Men Disappoint Me. My Friends Make Me Sad. My Job Is No Fun. This Sandwich Isn’t Very Good. My Back Aches For Some Reason. I’m Tired of This Town. My Face Still Breaks Out Sometimes. My Dog Barks At Nothing. This Room Is Too Messy.
Air Disappoints Me. Breathing Makes Me Sad. My Husband Barks at Nothing. My Fun Made Me Jobless. This Town Thinks I’m Cringy. My Room Makes Me Lazy. This Advice Column Makes Me Stupid.
Oh, Polly, you soggy sandwich, you dried up chia pet. The more you relate to these wilted millennial lettuce wraps, the more we quietly pity you — you, with your ever-so-complicated past and present and future, unable to get your shit in order, unable to sally the fuck forth without slicing and dicing every single experience into smaller and smaller chunks. Watching you reckon with the past is like watching a polar bear pace in circles in his pit at the zoo. Everyone thinks he’s a cuddly little snuggle-lumpkins, but inside his head, he’s making a Pinterest board filled with snapshots of himself disemboweling zoo visitors and then posing with their intestines draped decoratively around his neck. Swag!
It would be fun to hate you, my drippy sister, if your barely-suppressed rage and elaborate projections weren’t so depressing. So let’s turn to something even worse: This article about missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, in which the author turns one of the most interesting aviation mysteries of all time into the narrative equivalent of a 10,000-word furniture assembly instruction pamphlet. In addition to repeating every detail we already know about the disappearance of MH 370 as if he discovered each one himself (and doing so with all of the enthusiasm of an Amazon warehouse worker filling bubble wrap packages with copies of Tuesdays with Morrie), the author introduces us to an obsessive beachcombing trust-fund freaker dude, but makes him sound about as interesting as a mid-level executive at a vacuum cleaner company somewhere in the Midwest. And where does the story finally land? Nowhere. It’s a long, slow, quiet drift into oblivion, much like the doomed flight itself.
So let’s shift our focus to a very different story, this one about a clump of embryonic cells that suddenly goes missing. Here is a subject that even this evil whore of a writer wouldn’t wander within a 46,000-square-mile radius of, the narrative equivalent of a 10,000-word furniture assembly instruction pamphlet. Yet our author, Sarah Miller, offers up an unnervingly moving and witty tale that we wish would last forever and ever, Amen.
And that is how you reckon with your goddamn past, idiot writers of the world. Are you listening, my sad chia pet of a sister? Go comb your sprouty dreadlocks and step up your game.
Got any special insights into why everything is more terrible than usual? Write to askmolly at protonmail.com.