Those of you who follow me across platforms will have noticed that I wrote yet another thing. I returned to the pages of The Washington Examiner, which asked me to guide their readers on the merits of Netflix’s latest narrative true crime adventure The Watcher. I don’t know whether or not my editor was aware of my New Jersey residency, let alone in such close proximity to the real Watcher house, but I nonetheless rendered unto him and the readers my most New Jerseyan judgment: it sucks.
I did not go so far as to say that it was the single worst event imposed upon our state by outsiders since War of the Worlds or the Hindenburg explosion, but it certainly did us no positive service. Frankly it made us all look like a bunch of deranged ingrates. We are, of course; but it’s only fun when we are the ones pointing it out.
But as I wrote, the one saving grace of the series is its showcase of the actual letters written by the actual Watcher (helpfully provided by The Cut) in all their menacing gothic magnificence. Not since the Unabomber has prose figured so prominently in a crime. Indeed, the prose is the crime. The Watcher’s mastery of voice, and the obvious success of its intended outcome, does make for a very uneasy experience if you are unfortunate enough to come under their scrutiny. For everyone else, it is a high watermark of epistolary literature. Ryan Murphy had enough good sense to leave it more or less unmolested by his candy-coated pulp imagination.
But this praise, and a quick scan of my own self-promotional habits, has given rise to rather absurd rumors that I am the Watcher. Part of me, I’ll admit, is only too happy to take this credit. But a few extra seconds’ thought dispels that temptation. First for obvious legal reasons and second because were I to try and prove my authorship I would fail conclusively. What then follows is painful and humbling but very necessary to admit.
Any seasoned writer can tell you that one of the biggest obstacles to getting anything accomplished—besides getting paid—is doubt. The doubt may be singular and entirely self-focused. You in your own capacity are unworthy of the craft and are better off quitting while you’re behind. And even if you’ve worked through that, there is still the more general doubt as to the value of your chosen craft as a whole. Doing WoRdS? In this economy?? But the marvel of the Watcher is how well they overcame both of these doubts and left the podcasting and other nü media naysayers looking like morons. Of course a writer has worth and words have power if the right ideas have the proper medium. Some things you just can’t teach, but must arrive at through your own trials.
In my 15-year arc as a writer I have overcome a lot of doubts, just not those associated with writing threatening letters. I have longed to indulge in this particular subgenre of invective. While mass-audience polemics leave me rather cold by their narrow formula, the sheer imaginative breadth of directing your indignation to a single person is far more stimulating. Certainly the results of your campaign will be easier to gauge. But ambition cannot match the trepidation, and I practically drown in anxiety. What the fuck is wrong with me?
Do I lack enemies? Hardly! I made a new one just a week ago with immense threatening letter potential.
When you reach a certain age, new friendships lose their enchanting faculties relative to the thrill of budding animosities. Especially when their roots are an utter mystery. I cannot tie any specific transgression by this neighbor that would earn him my boundless ire. Certainly he is not like my immediate next-door neighbors who think EDM is an appropriate accompaniment for a first birthday party. Certainly he not also like my further-down-the-street neighbors who are apparently allergic to waving back to me while walking their dog. Moreover, this guy presents no obvious trace of suburban performativity that would annoy most right-thinking people. His house is not a remodeled behemoth of Lovecraftian proportions. He does not have an “IN THIS HOUSE …” sign or any year-round campaign endorsements, and he does not hang is American flag upside down like a shithead. Some people, I guess, just have an aura around them. An aura of dickishness. Maybe I do, too, and we were always going to be on the wrong foot.
Here you’d think that I have all I need. I have the sufficiently proven writing ability, and now the most adequate blank canvas on which to inflict it to the severest degree. But here is where my problems begin.
You see, unlike most writers, or least unlike most of their admissions, I actually enjoy writing. This is not to say that it is always easy or satisfactory, but it is by and large a more fulfilling use of my time compared to the scorched and smoldering flatland of psychic death that is my daily existence. Writing is a way of being in control. When something goes badly it at least goes badly on my terms compared to everything else that weighed down by co-authorship and outside ownership. The enjoyment of writing corresponds with an affection for language itself, which according to my mom started around my 11th month of existence when she and my dad sat down and listed the 100 or so words I was alleged to have picked up by then.
Love for one thing used to convey hate for something else is not impossible but a very deft balancing act. Even Shakespeare didn’t pass it off it entirely convincingly. (So, like, am I supposed to not like Macbeth or what?) To put all my skills toward caustic ends may not, in fact, have a caustic outcome. Bringing myself to the peak of my linguistic powers for some asshole seems only to ennoble the asshole. Yes, I have chosen a color palette that might not suit you as you prefer, but the likeness may yet have some refined, edifying qualities, like an Edward Gorey illustration or one of the early paintings Francis Bacon burned. By conveying in prose your most vile nature, I only do you a service, by doing what you were incapable of doing before. And having done it, you may go on and do a vile thing, and you have my words to impress upon your hapless victims the full dazzling and lyrical nature of your depthless, inevitable maleficence. In other words, I’ve given you a fucking doctor’s note for evil.
Fine. Ornate rhetoric is powerless against you. So what about crude rhetoric? What about a good old English vulgarism, or a single swear word? One of the things people noted about Veep in its rocky first season was how Armando Ianucci couldn’t successfully impress his verbose, (probably lowland) Scottish, tension-diffusing style of cursing upon the monosyllabic, Germanic, tension-heightening preferences held by Americans. He eventually met his new audience halfway, and was inexplicably adored for it. Frankly I saw no reason to fix what wasn’t fucked up. A succinct American swear word has its power, like a drone missile aimed at a backyard wedding. But again, context is key. How exactly am I going to tell my confirmed local enemy to properly go fuck himself? We are not on the floor of the Senate where such an epithet has landed well enough. Do I paint “GET FUCKED” or “ SUCK SHIT, DICKHOLE” on his driveway? Scorch “FUCK FUCKITY FUCK FUCK” onto his grass? No. He will again take it as high-fucking-art and sell it as an NFT.
Alas, all is tragedy. For words fail. But I guess that happens. Not everything has a verbal solution. Sometimes only action suffices. But what action? I turned it over in my mind for weeks. And lo! A neighbor with whom I am on more or less amiable terms dropped in conversation that he had a dead cat he wasn’t getting much use out of. Cue the mental fireworks. I dropped subtle hints that I could make use of just such a thing, and out of his compost heap and into my hands the cat was duly transferred.
I made a kind of half-assed, feline slingshot that, with sufficient force, would launch the carcass against my nemesis’s window in the dead of night1. Of course glass doesn’t break in real life the same way it does in the movies. The dead cat made a heavy thud when it slammed the window and then kind of exploded everywhere. My only regret was in not allowing a wider radius in which to position myself.
What lessons can we take from this, subscribers? First, Netflix sucks. Second, not everyone should write but some secret writers are sick geniuses. Third, all doubts are different and will be overcome in their own time. Fourth, lawyers are pretty cool. And fifth, whatever I may be, I am not the goddamn Watcher.
This is a joke that I made up in case it was not clear.