Nobody’s thinking about you

and that's just how we like it

Richard Yates, when asked about subject matter in his work once said “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and their in lies the tragedy.”

How do people see us? Do we have the right friends? Are we beautiful and handsome enough? Are the clothes just right? The car? The bank account? There is a sick self consciousness that undercuts our sense of aboveness — the gap slowly widens, as we age, between our ideas of ourselves as special people and the reality of being just like everyone else. But the widening gap is where all the fun exists.

It is where living happens.

This is why the works of Yates were always critically lauded but never commercially viable. Evidenced by the fact that none of his seven major works were able to sell more than 12,000 copies in hardcover. The dude produced, exclusively, commercial flops.

The mirror image of Americans was a bit too crisp. It was shocking, the ease with which he was able to crawl inside the brains of the middle class and feel their lonely heart beat may have been off putting to the workaday reader. These are the same folks twenty years later who would fall victim to the likes of Star Wars-Harry Potter-Comic Book nonsense and other escapist, infantilized, belly-rubbing popcorn classics. It tracks.

Challenging the roughness of existence fell out of favor, and it has never returned.

When I posted the above image to an Instagram story last week, the ‘hearts’ started to pour in. The edges were bleeding.

Little did everyone know that this was a picture of a page from an Elizabeth Gilbert book. Eat Pray Love, baby..

It made me feel like, maybe we really are all on self-island, but..together? Now more than ever, we may need an injection of people talking about Richard Yates. Realism. Blunt reality. And stillness in the face of it.

We are all the protagonist in our own story, and likely the villain in someone else’s. Painfully alone. Even in the midst of the deepest hug, or most romantic kiss. We are front and center, at the middle of the stage with the lights burning the makeup off our faces.

Let us do what we want without fear or recourse. Remove yourself from the microscope — the prying eye of the public — because, remember, nobody is thinking about you.

Take a minute to listen to Simplicity Is Beautiful by Juliana Hatfleid, or watch Timothee Chalamet dance on a New York City pier to Visions of Johanna. Both are cool. The Skeleton Key by Roc Marciano is an album I have been enjoying this week. I am currently halfway through Milk Fed by Melissa Broder and I am enjoying it, but her poetry is better. I will post about all of the 2024 reading stuff next week. In the meantime, peace and love.