people than I have in years past with these stories. Like this masterpiece (one must scroll down, but it's there, the entire story, which is the only story I've ever posted in full in these pages), "Best Present Ever." I am going to say that no one has ever written a story that good. Do you want me to pretend? I can't say the thing that is true? It's not true? Read it. It is true. I have to say the truth. Anyone who reads the story will see the truth in what I have just said. They might not admit the truth--many people hate me--but they will know the truth.

I can't sit back and avoid saying the truth when it's relevant to say the truth as other people come forward and say things that they know is the truth because that's not how it works. People say what they think they're supposed to say, and for attention. And they say those things about people who they see as like themselves, or who are achievable in theory for people like themselves, because that makes them feel best about themselves. People don't see me as achievable. They don't see as like them. They see me as far from those things as possible. So usually they're going to say nothing as a result. At least right now.

I don't know how many friends and family members I sent that story to a few Christmases ago. Fifteen, maybe? I'm using these terms rather loosely. I don't want to parse them with much scrutiny. They won't bear up to much scrutiny. And very few of those people said a word about that story.

Again, read it. You're thinking, if you don't know me, haven't seen my work, how good can it possibly be? Better than anything you can imagine is the answer. Publishing people don't want anyone to see it because of how good it is and how good the person it's by is. Because there's nothing in publishing--in their subculture of incestuous evil--that can compare to it or him in quality. That's the truth. That's the problem. To be solved. On my end. I don't know how to solve this. Everything is against a solution anyway. Thousands of mechanized factors mitigate against the possibility of a solution.

My plan? I don't have a plan beyond keep going, keep creating. Everything has been tried. None of it matters, because that's not how this works. There isn't a work that does it, or 1000 great works that do it, or 10,000 things you published as the best writer of this kind, of this kind, on this subject, on that subject, etc. etc. etc.

It's just not how it works. It's not how publishing works or the world outside of publishing. It's other stuff. Then, after the other stuff does its stuff, and you have the work that no one else has, well, maybe something happens then that's bigger than what ever happened for someone else, none of whom had the work, not like you do.

But we don't know. I don't know. It's never happened before. Because, again, that's now how it works.

What I would like to know, one way or the other, before I do, is what would happen. I'm not sure I'll ever have that chance. I feel like I never will. Sometimes I think my plan is terrible. That it's a non-plan. Keeping going, keeping creating, writing the best work there's ever been every damn day. It's all I got, though.

Even if the story was rubbish, though, it's still a Christmas gift from someone. In my world, most people just aren't going to throw me a token, "Thanks." Or even "Hey, got what you sent, will check it out."

If I was someone else, of course they would. These people know what I am. My kindness, my decency, my fairness. Each of them know that if they needed anything, there isn't anyone who would be there the best they could be there for them with the utmost alacrity. In other words, it's not because I banged their wife or was the bad son or embezzled them or Lorin Stein-ed their daughter. It's because it's me, and that's just how it works with me. I don't think I want to put myself through that this Christmas, especially with something so special.