Issue 1: Introducing 'Common Fiction.'
A newsletter about real world and internet happenings but also my feelings.
Hi, my name is Nic Juarez and I’m a writer you probably haven’t heard much about, which is okay. This is my newsletter, Common Fiction, where I write about the things that are currently happening and connect them in a really loose, nonspecific way.
I know it’s kind of weird to start this newsletter thing now since some really next level shitty things have happened recently, but I’ve been thinking of starting this thing for a while and the whole point is to try to make some sense of the things that happen by writing about them, even if they’re overwhelmingly shitty.
So, here it goes.
Legit questions.
Last weekend some people were violently killed in several mass shootings by men with guns that were designed to kill lots of things (read: people) really quickly. It’s happened so often that we knew exactly what politicians would say before they could say it. There was intense, loud arguing and a lot of people were justifiably angry and frustrated about gun control and a lot of Republican politicians kind of shrugged and said a lot of tired excuses and bad faith solutions but they also whispered to themselves just get through this interview and it will be over until the next one and I guess they were right because it has since gotten quiet all over again.
Who knew that feral hogs are also kind of a problem? For the internet to then touch perfection the day after all this death with one of the weirder memes to rip through Twitter was pretty strange. Everyone seemed to be speaking the same language for a fleeting moment and honestly it felt like a warm embrace.
So much so that Wired’s Emma Grey Ellis finds it oddly, dangerously familiar. “The banality of mass shootings and politicians' callous response is brain-breaking, and so is the diversity of experience in America,” Ellis writes. “It's hard to find consensus when one person's absurdist image is another person's backyard.”
Later, the Washington Post let Marc Thiessen say that millennials should really shut up already about safe spaces and trigger warnings because teenagers and children fought in WWII so we don’t need to cry about modern-day violence, okay? It didn’t really make sense and seemed like a pretty stupid argument and I didn’t understand why it was there. But then Luke O’Neil pointed out that shit like this ends up getting published because “It means nothing to write an article at a prestige publication anymore. It means you were around the specific day there was space to fill” and I appreciated the forthrightness and then he compared it to having your big moment next to a Dilbert cartoon and that was funny.
It seemed like labor columnist and heavy metal writer Kim Kelly had a really shitty week, unfortunately. Conservative media propagandist Any Ngo suggested that the Dayton shooter promoted Kelly’s and other writers’ work, making her and others digitally and physically vulnerable. This was right before her Columbia Journalism Review debut in which she questions whether politics should be removed from criticism as a response to NPR cutting ties with her over a Tucker Carlson segment where he got peeved about one of Kelly’s tweets. “Arts criticism comes from the heart and the gut; cutting out the human parts—our opinions—leaves the whole thing bloodless,” Kelly writes. “I could never separate the personal from the political, nor do I have the luxury of pretending I can.” She has also started a Patreon, which anyone who values tough, thoughtful writing about heavy metal, revolution, and class should consider supporting.
Sixty Million and more.
“I could get high with no complaints,” a playlist
Some guys (presumably) at a podcast I’ve never heard of said these are the greatest rappers of all time and a lot of people on twitter said the hell? and some of them said noooo, actually these are the greatest rappers of all time and finally the Ringer’s Rob Harvilla asked: does it even matter?
The World Economic Forum found that it will take 208 years before women gain equality with men. That is a depressing amount of time, but some of your favorite comedians are trying to make it easier to talk about by kind of laughing about it, too.
The greatest writer alive, Toni Morrison, died. When I was in college I used to be really into Cormac McCarthy and the way he placed brutal words side by side to somehow make these long, beautiful passages, and I considered him to be the best writer alive. Then I read “Beloved” and realized oh shit, she’s actually the best because she was capable of that but used her mastery of language to explain things that I actually understood and cared about. Later, I worked at a bookstore in Westwood and a white woman returned a copy of “Beloved,” one of the most beautiful, brutal books I had ever read, because she didn’t want her high school student to read about slaves committing bestiality and because slavery happened a long time ago so why do we have to think about it still? Can’t we just get over it?
At some point, Lizzo and Megan Thee Stallion released “HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM” on Twitter and it was just what a lot of people needed for a couple of hours. At some other point, between the hours of 4 a.m. and 9 a.m., a dj from North Carolina played his beats on the local news channel. It was beautiful.
I didn’t specify earlier that one of those shootings happened at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and the guy behind it wanted to kill Mexicans, specifically. The Walmart was having a back-to-school sale and Mexicans from El Paso and Ciudad Juarez were trying to get bargains when a racist gunman opened fire. Being Mexican in the United States means you almost forget how much people hate you, or at least think you’re reasonably dumb, for being Mexican because they usually show it in these small ways that can be pretty easy to ignore after a while, but then someone does something like kill a bunch of Mexican people or call them rapists or looks passed their subhuman conditions and you go oh right, they really hate us. Vice’s Alex Zaragoza painfully, and somehow therapeutically, writes about how it’s possible to continually survive through a lifetime of trauma. “But I've learned joy is a vital part of survival. To smile and joke and love; to drink a beer with friends and call my mom and tell her ‘te quiero mucho, mami’; it's intrinsic to survival,” Zaragoza writes. “We get up in the morning and we tell ourselves we are worthy, we won’t be decimated: we will live.”
This newsletter thing is nearly over and maybe you sensed that already. So, what’s the plan going forward? For now it’s to continue gathering these internet and IRL scraps and try to make sense enough to share them with you every Sunday. I also want to offer some long-form pieces that I think you’ll like, too.
Thanks for being here, I really appreciate it.
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