Seducing the Unhusband, or How but a Writer Assiduously Disarmed His Profoundly Hateful Assassin, Part VI

it gets more absurd

Acknowledgments: for Brian and Meghan McCarty for exploding with laughter when I told them “I’m like Johnny Depp in the Pirates movies;” for my new friend Joe Robinson, the most literary and interesting finance bro there ever was, and our deep cigar sojourn; for the pretty lady who I commented on why so many pretty women like you ma’m carry hundreds in cash around because I would be too afraid of getting raped—that’s why I don't carry any cash—and how she erupted seismically into gales of whales of laughter; for my Jewish and Ukrainian friends who appreciated the flag pins I wore at work for a while before the managers took me to task for it like they disdained my personality there in general because of how I never looked or talked or walked like I worked there, the owners who I’m not going to be very nice to in my writing because of how much they pushed me around so jealous of me they forced me to quit—I hope you’re happy; for myself for after I make my fortune how I want to open my own supermarket where instead of muzak no we listen to Jimi Hendrix Nirvana or Beethoven and Bach, and my employees have to dress very stylishly as the dress code and customers get discounts for being nice looking like all good looking people who dress well should get tax deductions, tax breaks, the smarter you are the better looking you are the easier the world should be made for you to be your oyster, not harder; for stupid people we should raise taxes on, also bad looking people with no respect for themselves or others who dress poorly and eat worse; for the owners again who don’t know how rich I’m about to make them with every erudite college graduate working in a supermarket after me; for all the losers who copy, but especially in college who copied, me; for myself for being a copycat too; for Substack for copyrighting my work when they didn’t have to because no one can imitate me; for myself for having no fear of anyone stealing my ideas; for my alma mater for trying to commit me to a mental institution just for questioning their DEI values in freshman orientation, and for the nurse who evaluated me who said “I always thought that was a conservative school, who said “you need to pick your battles—” indeed I scared the hell out of those progressive students just for saying I don’t think that people are entitled to respect, because respect is earned, and no one is entitled to fucking anything technically (and I said a number of other things that were making the other sensible rational kids laugh); for myself for actually committing myself for three days for an evaluation over the winter to make sure I hadn’t totally lost it, when I was in a hung over state, and so for the psychiatrist who perceived right away that I was but a neurotic writer and was ready to clear me after just one conversation, and the beautiful nurse, a Victoria who sympathized with the pressure and stress it felt like I was under and still feels like, and for the extremely kind staff there and the social worker who was very kind to me, who enjoyed my wit and insights and humor, and were like wow you’re really a writer?; for Laura Ingraham who defended everything Trump said on the tv in the hospital like it was gospel and condemning everything Biden did out of hand, which is fine, for how it allowed me to take stock of my surroundings and I was feeling like you know some schizophrenics here we could probably switch at least RFK Jr with and put him here instead—indeed some of the smartest people you’ll ever encounter are all in institutions every now and again (it was a fascinatingly enlightening experience); for Daniela Rondinelli and her boyfriend Bobby for being some of the kindest most genuine, big-hearted people I know; for my AA friends who I’m too afraid to ever share “A Driving Problem” with, that being one reason I stopped going to meetings as much as they liked my company and begged me to come more often; for Casey and his girlfriend or wife Jill who inspired the Jen and Pete characters in Seducing the Therapist (I miss you fun people.)—that’s it with the acknowledgments for now; for Nikki Haley because I still have a little boy crush on you; oh and for the gangster who threatened me for no reason we had to bar out of the store; and for the other black people like him who can’t help hating me because I don’t subscribe to their culture of “respect”—like must I?—I understand that racism is not completely eradicated yet, but look I was raised in very different society, and I live like this is a monarchy where you could speak boldly and frankly, not a humbling self-loathing modest progressive social democracy where everyone has to be equal and the same and flat, and everything circles tiredly around and around the lowest common denominator; for Tucker Carlson for being my arch nemesis; for the other crazy guy too who threatened to beat me in the head with a grocery item; for everyone who likes to threaten me just for being alive; for myself for rarely though having to seldom engage another man with my fists; for my old Irish friend who always wore a naval cap, who saved me from the vagabond threatening me in Ireland—I can’t thank you enough John; and for Alex Lorie for giving me the idea to refer to the liquor store Bottles and Cases as “Cases and Caskets;” for Kevin O’Rourke for calling me the other morning “Scott Fitzgerald;” for Al Dunlap a corporate cost-cutter who would say things to people like you “like your new sailboat? You’re fired. How do you like that?” who inspired some of my mean rich sociopathic male characters like Stormbranch in this series and my character in my first novel Leviathan, Fitzpatrick O’Connell; and for Jon Ronson whose book on psychopaths like them I highly recommend and for Kevin Dutton whose book The Wisdom of Psychopaths is just as good; for a Mary, who greeted me, “Hey John Steinbeck;” for John Debellis for calling me “JD Salinger;” and for Mercedes one last time for nicknaming me “Shakespeare;” lastly (seriously) for the Wall Street Journal editorial board and Holman Jenkins Jr. who I share my undergrad with, whom I consider the Journal’s funniest wittiest columnist; for Bari Weiss for being an inscrutable enigma; and for The New York Times for being a propagandistic Jew-hating rag; and for The New Yorker for being the most pretentious and shallow publication that ever existed; for Trump for if he’s right about one thing it’s that Biden really was the worst president in American history—for indicting his political opposition, for pardoning his menace of a son, whom I am determined to get back behind bars, and for nominating Harris who would have been perhaps even worse than him, because just when you think things couldn’t get worse in this country, sometimes they do; for John Bolton for pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal; for my parents who are the only reason I never became a high school drop out; for Barack Obama who was also an atrocious president throwing trillions on an economy in recession like that ever worked and not following through on his Syria redline; for the narcissists too of do-gooder, good boy, good girl progressives and socialists all around the world who don’t fucking get macroeconomics.

Seducing the Unhusband

by Jay Burkett

“Do not lead. I will not follow. Do not follow. I will not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.”—Albert Camus

“We live in a society—” the actor who plays George Costanza in Seinfeld

“Fortis imaginatio generat causum {a powerful imagination generates the event} as the scholars say. I am one of those by whom the powerful blows of the imagination are felt most strongly. Everyone is hit by it, but some are bowled over. It cuts a deep impression into me: my skill consists in avoiding it not resisting it. I would rather live among people who are healthy and cheerful: the sight of another man’s suffering produces physical suffering in me, and my own sensitivity has often misappropriated the feelings of a third party.”

“I have nothing to offer except my own confusion.” —Jack Kerouac

“You confuse me.”— Elizabeth Cronin over text

Me to my mom one night after she complained of me comparing myself too much to other writers— “a writer is the sum of his influences.”

“All art is theft.—a saying

“Richard you’re boring when you don’t drink”—Elizabeth Taylor to her husband

“Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am.”).—” Rene Descartes

“If he loved you with all the power of his soul, he couldn’t love you as much as I do in a single day.”—Heathcliff on the sickly Edgar in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, which puts me in mind of how I used to talk to Liz when she was dating Teddy.

“I imagine therefore the world as it is exists.—” me

“Finally my brethren, be Strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, above all taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God.” —Ephesians 6:10-14, 16-17 NKJV (courtesy of my friend, Josh Wright who likes to message me scripture)

“To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he was just Jim—nothing more. He had of course another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would suddenly leave the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to another—generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a seamen in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of a water clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang in Batavia—and in each of these halting places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards when his keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports and White men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say— Lord Jim.” —Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad

“Alas my children, this is the day you shall always remember as the day you almost caught captain Jack Sparrow.”—Johnny Depp

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”—Nietzsche The Will to Power

“Man will not only endure. He will prevail.—” William Faulkner accepting the Nobel prize

Seducing the Unhusband, Volume VI, or How a Writer Assiduously Disarmed His Profoundly Hateful Assassin

by Jay Burkett

The word was out. It was around town, and peddling hurtling pivoting and plummeting around Long Island— New York, and around the internet and the world. Well the internet is the world now. That’s why people were so miserably on edge.

Now eventually everyone was embracing when not considering strangling him as the friend they really weren’t sure he was all along, for natural reasons. Jealousy is good. And despite his severe anxiety, he was letting everyone’s formerly jealous, but perhaps in some way still envious and sore, husband shoot shot glasses off his head with fifty-seven magnums. He was aware that alas he had won everyone’s trust, not totally but you can’t be totally sure so— and things were happily ever after (perhaps) even if he were still abhorrently, abominably abortionately, and arbitrarily still sadly dangerously single. (He would conjure up the broken pieces of shot glass with just his mind reconstructing full shots, putting the broken pieces and solution back together and then downing them.) Because it was tragic how things didn’t work out with the British girl though she made a great fragmentary character he didn’t let us fully know in his semi-semi-semi autobiographical tortured series. So she was a great girl in the stellar ensemble cast of all the inspirational heroic and villainous people in his magical fantastic life inspiring all his creations. Anyway, now, that evening everyone was scrambling to find him shit-heaping-piles of pretty girls for him to possibly test out for test drives at Go-Karting, mini golf, paddle, tennis, equestrian, as they discussed his relationship status like it was a crisis like maybe he still might seduce someone’s wife if they didn’t find him somebody now— this all hectically happening at the Salt Hole or the Shit Hole or the Dick Hole whatever this Salt Valley bar was called like Stop and Drop Dead Right Now, the grocery store he barely survived working at, for too long—it was exploding with imploding convulsive obsessive-compulsive implosions of quaky, creaky, shaky mawkish drinks.

He was buying them one as rapidly as they were buying him one.

But…

There was one man left at least the prodigious talent still had some reason to be worried about, or there were a hundred. Everyone had been wanting to kill him for no reason for as long as he could remember, and it wasn’t about to just stop.

It would never stop the empty or the fulsome winsome threats!

This was DanWill or Chuck or DanWillWoodchuck Stormbranch, who was assembling meticulously his automatic sniper rifle on top of his tank on a big tripod with the longest barrel on the sunniest day the barrel that was so long no one noticed it, extending across parked cars—and, eying him through the scope while the kid still worked in “Stop Drop, and Roll or Otherwise Stop and Drop Dead Right Now,” or was it not “Cases and Caskets” where he worked a boujee boozy booze store that sold liquor and coffins together, mail order delivery?

…

Stormbranch was watching those nigh compulsive complimentary flirtations with a cold admixture of liverish envy and spleen, hate, rage, scorn and disdain, and somewhere in himself even in his cold black heart, love.

When the talent lifted his head for a moment and he looked out the window into the parking lot, where he was once or he was daily physically hit by cars that drove too fast through there, and he met Stormbranch’s gaze: it unnerved Stormbranch, something about his eyes, something about what he knew about the state of Stormbranch’s soul.

Or was it Thornbranch? Either would do.

Stormbranch lost his shit. Packing up his sniper rifle; when the kid materialized out of thick humid summer air thickly smoking on the dashboard of his tank, languidly, startling him.

Because his tank had a dashboard.

“I like you,” Colin said under his breath with legs crossed.

“Your balls are as big as mine, coming to execute me here in broad plain unspoken unspeakable speechless, unutterable and inaudible unalterable daylight.”

“Say, did Elon Musk make this thing? Wait no. He couldn’t. Elon Musk wouldn’t have the gall or the taste to dare manufacture literal tanks. I’ll have to write about this.”

“Why do you like me?” Stormbranch was growling like an aggrieved big dog like a Rottweiler.

“I told you you have like bigger balls than I do. But why do you despise me so much?”

“Because you wrote a book about your career in the supermarket flirting with my bizarrely unoffended friends’ wives man!”

“It’s outrageous!” Stormbranch thundered. Rumbled.

“Readable though. Had to get famous somehow. And fast. What else was I going to do? People don’t have the attention spans to read unless it impacts their lives directly. And look I don’t even do anything, and I still have guys threatening me constantly and harassing me. Ever since I was a wee lad. So even if I didn’t write about it and scandalize madden embarrass or humiliate anyone, I would still have this problem, and you would still have this problem with me. So now I’m coming clean about it. I’m doing the decent thing and calling men out for bullying me for nothing and calling women out for making me uncomfortable and calling myself out for making you uncomfortable and making everyone uncomfortable, because—because everything these days is so uncomfortable, despite well because of how comfortable we are. You have to give me some credit in all your rage you psychopathic son of a bitch, with all due respect.”

“Give me one of those healthy cigarettes. I prefer working out to smoking usually.”

He gave Stormbranch a cigarette who had never smoked ever before.

“What is just so wild to me is how I never did anything with your friends’ wives, never would, and guys look at me like they register me as a threat and they envy me anyway, but like what am I doing wrong! I never did anything! You can’t help me working there. You can’t blame me for reading a lot of books or being tall. It’s just unfair. What should we do about me, minimize my IQ, cancel my blog, make me bald, ban my books, burn them? Like what is that going to do? You could burn all Thomas Hobbes’s books ban Ulysses ban Women in Love what the fuck is that going to do? You can’t stop a DH Laurence or a Marquis De Sade or an Eminem or a Joyce from saying what he wants to say. Because he has to say it. You see with this series just like Trump is testing whether the Republic is worth keeping, my mission was to test whether we really want to decide whether the nuclear traditional family is worth preserving or we just want to kick it over a cliff. Because look at the degenerates we have in office. Look at all the men who cheat with their secretaries and women who like run off with younger men. It just happens less than the former, but it happens. Men do it more. But women will do it more with the divorce laws in this state and the money and power women have now. But back to the extramarital corruption you can see everywhere. Just take Jude Law who’s had kids with so many women. And Johnny Depp. People who are married a million times. Like for Christ’s sake, marry once, and even if you fall in love again, restrain yourself! Hold onto what you have and know better than to throw it all away! Maybe someone’s wife fantasized about me a little, so we all do that to each other; it doesn’t mean anything. Very very few of them like one or two, like this former model from Greenlawn specifically or Centerport actually, who’s husband was an awful man actually wanted to make off with me. You know some of them you have to pity because they really did not marry well. As I pity a man who had the balls to marry a flirtatious former model that I pity for marrying him. I’m determined not to marry poorly. But you see I would never so much as actually flirt let alone have some kind of fling when it’s a man I either know and/or have respect for and admire. How could you betray someone you either like or you love? Well I guess it depends on how into the woman you are. The only one I was really falling for was that former model, and it was only to her I felt really vulnerable. With everyone else I felt nothing. And I like either cops or big guys who work in finance or medicine. I don’t like men who are not manly in their own right. Like guys who are as cool and competent as I am. Bankers, investors. Unmanly people I don’t like are like critics and journalists because they’re more jealous of me than anyone, all failed writers. Oh and I hate academics. If you’re a high school teacher, I love that. I can admire that. But not a professor. You know what, if you’re a professor of any kind, I’m definitely going to have something with your wife even if she’s ugly and repulsive. Just to spite racist antisemitic academia. I love guys who work in medicine and lawyers. I love rich and powerful guys who eat red meat and like firearms like me. And construction workers and firemen. Some philosophers considered like-minded friendship superior to romantic or erotic love. I just read Simon May’s book on the history of Western love. I’m on the fence. I still don’t know what love I love or prefer. This sounds really OCD but sex is almost so intense for me I don’t even like it. That’s probably the real reason I haven’t had sex in several years now. Well I also needed to cut the boozing and not work and have no girls to buckle down to write for several years, then I fell hard off the wagon and all this chaos all began. Sex is like cocaine for me, too stimulating too powerful. Romance I have to admit is almost too much for my system too. Perhaps like Kierkegaard eventually argued it’s better to be celibate not out of hate like an incel or something, but simply for the sake of your own integrity and peace of mind. Like women are almost more dangerous to a man even than other men I realize. I don’t know if I’m more scared of married men rather than the married women. Like the latter could just corrupt me and drive me crazy and the former could kill me. I don’t know what’s the lesser of two evils. I’m smart but I can’t make these calculations which is why I don’t even write so much as just drink let alone run around womanizing. I want to be like Laurence in Arabia now I think or the Buddha, a wanderer an exile in the mountains, the tundra, the desert. I think love of God though or an idealist in love with ideas or narcissus in love with himself is appealing, though I’m afraid I’m so nice looking I’ll go out like Adonis hunting a wild animal. Do you know why Adonis dies that way in the myth when Aphrodite loves him? It’s because you can be so good looking that not even the Goddess of love can you appreciate! And so you die fighting in war or something. That’s the message. You know some days I hope for like war with China just so I can take up arms despite my Crohn’s disease. Well maybe I would work in intelligence. World War Three is almost definitely coming. We all need to prepare and stop eating our hearts out here. And think about what’s happening abroad. Since wrapping up my series or trying to on my tortured anxiety-ridden pick-up artistry I have resorted to foreign policy again, and now I have those anxieties about nuclear war again. Like if you read Annie Jacobson’s book. Like it takes like only two hours to eviscerate the planet. I’m not optimistic about Trump just using his personality to cut deals. Some men are nihilists like the joker who “just wants to watch the world burn” in Batman and guys like Putin you can’t cut deals with because they’re aging dictators, and they’re like Hitler. We either have to arm proxies to the teeth or engage flat-out in nuclear brinkmanship in my opinion. Well that was Walter Russell Mead’s opinion. I read his Global View column in The Wall Street Journal every day. Celibacy and a million deep platonic friendships could be ideally where it’s actually at. Not to disappoint all the girls who want so desperately to be with me. It’s terrible damned if you do damned if you don’t. Follow my heart and die. Don’t follow it and miss out and— or disappoint. As my college girlfriend would tell you, I don’t know what I’m doing and actually atrocious in bed. I’m so inhibited like all the time, I simply can’t perform. Too self-conscious. Sex is so overrated. Masturbating to all the porn we have now online and all the erotic art I can spend like whole days and nights doing. That’s better than the real thing.”

“I love how afraid of us he is. It’s very flattering to the vanity and hilarious,” one of the gentlemen pronounced, “because some of us we could if we wanted truly in sooth like bribe Salt Valley PD to look the other way while we dismembered him or drew and quartered him, beheaded him, put a tarantula in his coffee, put a horse’s head on the pillow next to him, throw him in a snakepit. I know guys who would do that.”

This was Lessa Steeplechase’s husband. Rand Steeplechase like Ayn Rand was an investment banker and sort of an intellectual. Because as much as Colin knew and specialized in literature and philosophy and Lessa knew all about tariffs, this guy thought about everything, especially Heidegger, but not because he was a nazi, and he didn’t like Ayn Rand at all so he hated his own name. He was tall with very dark hair and Irish and had clear eyes like he could see everything or he had seen everything, and slept with both eyes open in contemplation of everything all at once.

This indeed was what was so interesting to Lessa about Colin. He was one of them. He was one of us, one of us one of us one of us, like that scene in “The Wolf of Wall Street” “one of us” good looking, talented and cool. What the ladies liked about him that no one understood was that he mirrored and reflected their own husbands, who reflected him. Because everyone is reflecting and mirroring everyone like his own writing is just holding a mirror up to nature, and we were all nearly the same person with trivial differences. No one was a person or even a character. Social life is a labyrinth of layered conflicting personalities.

Someone remarked, “I’m at least as anxious of him as he is of us. We all have guns and resources, but with his mouth, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had like a flamethrower in his liquor stash. He sounds like he could be a paranoiac.” This was a lawyer who specialized in cases of criminal insanity, because he was himself a little insane. “I defended a guy once with paranoia who lost his mind and shot his best friend with a bow and arrow for no reason.”

Meanwhile Stormbranched searched restlessly foraging sporadically spasmodically spastically melodramatically in the woods for his missing golf ball—he was always shooting it into the water or the trees in his jealous envious highfalutin, hyper-fury. And then cutting down all the trees with torpid, limpid insipid intransigent transient translucent toothpicks and paperclips. The guys hated golfing with him anyway. For all Stormbranch’s hatred of “liars,” he was a disposable despicable despotic tyrannical megalomaniacal cheat at golf and tennis and cards and everything. The guys didn’t know why they wasted their time with him.

Some men you were always hanging out with but you didn’t know why because you found and considered them unutterably gutturally intolerable. Insufferable and unendurable.

“Lessa tells me he’s like an amazing writer. And I mean I knew that already. Someone else told me and I did meet him once. I gotta read it and he wrote about her and me apparently and I don’t know what’s taking me so long. I love literature. I’ve read all of it. Sure Hemingway Hunter Thompson Faulkner. Lessa says he’s gritty horny and utterly obscene. He’s more like Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce, which I always found a little intimidating, but I guess I can power through it. Marquis De Sade. Lars Von Trier. He likes to get under your skin. It’s too bad he’s so scared of us we can’t get him out with us. What do I have to do to reassure him despite his doubting disease that no we’re not that angry with him?”

“I read Ulysses once and Finnegan’s Wake,” Lily Hunter’s barrel-chested husband, Toddler Hunter broadcast. A neurosurgeon. “You know sometimes I want to write a novel. Wouldn’t that be cool to be like Michael Crichton or John Grisham like a doctor a lawyer but also a thriller writer! It’s not enough to make a lot of money. I want to be famous!”

“Didn’t he say it’s a tragedy not more Americans are narcissists who crave wealth and status? He says that narcissism and a lack of empathy are the principle personality traits pushing the human race forward.—personally I just love how much he drinks. Isn’t he like a whiskey connoisseur and a massive beer snob? I want him to show me around the liquor store. Give me some recommendations.”

Someone else said, “apparently I’m a loser because I drink vodka.”

Everybody laughed.

“He drinks all day someone else said. He’s like Churchill. He puts some bourbon in his coffee in the morning and has a shot or two before toiling away in the restaurant. He’s not an alcoholic. He’s much more disciplined than you imagine and just like he exaggerates his wiles with the ladies, he embellishes how much he drinks. It’s all about burnishing his personality and making a big bold and aggressive entrance. And a statement. Like here I am. The prose writer of the century is here.”

“I still think he really is a womanizer who either did things or had plans to with some women in that store. Maybe not any of our wives per se. Maybe they just inspired a few of the characters. But maybe there are others he hasn’t mentioned at all. You consider that pissibility? Not possibility. Pissibility!”

“Has he ever shot a lion though or know how to cook?” The guys were golfing with croquet mallets because some things you liked to do just because they were impulsive or willful. Or silly.

“I love how he regrets writing so passionately about the British girl, because he think it’s so nauseatingly sentimental and embarrassing. He’s not a lover. He’s a provoker. Warrior. And the love part is at odds with the rest of his unsentimental personality, the cynical cold hard guy who drinks and smokes who’s a lifelong happy bachelor. Does he actually want love or not?”

“He’s as handsome as he is ugly. He brushes his teeth like a thousand times a day religiously but they’re showing the siren signs of tobacco, and too many nights passing out with food lodged in his teeth like popcorn from all the movies he consumes, the black coffee and the whiskey. He doesn’t give a shit though. He’s young. He’s more proud than vain. So who cares? He’s as pompously productive as he is seductive and routinely laid out by the bottle. He’s as much of a genius as he is an idiot. Retarded. He got a two million dollar fine for going around a school bus stop sign. He said he never learned you could get a ticket for that. Even if he drove carefully. Lucky he didn’t get points on his license. He looks as great as he is clinically but unprovably insane. An esoteric savant, a polymath. He knows every language. And he is deterioratingly unhealthy. He has chronic nerve pain, chronic back pain, Crohn’s disease, a rapidly receding hairline, a wart on the fourth finger of his right hand which is almost unnoticeable but still. He’s prone to heat rashes. Jock itch. He’s a prodigious sweater and he’s prone to sinus infections. Like year round. He’s hounded by borderline arthritic joint pain and body aches for no reason. He has severe depression severe anxiety and moderate-to severe OCD. And one has every reason to expect as he ages and the pressure mounts it’s all just going to worsen until either he has a heart attack or a stroke dies in a car accident, or he just one day shoots himself. If he makes it to thirty, forty or fifty without killing himself or killing his doctors for getting in the way of him killing himself then it would be a miracle. And oh yeah he drinks almost as much as I do,” Sam Smashing sang this all out as she crashed her yacht again like a private plane into each and every boat in the mooring field of the Greenwich Riverside Yacht Club or the Seawanhaka Yacht Club or The Pine Tree Pond Club. This now totaled boat was called “The Vendetta.” The last one was called “The Renegade,” and before that the “Bad Ass Bad Bitch.” She sang this all out before abandoning ship and dressing her kids in life preservers, she and her hapless cuckhold husband hopelessly in love with her—she had like seven kids—and they all leapt into the harbor!

Lily’s husband, Toddler Hunter, having acquired Colin’s number somehow from another embarrassed husband who manipulated the NSA or DOGE to get it, leaving a message—

“We don’t want to kill you. Not anymore. At first I wanted to hack you to pieces with a broom and lay a hot iron on your face until you passed out dead of sheer pain, admittedly. But no. And some of us still are eh rather indignant to say the least, and everyone wants a real heartfelt apology you can’t fuck up, but mainly we just want to meet you and like throw something on the grill no not your face or your dick like burgers and hot dogs no that’s not a euphemism for… We could meet in a public place but no there wouldn’t be like a rooftop sniper or whatever you’re so anxious about. No not everyone there to make it look safe would be like a hired actor. This isn’t The Godfather you’re messing with. You watch too many movies. We’re not going to shoot you in a restaurant we lure you into or machine gun you in a revolving door. If we give you a ride we’re not gonna drive you out to the sticks. Come on kid. We just want to meet you. I get it. You’re trying to involve us in your micromoralrevolution to rescue Western morality by destabilizing our commitments and causing us to question what’s true and what isn’t; and honestly I’m completely on board. It’s fascinating. And I want to write my own novel. Not something as insane as you but something. You made me realize I want to do more with myself! I don’t just want to be an upper class dad. And so as you made Lily aware what she could do with her life, or not do, you made me aware now, and so you owe it to me just to meet you once. You know what now we’ll want to kill you more like for real if you don’t hang out with us and don’t trust us!” Mr Hunter hung up in stung exasperation.

“Don’t meet us then! Where’s the tough guy who wrote about seducing my wife! Go ahead maybe write about actually doing it for all I care! You can write about Lily all you want!” Hunter in a change of mood leaving another message where Colin presumably terrified of them all or the prospect of seeing any of them let alone all of them was not returning his calls and was resolved never to chance even encountering anyone he antagonized.

He was in his mom’s basement or his dad’s basement or a jealous husband who already got to him’s basement drinking and not disposed to return calls even kindly ones. He did not trust anybody. He didn’t even trust himself not to return calls. So he just threw his phone in a corner and did not look at it and drink and not even jerk off.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Celeste’s husband Tom Tomlinson texted Todd later. “Threaten to kill him if he’s too much of a pussy to hang out with us!”

To be succeeded by Seducing the Writer or a Story of How a Jealous Husband Overcomes his Jealousy and Befriends an Artist and His Wife Ironically Attempts to Make Him Pay For It