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—

Every morning, my Whoop wakes me up between 6:15a-7:15a.

I get out of bed but keep the lights off because a writer I follow does this and she’s a better writer than I am, so now I do this too.

Ben is still asleep. He’s a doctor, and so one would think that he’d be awake by now, but they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

The room is around 61 degrees, and so I put on sweatpants, a loose shirt and walk down the dark hall to the dark bathroom where I pee into the dark toilet and try not to miss the bowl before walking to the dark guest room with the dark desk where I rip my phone off the charger without looking at the screen because the writer I follow would never look at her phone this early in the sacred morning.

In the corner of the room is a wellness area: a massage gun, a vibrating faceless timer, a yellow resistance band, a heating pad, and a neck roller called a denneroll — a horribly named device invented in the early 2000s by a chiropractor named Dr. Adrian Dennewald who Ben says is not a real doctor, but then I remind Ben that Dr. Dennewald has invented a device used by millions and what has Ben done besides overslept.

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I flip the faceless timer to 45 minutes and yell, “Alexa, play Meditation by Joe Dispenza,” and then place the heating pad atop the denneroll and lie on the floor looking up at the ceiling with the device pressing into the back of my neck so that my Adam’s apple is forced to the sky, because “if you don’t start fixing your neck,” my chiropractor says, “one day, you’ll end up like the old people that come into my office with the back humps.”

And I don’t want to be like them.

The pre-denneroll generation.

Curved and forgotten.

We are not meant for that.

Monkeys, we all are.

Meant to swing from tree and eat banana and throw poop. Not sit at desk and crane neck and spiral.

And spiral I will.

Every meditation starts with noticing the spiral.

And since spiraling happens every day, so too must meditation.

Two days in a row without meditating, and the days become bad, and I know this because I track it daily in Excel:

1. Beginning of day

   1. How many total minutes I meditated

   2. How many of those minutes consisted of me being in a state of calm

2. End of day

   1. How good the day was (1-10)

1a is objective.

1b and 2a are not.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that if I don’t meditate often enough, my days are worse and a scarab burrows into my solar plexus and uses his little scarab claws to pull the strings of my shoulders down, collapsing me into someone I don’t want to be.

Because, again, monkey.

54 million years of it, actually.

And then 300,000 years ago we became homo sapiens, and 10,000 years ago we agriculturally revolutionized, and only 40 years ago we got computers, then cell phones, and now all of us spend the day looking down while our upper backs atrophy and our strained necks and overstimulated brains try to keep up.

You probably have issues with your neck too.

If you don’t, you will. And if you don’t think you will, you still will.

A tiny pain in your shoulder or trap. A migraine or brain fog or anxiety or depression or poor sleep or dementia — anything you have can be connected to posterior-rooted seemingly-negligible restricted cerebral blood flow due to muscular tension you didn’t even know you had and it will grow and fester. “If all you have is a denneroll,” Ben said to me the other day, followed by, “there is no way to actually change the curve in your spine with that thing but if it makes you happy, then go for it.”

It does make me happy, Ben.

Fuck you.

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“Take a moment,” the Joe Dispenza meditation says, “to acknowledge the space between your breath.”

Acknowledged. I focus on my breath. It is breathy. It goes in and out and fills my lungs and then the thoughts flood in. Like where Ben is the enemy because he never needs to meditate. Or where Mara is three days late at sending me the sales org chart.

Set a reminder on your phone right now to ask her about it, this is very important and if you don’t do it right now you’re going to forget and you’ll miss Q3 revenue no stop listen to the meditation.

It’s strange to me that not everyone meditates.

I don’t know how they manage.

How they gracefully move through life, colliding with polarizing social media and too many bills and bad bosses and squashed creativity and health issues and certain loved ones dying too soon and others not fast enough.

Maybe they don’t.

For a moment, I hear Joe Dispenza’s voice pulling me back into the audio, but then I hear Ben’s rustling in the other bedroom, and the jingle of a dog collar and, seconds after, the overhead manmade light pours in from the crack underneath the door, sweeping away my cherished morning darkness and carefully cultivated circadian rhythm, ever dooming me to the fate of less-good writer.

“Hi,” Ben whispers as he opens the door and looks down at me on the floor while I’m clearly meditating. “Are you medi—”

“—Yes,” I say, ending the conversation.

I really don’t understand that part.

Like, I understand that it happens.

But I don’t understand why it continues to happen.

When I do this every day and every day he receives the same response and one would think that, over time, he would change what he does but he does not and- “--as you notice thoughts enter your mind,” Joe says, “focus on your breath.”

Ben, work, food, sex, taxes, pimple, though not all of my thoughts are completely pointless I am incapable of choosing which mostly-pointless thought comes next, nor can I effectively retrace how I got there and, instead, jump from one non-sequitur to the other, because such are the brains of overly conscious primates whose minds barrel down a maze and every time we turn the corridor to face a new thought the wall behind us moves leaving us stuck on a forward-looking path staring down corners around which we cannot see, all we can do is hope that we get better at not being so afraid every time we turn.

I believe we’ve always been like this.

It’s why meditation has been around for so long.

Before Jesus, or Islam, or the Jews.

Drawings of people sitting upright on the cave walls in the Indus Valley in 1500 BCE. 1000 years later, in Buddhist texts, rules around posture and breath. Taoist teachings about letting the body slip away while you fall into “a fasting of the mind.” Socrates with Stoicism, where you watch your thoughts pull you into problems, and your job is to pull yourself out.

And then in the early 20th century, Asian immigrants moved to the U.S. and meditation found its way to psychologists and medical journals and Ram Dass and dreadlocked-smelly-hippies and now it sits with me and my floor, having cockroached its way beneath/beside/beyond God, highlighting what I believe to be a paradox of the human experience unsated by faith which is that we are all meant to seek stillness in silence and yet when we find ourselves alone in that silence, undistracted by the outside world, we tend not to like what we find.

It’s important to learn to grapple with that.

To learn to enjoy spending time with the person you are forced to spend the most time with.

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And there’s science that supports it.

Science that says meditation is objectively good and that you should do it.

I mean, I can’t make you, but if you don’t meditate, you’re more likely to have unstable high cortisol levels which is bad because cortisol tells your body to pause healing and instead re-allocate resources to physically fight the man who is about to stab you with a knife. After a while, if your cortisol levels remain too high for too long, you become ugly and wrinkly with blotchy skin, inflamed with brittle bones and auto-immune disorders and higher blood pressure and higher fat retention and more cancer and riskier heart problems and sooner die.

Here’s a chart I made with ChatGPT:

Doubling down on depression. Meditation is just as effective at treating depression as SSRIs, but meditation comes with none of the risks which, you would think, would make a lot more people meditate, especially the people I know, because so many of them claim to be oh so miserable, even somehow more miserable than you, and yet they choose not to meditate because meditation is hard and it’s much easier to throw up your hands and claim victim.

For example, loyal readers like Dawna Francis or Carla Guzman simply believe that meditation doesn’t work for people like them.

I do not agree.

Unless, of course, you are someone like Ben, who is really never bothered.

Ben.Ai

It does not matter how many times you shake the snowglobe of Ben’s mind; the flakes always remain glued to the ground.

In my snowglobe, however, there is somehow wind and the snow blows sideways and, at times, Ben finds it so exhausting to be around me, that I’ll be ranting to him about how the dog sitter overfed our now-fat dog and it’s a huge problem and, “we should start leaving Ralph with a camera around his collar, ideally one with a speaker, so I can patch in during these excessive treat windows and intervene. I mean look at him! This is ridiculous! So much for those fucking walks that he ALSO charged us for. You know what? We should–”

“--Hey,” Ben will softly interrupt, while petting the dog he trained before I entered the family unit — a dog who is always calm and never even barks, “you should go to the other room and meditate and do that neck stretch thing and then maybe come back after a bit.”

How dare he.

As if I’m a child.

An irritable, hunchbacked 36-year old child on his way to time out. Even the dog watches me go, “Thank God,” the dog wants to say, but can’t, his vocal cords suffocated by his newfound weight.

But the act of being sent to meditate works.

I come back anew.

And it’s working now, too.

I’ve been on the floor for 12 minutes, and I know this because that’s how long it takes for my neck to go numb from the denneroll, which means it’s time to finish the rest of the meditation sitting up.

It’s also the part of the session when my mind has slowed.

Where the scarab in my chest starts to loosen his reigns on my shoulders and back. Where the thoughts arrive more gently and leave on their own, making space for small moments of thoughtlessness, whatever that is.

Where, from a much calmer state, I can direct my mind eye towards images that reduce cortisol and increase dopamine/oxytocin like where I’m sitting outside on the grass in the sun with Ben and the dog and we have lots of money in our bank account and colorful vegetables are growing that Ben, and not I, planted and took care of and yet I get to eat them anyway.

I am calm.

Long breath.

Loose body.

The edges of my lips start to subconsciously curve upward as if I’ve taken the smallest amount of MDMA.

Being alive, as far as I perceive it, is better now than it was 20 minutes ago.

And that’s crazy.

Because nothing in my life has changed.

The org chart is still late.

100% of stressors still fully exist.

And yet the snow has settled, and the pulse has slowed, and though I have not transformed into a being of boundless energy, I have biochemically self-regulated from having sat on the floor long enough for my mind to shift.

And that’s very important. Because one day, not today, but one day, there will be no floor.

No youthful body that can easily sit cross-legged.

No hope for passive income vegetables.

No dog.

And no Ben.

And when that day comes, I would prefer to have spent as many mornings as possible noticing that, though the dog is still too fat, the light too bright, and Ben too mouthy, this life that is mine is, in fact, quite good.

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Questions for you, my lovely readers (please answer in the comments by clicking here):

1. Are you more like Ben (the snowglobe never moves) or like me (blizzard), and if so, do you find yourself romantically consistently attracted to the one that you are not?

2. What does your personal spiral usually start with?

3. If someone looked at the Excel sheet of your mind, what would your “How good the day was (1–10)” column look like this month? Like, would it be lots of 1s (bad) or 10s (good)? And then for the days where it’s lower, what are the habits that lift it back up?

Other pieces of mine to read:

• Your parents are old. And then, suddenly, so are you

• Meanwhile, in rural Vietnam

• “My pronouns are up/yours” and other adventures from cruises

If you like this piece, please push the LIKE/HEART button because it helps other people find the piece which helps me gain new subscribers 🫶

—

Last week, at 3 am on a Wednesday, my mom and stepdad landed in Durham, North Carolina, where I live. And so I got them an Airbnb.

“Oh this was so nice of you, Alexander,” my mother said, ignoring the shared understanding that I was using money to avoid feeling burdened.

“You should’ve let her stay with you,” said my friend Greg. “That would’ve been the right thing to do.”

But during the workweek, I am snippy and regimented. I use the guest room for meditation, the living room for client calls, and the rest of the house for more silence.

And silence is not a word my mother has ever known.

To be clear, my mother is not more of a burden than most mothers. She and Jonathan aren’t even here to visit me, but instead, to buy a small home in an active retirement community in South Carolina (median price $480k) because they can’t afford one back home in San Diego (median price $1m+), and “I’m 74,” Jonathan said, “if I’m going to take advantage of all of the amenities at one of these communities, I’ve gotta shit or get off the pot.”

I think about what those amenities might be.

Karaoke or trivia. Maybe golf. But he golfs only once a year so it doesn’t add up. Maybe they’re swingers.

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They’ll never actually leave San Diego, though.

They’ve lived in California for 34 years, they love hiking and mountains and beaches, and by the time you get to your 70s, it’s too difficult to ditch your friends and your dentist and your favorite UPS store or the familiar vibration you notice in your hands as you clutch the steering wheel and drive down the I-5 for the 22,352nd time. All the mundane scaffolding of life that keeps you feeling safe.

“Could you actually give up Porkyland?” I ask my mother, referring to the Mexican restaurant she’s walked to every day for the past five years.

“I know, Alexander,” she begins, “but I promised Jonathan that I’d at least look at a few of the communities, and so, here we are.”

We walk the four blocks to my house from the Airbnb. We grab lunch and go for a hike. They’re fast for their age. Jonathan still runs 5Ks. My mom walks 2-3 miles a day.

But, after the hike, when we’re sitting at my place, and it’s time for them to head back to their Airbnb, they have no idea where to go.

I text them the address. They both pull up Google Maps and hit start.

“Head West,” my mother’s phone says.

“Head West,” Jonathan’s follows.

“Oh god,” I say, remembering that this is a thing they do. “You don’t need her on both phones.”

“We do though,” Jonathan says, standing up from the couch.

My mother studies her screen as she starts toward the door, searching for clues of West. “Sometimes we think we’re losing our minds,” she begins, “but then we remember we’ve always been like this.”

I’m not so sure.

Sand.

That’s how the mind slips. Slowly, off your palm, grain by grain, and by the time you think to close your hand, you’ve forgotten how.

I imagine my mother and Jonathan have both seen the signs.

And when they tell me they’re looking for an active community with clubs and pilates and trails to walk on, what I really think they mean to say is that they don’t want to have to bear witness to those signs alone.

If we lived in another country, this would all fall on me to figure out.

Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Greece or Spain. Places where the cohabitation rate of elders living with their adult kids sits consistently above 50% as opposed to the U.S., where it sits around 10-12%.

I think about what it would be like for my mother to move in with Ben and me.

She speaks more often than I, which is very hard to do, and so, I’d be stuck, every evening, listening to her tell me about all the neighbors. About how Brett and Allison down the street seem to be having marital issues.

“Who?” I’d ask.

“Oh, you haven’t met them,” she’d say, “but you will. And when you do, you’ll see how he doesn’t even look at her when they talk,” she’d pause without pausing, “reminds me of your friend Kyle’s parents who you made us have dinner with when we visited freshman year.”

“I don’t remember—,” I’d say.

“—I give them six months.”

I could deal with this for one night, maybe two. But it’d soon take its toll, and then she’d feel like she was invading my rhythm, I’d feel guilty for making her feel that way, and then she and Jonathan would head to one of the communities they should’ve gone to from the start.

It’s all very hard, though, because neither living with me nor living at an active retirement community is that good of an option for her.

And as far as options go, there seem to be 10 or so ways that one can grow old in modern society, all of which circle around three main questions:

• Do you live with your kids? (Yes/No)

  • If No, do your kids at least live nearby? (Yes/No)

• Does the state provide lots of social services? (Yes/No)

The American model looks like No/Yes/Kinda, where most old people live in a prison with other old people, 80% of American elders are within 100 miles of their kids, and the state provides minimal Medicare w/Assisted Living Waiver programs.

An oversimplification of the elder-oriented world via ChatGPT looks like this:

You’ll notice that no rows are all green, but that red isn’t necessarily bad.

For example, “Do you live with your kids?”, “No”, should probably be green because people don’t want to live with their adult kids, and doing so seems to only be a thing you do if society tells you that you must, or if you’re poor.

The data comes from OECD reports, the World Happiness Report, UN datasets, a few country-specific aging studies, and some GPT inference, which means it’s far from perfect. But the point isn’t that people magically become happier when old people stop living with their kids; it’s that the countries where people are happy and wealthy also happen to be the places where old people choose not to live with their kids.

I look at the last row in the table.

Specifically India, where the cohabitation rate reaches 80%, and I think about how difficult that must be because Indians, just like my mother and me, are very loud.

And then I wonder if my mother would be louder if she were Indian.

It seems impossible, but since there are 1.44 billion Indians, specifically 18.5 million women between the ages of 71-75, that leaves us with roughly 3.7 million 71-year-old Indian women, and it is quite unlikely that my mother is louder than all 3.7 million of them.

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Still, I am not convinced.

Her favorite thing to do is to talk to everyone about nothing, and 90% of the time when I call her, she is standing in a parking lot telling me that she has to go because she’s talking to a new stranger.

“Her name is Angie,” she’ll say to me while looking at the woman in front of her, “and she goes to the same Mormon church as the Wades,” a family who lived on the same street as us, whom we haven’t spoken to in 15 years.

“Does Angie know the Wades?” I’ll ask.

“She does not,” my mother will say, “but she thinks she has heard of them,” and then my mother will hang up on me, returning to Angie until Angie’s ears fall off or until another stranger stumbles into my mother’s path, and that type of mother, as well as most mothers, would certainly not be happy living trapped without strangers to talk at in an ADU above my garage.

–

It’s evening now.

Day four of her South Carolina Retirement Community Tour.

I call to find out how it’s been going.

“Well, we just saw our third community and…it was okay,” she begins. As I expected. “Jonathan seems to like it, which is great, until he dies and I’m stuck here alone.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but, by then, you’ll have a bunch of nice old women you can gossip with and they’ll all be your friends or community or whatever, you know?”

“But Alexander,” she said into the phone, her voice a bit softer, “I don’t want these women to be my community.”

“Well that’s not really how this works,” I wanted to say, but did not.

Because once you reach a certain age, you become sort of stuck with whoever is around.

Like Jonathan’s mom, Eve.

She was 107 when she passed away in an assisted living center.

Who would she have said were her community? The other residents or nurses who turned over year after year? The son and granddaughter she saw once a month? My mother?

“We had a lovely conversation,” my mother would have said to the nurse after spending five hours in a conversation with Eve.

“Ma’am,” the nurse would’ve said, leaning in to place her hand atop my mother’s, “Eve’s been dead for hours.”

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And so the question remains.

What should my mom and Jonathan do? What, as a society, should we do with all the old people? How do we keep them healthy for a long time, while also making sure they’re joyful and busy and filled with meaning, without forcing them to find purpose through the caretaking of grandkids that an increasing number of them are never going to have, and how do we do all of this without bankrupting the economy + overburdening the medical system and has anyone anywhere figured this out?

Yes.

Denmark/Sweden/Finland/Norway. Obviously.

The Nords have a model that I think most Americans would hate, but basically, once you reach a certain age, you get universal basic income + social services that everyone has to accept wherein, every six months or so, a social worker shows up to your house to enroll you in mandatory benefits like home cleaning, bathing, grocery, meal prep, and transportation to social events and all of this is not optional because by making the assistance mandatory, it removes the shame around feeling incapable or poor while helping solve the ultimate goal of keeping elder happiness high while preventing the state from paying for expensive crisis hospitalizations.

GPT alleges that the math seems to work too.

My mom would probably hate this.

So would Jonathan.

So would many of you.

Because a system like this comes with high taxes and high government spending, and we seem to do both of those things quite poorly here.

People always cite the DMV.

The Danish DMV is nice though. They have digital driver’s licenses.

But this is neither here nor there because systemically changing America is too hard and my mom isn’t moving to Denmark because the weather is bad, her stories wouldn’t land, and going back to what I said earlier, old people don’t move.

“Wait, are you serious?” I say to her on the tail end of her trip as she sits down at the dinner table with Ben and me.

“Yes,” she says, telling us about the fifth community they saw. “We’re so excited,” she continues. “We picked the model of the house they’ll be building for us. We even stayed in a similar unit for three nights, and LOVED it.”

“Wow,” I say with a tightness in my gut. I force a smile. “That’s…great.”

“Yes!” she says. “We move in June.”

June? I think to myself. That’s very soon. Who’s going to decide everything? What if something goes wrong? Is this poor, rash decision-making an example of her starting to lose her mind?

“That’s so great,” Ben said.

Does Ben also not get it?

Does he not understand that, since Jonathan is older than her, and a guy, that she’ll most likely end up stuck there for 5-10 years…alone? And then what?

“Alexander, everyone was so happy there,” my mother continues, “We spoke to so many people and they all had such great things to say.” She ruffles through papers and brochures, readying to walk me through the home they’re picking. Fixtures. The larger showerhead. How they’re doing Whirlpool instead of KitchenAid. Why she wants her office to be on the left side of the garage and not the right.

Our dog, Ralph, walks up.

“Oh! And we asked for a see-through door so that when Ralph comes he can sit and look out the front! He’ll love that. Won’t you, Ralph? Good boy,” she says scratching his little head.

I pause to try and relax my stomach. And then I notice an excitement in her. One that I haven’t seen in a while. Maybe it’s adventure.

Or hope.

Because she is seventy-one. And still going. Still deciding and planning. Still doing improv classes and tutoring the neighbor’s kids.

And so perhaps I should notice more often.

How she lights up when she sees her cousin’s baby, offering herself up as babysitter as often as possible, to relish in whatever grandmother-ness she can, because deep down she knows that just because she wants something doesn’t mean it’ll arrive in time.

And I should listen better.

To the change from four years ago’s, “One day, Jonathan and I will go hiking in Argentina,” to last month’s, “Oh, Argentina…” she said, “that sounds so nice.”

Because today, though her mind is still fast and cutting, and there is so much she still wants to do, she has not the strength nor the money nor the time — sand slipping faster than either of us realizes, where she’ll probably never again rock climb or ice skate or travel too far alone. The voice in her head, the one she’s too careful to say aloud, now whispers, “Not in this life.”

And I don’t want that for her.

I want her to go to every place she’s ever read about in Reader’s Digest or Costco Magazine. I want her to see every beach and every mountain and know grandchildren she’ll probably never have and talk to every stranger in every parking lot because one day, so much sooner than I know, this will all go away and I’ll give anything to be Angie, standing in a parking lot being talked at by the loudest person the world has ever known.

And on the list of things she wants and still has enough time to do there are so many and yet so few and if “starting over in a new city,” is one of those things I hope she does it fully and I hope she does it now.

I still don’t know what we should do.

About all the people out there who are so much less fortunate than my mother.

About what we tax/mandate/subsidize, and what we don’t.

I believe our current system is broken, we don’t do enough to support the elder middle class, and I don’t have enough faith in either current political party to think we ever effectively will.

Fifteen years from now, when my mother’s mind starts to slip and she wanders out of her community in South Carolina and gets picked up by a helpful minivan family who wonders how this elderly woman is unable to tell them where she was coming/going but will easily tell them about how her late sister Diane’s ex-boyfriend’s father used to have a similar minivan that he bought from a man who had to sell it to pay for his wife’s rehab because she was a terrible alcoholic — a much longer story — but the van had great lumbar support, and then she asks the family how the lumbar support is and the dad says that it’s actually not that bad but sometimes, on longer trips his back hurts and so my mother calls her friend whose son is a chiropractor and three hours of this will go by until this kind family realizes that they’ve been kidnapped.

But in that moment, I’d love to feel good about what happens next — would love to know that she’s kidnapped a group of people, or even just a specific someone, whose job it is to actually look out for her.

Someone responsible for her well-being.

Someone I don’t have to pay.

Someone who brings her home.

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Questions from you, my lovely readers (please answer in the comments by clicking here):

If you are 50 years or older:

1. How would you rate your community that you’re not related to? (1 - 10, 10 being I have a crapton of friends)

2. If you currently have kids, do you want to live with them? If you currently don’t have kids, are you scared about not having someone to watch over you as you age?

If you are younger than 50:

1. Do you want your parents to, one day, live with you? Be honest.

2. When you imagine your own old age, what do you hope exists that doesn’t today?

When I was 13 years old, I was wandering the streets of Mexico with my father when I met a shirtless woman. She was homeless and naked, her breasts pockmarked by poverty and beaten by the sun. I would later become gay.

‘Gay’ is the joke/surprise of that paragraph — the pockmarked breasts are implied to have an association with me becoming gay, which is clearly not true, but because you were reading, and were then tricked, and then understood the trick, you are now better at sensing trickery and this upgrade in your senses evolutionarily increases your ability to live longer and procreate, and so your brain rewards you with endorphins.

And you feel happy.

There is another chemical, and it’s called dopamine.

Dopamine is basically the thing that tells you, “go get more endorphins,” and it is the chemical currently causing you to read more words on this page because, since you’ve already been rewarded with endorphins once, you are now being fed dopamine so that you desire to read more words in hopes of eventually receiving another endorphin reward.

If, instead of rewarding you with endorphins, I started this piece differently — perhaps with When I was 13 years old, I was wandering the streets of Mexico with my father, and it was nighttime, and a cold breeze crept across the back of my neck, and someone snuck up behind us and placed a gun into the small of my father’s back and then, in a thick, deep voice said, “If you move, I will kill your son,” and I then went on to describe how we were kidnapped, and I cried and screamed, and was bound to the floor as they beat my father and made me watch, and by retelling the story I make YOU watch, this would all trigger a different chemical in your brain: cortisol.

And, in that second story, though the downside is that I would’ve grown up without a father, the upside is that since I wouldn’t have ever run into the pockmarked breasts, the implication would also be that I wouldn’t have ever had to grow up gay.

Endorphins.

Endorphins make you relax and enjoy the fruit, while cortisol spikes your heart rate and readies you to run from the lion.

And it is always more important to run from the lion.

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It’s been a few months since Charlie Kirk died, but it was very interesting to see the battle of cortisol and endorphins play out so effectively online.

Like Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, and Mamdani, these topics quickly flow in and out of our overstimulated consciousnesses, and we very quickly forget what we were so passionate about. From time to time, though, it’s nice to pause and examine ourselves, the influenced, to think about how it all works.

For example, when I type ‘Charlie Kirk’ into my inbox, here are the subject lines I see from that period around his death:

• Jesus Isn’t Coming to Save You

• Full-Blown Authoritarianism

• Are Your Kids Secretly Becoming White Supremacists?

All cortisol.

Even with this Substack piece, if I were just optimizing around email open rates, I’d be better off titling it with something cortisol-oriented like:

1. You’re Going To Die, And Content Will Kill You

Rather than something with just dopamine and a hint of endorphins, like:

2. I Wore Crocs to a Funeral and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

3. You’ll Never Guess What I Found Behind My Fridge

Regarding your content feed, if you were sad about Charlie Kirk’s death, you were most likely seeing that Liberals were very happy, how they were celebrating, and how this was disgusting.

And if you were happy about Charlie Kirk’s death, you were most likely seeing how Republicans were going to hunt down and murder said celebrating evil Liberals.

Talking about a nation coming together after the death, though it probably was what you needed, was not what you were mostly shown, because you will be shown what you are more likely to click on, and you will always click on lions.

The lion clicking effect has moved us all, more quickly than we realize, from social-graph algorithms to discovery algorithms.

We are not ready for this move.

It may end the world.

The former universe of social-graph-based endorphins, Instagram, existed as a space where the 100-1000 people you actually sort of knew posted pictures of weddings, food, birthdays, and travel, but Instagram’s market share has declined due to the rise of “discovery-based” platforms, which, unlike Instagram, prioritize content from a broad group rather than just your friends, and this works very well because lions always get more clicks than baby showers, and it is highly unlikely that your 1,000 closest friends can create as much fear-based-cortisol-ridden content as can the rest of the content-generating world.

Ex: when I make the 15th video recapping my father and me surviving getting beaten up in a Mexican basement, it will be much less interesting to you than a new video made by a stranger talking about how, tomorrow, the Venezuelans/Somalians/insert_immigrant_group are coming for your children.

I will lose your attention.

The other creator will claim your click.

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We even tested this at work, and our best video, so far, was actually a combination of cortisol/dopamine/endorphins, with the below AI-generated video.

The video features a hot Asian girl at a bar, who looks at the camera and says, “I’d be into you if you didn’t have such tiny EBIDTA.”

It’s a:

1. A tiny cortisol spike (I’d be into you)

2. A little bit of dopamine (If)

3. Followed by endorphins (TinyPenis=TinyEBIDTA)

We made it for twenty cents, it took us less than an hour, and it generated a 7x higher click-through-rate than anything else we’ve made. And a high click-through-rate is good.

We’ve thought about automating all of our future ad creation.

Building an AI agent that creates B2B videos, publishes them on its own, and then, depending on the video’s performance, rewrites, re-generates, and again publishes, but I fear we’d risk ending up with something clickbait and cringe like B2B porn: a BDSM Salesforce Exec whipping an Early-Stage Startup until her core assets climax with liquid capital, or something maybe more cortisol-focused about how, if your company doesn’t hire out company, your business is going to fail: a video with an anthropomorphized version of your-logo-here hanging by a noose in a medieval square as a crowd of angry investors yell, “SHORT. DUMP. DELIST,” until your company’s writhing logo-body finally stops.

And both of these videos would be bad for brand equity.

But if we didn’t care.

Or if we were, let’s say, a creator with a political agenda or someone who solely hoped to generate revenue from ad dollars, it’s most likely that our video creation AI would, in a very short time, get extremely adept at generating content faster than viewers would be able to learn how to discern that said content was not factual, nor good for them, nor real.

And I think that’s where we are.

We are at the point where cortisol-ridden AI-generated content will soon constantly rise to the top of our algorithm-based feed, and many of us will fall victim to becoming radicalized by things that may or may not be real — our only hope being that enough of us have enough endorphins in our offline lives to motivate us into self-regulation and putting down our phones, and like gazelles, we shake off the stress of having been chased by lions that, for a moment, made us believe that everything was falling apart.

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Don’t forget, by nearly every long-term measure — health, education, poverty, even war — the world is still objectively a much better place than it ever has been.

All the counterarguments against the sentence above are tiny blips, capturing too much of your attention, that you choose to focus on due to your individual inability to go out into the world and find endorphins.

Your stress.

Your anger at everyone who doesn’t politically agree with you.

Your inability to want to make the world a better place without losing your mind.

You: sitting in a cave, on a cortisol drip, staring at shadows of lions, believing they’re all real.

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If you enjoyed reading this, send it to someone who you think is politically exhausting to be around. Maybe that someone is you!

If you want to read something more flowery and funnier, try this one.

If you want something more business-y, here ya go.

Fun fact: the title of this post was A/B/C tested, so whichever title is at the top of this page might be different from the one you received in your inbox.

I’ll post the results later on.

Questions for you to answer in the comments — if you’re reading this via email, click here to leave a comment:

1. How old are you

   1. How happy are you in your life (1-10)

      1. Is that more or less than it was for you 10 years ago

2. Do you have compassion and/or intellectual space for people who totally disagree with you politically? I imagine that if your answer here is “no,” you’re not going to comment because as you read this question you are feeling defensive lol

3. What do you do to prevent yourself from falling into an echo-chamber of only consuming media that you fully agree with

True story.

It’s 11 pm on a Wednesday, and I’m home alone.

Ben is working an overnight shift in the hospital, and our apartment is quiet. I hear the soft hum of the fridge and the pulling of the elevator cables in the hall.

As I crawl into bed, my phone rings.

Callbox Miami Beach

It’s too late for Amazon, and we have very few friends, so it must be my stalker.

His name is William Gunn, but he goes by Bill.

I’m on the third floor, so, unless someone lets Bill into the building, I’m relatively safe, but if I come too close to the window while I’m looking down and he’s looking up, he’ll be looking right at me.

So I stay in bed.

And I wait.

Bill Gunn has been coming to my apartment and leaving me messages for two years.

As far as I remember, he and I have never met.

The oldest message I have is from March 23rd, 2023.

But there are many others. I stopped saving them after the 20th or so.

Sometimes his messages are like the methy garbled nonsense above.

Other times, he seems to be on fewer drugs, and he’s telling me that he’ll be at McDonald’s, waiting for me so we can fool around.

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Bill is clearly mentally ill.

I’m not sure how one designates mentally ill anymore because nowadays it seems that everyone has started claiming that label to show the world that them falling short of the life they had decided they were entitled to is a result of something fully outside of their control, but I imagine if anyone has the right to the mental illness throne it is a man who calls people he has never met to leave messages that sound like this:

I’m also 99% sure that Bill is homeless.

Which sort of changes the probabilities assigned to all the different ways this might play out, right?

Because it makes it less likely that Bill will come rape or murder me, as premeditation usually requires some sort of a plan, and I feel like mentally ill homeless people aren’t good at that, but it simultaneously makes it more likely that, if he recognizes me on the streets, he will do something else, like eat my face.

I don’t mean to jump to these assumptions about homeless people, by the way.

I know not all homeless people are mentally ill and bad at planning.

GPT says that only 25% of homeless people have serious mental illness, which tracks with most of the homeless people I’ve spoken with over the years.

I do speak with a lot of them, by the way.

Not because I’m a do-gooder, but rather because speaking with them makes me feel less guilty about the fact that I’m doing nothing to help them from the circumstances that they are almost never responsible for.

Anyway, most homeless people are very nice.

Take Michael Boyce, for example.

Michael is a homeless black man who lives on Miami Beach and spends his days at the Starbucks by my house.

Michael is my favorite homeless person, and I mean that with no offense to any other homeless person reading this.

Every day at 7 am, Michael, 73 years old, comes from the east, walking down Lincoln Road with a walker that holds this and that and these and those. Shopping bags and duffles. Food, water, snacks, an iPad, a hat, a fan, a water bottle, a chessboard, and a poncho.

He sits under a Starbucks umbrella, and then he begins his hellos.

He’s very cute about them. His little waves and tiny smiles to each passerby.

Every patron knows Michael and they buy him food and drinks all day.

I don’t know how he pulled this off, but other homeless people should take note because by the time I get there at 9 am, he almost always says he doesn’t want anything because he’s too full, which is nice because it saves me money.

Michael always asks about my life, and he always asks about Ben.

When I first moved to Miami from LA, he asked how I was adjusting.

I told him that I hadn’t yet found a gym, and he reached deep into duffle number two and handed me a free day pass to a super fancy gym, that was way too expensive for me to ever join, signed by, “The owner — Alejandro,” Michael said, “he’s a good friend of mine,” and then a man in scrubs named Dr. Jake walked up said, “Black coffee?” and Michael said “Yes, thank you.”

Over the years, I’ve sat next to Michael many times.

He moved here a long time ago from North Carolina because his wife told him she wanted to. She asked him to marry her three times, and he kept saying no until finally, he said yes.

He loved her.

They lived in Miami for 15 years and had a beautiful life and were very happy.

And then she died.

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I don’t know how or when it was after that that Michael became homeless, but for people who aren’t mentally ill or addicted to drugs before the onset of their homelessness, which is the majority of homeless people, it’s usually the same reason: your rent goes up faster than your income.

Or like how this author Brian Goldstone said on a podcast I heard: maybe you had an expensive medical bill and you missed a payment by one or two days and then the system — literally, software run by private equity landlords — spits out an eviction notice, and in states like Florida and Texas, one out of five apartments are already PE-owned.

So now there’s an eviction on your record, and no one will rent to you.

You can move into a motel, but that’s 2-3x the price of your former rent, and so, pretty soon, you’re in your car. And then you’re homeless.

Maybe that’s what happened to Michael.

And though you might suggest that Michael go to a shelter, there are no homeless shelters on Miami Beach, nor should he want to go.

Michael has a life at this specific Starbucks on this specific block. He has community and friends.

People don’t like giving up the things that make them feel safe.

They want familiar faces and habits and routines and tasks and rituals.

I imagine that’s what I am to Bill Gunn, my stalker, who is currently standing outside of my apartment, waiting for me to pick up my phone.

A ritual.

A hallucination of a person he thinks he has a relationship with, summoned each time he walks by Lincoln Road.

Hallucinations like the ones where he thinks he’s an actor on One Life to Live.

Misfirings stemming from a brain that, due to the stresses of homelessness with scary raccoons and nights that are too hot and too cold is constantly flooded with cortisol, which prevents his hippocampus from pruning neural pathways that should be deemed unproductive, like the one that tells him to walk up to the callbox and have a one-way status update with his closest imaginary friend “0341 ALEX KRUGER”.

I’ve asked my friends and family about what I’m supposed to do here.

Like, you know…what is my responsibility in response to Bill.

I went to the police.

I mean, I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Bill but I would rather have the police have something happen to Bill rather than Bill have something happen to me, but the officer, upon hearing Bill’s voicemails, looked at me and said “it’s not illegal to leave voicemails,” and so I said, “well, in the future, do you want me to go downstairs to try and get him to assault me?” to which the officer responded, “I would not recommend that.”

I guess…what really should happen, what me/Miami/the world ☮️ should do is:

• Build more psychiatric hospitals and force Bill to live in them to see if he gets better

• Prevent private equity from holding residential real estate in their portfolios

• Allow the federal government to overreach and re-zone local jurisdictions for apartment buildings + shelters and then force state + local governments to build more affordable housing

Otherwise we all end up with more of this:

But that cute little list above is never going to happen.

What’s going to happen is that Republicans and Democrats will keep blaming each other for ineptness and heartlessness, and then this problem will just get worse and worse, and more people will opt to live in neighborhoods with private security, further widening the quality of life gap because local voters will never, at scale, vote for that list above because homeowners are typically anti-affordable-housing + anti-homeless-shelters but also vote at a 1.5x than of non-homeowners, and oh, and re: private equity — we’ll never rein it in because if there’s one thing our country loves, it’s unchecked capitalism.

Instead, we will complain about being scared of people like Stalker Bill: a man who, if he had the choice of a better life and the cognitive capacity to make said choice, probably would.

Also, I’m not actually scared of Bill.

I mean, I used to be, but, at around voicemail six, I got him on video, and then the thoughts in my brain flipped from “Wow, I’m being followed by a rabid drug-addcited murderer,” to “Wow, that elderly man with a very homosexual walk seems to have recently pulled out most of his hair.”

Sad.

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And then…well…last week, something horrible happened.

Ben and I were watching TV and eating ice cream, and my phone rang at 10:07 PM, and so we walked over to look down and watch Bill leave me a message, but at the end of his message, instead of walking away, Bill stayed at the callbox.

And did the unspeakable.

“Hi Rebecca, dahling,” he said, after having dialed another unit, “Bill Gunn here, model, artist, actor on One Life to Live — listen dahling—”

I gasped.

Betrayed.

“Wow,” Ben said, his mouth open as he walked away from the window, “You’ve literally been freaking out for two years about this,” he said, eyes locked on mine as he approached the couch. “He doesn’t even know who you are. He just leaves messages for everyone.” Ben sat. “You do realize how annoying you’ve been about this, right? To our friends? To the police?” He took a spoonful of ice cream and shoved it down his throat. “Ridiculous.”

Yes.

I know.

I agree with him.

I might have emotionally overreacted without enough information.

To think that I was important enough to have a stalker.

How arrogant.

I stood there for a moment and then closed the window.

I couldn’t bear to listen to Bill leave other messages.

My celebrity.

My pride.

But as I stood there at the window, seeing non-stalker Bill Gunn walk into the distance, I noticed something. That Bill and I are around the same height and that one day, if Ben ever gets sick of my antics, and my rent rises faster than my income, I too might end up like Billy Gunn: an elderly gay homeless man on Miami Beach having just finished another exhausting night on One Life to Live, sashaying my way down a busy street to call my imaginary friends and update them on the my adventurous wonderful crazy Lincoln Road life.

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Update: We moved out of Miami, and the new tenant, Steven, called me last week to ask me if there was anything I should know about the apartment, and I chose not to mention any of this, even though the callbox is still set to 0341, Steven’s number now, because him getting to know Bill feels like an experience I do not wish to deprive either of them of ❤️

Questions that I would like you guys to answer in the comments below:

1. Have you ever had a stalker?

2. Have you ever thought about BECOMING a stalker?

3. Are there any cities that you look at where homeless seems to have been “solved” and not in a fake way (like shipping homeless people to other cities), but in a real way, (like good zoning and good resources)?

Also, if you liked reading this piece, and you want another one with facts and economics, feel free to read this piece. If you want something with lower stakes that is funnier, try this one.

I’m alone on a cruise ship.

And I love being alone on cruise ships.

“Should we maybe go to the—”

“—no,” I want to reply to any person who has ever traveled with me. “WE are not going to anything.”

I won’t be compromising or asking about your day or feigning interest in seeing Royal Caribbean’s Musical Adventures of 007: Licensed to Thrill.

Just me, my breakfast, and the pleasure of watching a very large man walk by in front of me, holding a tray while he wears a tank top that reads ‘My Pronouns Are Up/Yours.’

I smile.

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Across the deck: a child drowns his pancakes in syrup. His mother yells at him, but he continues to pour. The husband ignores this — he’s busy staring at a hot teenage girl who he probably saw last night at the Mojito Lounge.

She was with her friends, he thinks to himself, but maybe if I had gone up to her and asked if — “Michael!” his wife says, prodding him with her needle-y fingers. “Take the syrup away!”

A warm breeze blows across my face, plucking me out of voyeurism as if to remind me how grateful I am to not be Michael.

To my right, a round brown woman with bright red lipstick scrubs ketchup off the table.

Her name is Sumi, and she’s from Mauritius, at least, according to the nametag on her chest that bounces with every scrub. There’s a lot of ketchup on the table, but Sumi doesn’t seem to mind. She looks content, like the way one would if they had pushed enough boulders to realize that they all end up feeling the same.

It’s time to eat, and so I look down at my plate.

*Three plates.

That’s one of the best parts of cruises: the food is everywhere, all the time, and free. I can order an omelette and two waffles and four yogurt parfaits, and then I can decide that I’m actually good with just coffee, and though I’ve never done this, the fact that I can is what makes cruises so special.

Cruisism — an abundance economy of waste and gluttony. Hedonism and selfishness and gambling and swingers and HIIT classes and trivia and cruisejail and pizza and passengers with abs and passengers who have never seen their abs and people from third world countries scrubbing ketchup next to people who hate people from third world countries and it is the most beautiful clash of human experiences and I don’t know why anyone would opt to vacation any other way.

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Plate 1: highlighter-yellow scrambled eggs, like the ones you’d find at a Holiday Inn Express continental breakfast, next to a cup of fruit and a few breakfast potatoes.

I rate the food on Royal Caribbean a 5/10, Norwegian a 6, and Virgin a 7, but it mostly all tastes relatively the same, which makes sense, since there is an oligopoly of three to four major food suppliers that dominate the logistics of almost all major cruise ports — but I’m fine with that, because the most important thing to me about the food on cruises is not how it tastes, but rather how I don’t feel like I’m paying to consume.

I pick up my fork.

But then.

I realize I’ve forgotten coffee.

And as I stand to get some, a seagull on a faraway rail looks my way.

We lock eyes, and then he breaks from my stare to look down at the potatoes on my plate, reminding me of one of the vulnerabilities of traveling without a boyfriend/cousin/food-guard.

Sumi sees all of this, “I’ll watch him,” she says, continuing to scrub, “You go.”

I nod and comply.

Sumi seems nice, and this is probably due to many factors, one of which being that she really likes her job.

“You do?”

“Yes,” she says, with sweat beading on her forehead as she polishes a new table, “I get to travel to beautiful places and talk to people. And be outside,” she motions to our surroundings with her dirty rag. “I love being outside.”

I think about where she’s from and what Mauritius must be like, and I realize I know nothing about it.

It must not be good.

Maybe they don’t have outside.

I don’t even know where it is, honestly.

It sounds like a place you’ve heard of, but when you try to think more about it, you just can’t.

Like Wellington.

She looks Indian.

“Mauritius is in Asia, right?”

“Africa.”

“Oh. Yeah,” I reply.

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A familiar voice catches my attention — “Yes, thank you,” it says to the buffet attendant who has handed the speaker a latte in a to-go cup. The speaker’s name is Jules Mahr, and she stands next to her 6-foot friend named Melanie. The two of them are from St. Louis. We met last night at karaoke after they hopped on stage to sing Pour Some Sugar On Me. They crushed. Melanie whipped her hair in the air for a full thirty-second guitar solo, only to be upstaged by Short Ginger Jules, who is probably fifty pounds heavier than anyone you’d expect to be able to do the splits, who did the splits.

She notices me.

“Alexxxxxx,” Jules says as she and Melanie walk over.

Melanie puts her hand on my shoulder. Last night, we hung out for hours, bopping around to three different bars, so this hand placement doesn’t feel weird. When you’re floating in the ocean for four or five days with the same group of passengers, and none of you have strong enough cell service to yank you out of the present, you end up seeing the same faces over and over again, at trivia or Teppanyaki or ice skating, and your brain starts to familiarize itself with them. You think, “Oh! That’s Angie, the 93-year-old Black woman whose birthday it was at the comedy show,” or “That’s the group of hot hipster men who I now realize are all lesbians.”

Sumi walks up to collect my second plate of half-eaten food, mostly fruit rinds and an untouched chicken sausage.

I introduce her to the girls.

“Hi Sumi,” they say, and then Sumi asks us if we’re ready for the White Night tonight, telling us that it’s going to be a very fun party and that we’re going to love it because everyone on the ship will be wearing white and it is very cool to see.

I nod along, though I don’t agree.

I’ve done this dance many times, where the day consists of me being told how exciting an upcoming evening will be where everyone wears the same color, and though I don’t really understand why this is interesting, or special, I allow myself to go along with the hysteria, getting my hopes up about a ‘Scarlet Night’, or a ‘Formal Night’, or a ‘White Party’, just to end up disappointed. Like every and all New Year’s.

I think of asking Sumi more questions to see if this White Night will be different, but then I realize that, as a breakfast attendant, Sumi’s galley-level-worker caste is contractually barred from attending the White Party, so, even though she’s on her fifth nine-month contract, and every third or fourth day of her life has been spent promoting a party (so, 263 White Parties so far), it’s a party to which she’s never been.

“That party sounds very fun,” Jules says.

Melanie agrees.

The captain’s voice comes over the intercom. His accent is South African, which means that he can pass for British, but that he costs the cruise company 65% less than what they’d have to pay for a British person to do the same job.

“Good morning everyone,” he begins in a gruff tone that still retains its bouncy South Africanisms, “this is your captain here,” and as the girls listen in, I think about how the minimum wage in South Africa sits at $268 per month.

He says that we’ve docked and that people who want to leave the ship to head over to Coco Cay, Royal Caribbean’s 250-million-dollar renovated fake island, can do so.

To be fair to Royal Caribbean, it’s a nice fake island.

It has the feeling as if there once were spiders and snakes and lizards and iguanas but then a planning committee lifted up the whole island and dumped it through a sifter, filtering out anything that could remind vacationers of nature or discomfort or Bahamanians, and then they took the pure white sand and, on top of it, poked into place a few palm trees, zip lines, cabanas, a buffalo wings station and cute little air-conditioned stores with Royal-Caribbean-branded beer koozies.

The family across the deck, the one with the kid who pours too much syrup and the woman who doesn’t like her husband, starts to collect their things. The husband hands the sunscreen to his son.

Jules and Melanie head out.

“You’re not going with your friends?” Sumi asks me.

I laugh and then tell her that I’d rather relax on the boat, that I don’t really like beaches, and am more of a forests kind of person, and then she tells me that I’d love Mauritius because they have incredible forests, and now I’m absolutely confused because as far as I know, Africa is big hot sand place with elephants, but, maybe there’s one forest hidden off to the side, and perhaps Sumi is from that forest.

She asks if she can take my plate, and I say yes, and then to my right, but far away, the man in the Up/Yours tank top seems to be having trouble with the milk dispenser.

He tries it two — three times, pressing the cup into the catch.

But nothing.

He looks around, spots Sumi, and then lifts his hand ever so slightly to hail. She heeds the call.

“See you tomorrow, sir,” she says to me as she scurries away.

“Bye Sumi!”

My phone buzzes because now that we’re at a port, phones work.

Jules and Melanie ask me to grab drinks tonight before trivia, which sounds fun, and, underneath that, I see a text from my boyfriend, inviting me to someone named Lindsay’s wedding on May 18th:

Lindsay, from work. Just sent you the email.

I pick up my coffee and bring my attention back to the deck.

To the seagull across the way.

And to the mother who is now yelling at her syrup son, “Noah!” for globbing sunscreen all over his face and now refusing to rub it in.

I glance down at my phone, open the Royal Caribbean app, and begin picking dates for my next cruise.

The father squeezes sunscreen into his palm and smears it across his own face, leaving it unrubbed, just like his son, the two of them mocking the mom.

On the app, I select May 18th.

And then the father dabs a glob onto his wife’s cheek. And it’s kind of cute.

And the son laughs.

And then, even the mom smiles.

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Hi. Hello. Okay.

If you liked this piece you’ll probably also like this one: Meanwhile In Rural Vietnam.

As always, here are questions I’d like you, the reader, to answer.

Please answer as a comment, if you can :D

1. Have you ever been on a cruise? I feel like people hate cruises, but I don’t get it. I love them.

2. Before reading this, would you have been able to point to Mauritius on a map?

3. Do you ever solo travel? I feel like everyone should. It’s good for you.

It’s Sunday. I’m sitting next to Ben on the couch, and we’re talking about our move to North Carolina.

“Well, that closet,” I say, looking over my left shoulder at the wooden door, “is going to be terrible,” and as he responds with, “Yes. Totally,” I notice a delay.

A pause.

The tiniest pause that you only notice when you’ve known someone so deeply, and when your brain, over so many interactions, has created an expectation of how quickly and in what form you expect them to react to something you do or say.

And then they don’t.

And now you’re off-script.

And something is wrong, either with you, or them, or both.

“What was that?” I ask.

“What was what?” he says.

“What. Was. That.”

He squirms. “What do you mean?”

“Why did you just do that. What were you thinking about one second ago.”

“Nothing I wasn’t thinking about anything I was just answering yo—“

“—No, that’s not…” I say, realizing that his eyes hadn’t met mine where I thought they would, like they were looking at my cheekbones or maybe my— “—oh my god,” I say.

“What?”

“You were looking at my nasolabial folds thinking about how I need a SMAS lift.”

He was. And he’s right.

Maybe not today, maybe not next year, but one day, I will need one.

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Ben learned about Superficial Musculoponeurotic System (SMAS) at a ‘here’s all the happenings in cosmetic plastic surgery’ conference a few weeks ago, while I was sitting at home on a Zoom call presenting my sales numbers to my team.

A text on my screen: You need a SMAS lift! LOVE YOU!

If you look in the mirror right now, which you should do, you might realize that you, too, could benefit from a SMAS lift on your nasolabial folds, which are the half circles running from your nostrils to your chin; parentheses around your mouth that make you look old.

In my 20s, I never cared about such things.

I wasn’t meant to.

We’re all not meant to.

20-year-olds are meant to do drugs and stay up late and have sex and frolic in the sun and then you hit 30 and your hair recedes and the fat from your face dissolves causing your skin to fall in on itself, each wrinkle loosely tied to some formula of Xnights of sub-optimal sleep + Yhours in direct sun + Zlines of coke and sometimes, when I’m alone, I count them, especially the ones under my eyes. Today it was fourteen. Fourteen tally marks on a prison wall from someone stuck in a decaying body. Fourteen etchings reminding me of how long I’ve been and how long I have left — each newcomer fine line closer in proximity to the last, like rings on a dying tree.

“It’s just,” he says, pinching the excess skin on the back part of my cheek and pulling it towards my ear, “there,” he sighs, a sense of calm washing over him as if he’s just transmuted me from Frog.

It’s not good to be Frog, by the way.

Beautiful and alluring gets you more clients.

It gets you promoted, you sell your script, you raise more money, you get discounted gym memberships — at 10 pm when you get to the ice cream store that just closed, the hourly worker will let you get ice cream anyway and they’ll scoop it for you and as you walk over to the point of sale system they’ll say that “it’s already logged out for the night but don’t worry about it,” and when they hand you your free ice cream, they’ll look at your attractive face, and though they say “here you go,” what they really mean is “thank you.”

I want that — or at least, as close as I can get to that for as long as possible.

In college, I had a friend named Erica Stewart who had it.

I remember being 19 years old with her, on a trip through Europe. We walked through the Madrid airport, her golden blonde hair floating in the wind above bright blue eyes on a symmetrical face atop perky tits and a tiny waist.

That’s what they all saw.

At first.

And then, like being on a video call and noticing a weird darkness in the blur of someone’s background, they’d become aware of me, her mediocre-looking, maybe-gay cousin who was probably on his final tour of Europe before he’d fall victim to whatever disorder was causing the already sunkenness under what-should-have-been healthy-looking 19-year-old eyes. Maybe leukemia.

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Regardless, I loved it.

I loved clinging, all week, to the side of Erica’s cup, catching stray drops of attention-rooted pity, and establishing a baseline to which I would, from that point forward, compare the attention I’d receive in any given moment since.

Now, as a 36-year-old with visible neck kyphosis and unshakable hip fat, it feels like I currently attract 7-8x less attention than I did then, and though, on a daily basis, I do my best to believe that this temporary state must be my seductive rock-bottom, I know that that’s not how aging works, and that the best I can do is try to slow the decay or start hanging out with people who have taken worse care of themselves than I, hoping that when I stand next to them, that one of them will relatively assume my formerly designated position as Frog.

I feel like this is a newer phenomenon, especially as a man.

Like all of us have suddenly realized that our handsomeness declines faster than we’ve been told.

‘Brotox’ is a new term I learned on TikTok that I’m embarrassed to have typed, but in 2019, men underwent 118,000 Botox procedures. Last year, that number hit 500,000. Men now account for 15% of the entire cosmetic botox market, with a 13.4% CAGR (compounded annual growth rate), which is a very high number for something that isn’t new.

“I get baby botox,” says a 24-year-old guy on my team.

“Whoa, really?” I say, “but you don’t even have any wrinkles.”

“Yeah,” he responds, “but I don’t want to all of a sudden wake up as some ugly dude in my mid-30s and have it be too late.”

I wait for him to say “No offense.”

I wait forever.

We, the men, used to not care.

Such self-hate or self-awareness used to be reserved for women, while society was meant to run around spouting lies on how we age into our 40s or even 50s, “Like wine.” But it seems that the noticing of how hideous everyone thinks you are has finally crossed the gender rubicon, that ad algorithms are stronger than false senses of security, and as the standards of male beauty have increased, people have come to understand that old-man wine, when left uncorked, actually does stink.

When I was chatting with GPT about this, it had a bunch of reasons why it thinks that’s the case, but, like most things, I think it can be reduced to technology amplifying the social aspects of being human and, more specifically, it’s that short-form content has made men compare themselves to other men at a frequency previously reserved for women, and then it’s combined with facts like how ugly people are more likely to get laid off, earn 9% less, are also more likely to be single and how, on dating apps, one standard deviation in attractiveness not only earns you hotter matches but it also gets you 20% more matches overall.

I’m not saying everyone should just go get their faces sliced up from a plastic surgeon, but in a world where the hotter you are, the less you suffer, it makes sense to at least figure out how feasible it is for you to be on a less suffering-filled path.

Botox, for example, is a good path, and shaves off 5-6 years.

Though I’m sure you can find horror stories, the risks, to me, seem negligible. All it does is reduce the amount of movement in specific facial muscles on the spots where the contraction of that muscle has been causing the skin to fold up on itself — a contraction that creates wrinkles. Think about how the lines on your forehead would go away if you never moved it. Like, if you never looked surprised about anything ever again. How beautiful you’d be.

Filler is a maybe, and can shave off 4-5 years while making you look less sad. Imagine there’s a jelly donut, but there’s no jelly inside and so the donut is falling in on itself. That’s your face. To fix it, you start by deciding which parts are too shallow, and you grab a tube of your favorite hyaluronic acid and you hand it to the injector and they take a needle and go pump pump pump. If they do a good job, you can look great. If they do a bad job, you look swollen and weird.

I could go on and on about blepharoplasties and facial fat transfers, HIFU and microneedling, laser resurfacing and chemical peels and ultherapy, kybella, and salmon sperm, but the only rule that matters is that you must always pass the litmus test of: if someone can tell you did anything at all, then you’ve done too much.

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“Good genetics,” must be what they think.

Like you’ve aged so gracefully on a diet of ice baths and pasture-raised eggs, and zinc.

“I just try to reduce my stress,” you must say when they ask.

And you want them to ask.

My spiritual coach, Francee, would tell me that I’m thinking about this the wrong way.

That if you see yourself as attractive, more people will be attracted to you; projecting rizz yieldeth rewards, but I would say that there are limits to self-worth overcoming physical unsightliness. To swimming against the flow of time.

And so maybe that is part of the answer.

Because since everyone gets old and ugly, and being stuck in the uncanny valley of someone who had too much work done is often worse than having done no work at all, maybe it all comes down to the individual preference of whether or not we choose to accept our inevitable ugliness or, instead, spend time and money fighting it, trying to convince ourselves that we’ve somehow slowed down the tsunami of aesthetic decay long enough where we believe the lie we tell ourselves: that no one is noticing us drown.

Because we don’t get to avoid suffering, and our job is simply to look in the mirror and choose from a few options of Frog.

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—

• Hey guys! Sorry, I haven’t written in a bit. Work has been nuts. I have a few more pieces coming down the pike shortly, and am going to work on publishing here more often :D

• Questions:

  • A) If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about your physical appearance and there was a 100% chance it looked excellent, what would it be

  • B) Do any of you have a moment in your life when you noticed yourself as a sideline character to a Erica

  • C) Was this piece too much “information about the industry ” or if I write more of these for other industries/topics that are similarly filled with facts and figures (which is the current plan) would that be chill

• Also, congrats to reader Erica Stewart, whom I have never met, for letting me use her name

• If you’re new here, here’s another piece that most people like of mine.

Hi everyone.

True story: when I was 25 years old, I raised $2m in venture capital and became the CEO of a funeral startup.

I spent around 5 years of my life working on that business and always thought about turning that part of my life into a book.

In an attempt to do so, I wrote a few parts, below, about attending a cremation conference.

As a heads up, the included writing is book-like and quite long, as opposed to my usual style of essay — so if you don’t like the prose/pace, no worries, the next piece will be more essay-like.

Also, the included stories are mostly true, but I changed people’s names so I don’t get yelled at.

Enjoy.

Alex

Funeral Director ID: 3960

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Welcome to CENA: Part 1

“Hi, welcome to CENA,” says the stout blonde woman in the plastic gray chair.

A large banner overhead reads ‘Cremation Expo North America 2016’.

“What’s your name, dear?” she asks me, and as she does so, I notice myself wondering what this woman must have done to end up here — how one becomes a conference coordinator in the funeral industry, if this was always her passion, or if her parents perhaps had her play with the wrong dolls.

“I’m Alex Kruger,” I say before pointing to my co-founder. “And this is Sophie Werner.”

“Hi!” Sophie squeaks in the small voice she reserves for first impressions.

The woman sitting in the chair riffles through plastic name tags tied to orange lanyards embroidered with the words ‘Sponsored by Tukios.’ “Here you both are,” the woman says before noticing the sticker on the corner of our badges. “Oh! First-timers! Welcome!” She beams. “My best advice,” she says, leaning in as if to tell a secret, “is to check out the after-conference events. Tonight, there’s a Funeral Director Evening Stroll down by the riverwalk.” Her hands jazz. “Should be a hoot!”

“Oh!” Sophie says, her voice widening like a lion finding out she’ll soon be dropped into a valley of baby gazelles, “we’ll be there.”

–

People always talk about firsts.

Virginity, skydiving, seeing your child born. To Sophie and me, as young founders of a death startup attending our first industry conference, this is that.

We’re here, at this tired Hilton in Cincinnati, on a mission that’ll make or break our business.

“Excuse me, sir?” chirps a voice on my right. I startle and turn to see a man wearing a black suit and holding what I believe to be a bottle of red liqueur.

“Yeah. What’s up?” I say, noticing his name tag: ‘Richard.’ He must be 30-something and seems like he was hot in high school, but now, perhaps due to time or hardship or meth, he’s that rare combination of greasy and gaunt that you used to find working at Blockbuster.

“Mind if I tell you about our new, scented embalming fluid?” he asks.

“Oooh!,” Sophie feigns. “What scent?”

“Cinnamon,” Richard responds, proud. “Are you two directors?” He asks, meaning funeral directors.

“Afraid not,” I say, and then I pause to reflect on my outfit, wondering if my gray button-down somehow makes me look funerary or if Richard just asks the same qualifying question to every passerby.

We talk for another minute or two before he asks us what we’re doing at CENA (Cremation Expo of North America) as non-directors who don’t work for a cemetery, funeral home, or cremation company. We tell him that we’re searching for someone to help us get our California-State funeral director’s licenses, and he tells us that he has no idea how that works but that we might want to talk to one of the higher-up conference organizers since those people know everything, and Richard, having spent his time in chemical sales, exclusively focused on the Northeastern U.S., doesn’t know anyone west of Mississippi.

We thank him for his time and begin moving from booth to booth, taking it all in.

I never thought I’d end up here.

Twelve months ago, if you had asked me if I was going to leave behind the guy I was in love with in NYC and move to LA to help the world figure out a better way to burn bodies, I would’ve told you that you were out of your mind and that I had no interest in corpses or the people who touched them.

Sophie would’ve said the same thing.

She had been living in Hell’s Kitchen, working at a wedding startup, and loving life as a hot 22-year-old with the world at her fingertips. She could’ve done whatever she wanted. If she’d stayed in NYC, she’d probably now be engaged to some perfect-looking investment banker whose family held the keys to Gramercy Park.

But that didn’t happen.

What did happen is that one day, a very rich man’s mother-in-law died and this was terribly inconvenient for him, as there were so many things that needed to get done to close out her life, and all of these things were things he and his wife didn’t want to do.

There has to be a better way, he thought to himself. And so, this very rich man called a less rich man who called a very unrich man, me.

“Would you like to be the CEO of a company?” the less rich man asked my 25-year-old self.

And now, here we are.

Sophie and I look around the exhibit hall of the great big funeral world: stand after stand of death-related goods, each one stranger than the last.

Makeup kits illuminated under fluorescent lights next to an ash-holding diamond necklace that sparkles in a glass case. A white casket-lowering pully-like rope weaves itself through lilac flowers next to a velvet-lined wooden box of metal bone cutters that seem to pull the cold from the air in the room. A woman stands next to the box in a bob and a pantsuit, and in her right hand, she holds shiny forceps, which are essentially medical tongs, but these ones have a strange angular end, assumedly meant for maneuvering through a turned narrow space — perhaps the nasal cavity. The woman smiles at Sophie and me. We do our best to return the gesture, as my mind, once again, drifts back to her childhood and then the little steps this forceps woman took or didn’t take to now be here.

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“Let’s go this way,” Sophie says, pointing down the middle aisle, where, according to the map, there seems to be some sort of large booth.

We round the corner.

A 40-foot photo of a border collie spans across what must be seven booths worth of real estate. The photo is huge — as if Lassie has become Godzilla.

“What are they selling?” I ask Sophie.

“I don’t know.”

Our eyes drift to the chaos beneath the monster dog. A southern-looking man in a cowboy hat gives off the confidence of someone who used to be this dog’s owner. On his left stands his sister or maybe his wife. The space around them is packed with funeral directors examining items strewn across tables: pawprints molded into clay or pressed into wood. Furry faces etched into pillows, tiny clocks, and paperweights. Stones and boxes and mugs. Even a martini shaker with a picture of a Jack Russell on it — display after display of crap, all here to show directors potential ways to hock tchotchkes to grievers who’ve just lost their little friends.

‘An Annoying Bark But A Big Heart. Maxi Gail Ritters, Lover of Shoes,’ or ‘Jim was a horse, of course, of course 1991-2015’.

The booth is a fucking hit.

“Unbelievable,” I say to Sophie, eyeing the pet genocide cash machine.

“Maybe we’re in the wrong business,” I say, reflecting on the fact that our startup only planned on transacting humans.

We pause to take it all in, but before we can even make our way to the table, a peppy female voice catches us by surprise. “Hey there!” it says.

We turn to our right to see a pretty blonde who seems to have hailed from a flashy 25-foot green tower in the foreground. Along the side of the tower, a fabric is stretched from one metal post to the other with the words: ‘Faster. Better. Aftercare.’

“Gabby, from Requiem,” she says, sticking out her right hand while holding an iPad in her left. She seems good at her job — people selling high-margin software usually are. Gabby readies a demo. “Soooo, what program are you using to make family tributes?”

I smile, impressed.

Though Sophie and I have never had a family ask us to make them a death PowerPoint, part of me feels that I will end up giving this salesperson my credit card, but before I have a chance to ask follow-up questions, Sophie breaks the news to Gabby about us not being funeral directors, and it’s at this moment that Gabby should leave, as we’re no use to her sales goals, but for some reason, maybe because we’re the young blood or because Sophie is charming and seductive and it works on everyone, Gabby stays.

“Oh wow, what are you guys doing here then?”

We tell her that we’re on a mission: that we need our funeral license and that the state of California requires us to have an incumbent sponsor to stamp us so we can sit for the funeral director’s test. Gabby finds this very boring but invites us to a Requiem happy hour.

“What about the Riverwalk?” I ask her.

“The what?” Gabby asks, raising one brow.

“The Riverwalk. The CENA lady said that that’s the fun event to go to.”

“Ohhh. Thattttt. Hah,” Gabby says as if I revealed that I was going to a Dungeons and Dragons sleepover. “Do whatever you want,” she continues, “but I’d recommend our invite-only open bar.”

“Alex, we’re doing the open bar,” Sophie says, and Gabby nods approvingly, even though I don’t think this is the right decision — it’s not like we’re looking for cool funeral people, if those were to even exist — but before I can protest, a faraway voice says, “Gabby, you have a sec?” and then Gabby twirls and prances back to her aftercare tower.

Part 2:

It’s lunchtime, and Sophie and I have made no progress in our search for a licensure lead.

I mean, we have business cards of people selling eggshell-colored casket liners and vendors selling American flag-themed prayer cards, but we have yet to find someone who can actually help us, and this help is important because without our licenses, the only way for us to charge families for death services is by hiring funeral intermediaries who already have licenses, and that sucks because hiring people costs a lot of money and a lot of money is something we don’t have.

At the buffet, I pick up salad tongs, which remind me of the nasal forceps from a few booths ago. I use the tongs to plate iceberg lettuce and conference center chicken.

Food in hand, Sophie and I scan the lunch area, strategizing where to sit. From our recent conversations with greasy Richard and peppy Gabby, we’ve learned that people under 40 aren’t helpful.

“Him,” Sophie says, spotting an older potbellied gentleman who sits alone at a 10-person round table, wearing an ugly tweed suit. He has three cookies on his plate next to a bottle of lemon-flavored Lipton Iced Tea.

“Mind if we join you?” I ask.

He nods and gives us a closed-lip smile.

Bob is very nice. Most people here are. We get to talking about how he’s from Kansas, and I ask how long he’s been in the funeral industry, already knowing that his answer will be that he’s been in it his whole life.

“Well, I've been in it my whole life,” he says.

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We tell him about our mission to find a licensure sponsor, and he tells us that we should talk to Dominic over there. “Dominic knows everyone. Works for the NAFD.”

The NAFD is the National Alliance of Funeral Directors. Its conferences, according to everyone we’ve met in the past six months, are not as cool as CENA’s, and when I first learned this, I laughed because I couldn’t understand how that could be possible.

“Dominic!” Bob shouts across the lunch area, waving him over. Dominic looks excited to be called over. He puts down his fork and bounces our way like the bubbly 42-year-old former-ad-salesperson-who-chose-to-leave-media-and-enter-death that he now is.

“Bobby, how are ya?” Dominic says, placing his hand on Bob’s shoulder.

Dominic takes a liking to Sophie and maybe me, especially when we tell him that we’re looking to give out equity to people who can act as advisors. Dominic then says that he knows the perfect person who, he thinks, won’t end up being the person who gets us our license but will be the person who will know the person who can help us get our license. And as I say, “sure,” Dominic turns his head towards his former table about to call for someone, at which point I begin to feel like Dominic and Bob have, in a matter of seconds, designed a multi-level marketing scheme where we give them equity in exchange for them calling out names.

Sophie and I look at each other as if to acknowledge that we seem stuck in funeral purgatory. A carnival of grim-reaping middlemen who enjoy passing us from one unhelpful person to the next, each handoff a cute little box wrapped in an illusion of progress but filled with nothing but our own wasted time.

But then, “Hugh,” Dominic calls, and as he does so, a man in his late 50s with a perfect head of white hair and an extremely handsome face, stands from his table and walks over, and I notice that the lunch-goers all around us all seem to settle. It’s like that moment from a teen movie where the hot girl walks through the room and the fan blows and the fuggos hold their breath.

Hugh arrives.

“Hey there,” he says, with a grandfatherly aura that quiets the chitter chatter, “what can I do for you?” And at this moment, the vast, unmanageable universe of funeral conferencing suddenly feels comfortably small.

Ten minutes pass as Sophie and I sit, hypnotized, answering each of his questions while he lures us into explaining, step by step, how our “online funeral concierge” would work, and, because I become thirsty, I momentarily fall out of his spell and look around, only to realize that both the ad salesman and the potbellied man holding the Lipton have long gone.

“Wait. Hugh,” I say. “Who are you though?”

Hugh smiles and takes a breath, responding with an “Ahhh” in the same way you’d expect the question of one’s identity to be answered if you were to ask it to God. “I own a couple of cemeteries,” he pauses, “and funeral homes,” he smiles, “but mostly cemeteries.”

Sophie hesitates before asking, “where?”

“—Hugh!,” yells a cheery woman with wavy brown hair, who introduces herself as Hugh’s wife, “Sue,” as she glides into our conversation with the warmth and grace of a good Midwestern Christian but without the parts that sometimes make that bad.

Sue tells Hugh that he needs to talk with someone from East Lansing because, apparently, there’s been another Pokémon incident.

“Well, it’s very sad actually,” Hugh says, catching up Sophie and me. “Kids have been wandering into our cemeteries staring at their phones using that new Pokémon Go game and…it’s disrespectful to the deceased and their loved ones.”

“Not to mention dangerous,” Sue says. “At night they fall into the unfilled graves and can really hurt themselves.”

I imagine a 14-year-old screaming, stuck in a hole with a snapped ankle from a Charizard quest. I hold back a grin. Sophie catches me. So does Hugh.

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“I know I know — it’s funny,” Hugh says. “But…it’s not good for our families. It’s rude.”

Sue taps his shoulder, and so Hugh tells Sophie and me that he’ll reach out to someone about our license, though this someone isn’t at CENA this time around and as I go to ask for more information Hugh and Sue float away leaving Sophie and me at the table with empty salad plates and some sort of weird funeral conference networking post-coital glow.

“You think he’s a big deal?” I ask Sophie as I begin to stand. “He seems like a big deal. But–”

“—I think he’s rich,” Sophie says, getting up.

“I mean, a couple of cemeteries isn’t rich,” I say, “It’s like, fine, I guess,” looking down at the map to find us a new row of vendors, knowing that Hugh has no reason to chat with us, the pee-ons, again. And so, he probably won’t.

We meet 20 or so more vendors, but it’s boring. The booths feel mostly the same: ashes this, embalming that — there is but one Hugh and none beside him.

My shoulders fall, hopeless. The important conference-goers who have enough influence to let us pay a ‘consultant’ to help us get our license tend to make deals behind closed doors, and out here, on the pit, all the attendees seem to be trying to sell us the latest and greatest in open-casket-mouth-sewing needle and thread.

“Let’s check out that last row,” Sophie says, pointing to the map, and as she does so, the head of a 6’5” bald giant catches our eyes as his voice bellows to our ears.

“And this here,” he shouts, while presenting a poster of a silver crematory oven to his audience, “is our largest oven yet! It’s fast, it’s quiet! Top of the line.” The enormous man speaks to normal-sized funeral directors who, juxtaposed, look like little people in big suits. “Here at American Crematory Services,” the giant continues, genuine and proud, “our ovens are unmatched and so is our service. All my clients have my personal cell, and though you’ll never need it, I’m always just one call away.”

The tiny men nod and clap.

The giant looks happy. Genuine and caring. He looks like he believes that he’s really doing good work — making a difference in the world in the way everyone always talks about wanting to, and the post-spiel smile that began to spread across his face now lingers as if it’s found a permanent home.

“He seems cool,” I say to Sophie.

“Yeah. He does.”

The tiny men walk away, oven flyers in hand, and Sophie and I acquaint ourselves with the friendly neighborhood giant who goes by Jerry.

He immediately feels like a friend.

“You met Hugh Walsh?” Jerry asks, looking shocked. “Quickly gettin’ to know the who’s who, aren’t ya?”

“Is he important?” Sophie asks, “he said he owns a couple of cemeteries.”

“A couple?!” Jerry shouts, “I mean, he’s gotta be in charge of…,” he counts aloud and does some quick math, “twenty cemeteries and maybe…fourty homes?”

“Holy shit,” I say.

“Yeah. And did it all himself,” Jerry says. “Made all his own money by being a nice, fair businessman,” he nods. “Not like those SCI cronies.”

SCI, Services Corporation International, is the behemoth in the land of death. Everyone has had things to say about them. Mostly bad. With a $12b market cap and over 1800 funeral homes at their fingertips, SCI jumps from town to town, buying up the well-known homes in a market without changing the name, creating the illusion that the funeral home in your town is still family-owned. Then, like any well-run corporation that grows via acquisition, SCI runs around snatching up the other worthwhile homes they can get a good price on until one day, you’re sitting in your cute little town figuring out what you want to happen to you when you pass, and you realize that no matter when or where or how you die, that you’ll be going to SCI.

At least, that’s what Sophie and I heard.

“You going to the Riverwalk tonight?” I ask Jerry.

“Ha!” the giant exclaims, his voice echoing through our chests like a megaphone blasting through the ribcages of small birds. “Absolutely do not go to the Riverwalk,” he says. “All the weirdos are there,” he continues and then lowers his voice, “the alkaline hydrolysis people.”

“The what?” Sophie asks.

“Those guys pushing the eco-friendly cremations. They…soak you in some sort of water until you just become…bone broth. They’re sick.”

Sophie and I nod in agreement — maybe flesh-burning is more natural.

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“Anyway,” Jerry says, “Riverwalk. Don’t go.”

We nod, and he tells us to meet him at the Requiem cocktail party, which is where anyone who’s anyone, in funerals, will be.

—

We skip the Riverwalk.

Part 3

It’s 6 pm when we arrive at the happy hour — Requiem has reserved the hotel’s only bar. The bar is dark and gloomy, but not in a way that feels sexy. More in a “Hi, we’re an outdated Hilton, and we know we have enough conference demand that some vendor will end up booking any private space, so we’re not going to re-urethane the wooden countertops that aren’t dirty but always seem to stick.”

The bargoers don’t seem to mind.

With the ovens and pendants and ash-filled fireworks all stripped away, it feels like any other B2B happy hour. There are the old-timers who tell you about how the industry has changed, and there are keynote speakers who are proud of the boring topics they just presented, surrounded by groupies, who, for some reason or another, hope to one day speak boringly as well. There are attractive salespeople who work for tech companies, and then there are the less attractive people who buy from them.

Sophie and I spot Requiem Gabby. She stands next to an overweight man in his 60s, and she laughs at something he says while she allows him to graze her arm.

Gabby sees us.

“Sophie!,” she beams. “And Andrew, right?”

“Yes, Alex,” I say.

She ignores this.

“Meet Bill,” Gabby says, “from Carriage.” After SCI’s recent 358-facility acquisition of a company called Stewart Enterprises, Carriage now stands as player number two.

“Now why do you go exposing me like that?” Bill says, chuckling.

Gabby fake-giggles.

“We won’t hold it against you!” Sophie says, oversmiling.

“You’ve gotta do a better job at hiding your nametag then!” I joke, pointing to his shirt and laughing, though my joke, like its two predecessors, is also not funny.

Sophie continues to quip with Bill, which temporarily pulls his eyes away from Gabby, so I try, for a second time today, to ask Gabby for advice on us getting our license. She’s drunk and tells me that she has no idea how to help, but she’s very fun and orders us all shots, and as we arrive at shot number three, Rich Cemeterian Hugh walks up to say hi to Sophie and me before telling us that he wants to introduce us to a man named Chris Clarke.

Upon hearing this name, Overweight Bill’s face changes.

The words Chris Clarke mean something here.

Not to Gabby and certainly not to Sophie or me, but Bill immediately looks me and Sophie up and down, trying to figure out who we are and why anyone would ever care.

“He told me to give you his number,” Hugh says. “You should send him a text. That’s probably easiest with him.”

“And…who is he?” Sophie asks.

Bill adjusts his posture.

“Chris owns a few places out near you guys,” Hugh says. “If he likes you, he’ll help.”

Hugh gets pulled away to another circle of people who are much more important, and Gabby follows the herd by putting her hand through Bill’s arm, and as this is all going on, Sophie and I hear a laugh as loud as a thousand laughs coming from the other end of the bar, where we spot Jerry The Oven Giant standing next to two skinny 30-something-year-old dudes who wear stylish matching button downs and look like they’re judging everyone else here.

“Let’s say hi,” Sophie says.

Jerry smiles and introduces us to his frail friends, Seth and Gabriel, a couple from Massachusetts who run a large urn manufacturing operation in the northeast.

“Our urns are all made in the USA,” they say.

“Does that matter?” I ask.

“It does to the people who buy them.”

We all take more shots.

“Are there a lot of gays in the funeral industry?” I ask before realizing that that might have sounded odd because we were absolutely not talking about their sexuality and that I, instead, was just thinking about it, and so I respond to their side-tilted heads with, “I mean. I’m gay. And I was just wondering.”

“Oh!” Jerry screams, shattering martini glasses. “I told you!,” he says to the homosexual urn sellers. “But I thought you two (nodding to Sophie and me) might be together,”

Sophie cackles before looking my way and batting her eyes, “Just a messed up couple, in love with death.”

“See?” I say to her, “It’s true! You’re killing my game.”

“Um...,” she begins, “or you’re killing my game,” and then she looks around the bar for a prospect. “How about that guy in the suit with the—”

“Ugh,” Jerry says, following her gaze to the beefcake across the bar. “Married.”

“How married?” And then the girl laughs alone while the four fags smile.

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We take another shot, and now we’re all drunk.

My phone buzzes.

“He wrote back!” I say to Sophie, whose eyes still linger in the distance.

“You sure he’s married?”

“Who wrote back?” Jerry asks.

“Some guy that Hugh introduced us to. Chris, um…,” I click into the message, “Clarke.”

Jerry’s face changes, “Wowww,” he drawls, “….good luck.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” I say. “Is he like, terrible or something?”

“No no,” Jerry says. The couple agrees. Or maybe they don’t.

“He’s just…well…he’s very smart. But…,” Jerry withholds. “Look…if you can make him money, he’ll make it happen. Just…don’t get on his bad side.”

“Dramaaa,” Sophie says.

“You’ll see,” Jerry says.

The night continues with drinking and laughing as Sophie and I stumble through the lobby, passing by plainclothed funeral people like Cinnamon Embalming Liquor Richard, who didn’t get the Requiem invite. With my arm locked in Sophie’s, I ask her what she thinks this Chris guy will be like and whether or not we’ll be able to win him over.

“Of course we will,” she says. “That’s literally the only thing we’re good at.”

Sophie and I arrive at the elevator bay and come upon the stout blonde woman from this morning who originally gave us our nametags and neck lanyards. It’s weird seeing her not in a chair. And also not sober.

“Well,” the woman begins, teeth reddened with wine, “looks like you two are having a good time.”

“Heyyyy,” I say, my words a bit slurred. “Wait! You’ll know this,” I begin, “who’s Chris Clarke?”

Her lips purse.

She pauses and takes a deep breath in. And then out. “Well,” she begins, using the tone of a teacher who’s about to explain to one student about how another student received detention, “he used to be the CENA president, of course. But,” she lifts her left finger as if to ‘tsk-tsk,’ “he’s on my naughty list this year. Who does he think he is? Not showing up after he already RSVP’d. Should have at least given us more notice. I had a whole speech introducing him and…,” she continues, going on about CENA politics and how she barely found someone in time to take his slot, and I lose interest because it’s 930pm and we’re drunk on a Wednesday at a midwestern funeral conference, and so I start to say goodnight.

“Hold on!” The woman says, putting her hands on her hips. “I didn’t see you two at the Riverwalk!”

“Oh. Um,” I begin. “I guess—”

“We thought it was tomorrow!” Sophie says, cutting me off while squeezing my arm.

“Oh no!” the blonde woman responds. “It was tonight.”

“So sorry. I say,” falling in line. “How was it?”

“It was really nice,” the woman says.

“That’s great to hear,” Sophie says, her voice warm and kind. “This has been such a fun conference. We’ll see you before we leave in the morning,” she says, and this pleases the conference woman, who then turns and waddles away.

My phone buzzes as Sophie and I hop into the elevators.

Chris: Call me tomorrow. 3pm.

I’m nervous.

“We’ll be fine,” Sophie says, exiting the elevator, leaving me to think back on today: the man selling dead dog paraphernalia and the lady proudly holding the nasal forceps. Or the urn gays. People who maybe didn’t choose the dolls they were given but who have chosen to spend the rest of their lives charting a path in death.

A people and a path that might actually not be that bad.

And as I drift off to sleep, I let out a small end-of-day-one-at-a-funeral-conference sigh through lips not yet touched by open-casket mouth-sewing thread, hopeful that this search might be finally coming to an end when, at 3 pm tomorrow, a man named Chris Clarke – smart, vindictive and maybe sketchy enough actually to help us, will finally end up being our guy.

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Questions (please comment below!)

• Did you like this more or less than the typical essay format? (Essay = arc with more manufactured closure)

• Do you wish it was more business-y?

• Would you read more stuff about the death industry, or was that all you think you’d ever want to read about it?

• Not a question, but a statement: I’m probably changing my future Substack Domain to KrugerWrites.com. It feels more on-brand. Thanks for reading ❤️

More stuff for you to read:

• Taking ayahuasca to fix a health problem

• What I do for work

• Someone I met on a plane

• On moving to someplace new

• Vietnam

This is my last year in Miami.

Next June, I’ll be moving to Durham, North Carolina, so that Ben can go into oculoplastics, which is what happens when a little girl is sitting in the back seat watching Paw Patrol on her iPad, and her mother isn’t paying attention and slams into a median, and the little girl breaks the bones around her eye socket while also rupturing her eyeball. 

Like a popped grape.

If a plastic surgeon tries to fix it, the girl will end up pretty, but blind. If instead, an ophthalmologist does the repair, the girl will see, but in the mirror, she’ll see that she’s ugly. 

Oculoplastics is when physicians fix both.

I was telling this to my friend, Natalie.

“That’s really cool,” Natalie said.

“No,” Ben interrupted, always interrupting. “That’s NOT what oculoplastics is.” 

“That sounds really cool though,” Natalie said, “you should do that.”

I’ve tried asking Ben what he thinks oculoplastics is, but every time he starts explaining, I find myself thinking about what life in Durham will be like, and I end up just nodding along to his garble of “BLAH which is NOT orbital surgery and so the little girl would instead go to BLAH BLAH BLAH.”

“Ohhh, that makes sense,” I say, having decided that my explanation is better.

But regardless of what oculoplastics is/n’t, Ben and I will be moving to Durham, North Carolina, and I wish him well with whatever it is he believes he does.

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I never imagined myself in Durham.

I’m 35 and have lived in San Diego, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Austin, LA, NYC, and Miami, and in each one, I became aware of some insurmountably negative trait of the people or city that caused me to leave.

I wonder what I’ll dislike about Durham.

Probably the “bull” thing. 

Bull Cider, Bull Brewery, Bull Car Wash, Bull Inflatable Toy Rental Depot, the list of bull-named small businesses never ends and that’s because in the late 1800s, a guy named John Green was launching a tobacco company in Durham and was looking for a logo while eating Coleman’s British Mustard and on the jar was the logo of a bull and he thought “cool, that’s a sick bull,” and so he named his company Bull Durham Tobacco, and the entire city fell in line. 

If it’s not this virus of the bull, I imagine I’ll dislike something else. Maybe the Durham people — I’ll find that their southern charm renders them too agreeable. Boring and polite.

Like in Japan.

Where the food was excellent and the nature was amazing and everything was safe and clean and on-time. And I hated it. How they were so deferential and considerate. Muted.

I like chaos. 

India and Vietnam. Middle Easterners and loud noises and yelling and confrontation. 

A maid in rural China banging on my door about check-out times, shouting “You late! You leave now!” grounds my nervous system as if to say “Dear child, you’re home.”

And so I guess I hope the Durhamites are not like the Japanese.  

My first original thought.

But even if they are, even if Ben and I don’t love it, I imagine we might stay.

And I think that’s because 35-year-old me is different from 22-year-old me who leapt from city to city, trying to over-optimize his time left — time that is now not only inherently less but also noticeably faster. 

Proportional theory, it’s called, where, as you age, each year feels shorter, as a smaller additional percentage of your life. For me, 1/34 (2.94%) will have felt longer than will 1/35 (2.86%). If you’re nine years old, losing one year is a huge deal. At ninety, it’s not.

And 37-year-old Alex in Durham will know all of this, along with the fact that the more he ages, the harder it will be for him to change course — aging is being the captain of a ship moving faster across the sea with arms that grow heavy and a wheel that stiffens and your job, while a heroin-like complacency thickens in your veins, is to watch your should’ves/could’ves fade into the horizon as your no-longer-possible paths fly past.

And then, from time to time when a ghost of one of those untaken paths whispers through the fog to tell you that you’re weak for letting your vestibular disorder prevent you from doing standup, or that you’re poor for being too scared to co-found that B2B SaaS startup, or that you’re a shitty brother/son for abandoning your family out west, you should do what I do and reach for the black tar while gazing beyond the rail to try to remind yourself that your vestibular disorder led you to Ben, that the CEO of that SaaS startup hates himself, and that your family wants what’s best for you, and you should do this not because you’ll actually believe any of it, but rather because you’ve learned that attempting to believe it is the only way to engender even the tiniest amount of hope around your ship and its flawed captain finding their way back to some true north. 

And sometimes, far out at sea, that hope is all you have.

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Maybe, for me, right now, I have to hope that that north is Durham, where, though today, the Durhamites seem too Japanese, an older version of me, with 50 years in Durham under his belt, will no longer blame his environment for the closure he lacks within.

By then, the few hairs on 85-year-old Alex’s head will all be grey, trying their best to cling to follicles being eaten away by some sort of skin disorder. Eczema, or perhaps cancer.

Ben and I will be sitting in a booth at Bull City Brunch about to order bull-shaped pancakes and a waitress named Daisy Mae will walk up. I’ll be wearing the hospital gown I stole from the cancer treatment center because I’ll have learned that you have to lean in quite hard to get people in Durham to have a real conversation.

“Havin’ a good mornin’ fellas?” Daisy Mae will say, ignoring my gown.

“No…” I’ll whisper as one of my old-man eyes, probably the left one, leaks from epiphora, an old-person eye condition that Ben will have refused to fix because he’ll have said that it’s not oculoplastics. “I’m dying,” I’ll continue. “Stage 3 cancer.”

Daisy’s face will fall a bit. 

“It hurts.” I’ll sigh. “Everywhere.”

She’ll look to Ben for support.

“He’s fine,” he’ll say. “Alex, leave the poor girl alone!”

“Please,” I’ll say, looking up while reaching for her. “He wants me to die. He wants the money. Help me,” I’ll plead as my arms shake, which will freak her out. She’ll jolt, spilling a pitcher of water onto my hands, “My hand!” I’ll scream as if it burns, falling out of the booth onto the floor in my gown. Daisy will shriek and run away crying while the now-silent Durhamites all stare. Meek and afraid.

I’ll bring my gaze up from my now wet cancer clothes to lock eyes with Ben, who will hate me for this performance. But then, I’ll smile, having accepted that, though time whittles us down, it often lets us keep the parts we need, that our ships are usually on the right path, and that there’s something nice about being the only real bull among a herd of sterile mules in Durham, North Carolina.

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Hello friends.

1. Does anyone have anyone I should meet in Durham when I move there in a year?

2. Were you annoyed that this piece was shorter than the others?

3. If I have a real-life actual crazy person stalking me who I’ve already gone to the police about, should I wait until I’m certain he’s not going to kill me before writing a piece about him, or does the fact that we’re not sure about him killing me make the piece more fun to read?

Five years ago, I was a groomsman at a wedding where I met another groomsman named Drew, who was there with his wife and four-month-old baby.

His wife was pretty. She held her son in a light blue blanket. 

I thought Drew, too, was attractive, but Drew was tall, and though there are exceptions, I typically think tall is disgusting.

At the afterparty, Drew asked how long I had been gay for, and I told him that when my neighbor Michael Boyce and I were five years old, we used to play a game where we’d shine flashlights at each other's buttholes. 

“So I guess, since then,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I came out when I was 22.”

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Drew told me that he recently decided that he might be partially bisexual, and then a few minutes later, he tried to hook up with me in the hotel room next to his sleeping child and wife.

I asked him to leave and check with his wife if this was allowed, not because I was against him cheating, but because I didn’t want to be the gay guy who caused drama at the wedding.

He left to ask.

There’s an app called Feeld that all the kids are using nowadays. 

It can help you ask.

Unlike the boring worlds of Hinge and Tinder, Feeld is full of anything you can possibly think of. 

You can make a profile as a couple or alone. You can match with other pairs or singles. A man or a woman or a transgender person, and if you think yourself open-minded, there are 19 additional options besides those three, and even if you’re able to name 3-5 of them, there is an option on the picklist for “other.” 

Tida wena is a phrase I just learned. 

It means twisted woman.

Feeld seems to be having a moment. 

Over the past three years, it’s paid memberships have skyrocketed 550%.

For a while, it was a threesome app called 3nder, and then it became more kinky, but now it’s trying to be everything to everyone.

• Monogamous

• Polyamorous

• Open Relationships

• Ethical Non-Monogamy

• Heterosexual

• Homosexual

• Bisexual

• Pansexual

• BDSM

• Role Play

• Cuckolding

• Bondage

• Threesomes

• Swinging

• Kink

• Tantra

• Emotional Connection

• Friendship

• Spiritual Connection

• New Experiences

• Curiosity

• Experimentation

• Emotional Intimacy

• Physical Intimacy

• Intellectual Intimacy

• Vegan

• Yoga

• Long-term Relationship

• Casual Dating

• Asexual

• Queer

• Straight

• Non-binary

• Transgender

• Cisgender

• Exhibitionism

• Voyeurism

• Sensory Play

• Soft Swap

• Full Swap

• Online Flirting

• In-person Meetups
  

I think it’s working.

Take Feeld user Lucy Holden, for example, who doesn’t look like the pink-haired introverted furry I’d expect to find on Feeld, but rather, the pretty, long-brown-haired, post-sorority college girl I’d expect to run into on Bumble, one of the mainstream dating apps, whose share price has plummeted recently.

Feeld seems different from what I remember.

When I used it in LA in 2019, my friend told me that he hated the app because “it was all fuggos.” 

Looking to prove him wrong, I began swiping through mostly non-hots until I matched with an attractive 23-year-old straight couple who insisted that, instead of SMS, we chat on Kik. 

They then asked me for naked pics.

And so I sent them.

And they ghosted. 

I, fuggo.

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But now, Feeld is filled with hots. 

And pings and “majestic” members and far-away-from-your-home-location-settings and hidden likes and all the things that seem to indicate a high rate of a very engaged user base.

I think this is because non-monogamy is on the rise. It seems that people are all starting to think that “the one” was an idea that made sense when people lived till 35, but now, our unmet needs have more time to fester, which leads to resentment and cheating, and while life is very long, it’s also very short — before you know it you’ll be old and full of regrets, wondering if the guy at the gym with the sleeve or the girl at the coffee shop with dark eyeshadow were someones you forwent having human experiences with simply because you and your partner were never able to figure out how to be less insecure.

We’re all insecure. 

Full of unsure-ofs and I-could-nevers that prevent us from becoming more comfortable with ourselves — lurking shadows and silent self-rejections we avoid being too curious about.

There was a girl I once knew. 

Let’s call her Jackie.

I met her at a networking event when I was fresh out of school.

And so was she.

But unlike corporate-grind-22-year-old Alex, Jackie was the “number one SEO-ranked Asian female dominatrix,” she told me.

She had not intended to become a dominatrix.

It all started when she needed money and tried to sell a pair of running shoes on eBay. 

How often do you use them? One buyer wrote in.

Once a week, she replied publicly on the listing. 

Then came other questions from potential buyers.

Did you sweat in them? How old are you? What do you look like?

And then she understood. 

19-year-old Asian female college student selling running shoes. I run in them three to four times/week. Very used, she wrote.

Up went the bids.

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“And so, I went to Goodwill, and I bought all the women's running shoes they had.”

She was a psych student at the time, hoping to, one day, become a marriage and family counselor, but that all got derailed when the shoe thing started taking off — curious, she reached out to a woman online right outside of Madison, who became her mentor.

Jackie developed her craft, got better at SEO, and soon graduated into a self-made international entrepreneur.

In March, I’ll be in Shanghai. 

April in Paris. 

May, London.

Clients all over the world filled out online intake forms, paid a deposit for the appointment, consented that they’d never touch her, and then, if approved, received their session.

“I ask everything I need to know on my intake form,” she said to me. “It’s super thorough. The motivations for the session always ends up coming from something that happened to them when they were a kid.” 

“Like what?” I asked, thinking about how when I was ten years old, I had a crush on my piano teacher, Brian, who killed himself.

“Well,” she said, “I had this one guy who had me tie his hands behind his back and then I put on a pig mask, and then he’d plead as I shoved whipped cream pies into his face.”

“What? Why?” I asked.

“I guess he used to watch the Muppets and there was some gag where Miss Piggy did that to Kermit.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah,” Jackie said. “It’s always something like that.”

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I believe that we all have these, whether we’re aware of them or not. Desires rearing their heads as insecurities in fear’s clothing.

Too scary for us to look at or figure out why they’re there, so we never ask.

I wonder what mine are.

I hate feeling small. 

Maybe, growing up, some large hyper-masculine neighbor diddled me, and I just can’t remember it.

There was one mom in our cul-de-sac, Pauline Lamont, who fit the description, but I don’t think she had it in her. 

She was always late to the carpool. 

Bad at follow-through.

Perhaps, one day, I’ll get to be someone else’s trauma. That’d be nice. To be important enough to cause someone to go see Jackie or download Feeld to try and figure it out.

Drew, the groomsman at the wedding, ended up coming back to my hotel room that night.

He knocked on the door and brought, with him, his wife.

We all started hooking up, and it was going well.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

But then she freaked out because they had “never been with another man before,” and it was too much for her, which I would have thought would have been less of a concern than the fact that their four-month-old was in the adjacent room wrapped in a light blue blanket without a baby monitor.

But maybe that’s how this all works.

Maybe one day, Jackie will receive an intake form asking her to bring a male companion, and the two of them will swaddle adult-baby-Drew in a blue blanket just so they can leave him to have sex with the guy in the room next door.

How nice that would be for me. 

To feel so important and powerful to someone.

To be someone else’s Miss Piggy.

Something unsmall.

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Hello.

This was a shorter piece than usual.

Questions for you all:

1. What are your thoughts on open relationships? Am I in an echochamber of annoying hippy liberals who will soon age out of their beliefs?

2. Have you ever been on Feeld/AshleyMadison/Similar whatever you’re comfortable sharing?

3. If I posted this on LinkedIn and you were a client of mine, would you stop working with me, or would it be humanizing to see me not as a corporate drone, or is that only a thing that people encourage, but then, in practice, once I posted this on LinkedIn you’d fire me lol

Okay, so…I tried recording audio again.

But I’m very bad at it.

And I want to get better.

If you choose to listen to it (above), please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Ex: “Alex, you should try to make your voice sound Slower/Calmer/LessHomosexual”

Tx

Asheville

Asheville, North Carolina: a cute tree-filled mountain town known for being liberal but not to the point where it’s annoying.

Like Savannah meets Ann Arbor.

Last month, I flew up there because Ben was gone and I wanted to leave Miami because I am a person who likes having conversations with people who have things to talk about other than how the weather was nice and so they went to the beach.

Friday night, I wound up at a bar.

I stood next to two women in their 50s — one tall and one short. We were drinking and laughing, and eventually, they asked about my job. 

That’s when,

“You’re disgusting,” spat the short lady. Her eyes were glazed over from the tequila, but she kept them locked on mine like daggers piercing through milky tea.

“Wait. What?” I said, confused.  

We had spent the last half hour taking shots and giggling; just moments before, she leaned in closely, asking me to try her Paloma, resting her boobs on my arm. “So nice that I can do this because you’re gay,” she said.

But now, a new, angry version of her arrived, and this one needed no gay breast stool. 

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“THERE ARE AMERICANS WHO COULD USE THOSE JOBS,” she shouted over the Dua Lipa song.

“Hey hey,” the taller friend intervened, trying to reel Short in, “I think you should get some water.”

“This has NOTHING to do with me,” Short responded, standing her ground. Her face was scrunched — neck muscles tensed. And then she turned to me. “I’m an energy healer,” she said, like a weight loss coach who was morbidly obese, “and when you said ‘American companies’ — I felt an ENERGY shift.”  She looked to Tall. “DON’T talk to him anymore. He’s a bad person.” And then she placed her drink on the bar, scoffed, and walked to the restroom.

You’re wondering what I do for work.

That makes sense.

In sum, though I wish I were a writer who wrote about his feelings all day, I don’t have enough money to do that and so, instead, I help run an international recruiting business where we find super smart people from all over the world and then we land them work-from-home jobs for American companies.

Some people don’t like that.

People like Short.

“Whoa,” I said to Tall as I let out a breath.

“Sorry about that,” said Tall, who was not a healer but, in fact, had a real job. 

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“You’re fine,” she responded, tucking her long blonde-gray hair behind her ear. She was pretty and, ironically, had great energy. “How does it work, though?” she asked. “I have a couple of clients who could use you.”

Tall asked for my number and typed it into her contacts as fast as she could. I liked that she wanted my number. It made me feel that maybe I wasn’t as disgusting as Short had decided — that maybe I was only semi-disgusting. Chocolate cream cheese. 

Tall went to hand me my phone back. As she did—

“—WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING TO HIM?” Short said, out of nowhere.

‘S O R R Y’ Tall mouthed as Short dragged her into darkness. 

I stood at the bar alone but was still within eyeshot of them both, and so, after 10 minutes, I left. 

It doesn’t feel good getting yelled at by an adult you’re not related to. 

It’s unnerving.

Breaks the rules.

On my walk home, I called my friend, Margaret Carr. She’s always the person I call for emotional crises because she never gets emotional about anything. 

Perhaps that’s why she has lots of money, while I do not. 

“I don’t think I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster,” she said from her Chelsea penthouse balcony, looking down on the ants of Manhattan while probably sipping the darkest red that wine can offer. Maybe a black merlot. “Just work on your pitch,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Well,” she said, “knowing you, you probably said something like…‘We help companies replace their overpaid Americans’.” 

I stayed silent.  

The cold Asheville air blew across my face.

“Well. That’s what works on our ads!” I responded. “It’s our lowest cost-per-meeting by a landslide!”

“Right. Obviously. It’s—”

“—and we tried the nice stuff! It doesn’t convert to meetings!”

“Look, you’re being inflammatory, which gets people angry, which probably makes your clicks cheaper, but when you’re in person, you’ve gotta start with something else.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe say that you give opportunities to people abroad.”

“What does that even mean? What are we like, some loser non-profit that mails protractors to kids in Ghana?”

“It worked for Toms.”

“Didn’t they go bankrupt literally because of that?”

“Oh. Interesting.” She took a sip and thought a bit more. “Are your people good?” she asked.

“Like, good at their job?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah they’re great.”

“So just say that.”

The wind calmed.

“Goodnight,” she said, walking inside to place her wine atop a custom-cut marble counter and returning herself to an evening of not listening to the plights of the poor.

I don’t think I’m a monster. 

Doth he protest.

Everyone who works for us seems really happy, and not even in a Stockholm Syndrome way, but in a real way.

One of our marketers in Egypt told me, “You’re overpaying us all. Two months for you guys is a down payment on a house here.”

“Okay, but that’s not a bad thing.” I said. “If you keep hitting your numbers, we’ll just keep paying you more. That seems good, right?”

Yes. That’s obviously right. 

That’s one of the advantages of hiring abroad.  

You can leverage the strength, albeit dwindling strength, of the American dollar. 

Overpaying by 40% - 60% in, let’s say, Kenya, Argentina, or South Africa costs U.S. companies very little. When people earn more money, they adjust their lifestyle, and then, in fear of losing said lifestyle, they stay hard-working, and though capitalism is a dark drug, I’d still consider this a win-win.

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But none of this self-masturbation helped me shake the lingering feeling from the yelling bargoer who accused me of being anti-American.

Before she yelled, but after she had told me that she was also an acupuncturist who gives Botox because those things somehow don’t conflict, I would’ve pegged her as some sort of far-left, jaded hippie — someone who shouted things she learned from TikTok recently like “Americans are living on stolen land!” but instead, she hopped on the other side of the I-Don’t-Like-Alex’s-Business train, which is a very politically diverse train with many sections of angry people, including the politically-far-Right section she chose to sit in — the section that preaches took ‘er jobs.

And maybe she really believes that’s the correct place.

Maybe she really believes that my tiny international recruiting business is responsible for the decline of American discretionary income and rise in inflation, along with the very real tragedy of people in the U.S. not being able to easily find high-enough-paying jobs. 

Maybe she also separately reads about an influx of illegal immigrants, or she saw the TikTok I saw the other night, which made me cry, about an older woman in Colorado talking about how she and her husband are trying to live off $30k/year after having had to quit being a teacher due to a disability, and how now she’s had to learn to stitch her clothes back together because she can no longer afford to go to Goodwill and how, at the food bank, the line is too long because of the new immigrants standing in front of her who take more food than they’re supposed to, which I guess would somehow be connected to our too-liberal immigration policy but then that doesn’t seem true based on this thing I spent 30 minutes studying before realizing that it mostly applied to legal immigration which is completely different from illegal immigration and so perhaps I was studying the wrong thing.

And maybe both Colorado AND Short are right.

Maybe we have too many immigrants, and they’re all from the wrong places, and we should only give jobs to people already in and from the U.S., and we should completely close our borders, and cobble our shoes using only what we can find in our own backyards.

But I don’t think that’s true.

And that’s because A) I believe that we do have an obligation to help humans who are less fortunate than us, including the Coloradan and those standing in front of her, and B) we objectively need more people in America because of this thing that has nothing to do with being nice to others called the replacement rate, which is basically the number of kids that the average couple in a society must have in order for the society to successfully “replace” itself over time. 

In the U.S., that number should be 2.1. 

But we’re only at 1.7. 

And that’s bad.

Because if your country stays below where it should be for too long, your population dwindles, the ratio of young to old falls, and eventually you have too many old people with too expensive medical bills who can’t militarize or caretake, just like what happened in Japan, and after a while you lack the required amount of youngins to keep the pensions fat and the lights on and the shelves stocked and the people alive.

But I guess that’s not totally relevant to what I came here to write about.

Because I originally came here to write about Short, who had interrupted the Dua Lipa song to yell at me about how everyone who works for our company steals jobs from Americans.

And those people are not immigrants.

In fact, those people are taking jobs and dollars from Americans and shoving them into their own bank accounts offshore, and by not spending those dollars in the U.S. they’re probably even further destroying the U.S. economy.

Someone said to me last week.

Unless…just like the platitude of “let’s close our borders to curb problems that aren’t actually solved by closing our borders,” the whole “hire people abroad cripples our economy,” thing is also not true.  

Because maybe every $1 spent outsourcing ends up returning $1.12-$1.17 to the U.S., and maybe closing off our economy and issuing too many U.S. dollars here in the U.S. without enough consumption of those dollars abroad potentially weakens the U.S. dollar — cue YouTube video about Argentina, and, maybe, it’s in our best interest, as Americans, to keep the rest of the world addicted to the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency for as long as possible, God-forbid South Africa, Brazil, Russia, India, and China wise up and come up with a digitally re-invented reserve currency of their own.

And maybe Short is just mad for the same reasons that most people, in life, are mad.

People like J:

Or Mr. H (the H is for horny):

Or Fuck. 

Actually, Fuck was nice. 

Thank you, Fuck.

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I think people are mad because life is just scarier right now, and people don’t seem as happy as they used to be.

We’re all nervous about an election where there is no good outcome, coupled with the fact that it feels like we’re all one podcast or Substack article away from believing that the people who believe there’s a WW3 or Civil War coming aren’t wearing tin hats.

And I do think there is a winter en route.

Especially with jobs.

Some weird combination of COVID having made many jobs remote, followed by the inevitable re-allocation of those same jobs to lower-cost laborers abroad, which is just a bandaid-of-a-scapegoat for us sheep to flock to in order to avoid looking at the greater problem where AI eliminates all of those remote jobs, especially mine and everyone else’s I work with, including the guy who was paid to translate the original version of the Argentine video that came before the AI-translated one, and I don’t believe there is a way out of this.

And because of that, it behooves us to do whatever we can to survive. 

To learn how to leverage other people/AI to figure out where new types of income are going to come from because they won’t come from doing clicky-clacky things on a keyboard.

And as someone with no real skills but with lots of visions of how I’d like my life to be, I do wonder what an inflation-ridden economy is supposed to do with me and my entitled-yet-inept peers, and perhaps Mr H. (the H is for Horny) is correct: perhaps we should just be brought to the chopping block. But, until then, as someone who likes America a lot, I think the best way for our self-important country to adapt to the upcoming job collapse is to let the rest of the world get better at shoe-cobbling, powerpoints, and customer service, while we figure out how to stay at the top of some sort of money-making food chain for as long as we can, maybe leading the world in exporting creativity and business-launching the same way we already lead as the largest exporter of culture.

And though I’m not economically studied enough to be writing any of this, maybe that’s the point — maybe, just like Short yelling at me in a bar for things she doesn’t understand, I don’t really have to know what I’m talking about to put it onto the page and push “Publish.” Maybe Short and I are both just sheep.

Sheep, running around ingesting images and videos about wars and fiscal policy and multivariate problems that our tiny sheep brains can’t possibly understand, taking stances for or against interest rate cuts or puberty blockers or hostage flyers while simultaneously confidently shooing away the homeless woman in front of us asking for a dollar, having told ourselves that we’re capable of quantifiably measuring how our energy, money, and compassion are most effectively spent, and ignoring the fact that we’re not as intelligent nor as kind as we’d like to believe.

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Dumb sheep, pressing doo-doo-covered hooves into the screen, thinking it will prevent the coming winters, while probably not thoroughly understanding the articles we post or cite (like that 2003 McKinsey article I linked to above but didn’t read lolz) in order to yell/defend concepts or causes we only seem to care about for little blips of time.

Because even after all of this, when I take a step back, I don’t care very much about globalization, AI or even the end of jobs.

Sure, I love our company (scalearmy.com), and I really hope I’m able to cockroach us through whatever comes next for America both at home and abroad, but my motivation for doing so exists only for one reason: to amass enough money to fund a blog where I can write about my feelings, so that when a lady yells at me in a bar, there is a place where I can go to complain about her to thousands of people.

And given that I really like self-telling the lie that everything happens for a reason, maybe the lesson I’m supposed to learn here is that when I get publicly scolded by a lost short woman in Asheville, I should be grateful of the fact that I’m not her, and that I’ve found a love of writing that allows me to scream back at her later, but in my own special way that fills me with pride, and that developing this specific craft of whining about her means more to me than how many children I have, or custom-cut marble countertops I own, or people in America I’ve employed, and that I should put my time and focus into being appreciative of that, rather than into the launch of my new business, OutsourcedOnlineEnergyHealers.com which, instead, exists for the sole purpose of speeding up one specific Ashevillian sheep’s march to the slaughter.

Now accepting investors.

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Okay. Hi. Sooooooooooooo.

Questions from my readers/friends (please put your answers in the comments!)

1. Even though this piece was intentionally less funny than my others, were you bored?

2. Was the voiceover good/bad? If bad, please give suggestions.

3. What is the meanest thing someone has ever said to you in person? What’s the meanest thing someone has ever said to you online? If you don’t have a good answer for either of these, would you like me to Tweet something mean at you so that you don’t feel like you’ve been shafted from having a universal experience?

Lylas

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My sister just bought a dog named Otis, and Otis is unlike any other dog, and that’s because Otis belongs to Emily Kruger, and Emily Kruger is unwell.

Before buying Otis, Emily spent 15 months researching— blog after blog, breeder after breeder —in search of the perfect light-gold, medium-haired sporting retriever. According to her, this retriever is completely different from the reddish, show-bred American golden. This distinction is so important to her that six months ago, she dragged our family to GoldiePalooza in Anaheim, California, which was exactly the type of place you’d think it was.

A place where a woman ran a booth about her rescue that proudly only saves goldens. “What happens to the other dogs?” I wanted to ask her, knowing that she’d reply, lips pursed with a hard ‘p’, “Nope.”

Or two booths down, where another guy sold a shirt that read, ‘Who needs gold when you’ve got goldens,’ next to another man selling golden retriever trucker hats, which, to be clear, were meant to be worn by the dog.

“Would you ever buy a puppy here?” I asked my sister.

“Uch. Never,” she scoffed.

Instead, Emily picked a breeder out of Salt Lake City — a kind, Mormon-seeming family who ran a white-glove golden retriever puppy purchasing business that would never show up to compete with breeders at a ‘Palooza’. 

Coke pays no heed to RC Cola.

Emily loved her breeder. 

She loved every step of procuring Otis — every email and YouTube video. Every Instagram post and Facetime.

The meaningful interactions began on a Thursday afternoon, right after the litter was born, when each pup was given a name related to October: ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Ghost’ or ‘Candy,’ etc., and though the names themselves weren’t important, the act of having names was crucial, because each puppy was to spend the next eight weeks being individually tracked and graded, on actual report cards, that were then distributed to the already-paid-the-deposit buyers.

“That’s a three on Confidence for Pumpkin,” the breed mother said on camera, as she zoomed in on the dog’s apprehension to playing with a battery-powered, automatically-moving plastic ball. Out of the right side of the screen, the mother’s seven-year-old daughter busted into the scene and pummeled Pumpkin onto his back. Pumpkin submitted. “But an eight on Touch Tolerance!” the mother said.

“Hm,” Emily said to me while screensharing the clips on Facetime, “I can’t decide between Amber or Walnut.”

“Okay…” I said.

“You see, Walnut’s Nerve Tolerance is very high, but…ugh…his Pack Drive is too low!”

“Mhm.”

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And though I would have loved to tell her that none of this mattered, as a dog’s demeanor changes over time, Emily Kruger, like the other depositors, who were all taking their pick of the litter based on the order in which they paid their deposit, isn’t the type of person who leaves big decisions like Pack Drive up to chance. 

Unwell Emily knows what she wants from the world and demands that it gives it to her.

“He doesn’t understand hats,” she said to me last week when I visited Otis, who was then, twelve-weeks-old.

“What?”

“Like. Watch,” she said, reaching into the closet to pull out an elf hat. “Here Otie!” she said.

Otis bounced over, smiling, before sitting at Emily’s feet, ready to demolish a new gift.

“It’s just a hat, okay?” she said. “So DON’T bite it!” 

And then, obviously, as she tried to attach the hat to his head, he used his baby shark teeth to bite into her soft human flesh.

“Ow!” she screamed, “I SAID NO BITE!” and then she pulled away, leaving the 3-month-old to gain control over his 372-month-old master and tear the hat to shreds.

“See?” she said to me while massaging the blood off her hands. “How am I supposed to get a post up in time for Christmas?”

It’s no surprise that she cares about his social following.

For work, she manages a bunch of Instagram accounts, and when you give a violinist a new violin, you should expect her to play. 

And this is all fine, and none of this bothers me, but where she and I do disagree is on the other stuff.

Like how often to let Otis outside.

And what to do when he nips.

If it were up to me, he’d spend all day frolicking in the great outdoors and would come inside only to eat and cuddle and play. 

And if he bit, I’d bite him back, like I did to the other dog we had growing up. Who bit me once, and then never bit me again.

But Emily is not the type of person to bite a dog — for her, the thought of Otis getting bit by a human or even a dog is too much to bear.

“I don’t know that I want him going to dog parks,” she said to me when we talked about how I think he needs to socialize. 

“Emily, if he doesn’t learn that certain dogs don’t like him,” I began, “he’ll end up getting attacked.”

“I get it,” she responded, using scab-covered hands to fill an electronic dog treat tosser to the brim, “but…you never know what type of dogs are at those things. They’re not vetted,” she said, sounding like the Palooza Woman whose rescue ran only golden-deep.

Neuroses, these are.

But neuroses like these never solely belong to us. They’re contagions we catch, usually from the ones we love. When I look at my sister and try to determine where she got it from, I first always conclude that it didn’t come from our father. 

A man, so fearless of strangers that, on his custody days, when he and his friends would go gambling in Vegas, he’d drop me and Emily off at the Mirage or the Hilton Flamingo and she and I would be left to wander around Sin City, with our hotel room key and his ATM card in our pockets. 

I was 9 years old. And she was 7.

“What if they got kidnapped?” my mother screamed into the phone. 

“Yeah!” Emily screamed in the background. “Kidnapped!”

“Pssssshhh,” my father replied, “They’re fine. They’re annoying anyway,” he said. “They’d probably give them right back,” he laughed.

And so, if not from him, Emily must get her lack of resolve from our mother, a woman who goes to the bank to deposit her checks, and who only makes flight purchases over the phone, fearing something may get lost in the button-clickiness of the interwebs. 

For her, the world is scary and we must remain vigilant.

Once, after seeing a clip on San Diego KFMB Local News, she called to tell me about a new trend of hooligans that had been running up behind people in parking lots and pushing them down.

“And then what?” I asked, “do they take your money? Or like…rape you?”

“No, Alexander,” she said, “The newscaster said that they just push you down and then they run away,” she sighed. “It’s horrible.”

“Mhm,” I said. 

But she ended up being wrong. 

They did rape me.

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No, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say — what I meant to say is that I’m not tiny-problem anxious.

I live, after all, in Miami Beach, where the crime rate is one out of every ten individuals, which means that 95% of U.S. cities are safer to live in, and even knowing that, I never lock our front door.

I’m always losing my keys and I guess I’m more annoyed with being locked out of my apartment than I am anxious about someone breaking in and stealing my electric toothbrush or our Eufy G20 Robovac for PetHair, or God-willing, Ben’s ugly art.

My brain focuses more on bigger, more real fears, like winding up bankrupt or getting dumped by Ben for constantly slandering him or waking up one day, old and under-accomplished, a failed writer who never did figure out how to convince enough people to listen to his shoutings into the void.

And so, petty apartment thieves and parking-lot-non-raping-down-pushers just don’t hold space in my skull where there’s no room to worry about the smell of the roses when I fear the ecological collapse of the entire garden. 

I try my best to make do with my composition.

“Let’s go to Mexico City this summer,” I texted my mom, who is now almost 70, after I saw a pharma commercial that kicked off me mentally spiraling about how she and I likely only have 10-12 more good years together and, how, given that I live across the country, at our current rate of 2 in-person interactions per year, I’ll have only around 20-30 encounters before one of the people I care about most in the world falls victim to the unavoidable passing of time.

Only 20-30 encounters of traveling and hiking and making fun of strangers. 

Only 20-30 more encounters where she’ll pull out a to-do list of things for me to help her with that she doesn’t actually need me to help her with.

Only 20-30 more times where I’ll get to admire the wrinkles around her eyes as she looks into the distance and thinks about whether or not the stove is on, if my sister’s getting engaged, or if we’ll ever make it back to Japan, and then I’ll notice her eyes jump down to the floor and then back up, as she attempts to delete the story she came upon where she now realizes that we might not, and as her knees start to give and her mind starts to slip, I wonder what my sister and I will do about that.

My lovely sister, who, unwell but meaning well, will probably shackle my mother to a wheelchair in a bleak Jewish-enough assisted living with the goal of wringing out a few extra mediocre years, and then Emily and I will fight about whether or not that’s better or worse than my regimen of slipping LSD into my mother’s Ensure to try and fix the mental fog that comes for us all.

I don’t know which path is right. 

This bubble-boyness that belongs to Emily, or this motorcycle-diaryness that belongs to me.

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Maybe once I have something I’m afraid to lose, I’ll eat my words.

Maybe even with Otis, who I’ve recently come to love.

A puppy who is not yet vaccinated against something called parvo, which is the reason Emily doesn’t let him outside — a reason I disagreed with.

And so, last month, when I visited, I convinced Emily to take Otis with us on adventures: to Lucky Thai, and for ice cream, and to two or three shopping malls.

And then, later that night, I went online and read more about parvo.

And it turns out, that when you pause to think about how rare it is that you see cute young puppies on walks in the park, the main reason for this is that most cute young puppies are too young to get the parvo vaccination, and 90% of unvaccinated-puppies who catch parvo die.

I sat on Emily’s couch as I learned all this.

“Why are you making that face?” she asked me, as I scrolled, as hard as I could, to find something redeeming so I could tell myself that I hadn’t made a mistake by pushing her dog out into the wild, in the direction that felt most genuine to me.

“Um, so…” I said, my voice lower and shaky, knowing that I was about to deliver un-good news to my helicopter mom of a sister. “I think…maybe all those adventures today…was…not good?”

“What?” she said, “what do you mean?” she squeaked.

I refused to lie. 

God forbid she continued to take him on field trips and then he ended up actually catching parvo and dying because I had not only enabled but also advocated for bad behavior. 

And so I was honest.

And as I recited to her the words on my screen about how it’d take 3-7 days for parvo symptoms to set in, which would most likely be lethargy and then diarrhea and then vomiting and then shortly after, when she’s holding him in her arms, organ failure and then death.

She started crying, so I started crying.

And while Otis sat there, on the ground, chomping on a pile of green felt which formerly identified as an elf hat, Emily and I called our mother, who was probably distracted by KFMB local news and didn’t answer, and then our father who, based on the way which we cried, probably assumed that an entire family had been slaughtered in front of us before he understood the situation, and told us we were out of our minds and then immediately hung up.

But he doesn’t get it. 

He doesn’t know what it’s like.

To look down at your puppy wagging its tail and to know, in the deepest parts of your being, that said puppy has parvo.

He doesn’t get how it feels to stare into the eyes of the cutest little golden retriever that ever did live — a retriever who, in the last few weeks, has amassed 4.5m likes on Instagram, and to be so certainly sure that your retriever is about to die.

He doesn’t know what it’s like to be like this. 

To be scared and nervous, and entirely anxious.

Utterly and completely unwell.

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Questions for all of you, after reading/listening above (please write in the comments below):

1. Video: I’ve been working on trying out video (recording myself performing the piece on camera) but it’s very annoying to do well. I either look like I’m reading or I look too rehearsed. Are there any writers/storytellers you know of who have been able to adapt well to a video format? I’m thinking maybe of TikTok storytellers/YouTube writers who sit in front of a camera and say things that they’ve written, even if they’re pretending that it’s off the cuff.

2. Audio: Was the audio above too cringe without a laugh track? Should it be:

   1. Faster

   2. Slower

   3. More performative in some way

   4. Less performative in some way

Last, but not least, just throwing a shout to to some writers I admire on the platform:

• Dia Becker — just discovered her this morning — this piece was dark and moving and funny and epic and there were at least 5 lines I wanted to save.

• Alex Dobrenko — reading him feels like watching the synapses of someone’s brain fire uncontrollably all over the paper and then all of a sudden it’s been ten minutes and you’ve finished reading a piece of his by accident.

• Elle Griffin — if you’re a writer who wants to learn how to grow on Substack, Elle is a cut above. She’s also an excellent writer who does deep dives on smart governance things like re-imagining governance.

• Michael Estrin — lawyer-turned-writer but I guess he’s still a lawyer. He’s an incredibly easy read and he launched a podcast I’ve been listening to. I really like this episode here — it helped me feel a ton better about not calling myself a failure just because I’m not a full-time writer. Very grateful for his content.

Hey all,

I just had the chance to open for David Sedaris’ audiences at a few of his different shows, which was awesome!

Here’s the audio from one of the nights with a version of this piece I read.

The full written piece is below.

Bounty Hunter

Right now, my boyfriend Ben and I are boarding a Southwest flight. 

We love Southwest, except for the part where there are no assigned seats, and you’re meant to quickly choose the ones you like before they’re taken by the other cattle biting at your heels.

“Is that one open?” I ask the blonde woman who is probably named Janine and works in HR at a 400-person consumer goods company. 

Maybe toothpaste. 

“Yes!” Janine says, standing up so I can make my way to the window.

Ben also picks a window — same row but on the opposite side. We both need sleep.

I take out my laptop and place it on the tray table.

And then, “May I?” asks a handsome giant wearing a bright yellow jacket and a cowboy hat.

You never want someone large next to you. 

Too tall or too wide, it doesn’t matter.

Your best bet is a petite woman who gives you her peanuts because “I’m so full. I could never.” Someone who can pull her legs onto the chair should you need to get to the bathroom. Someone who would never think about battling with you for the armrest, fearful her bird-like elbow might snap.

Not this guy.

This 6’7” monster of a man. 

My boyfriend, on the other hand, is a frail man — like a nerdy Timothy Chalamet, which doesn’t bother me, but one can’t help the mind from wondering what it might be like — to be the one who’s always held.

“How’s it going?” I say to the handsome cowboy, attempting to come across as friendly but not desperate.

People hate desperate.

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The cowboy looks at me with stark blue eyes and a leathered face but says nothing, and instead, repositions himself, wedging his treetrunk legs against the seat back pocket in front of him.

I try again in the more masculine voice I save for when I’m around my fraternity brothers, “You going home?”

“Mhm,” he says, looking down at his Android phone and scrolling through his contacts, leaving me discarded.

But then, “Was up here workin’” he says, and I sigh in relief at what might’ve otherwise been an entire flight of me sitting with loneliness and rejection. 

He continues telling me, in a southern accent as if to highlight his cowboy hat, that he’s an electrical engineer and has been “fixin’ power grids for the city.”.

I spot his dirty fingernails. 

THAT kind of engineer, I think to myself. 

That must be why he’s so big. 

From picking up building stuff. 

Heavy wires. Pylons, whatever those are.  

We’re en route to Austin, and I love Austin. I decide to share this.

“Not for me,” he says. “I’m quite far outside the city. Don’t really care for…Austin-people,” he finishes, in a way that sounds like “pussy-footin' liberals.”

Janine’s ears perk up, nervous about where this is about to go, and though the pit in my stomach tells me to shut my mouth, the sickness in my brain tells me to soldier on.

He says his name is Brady, that he’s not too fond of his engineering work, and that he’d like to spend more of his career doing what he loves.

“What is that?” I ask, imagining him responding with something like “Murdering fags.” 

I cackle inside my head.

“Bounty huntin’,” he says.

“Wait,” my voice cracks, “Really?”

“Yes, sir,” Brady says. And then a small smile spreads across his face.

“Woahhhhh,” I say, pressing my fingers into my legs. “That’s craaaazy.”

Janine chuckles, and though I like idea of all three of us gabbing on for the remainder of the flight, I fear she will most likely end up distracting him from me and I am nothing if not needing of attention.

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The flight attendant comes by.

She tells me that my laptop should be stowed for takeoff, and though I attempt to shove it in the seat back pocket, the pocket is too small. 

“Ugh. It doesn’t fit,” I say, to which Brady responds “that’s what she said,” and I giggle because I want Brady to like me.

I place my laptop on the floor and wonder if Brady now thinks I’m gay, not because of how I handle my laptop but because I don’t know if I responded correctly to his TWSS comment and so now I’m nervous that he’s onto me and at the same time I notice myself staring at his thick legs.

The cabin door closes, and we taxi towards the runway. 

I ask Brady about bounty hunting, and I learn that:

1. Bounty Hunting happens when someone (a defendant) is sentenced to appear in court in a few weeks, for literally anything. During that time, the defendant is stuck in jail, waiting for their court date.

2. A judge gives the defendant the right to leave jail and spend their pre-court time at home, in exchange for the defendant paying bail, which is a deposit that acts as a guarantee to the court, in case the defendant doesn’t show up.

3. If the defendant doesn’t have access to the amount of money that the court is requesting for bail, let’s say $200k, the defendant can get a loan from a bail bondsman, in exchange for paying…let’s say…a $15k deposit to the bondsman.

4. Okay. So, let’s assume they pay the deposit. Now, the bondsman really wants the defendant to show up to court because if the defendant flees, aka “skips bail” the bondsman loses their money — and so, if the amount of money to be lost is high enough, the bondsman will hire a bounty hunter on commission for 10-20% of the total bail amount, for the bounty hunter to go find the defendant and bring them to justice, usually, “by whatever means necessary, as long as the person comes back alive,” Brady says “and we don’t have to follow the usual rules.” 

He half-grins.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, when you sign that bail agreement, you waive your Fourth Amendment rights.”

I don’t know what those are.

“If you’re at your house, we can enter your house without your permission. If you run to a hotel, we’ll follow and chase you down.”

The plane starts to take off, and it’s noisy, so we pause our conversation. 

I look out the window at all the cars passing by and think about how many of the drivers are being hunted. 

The jet engine roars for 25 seconds, which feels like a small enough amount of time for me to dive back in without having to fluff, though I am now nervous that he’s going to grow suspicious of why I’m still talking to him but, to me, that’s a better outcome than me not getting to talk to him at all.

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“How do you find them?” I ask. “Like…the people who are on the run.”

He puts his phone in airplane mode and speaks to me without making eye contact.

“People are always leavin’ breadcrumbs,” he says. “Especially nowadays. Cell phone, credit cards. You can’t do much without someone knowin’ about it. Doesn’t really matter how far you try and go.”

“What’s the farthest you’ve ever had to go to get someone?”

“Mexico,” he says, proud. “A few times.”

“And then what? You just, put them in handcuffs and…walk them over the border?” 

“I tell ’em,” he begins, lifting his chin as if he’s about to say a line from a movie. “You can walk back nicely, or I can drag you back, hogtied.’”

Hot.

I pause to collect myself, and then I think about how weird it would be to be tied in the back of what I assume would be a pickup truck as it crosses the border. 

“Don’t you need…a warrant to like…take people from Mexico?”

Brady hoists himself ever so slightly off the seat to reach for something. He flexes his beefy quads, stretching his jeans enough to reach inside his pants and whip out his ID Card. “National Fugitive Recovery Agent,” it says. 

“That’s all you need?” I ask.

He smiles. “It’s not something most border patrol want to get involved in. They tend to…‘look the other way’.”

I then ask him why people skip bail, and he tells me that they’re scared of being in jail or they’re scared of losing their job or their kids. “Or…they think they’re innocent,” he says, “that the law’s out to get ‘em, and that they’re better off on the run.”

“They think they’ll actually be able to hide,” I say aloud.

“Yup.”

He says people can’t hide though. 

Everyone ends up needing to apply for a job or get on a plane, and “even if you have friends that’ll hide you, eventually you get pulled over for a traffic stop and you’re done.”

“Do people ever try and fight you?” I ask.

“Sometimes,” he says.

I can’t imagine ever trying to fight him. 

I can’t even send back food.

Also, I’d be very confused to see him at my front door. My brain would think, ‘Are you actually here to take me in? And can you say hogtied again?’

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I look out the window for a second. 

Brady takes out his phone and starts playing a mobile game. It looks like Poker. 

I take out my phone but put it on my right side so that Brady can’t see what I’m reading, and I learn that the U.S. and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that have a for-profit bail industry, which makes me think there’s something strange about that, but then I never think about it ever again.

The flight attendant comes by and takes our drink orders. 

Janine gets a Diet Coke, and Brady gets a Jack Daniels. 

I order a hot water because sipping hot water helps me sleep, but after ordering, I think about how unmasculine that order just made me appear, and how I should have chosen something different. 

“Beer,” I could have said. “The one with the most IPA.” That would’ve made Brady like me.

“Hey,” I say to him. “Can I ask more questions or is this annoying?”

He smirks. “It’s fine.”

And so I ask him how he got started bounty hunting, and then he tells me that he had a friend named Kyle who was doing pretty well huntin’ and one day Kyle asked Brady to tag along.

“But…why did you say yes?” I ask. “Did you play a lot of like…Call of Duty or something?” I say, before realizing that a 40-something year old wouldn’t have played COD and that I’m an IDIOT.

“Did karate as a kid,” he says. “And then got into shooting as I got older.”

“Do you own guns?” I ask, trying not to sound like ‘Do you do pot?’

“Mhm.”

“How many?”

“A lot,” he says.

“Do you fly with them?”

“Only smaller pieces.”

I see Janine shift her weight.

“Like…now?”

“Not at this moment,” he says. “And even when I am, I check ’em. No ammo though. You can’t check a gun with ammo — gotta buy that when I land.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I say, thinking about all the people on this plane who have AK47s checked below, though I have no idea what an AK47 looks like or how it’s different than any other gun not called AK47.

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“Have you ever gotten hurt…hunting?” I ask.

“Shot at a few times. Stabbed at twice,” he says slyly.

“You’ve been STABBED?!”.

He laughs. So does Janine, which makes me want to yell “SHUT UP JANINE.” 

“Here,” Brady says, using his large calloused finger to point to his thigh, “here,” to his shoulder, and then “here,” to his abdomen, his voice steady and strong.

I want to see his scars. 

I want to touch them.

Maybe lick them.

Something’s wrong with me. 

Must be the hot water.

“But usually, it doesn’t get that far,” Brady says. “We’ve got tasers and such.” 

“Getting tased sounds terrible,” I say.

“Yeah. And people shit themselves,” he says, “that’s why they make you practice outdoors.”

“Oh, of course that happens, yes,” I say, nodding affirmatively. “Do you call for backup ever? Maybe with Kyle? Like two friends going out…for a hunt?”

Brady’s smile fades. He looks past me. “Not anymore.”

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“Oh. Okay,” I say, wondering if Kyle is dead.

“Kyle’s dead,” Brady says. “Got shot on a job.”

“Ah. That sucks,” I say. “Sorry.”

“It’s part of it,” he says. And then he takes a sip of whiskey.

I bet Brady’s lonely. 

When he texted someone at the start of the flight, he just scrolled through his contacts and then clicked the one he wanted. He might’ve had 45 contacts, in total. He didn’t even type their name. 

Being a bounty hunter must eat at you. 

It must be hard to have to come home and pretend you didn’t just spend a week chasing down someone who believes you ruined their entire life.

“Is it…hard?” I ask him. “Like…the arresting people? Are they sad when you eventually find them?”

“Mm. Sometimes,” he says. “Once. I had to go after a friend of mine. She was also a bounty hunter, actually.”

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“Woah. But she probably knew how to get away, right?”

“Well,” he says. “Funny thing is that…when I came to her house…she was all wide-eyed — just totally forgot about showin’ up to court.”

“Weird.”

I think about getting arrested.

And about how I should have gone to jail a couple of times. 

That one time I got caught driving 105 MPH in a 65 and how I started crying so the cop wrote down that I was only going 86. And how, in college, when weed was still illegal, I accidentally flew with a bunch of weed brownies. And then, once at Target, how I walked out with gum in my pocket that I forgot to pay for. 

I pour the last drop of hot water from the tiny paper cup into my mouth, and I notice myself getting tired, so I bundle up my hoodie as a pillow, put on my eye mask, and lean into the right window. I allow my left arm to settle by my side, nestling in between my small ribcage and Brady’s large elbow, which firmly holds court on the armrest, and though I wish there were room on the armrest for my tiny, bird-like arm, I concede.

I drift off to dream a dream of Brady, and before it gets too interesting, I hear the fasten seatbelt sign turn on, shaking me from my slumber.

I feel Brady’s right elbow touching my left and it feels like home and so I force my left arm to stay where it is while using my right hand to take off my eye mask because this one-way intimacy hinges on the 2.5 square inches of skin conjoining our elbows.

I think about how this will probably be the last time I see Brady. 

Maybe in some other reality, things would be different. 

In some other world, he and I would walk off the plane together, my dainty hand placed in his enormous one, and we’d leave the terminal via horseback, galloping out to his ranch outside of Austin where we’d grow maize and tobacco, and tell people that we “live off the land.” 

“Muther,” one of our three muscular kids would say to me, “you’re so frail and delicate, like a reed in the wind.” 

“I know, Wyatt,” I’d say, smiling, readjusting my thin, blue bonnet, “you and Clayton are also so burly and strong. One day, you’ll grow up to be great big hunters, just like your dad!” 

And then I’d look over to Darlene, who wasn’t able to escape the inheritance of her father’s broad shoulders, and I’d pray she finds herself a lesbian.

“Flight attendants, prepare for landing,” says the PA, snapping me out of visions of a better life.

I see Brady texting. 

It’s a selfie from someone named Tricia. 

She sits in the driver’s seat of a minivan, and though I want her to look like a whore, she seems warm.

A small smile spreads across Brady’s face, which stirs something deep inside me called betrayal.

As we touch down, Janine stands, followed by Brady, who doesn’t say goodbye, and instead, I accidentally catch the eyes of a miniature man who calls himself Ben.

“You didn’t even look at me!” my boyfriend snaps as we meet in the aisle. “I kept looking over at you the whole flight and all you did was talk to that hot cowboy!”

“Bounty hunter,” I say.

“What?”

“He’s a bounty hunter,” I say, stepping into the terminal. 

As Ben’s hand reaches for mine, I notice how small it is, and in the far distance, amongst of sea of bobbing heads, I spot a cowboy hat bouncing high above the rest, and I think about a different existence: one with a giant muscle-for-hire husband, on a farm outside the city — a better life.

Okay. So…..questions for you guys (please answer below in the comments):

1. How does this style compare to other stuff of mine you’ve read? For example, this piece was similar to Witch, where it’s not really about me at all. In both pieces, I just sort of sit there as a framing device for comic relief. Wondering if you would have wanted: A) More of Alex, B) More of Brady C) More of Bounty Hunter Industry (more like…$ and taxpayers burden of holding people in jail [I had a whole bit about this that I cut from the piece because it felt too drawn out])

2. Would you rather this have been shorter? The world is changing. We’re used to TikTok. How do I possibly get distribution on TikTok when my style is so long-form? Should I cut it up? Should I look into the microphone and put the camera close to my face and just try reading 1-2 minutes of this? All suggestions are helpful!

3. If I turned my writing into audio (and I narrated all of my pieces), is that something any of you would ever want to listen to?

xo tysm etc.

If you want to read another piece, here ya go:

I used to have a therapist, but no longer. 

Instead, I now speak to a witch. 

The choice to change from a normal therapist to a witch wasn’t unfounded. 

I’ve had five psychologists throughout my life.

When I was 9, there was our family therapist Emily, and then at 16, there was Elliot, and then after college, I went back to Emily for one single session.

My mother was still a patient of hers at the time, and I wanted Emily’s advice on how I should go about telling my mother I was gay.

Emily said, very directly, that it would not go well.

She also said that my mother was very spatially associated and that I should come out to my mother at a place she would never need to go back to, or drive by, or think about, or be reminded of. 

Maybe somewhere abroad. 

Perhaps Guam.

But I didn’t have time for that, and so I took my mother to a park far away from her home and then told her I was gay. 

She’s never been back to that park.

“Park of misfortune,” she calls it.

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At 23, I started seeing Therapist Dan, who I found myself attracted to. 

And, at 26, I saw Brian, who was good, but then I got bored. Or, I guess we got bored, as if we were digging for problems to fill the time, and that’s always annoying because, after a while, you begin to measure the silence in dollars.

But now, I see Francee. My witch.

She’s not a licensed therapist by any means, but I don’t care about that.

I’m lucky to have had very few real problems, and even the largest traumas that have come my way, like when I was 9 years old, and my mom’s 19-year-old Vietnamese student who was living with us started asking me to lick her nipples, all ended up quite well for me, insofar as by the time I turned 10, I started asking Anh if I could lick her nipples and she said no, but now, as I write this, I realize that perhaps I’m not being self-compassionate enough and that maybe Anh was my first rejection.

Something to belabor with $7/minute Brian.

But Francee has been through much more than adolescent nippling. 

I think that’s why I trust her. 

All of my prior therapists were well-off, liberal-enough 30 to 50-something-year-olds who decided, when they were 20, to become people who could spend the rest of their lives sitting in a chair, giving advice with underdeveloped eyes through tiny lenses.

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But not Francee. 

“Well, when my girlfriend and I used to have her kids over we—”

“You had a girlfriend?” I asked.

“Oh! I never told you about that time I was a lesbian for seven years?” she laughed before telling me about April and then Carolyn.

I’m not surprised. 

I mean, she looks like she could be a lesbian — albeit a feminine one. 

Not that lesbians can’t be feminine, but you get it. 

She has short blonde hair and a beautiful smile, like a pretty Guy Fieri.

Regardless, I like that she tells me about her past loves.

Regular therapists never do that. 

I remember crying to Brian about how Mark, someone I had been on two dates with, rejected me, and I remember Brian saying: 

“It’s important to examine why this rejection is having such a strong impact on you.”

No doubt that he was right. 

No doubt I was overreacting to a very run-of-the-mill situation of someone telling someone else they’re not enough. 

Someone telling me no. 

Someone like that bitch, Anh.

But that’s not what I wanted from Brian. I wanted him to tell me that everyone gets rejected and that he’s been rejected, and I wanted to know what rejection felt like for him.

That’s what Francee, my spiritual healer, would do. 

Sure, maybe she’d also pull a tarot card and tell me about how I should use my “sword of light to sever my connections to negative self-stories,” but in addition, I’d learn about that time her ex-husband cheated on her with her best friend.

And then she’d tell me about how she used to be depressed, but how, whether accidentally or intentionally, she crashed her car, head-on, into a semi, and that shook her into turning her life around.

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I want that kind of person talking to me. 

Someone who can objectively tell me how my problems are non-problems. 

I remember once being in a rut about health stuff. 

I was complaining to her about how a doctor gave me bad advice, and then she told me how a doctor once refused to give her an abortion.

“Well, actually,” she began, as she stepped out of a barn in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, “I guess it wasn’t an abortion,” she said. “The doctor said no to fixin’ me. I was 16 and had just had a kid, and I didn’t want to get pregnant again, but he said he wouldn’t fix me until I was at least 21 and married with two kids.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s very specific of him, right?”

“Very specific!” and then she laughed, though I’m not sure why, but she laughed in the way she always does. In the way that children do, where, for that moment, it’s all-consuming, and they smile from ear to ear, unafraid of being too much or too open for a world that has yet to tell them to laugh more softly. “And then a few months later, I got pregnant again and my husband wouldn’t let me have an abortion so…”

“So you kept that one too?” I asked.

“Yes,” she giggled, “Yes, I did.” 

It’s always like this. 

She tells me about who she’s been, and I listen, unable to add anything to the trials and tribulations of her rich, colorful life.

My friend Nat doesn’t think I should take advice from Francee. 

That a person who’s been divorced three times shouldn’t tell me what to do with my relationship. That someone who lives out of their truck shouldn’t tell me what to do with my career. 

But I think it’s because she lives out of her truck that I trust her.

Because when I tell her about how I’m stressed about a client who owes me money, she can tell me what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck while raising a meth addict and moving to rural Alabama for the love of her life, just so he could divorce her and leave her with nothing. 

Not even an abortion.

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I don’t know where I’m supposed to find a support system like that.

Someone who will take my unscheduled 5 to 10-minute calls, once or twice a week because my privileged struggles have, yet again, broken me into pieces, and I desperately need someone to glue me back together.

And when, occasionally, I have to deal with her saying, “Alex, I see you haven’t looked at your cards in a few weeks,” as a response to me not having opened her last 37 WhatsApp messages, I respond with, “Francee I…” and my voice trailing off to silently remind her that I don’t care about tarot, and then we pause to acknowledge the two-wayness of this relationship wherein I pay her to pick up phone calls about my non-problems, and in exchange, she gets to send me stuff that I choose not to read. But such are the quirks of working with the best ear I’ve ever paid.

“I know,” she says, “but it’s there when you need it.”

And sometimes, I do need it. 

When my TikTok grows tired, and there’s no new episode of Wheel of Time, and my boyfriend isn’t home for me to complain at.  

I open up WhatsApp and look at the last 5 cards she’s pulled. 

“Nourishment,” the last card says, with a picture of a woman with her arms widespread in a Garden of Eden. “Nourish your body, mind, and spirit. Your jealousy or envy are a sign of what you’re hungering for. Pay attention to your health.”

“Sure,” I think to myself, imagining all the people I’m jealous of and all the terrible things I’d like to have happen to them. 

And then I’ll think about why I’m jealous, and maybe it’s because they’re famous well-known writers, and I’m famously not.

But then, as I walk to the fridge and am faced with the choice of a double chocolate chip cookie and an apple, I pay attention to my health and reach for the fruit.

But I don’t tell Francee that. 

The witch can’t know that she has that kind of power. 

She can’t know that anything she does besides answering my calls has any effect. 

God forbid she stops picking up, and she becomes someone else in my life.

Someone who disregards my wants and needs. 

Someone like that bitch, Anh.

Would love to know if you’ve ever done any weird mental health stuff (drugs/shamans/morning affirmations/etc.) — Please write them in the comments below so I can try things that don’t work and then write about them thanks!

“No one looked at me today when I walked home from work,” he said to her. And he’s handsome. But he has wrinkles and his hair has greyed.

And I get it. Because Todd took pictures of me last weekend. Pictures of a man I almost recognized — with a creased neck and a hairline that once was.

And I think back to 2 months ago. 

At Bar Palma. And how many more times than usual I smiled at strangers as if to ask them if I still had it, and how many more times than usual their eyes jumped away as if to tell me that I did not.

I think about having kids. 

And what that would be like. 

And what it would do to my mediocre career of Almosts. Swings untaken. Or taken and missed. And I think what I’d need to happen for me to be proud. And how I don’t know what that would be.

I see how they’re tired. My friends who are parents. And how they’re grateful. Or maybe distracted. As if having a family hedges against failing to figure out who you are.

And I fear what I’ll have to show. 

If I stay both unknowing and also without.

And I wonder what else there is. 

What else there might be. 

But maybe there isn’t. 

Maybe getting older is just coming to terms with walking home unnoticed.

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Hangzhou, China: a real-life, tech-enabled police state where Big Brother monitors its citizens' every move. Where a jaywalker might be deemed "untrustworthy" and be prohibited from buying plane tickets. Where someone who plays music too loudly might be denied a loan. Or where someone who honks in traffic might be fired from their job.

Most people can't imagine living in an environment like that.

But I can.

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“Alex,” said Bernadette, our HOA’s best asset against oppositionists, “is someone moving into your apartment right now?” 

It was 12pm on a Sunday, and Ben had decided to bring a couch and a couple of boxes over to Vernazza, my Miami apartment. There was no moving van outside.  No dolly or U-Haul boxes littering the hallway. No double-parked cars nor elevators commandeered for exclusive use.

And yet, Bernadette Berry, who does not even live in our building, somehow had a hunch that something was awry.

“Oh. Um,” I began, caught off-guard, “my boyfriend was just giving me some furniture.”

“Is he moving in?”

“No. Well. Yes, but not right now. He’ll be moving in in a few weeks…” I said, my voice shaking.

“Not without the HOA’s approval, he won’t be.”

“Oh, um,” I said, staring at Ben who was taking pieces of his ugly art and holding it up to my clean walls. He noticed the concerned look on my face. “What is it?” he whispered.

“Well,” I said to Bernadette, “what do you need me to do to get him approved?”

She let out a sigh as if listening to me made her tired. “Alex, it’s in the bylaws that you signed when you moved in.”

“Oh, I—”

“First, I need a note from your landlord saying that she’s okay with your partner becoming a co-habitant. Second, I need your partner to fill out a full application and pay the $150 application fee, AND include references which we may or may not be calling. And then, if and only if the HOA would like to interview him, which again, is not guaranteed, he’ll need to have a meeting with a current owner of another unit in the building, not a resident, but an owner, who will need to approve him.”

I relaxed my stomach. I’ve been working on that. Remaining calm, etc. “Okay. That all sounds doable.” I tried changing my tone. “Sorry…it’s just been crazy. He’s been on a super rough shift at the hospital and—”

“—and that’s great, Alex. Send me that note from your landlord when you get a chance. And again, just reiterating, your partner is not to move in until you receive our approval. In writing.”

“Okay, that’s-”

“-have a nice day.”

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I often wonder how much Bernadette gets paid. I’ve lived at Vernazza, a 4-story, 25-unit condo building with no amenities, besides its free third-reich year-round larp event, for two and a half years and I’ve come to believe that throughout my entire life, Bernadette is the most diligent person I’ve ever met.

I don't know how she does it. Music too loud after 10pm? Email in your inbox the next morning. Failure to break down your package? Email the same day. Bicycle unregistered? Booted within the hour.

“You saw the notice about the guy in 208?” I once asked Ben as he walked in after a long day at work.

“Of course, I saw it,” he said. “That’s crazy that they’re allowed to do that. It must be illegal.” He said, referring to the flyer.

It read: The building gets fined when you put recyclables in the trash! Please be more careful!

The message itself was kosher. But below the message was a picture of Resident 208 standing by our dumpster. 

Bernadette, or one of her cronies, had gone through our building’s security footage and found a clip of the guy from 208 tossing a pizza box into the garbage. The footage was then paused, screenshot, printed out, and then taped around our elevators and stairwells.

“Someone’s gonna come after her one day,” I said to Ben. “I’m convinced.”

I was complaining about this to one of my friends, Molly Turner, who told me that I should be grateful that there’s someone who cares about the building, and as she says this I grow suspicious, and wonder if Molly, one of my best friends, is actually a plant, paid to further the HOA’s cause. 

“Remember how bad that duplex situation was?” Molly asked me, referring to a duplex we once shared.

Once, we were watching TV and noticed our downstairs neighbor Tara, arguing with someone, and they were loud so we turned up the TV.  A few hours later, Tara asked us if we heard them yelling, to which we responded “Yes, but it wasn’t a big deal,” to which Tara replied that “it was a big deal because that meth-y homeless lady was trying to steal my Amazon package,” and this concerned Molly and me because we were waiting on a new set of silicon turquoise spatulas.

“Ugh, maybe you’re right,” I said to Molly on the phone, “maybe it’s better this way.” And then I sat at my dining room table, staring at my front door, slowly believing that Bernadette’s propaganda had finally started to work.

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It happened over a set of weeks, and I began to notice that I began to notice.

A group of 16-year-olds I didn’t recognize stumble out of 201 — potentially Airbnb-ing, which, according to the bylaws, is not allowed. A new-sounding, high-pitched bark coming from 307 — perhaps an unapproved dog. Or a home-sweet-home doormat outside of 108, violating line 14 which clearly says “no doormats, potted plants, or other decor paraphernalia may occupy the shared hallways.”

And then this morning, I was walking through our downstairs lobby and noticed David Pearson, one of the owners, not residents, but owners, pacing along the southern wall. He was searching for something. My own eyes made their way to the glass table at the center of the lobby, atop which usually stands a 20” Cupid statue made of white plaster resembling something you’d find at a flea market for $9.75.

Today, however, the Cupid statue’s head was missing. 

I gasped.

“I know,” said David from the far corner of the room as he lifted up couch cushions and dug through trash cans searching for the decapitated head. “It’s terrible.”

“Who would do such a-”

“-some drunk girls,” he responded. “At least that’s what it looked like on the video. I’m still working on who they are and who they were visiting.”

“Terrible. Such terrible people,” I said, distraught. “And the fact that they’re friends with someone here...”

“I know,” David Pearson replied. “We’ve gotta get to the bottom of this, Alex. At first, it’s just a statue’s head, but then…well…these things are a slippery slope.”

I nodded.

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Anyway, that was this morning. 

Now, Ben and I sit at the dinner table.

“Can you believe it?” I ask him.

He picks up his plate as he walks to the kitchen. “It’s not a big deal,” he says.

“What do you mean? It’s literally been in this building for years. People love that statue. And now it’s destroyed. Don’t you think that’s horrible?” I say, following him to the sink.

“No,” he says, “It’s just a dumb statue.”

How dare he. Something’s off about him, I think to myself, as he walks to the bathroom to brush his teeth. 

Over the past few weeks, he’s been less grateful than he should be about Vernazza. I suspect he might know something about the drunk girls. Something he doesn’t want me to find out.

“Wanna finish watching Halo?” he asks me from the bathroom, as if everything is okay.

“No,” I say, “it’s just a dumb show,” and then I pick up a book from the table “I might go read.”

“Oh. Um. Okay. Weird,” he says. 

I turn and leave and as I enter the bedroom, change into PJs and lift up our grey duvet, I reflect on the evils of the world as I’ve come to know it. Criminals, in OUR lobby, I think to myself. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ben sit down on the couch and turn on the TV, while I begin to immerse myself in this new book I’ve just purchased about how democracies always fail.

From the living room, the TV plays loudly. 

“Hey! Can you turn it down?” I yell. “I don’t wanna bother the neighbors.”

“It’s fine,” Ben responds.

“Ben,” I say.

“It’s at 32. There’s no way they can hear it.”

“It’s loud,” I say.

“It’s fine,” he says back.

Who does he think he is? Not only is this my apartment, but to be so selfish on a day like today…on a day where the serenity of Vernazza is already hanging by a thread.

As I return my gaze to my book, not that I’m in any state to read, my eyes pass over our bedroom wall, catching his ugly art, and it hits me. And I know what I have to do next. And so I reach for my phone and begin drafting an email to Bernadette — a noise complaint, for Ben, a resident in 402.

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My sister’s car was broken into a few days ago. 

The thief, if you can even call him that, didn’t take much. 

Also, I guess it might not be a him — could be her or even a them. But that doesn’t feel accurate.

“He stole a pair of sunglasses from TJ Maxx and an angel pendant I had hanging from the rearview mirror,” my sister, Emily told me on the phone. “Oh and around 200 UPS receipts.”

“200 UPS receipts?” I asked.

“Yeah. Super annoying, right?”

“No. I mean. Sure, but, why did you have 200 UPS receipts?”

“Well, I return a lot of things,” she said.

“But 200? Why do you save the receipts? How much stuff do you buy?” I said, looking around my apartment where Ben and I have decided that if we buy an article of clothing, we have to throw an article away. Or “give” it away, if anyone is asking.

“Did he break the car window?”

“No,” she said, “I still don’t know how he got in.”

“Well then…how do you know he broke in? Maybe Mark just threw away your receipts and you guys forgot?”

She scoffed. “No. Because I had them yesterday when I went to the UPS store but then when I went again today, I opened the glove compartment and they were gone.”

“You went to the UPS Store both days?”

“I had a lot to return.”

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My sister is very much herself. 

She knows who she is and has no interest in being anyone else. I wish I were like that instead of always running. Like a squirrel. Or maybe a ferret. From job to job or city to city. Searching for something that fits. Wearing a boy scout uniform in San Diego or misogynistic frat bro letters in Chicago, a funeral director’s suit in LA, or a gay marketer’s LinkedIn headshot in Miami — silk after silk, looking for something that sits right.

For Emily, though, everything seems perfectly snug.

“I want to be a mom and have two kids and a golden retriever,” she’s said for the past five years.

“Well. Do you care where you live?”

“Somewhere not cold.”

“What about your job?”

“I don’t know. Something that pays enough to have two kids and a golden retriever. I don’t really care what it is. I’ll figure it out.”

And she will. 

Last week, she took me to a golden retriever festival where every breed of golden could be found. 

“Need to pick out the right one,” she said

When I was younger, I viewed her as complacent. Lazy and undermotivated. But now, I envy her.

I once got a text from my roommate.

“You should check on Emily,” it said.

And so, like any concerned brother would do, I called. But Emily didn’t answer. And that’s because she was busy. 

Crying. 

And not only crying but crying, sprawled out on the cold concrete floor of the Burbank Ikea because they had mailed her the wrong latch to her nightstand and the customer service department had closed earlier than Emily had planned. And Emily, my dear sister, was determined to make it clear to all the employees and especially their customers, that she had been wronged and that she was not leaving until she received the correctly sized silver-painted latch she deserved.

“But what if you saw someone you know?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t really think about that.”

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My dad is like this too. 

Once, at a CVS, there was a very long line at the pharmacy. And when it was finally his turn, the pharmacist refused to honor a GoodRx coupon on his sildenafil (generic Viagra), which, after the discount, should have totaled $12 for 30 pills, which is around 80% off the typical retail price.

“I’ve been coming here for years,” my father, a disheveled-looking 66-year-old man with velcro sandals and a cane, said to the young female pharmacist, “I know how this works, and this is a valid coupon code.” 

The two of them went back and forth about expirations and policies and I still don’t know if he was in the right, but regardless, he looked her in the eyes, and with everyone in line staring he said,

"Hey. I don’t think you understand. I have absolutely nothing to do,” he tightened his grip on the cane that I don’t believe he actually needs, “and I’m not moving from this counter until you give me my pills at the right price.” 

She readied a response, “Sir we—”

But she was no match.

“—If I were you,” he said, again, in front of many people, who were, at that moment, experiencing what would hopefully become a core memory, “I’d call the police and have them drag me out of here. And while you’re busy doing that, I’ll call the local news. It would be the proudest moment of my life for the television to say ‘Today an old man was arrested at the CVS on Navajo Road while attempting to purchase his medicine’.” 

A few minutes later, she handed him his pills. She charged him $12.

I don’t know if I could do that. Even if it was justified. God forbid someone were to look at me weird. Or remember me in some less-than-bright light.

I remember asking my sister about the IKEA incident.

“Weren’t you embarrassed?” I asked.

“Why would I be embarrassed?”

“I don’t know. Because you’re an adult and adults don’t do those things.”

“Well. I got the latch, so…”

And maybe she’s right. 

Who knows how many times in my life I’ve given up. Thrown up a white flag stemming from self-imposed shame that clawed its way out of a pile of ill-fitting clothes. And how many more times my life could’ve been better — maybe filled with rightfully earned silver latches or discounted Viagras.

Maybe even a golden retriever.

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“It’s hard to be an old person,” my great-aunt says on the phone to me. “I spend most of the day calling to figure out how to change my Times subscription, or fix the bill for Murray’s rehab, or fight with the state about that letter for our house on Fire Island.”

“Rose,” I begin, “Can’t you just get all of that done online? You’re good with your phone,” I say, remembering that she once FaceTimed me before I remember that that was an accident.

“I’m terrible with my phone,” she says. “It haunts me! I should’ve been born a century earlier,” and I hear her breathe heavily, maybe a bit more heavily than usual, as something loud slams behind her. Their black front door. New York apartment doors always slam like that.

“Why not be born a century later?” I ask.

“No. Things were better before,” she says.

“Well, a century before, women couldn’t vote which… to be clear…is something I agree with, but…”

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She ignores me, and I hear what sounds like the rustling of grocery bags.

“People cared about each other more back then,” she says. “Families lived together, and there was a community to catch you, if God forbid you were to fall.”

I hear her walking around her apartment, wearing what I imagine to be an olive green winter coat and her cute round golden glasses. She’s the grandmother I never had. I hear a clanking sound. Maybe she’s putting something on the counter. Maybe in the kitchen.

She lives on the Upper East Side with my Uncle Murray in a tiny two-bedroom apartment. The windows are always too cracked, and the radiator is always too loud. It’s one of those old steam radiators where it sounds like a monkey is banging a wrench on a set of pipes. My aunt and uncle don’t mind though. The longer you live in a rent-controlled apartment, the harder it is to leave.

I remember visiting them when I was a kid. I must’ve been 6 or 7, in town from my family’s safe San Diegan suburb. My mother was at a wedding or a funeral, and I stayed in their guest bedroom while Murray and Rose slept across the hall. I didn’t like New York at night. A bunch of strangers in a building, all waiting to kidnap me — boogeymen lurking just beyond the loud-slamming door.

I couldn’t sleep. I walked to their bedroom and knocked. I heard my aunt’s footsteps approaching, and then she flung open the bedroom door, wearing a CPAP Darth Vader-style mask.

I screamed.

“Everything okay?” she asked as she ripped the machine off her face.

“What does he want?” my uncle yelled from the darkness.

“I’m scared,” I said

“He's scared,” she said, turning behind her.

“Scared of what?” yelled the far-away voice.

“What are you scared of?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. Just…,” my toes curled, “noises.”

“He said he’s scared of noises.”

“What kind of noises?” yelled my uncle.

And this went on for a minute or two until they told me there was nothing to be afraid of and that I should get to bed.

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“Where’s Murray?” I ask my aunt on the phone while she unpacks groceries in the kitchen.

“He’s in the hospital.” 

“Again?” I ask.

“He never left.”

I want to ask her ‘what for,’ but I don’t remember what lured him in last, and I don’t want to get caught as uncaring, so instead, I ask if he’s doing okay.

“No,” she says, “he can’t even stand.”

“Is he…getting better?” I ask, hoping to suss out the cause.

“They don’t know. He has COVID but I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“What do you think it is then?”

“I think he’s old,” she says.

“Hm,” I say, letting the ‘hm’ hang there, not knowing if I’m supposed to ask her if she thinks he’s going to get better while not wanting to ask and have her tell me he won’t. But it feels like she wants me to ask. “Is he going to get better?”

“What am I, the doctor?” she says. And then I feel her smile. 

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For Rose, life is meant to be joked about. Nothing is off-limits.

Four years ago, we were at an Italian restaurant, and I noticed that Murray’s neck had curved and maybe…hardened, if that’s how necks work. And it hardened and curved so much that he couldn’t lift his chin and instead was looking at me out the tops of his eyes. I imagined it was sad for him, as a still-working cartoonist, to not be able to look left and right and up and down to see all the curious scenes he could draw. And for her, to watch someone she cared for shrink and fall more and more into constant pain.

I called her a week after the visit. “Rose,” I said, “what’s wrong with Murray’s neck?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said,   

“Why is he hunched over?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve never asked him?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“That’s his problem. I’ve got my own problems,” she said. “These knees!” She laughed. “And this wrist. Now, these are problems.”

And they were.

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But Murray and Rose are fighters, trying their best not to let the body rule the mind. Sure, the two of them have health problems, but they also have places to go and people to bother.

A few years ago, my uncle was on a Subway, sitting next to a couple of Chinese tourists, when he noticed a pain in his chest. His defibrillator kicked in like it had many times before, and while sitting upright next to the tourists, he started involuntarily convulsing as the machine shocked him back to life. The couple, having no idea what was wrong with this seizing old man, stared in horror.

Moments later, he came to. 

And then he turned to them and, with what I imagine to be perfect delivery, said, “Don’t mind me.” Then he paused calmly, “I’m just having a heart attack.”

At the next stop, he climbed the stairs and called an ambulance.

“Remember that time with the Chinese tourists?” I ask her on the phone.

“Ha,” she chuckles, “of course. Still the same old Murray.”

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“Yeah.” I say before pausing. “How about you?” I ask. 

“What about me?” she says.

“You feeling okay? You’re not gonna die on me anytime soon, right?”

“Ha. I’m terrible. But, no, I have a bit more time,” she says, confident. “I am more tired though.”

“Tired from what?” I ask before almost saying, ‘you don’t do anything besides whine about calling service providers,’ but I know that wouldn’t be nice, so I don’t say that.

“I don’t know, but the tiredness feels different,” she says. “I’ll sleep for 12 or 13 hours a day and feel exhausted. I think I’m just old,” she says, and as she says this, I imagine her looking at photos on her wall: a Rose from 30 years ago, standing at my mother's wedding, or maybe a Rose from 60 years ago, standing at her own. A woman less wrinkled. More spry. One who could dance and leap and wonder and dream and believe that her situation would get better — a Rose who hoped.

“Well…” I say as I prepare to deliver a 33-year-old’s mediocre advice about aging with gratitude and grace, but before I can do so, she thankfully cuts me off.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s nothing I’m afraid of. I just don’t enjoy being alive as much as I used to. It’s not fun in this world when you’re my age. Everything is impossible. I’m exhausted,” she says. 

I hear something that sounds like Rose placing a pan on a stove, and I look at my phone to see that it’s late for her, 915p.

“Are you cooking?”

“Yes dear. I was visiting Murray at the hospital, and I haven’t eaten yet.” She breathes again and moves something else around. “Actually, I should go,” she finishes, and now I’m tempted to ask her why she isn’t just getting Uber Eats, but I know that that would cause more stress to her than it’s worth — another task that she’d deem impossible.

“Okay,” I say. “Well. Go cook, then. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

We hang up, and for the first time in my life, I worry about her.

Not because the conversation we just had might end up being our last, though that might be true. And not because her visit to the hospital today might end up being the last time she’ll ever see Murray, though that also might be the case. But rather, because when she tells me that her life is sad and hard and lonely, and I picture her, as an 85-year-old with no nearby kids or family, in a rickety apartment, late at night, with not-so-working knees and rusty old wrists, leaning over the stove, trying to squint through her fogged-up round golden glasses so she can cook dinner for one, and I imagine her thinking to herself that her life, as it is now, might not be all that worth it, all I can think about is that she might be right.

.

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We’re in the back of a taxi.

Our angry driver speeds down a road in the hills of rural Vietnam, and as we pull around the corner, a Vietnamese boy, who’s maybe 14, flags us down. 

“You are Alex, yes?” asks Chue, the son of Alice, our Airbnb host. He smiles, showing off a set of crooked teeth. 

Ben and I get out of the cab.

Chue is excited to meet us. He seems gentle and kind. Maybe gay. 

He’s wearing cargo shorts, a soccer jersey, and a pair of red and blue velcro sandals with the words “Go Fun Sky!” printed on the side.

Our white-tank-top tattooed driver yells at Chue in Vietnamese, which is a language that I very much do not speak, but I guess he’s yelling because Chue’s home, which is off a dirt road with no posted address or signs or cell service, was difficult to find. The driver is loud; the kind of loud you’d expect him to be if Chue had gotten him fired from a job or had been screwing his wife or maybe son, but 14-year-old Chue yells even louder, causing the driver to back down and me to think myself a weak man.

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Chue leads Ben and me up a poorly paved cement road through overgrown bamboo trees. 

Every few feet, a gap in the bamboo forest opens up, letting us glimpse the rice fields below. It’s stunning. Tiny lakes with green grass poking out the top, all shelved into a hillside, like steps climbing towards the top of a mountain. 

Each rice field belongs to a family, so each field sits next to a small bamboo home. We pass a home on our right with the words “Homestay Friendly Times 1” carved into a sign on the door out front. Below it: “Welcome” “Salut” “ברוך הבא”

The sound of our suitcase wheels dragging along the cement path causes an obese woman in her 50s to step out of her doorway, breasts first. I mean, her breasts are covered, but her loose pink shirt and lack of bra trick the mind. She seems surprised to see us, but smiles and waves warmly in a way that I interpret to mean “Hello, Whites.” She then shouts to Chue, who shouts back without changing course, so I assume this woman is not the owner of the Airbnb.

“You stay with Alice?” she asks me as we walk by. “Where you from?”

“America,” I say. “And yes, we’re staying with Alice. Do you know her?”

“Oh yes okay. How long you stay?”

“Three days.” 

“Oh okay. I see you!” She says, watching us go.

Vietnamese people in the mountains are kind, I decide. So friendly and in love with life. It’s also so great that she knows Alice. Everyone here knows each other. The sense of community amongst these Hmong Villagers is stronger than that of my vapid life with the self-absorbed residents of Miami.

Twenty feet down the road, we approach a 10-foot cement wall that wraps around the perimeter of what looks like a compound. As we enter, three dogs who seem to live here run up, barking. I don’t think they like us. Chue yells at them and does some sort of masculine “tsk tsk” sound, and so they run away. Perhaps Chue is not gay. 

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“Are they friendly?” Ben asks him. 

Chue seems confused.

“Three dogs,” Chue says.

“But what are their names?” Ben asks.

“We call them Dog.”

“But then how do they know who is who?” I ask.

“We say Dog. They look. They know.”

A woman walks out of the home. She looks to be in her late 50s. Long black hair with streaks of gray, all wrapped in a bun. She wears a pair of blue capris and a red t-shirt that says “Paris.” 

“Ben! Alex!,” she says, excited. “ I Alice. So good seeing you!” She asks us about our trip and apologizes for her homestay being difficult to find.

We tell her not to worry and that we’re happy we’ve arrived.

Alice walks us over to a 7-foot wall map of the Sapa Valley and orients us on the valley and our stay. Over the next two days, Ben and I will be the only guests staying with her family. We’re actually the first guests she’s had in 18 months – COVID decimated the Sapa tourist economy. She couldn’t be more pleased to have us. 

“Maybe now more people come,” she says, and it sounds like a prayer.

A few years ago, Sapa had become Insta-worthy. Overnight, the residents of the valley were lifted from absolute poverty to almost-low-income. She and her husband took what little money they had and built three tiny shacks to house more dormers. The month they finished, COVID hit, and they lost everything.

“For dinner,” she says, “you message you say you want vegetarian yes?”

“Yes,” Ben says. “If that’s alright.”

“Yes okay,” she says.

We make our way to our cottage. On our left, we pass a stunning view of more fields and valleys. On our right, a 14-year-old girl holds a baby. Maybe it’s Alice’s other child.

“Hi, I’m Eve.”

“Hi Eve.”

“I am wife of Chue (not gay) and this is our baby, Kim.”

“So cute,” Ben says.

We ask Eve about hiking in Sapa. 

She tells us that she and Alice both offer trekking options for hire and that we shouldn’t go on our own because we will probably get lost. I ask her how much it costs, and she says that “it’s $30 per person for a 6-hour trekking,” and though I realize that this is twice as much as our nightly room rate, she continues, saying that “much people get hurt a lot trekking because there are no signs and Google Maps cannot work and there is no phone service and you can be lost maybe one or two days.”  

We agree to pay the bounty.

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Ben and I settle into our room and take in the scene: the valley is gorgeous. Each rice field is perfectly manicured. Scattered buffalo plow the mud. Chickens and dogs play outside. It’s paradise.

“I can’t believe that’s Eve’s baby,” I say.

“I know, right? Maybe she’s older and just looks young,” Ben says.

“Must be this simple, relaxing life.”

—

It’s dinnertime, and we sit with the whole family. 

There’s Alice’s husband, a couple of children between 12-20 years old, and two new unattributed babies. The family doesn’t talk much to one another, but they don’t seem bothered by it, unlike my loud Jewish family, where we all act as each other’s punching bags for problems we’ll never resolve.

The food is rice, eggs, a tomato dish, green beans, and veggie spring rolls. It tastes fresh.

“Are you guys usually vegetarian?” Ben asks Alice.

“Oh no, we no vegetarian, but you say vegetarian.”

“Oh,” Ben begins, “I’m sorry I didn’t realize you all would have to eat vege—”

“—No no,” Alice interrupts, “vegetarian better for us. Less money. Meat expensive,” she says, scooping some rice onto the plate that belongs to the baby on her left. “Homestay guests we usually make meat. Make them happy. But vegetables less money. Better for me.”

“So interesting,” I begin. “In America, it’s actually just as expensive to eat vegetables. Vegetarian diets sometimes even cost more.” A spring roll crunches in my mouth. “Meat is actually cheaper,” I say definitively as if I’ve ever read past any headline.

“Wow. America great for me,” Alice says. “I love meat.”

“So interesting,” I repeat again.

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One of the teenage-looking dinner guests gets up from their seat and moves to the floor on the other side of the room to watch Vietnamese TikTok.

We all eat in silence for a bit, and then the front door opens, welcoming in the breast-first woman who still wears her pink shirt. She sits next to Alice but doesn’t touch the food, and then, studying Ben and me with her eyes, she whispers to Alice in Vietnamese, and though I have no idea what she’s saying, I think she’s wondering if Ben and I are gay together because, in my view of the world, which revolves around me, my sexuality and I are all anyone ever talks about.

“A lot of people traveling again?” Breasts asks. 

We tell her that we don’t know because after leaving the U.S., we’ve only been to Hanoi, but it seems like she wants us to say something closer to, “Lots of tourists are coming to Sapa soon. You’ll be back in business in no time.”

“When was the last time you were in Hanoi?” I ask, looking to Alice while taking another bite.

“I no go Hanoi. I no leave Sapa,” she says.

“Never?” I say. “I mean, it’s pretty close,” I continue, tone-deaf to poverty while failing to realize that a six-hour shuttle, each way, isn’t “close.”

“I go two times my whole life,” Alice says. 

There’s a heavy silence.

It’s a moment that Ben or I should say, “Ohhhhh, totally. I get it. And we hate Hanoi. Hanoi sucks.” But instead, we don’t say anything and so we all just sit in a silence that’s made louder by the fact that there are still eight other people around the dinner table who are all eating to themselves, and Ben and I aren’t sure if they understand the dialogue and are disgusted by our economic insensitivity, or if they’re actually not disgusted by us, but rather are ashamed of themselves because of something we’ve said. Or actually maybe they’re not thinking about any of it at all.

Two more children finish eating and walk to the far corner to charge their phones and Tok.

Ben and I rest our forks on our plates. 

“Okay,” Alice says, standing to clear the table. “I make cleaning and going to bed. I waking up tomorrow early for picking rice. After finish picking rice, we go trekking, okay?”

“You’re picking rice before our six hours of trekking?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “Everyone Sapa picking rice all the time. Homestay business no good so everyone picking rice. All kids leaving school to help family picking rice.”

I look over to the children in the corner and think about what growing up like that must be like.

“Is the field far?” I ask. “Can I watch and maybe…help?” I say, hoping to voyeur and perhaps collect some content. 

“No far. You help picking? Four hours, okay?”

“Oh. Um,” I say, breaking eye contact. “Let’s see in the morning. I’m very tired from the six-hour shuttle.”

“Oh yes, okay,” Alice says, scraping leftovers into bowls for the dogs.

—

The morning comes and goes, and I don’t pick rice.

Ben does, but he’s a better person than I am. He’s also younger. Time hardens the soul, and after a while, the joy derived from novel experiences gets squashed by imagining yourself having to feel even the slightest bit of discomfort. Give him time.

He returns, exhausted, with stories of hardship, and I feign interest while scanning my packing list:

Sunscreen, bug spray, wide-brimmed hats, first aid kit, long socks, a Camelback, and waterproof hiking boots

We meet Alice in the living room and see that she has:

1 tiny teal purse that might fit 1.5 wallets

“That’s all you’re bringing?!” I ask. “What about water? Isn’t it six hours?”

“I have,” she says, reaching into her purse to pull out a water pouch the size of a Capri Sun.

“Oh, yes. Okay,” I say.

—

The hike is beautiful. 

Every fifteen minutes or so, Ben and I ask Alice if we can pause for a picture. Grassy meadows canvassing hills. Bamboo forests spreading along mountainsides. Naked children laughing as they climb up waterfalls.

“Don’t they get hurt?” I ask Alice while I imagine my penis chafing the side of a boulder.

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“Yes, I think they get hurt,” she says. 

“Hello!” one of the kids yells to Ben and me.

“Supercool,” another one says, showing off his English. They giggle.

2 pm arrives, and a light fog rolls in. An American hiker comes across our path, and we ask him to take a picture of us with Alice. He tells her that the landscape is amazing. That it’s beautiful.

“Oh, okay,” she says, but she doesn’t agree.

And at this moment, I feel like it’s my job, as the white savior of perspective, to help her see with eyes of clear. “Alice, you don’t see how incredible this is?” I say, staring out at clusters of mountains brushed with mist. “This is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen in my entire life.”

“I here all my life. I no think pretty.”

“But you have to realize how nice this is. It’s so beautiful.” 

“Hm,” she says. “Okay. You say beautiful, I say beautiful.”

On the way back to her home, Alice tells us she wants to stop at her daughter’s house, a couple of miles out. Alice sees her every week or so. We walk in, and they say hi, but they don’t hug. 

On my right, a beautiful German-Shephard-like dog sits on the porch, far from the family. I’m hopeful he’s friendly and wants me to pet him. I make eye contact, and he looks away, almost scared.

“What’s his name?” I ask. 

“We say dog,” Alice’s daughter answers.

Oh, she’s in on this bit, too.

A girl stumbles out of the house. She has special needs and a deformity on her leg. Misshapen bone with discolored skin. She limps. It looks painful, but she doesn’t seem to mind.  There’s another girl without any leg deformities, but she’s mute. 

Ben is a doctor, so I whisper, asking him what malady they have and how they got it. I always ask. He says he doesn’t know what they have but that it’s probably due to malnutrition and a lack of medicine. I find this answer to be uninteresting.

We pass a small shack where a young boy hits a stick against the wall. Alice knows him and talks to him, but he doesn’t reply.

She tells us that this boy is also mute and lives with his 12-year-old sister. They’re mostly alone because their dad is gone, and their mother is very busy.

“Where’s their dad?” I ask. 

“He leave,” she says.

“He no want marry. So he leave. Go someplace else.”

“That’s sad,” I say.

“Mhm,” she says.

“How did you and your husband meet?” I ask.

“My sister marry my husband brother. And then my husband kidnap me.”

“Kidnap?” I ask, thinking she used the wrong word.

“Yes. Now men kidnap no more but long time ago when husband want to marry wife he kidnap her for two maybe three days until she say yes. I 16 and I no want marry him but my family tell me I marry him because if I say no maybe he get angry and he no want marry me anymore and people think something wrong with me and then no one in Sapa want marry me.”

“Oh,” Ben says.

We walk another mile, and I’m thirsty, so I drink the rest of my once-full Camelback. Alice has yet to touch her Capri-Sun-sized pouch.

The trail makes a sharp curve to the right. As we come around, we spook a group of butterflies, maybe 40 or so, that all fly up from the ground.

“Wow, it’s amazing,” I say, lifting my arms to the sky, just like Drew Barrymore would.

“They eat shit,” Alice says, and as she says this, the butterflies settle and return to the pile of buffalo poop on the ground.

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It starts to rain.

Ben and I tread carefully as the trail is slick. 

Our Gore-Tex hiking boots are ready for this type of natural disaster, but I worry about Alice, a woman of perhaps 60 years old, who, not knowing it was going to rain, chose to wear open-toed children’s shoes. Maybe the same pair worn by Chue.

“Are you gonna be okay in those?” I ask.

“Oh yes. I okay,” she says, with shoes still clean. Wet, but not dirty.

Two minutes later, Ben slips, soaking the entire right side of his body as Alice’s sandals remain spotless.

The rain stops, and we come upon a rice field where a grandmotherly woman hunches over, picking.

The woman talks to Alice. Behind them, a frail 14-year-old girl pulls a buffalo. By “pulls a buffalo,” I mean that the girl is pulling a rope that has been snaked up the buffalo’s right nostril and out its left. The rope is tied to itself, forming a slipknot whereby the buffalo’s nasal cavity acts as an anchor.

The girl yanks hard on the rope, and the buffalo makes a face that I don’t want to see, and so I look away.

We arrive back at Alice’s home, and she asks Ben and me to help her with her TripAdvisor account. She’s having trouble receiving payouts, and it’s hard for her to figure out the problem because all the customer support help-text is in English.

The three of us sit in the living room, surrounded by dogs and babies, as Alice walks us through the platform. She has 4.9 stars across a couple hundred reviews. Verifying her account, I ask for her birthday, and she gives it. It’s January first.

“You were born on New Year’s?” I say. “That’s so cool.”

“No no,” she replies. “I no know birthday. People in Sapa Town tell me use that.”

“Oh, sure. Of course. That’s fine,” I say, and though I try to hide that I feel sad for her, she catches me.

“I happy you help me,” she says, “I very dumb.”

“You’re not dumb,” Ben says.

“I no know math or English. I also no read.”

“Even so, you have so many reviews on Trip Advisor and Airbnb,” I say. “That’s amazing. You should be very proud of yourself. That’s really hard to do. Especially since you can’t read or write English,” I preach, but I don’t know if she hears me or if she understands what I’m trying to say, or if she only understands the last part about how she can’t read or write.

“Okay I go kitchen for making dinner. You tell me you need something for TripAdvisor okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

Alice leaves.

“You know Alice is only four years older than me, right?” I say to Ben.

“Whoa,” he says. “I thought she was 50. Maybe 60 even.”

“Same.”

We eat another vegetarian dinner. There are many children there and I’m not sure if they are the same children from the day before. The next morning comes, and we pack our bags to leave. 

We give Alice and her family a hug, and she tells us to leave her a review for her on TripAdvisor and Airbnb. Eve asks us to leave a review for her separately, on a different account, because she and Chue are moving out in a few months and are going to need to start a Homestay + Trekking business of their own.

In the distance, we hear a car honking. Chue tells us to go.

Ben and I start walking towards the road, and on our left, we see two men taking a blowtorch to a shaved, dead dog. 

Maybe easier not to give names.

Ten feet away, another dog sits on the ground, licking his paw. He looks sad, or at least I think he’s sad that his friend is dead. But maybe I’m wrong, and he’s not. 

The scratching wheels of our suitcases summon Breasts, who walks out in her pink shirt to smile and wave us goodbye. 

“You have good time with Alice, yes?”

“Yes. Very good time.”

“You tell America people come to Sapa okay. Tell them very pretty, okay?” she says, smiling warmly. 

“Yes yes,” I say. “Okay.”

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“You wanna go where everybody knows your name,” sings the theme song from an 80’s TV show called Cheers.

We all like feeling seen. Recognized. Noticed.

“Nice feet,” says a voice on my left as I sit down to work.

Oh no, not again, I think to myself. But then I look up.

“Thank god,” I say to the French woman I met here two weeks ago. I don’t know her name.

“I was scared you wouldn’t remember me,” she says, smiling and putting down her large cold brew.

“No, of course, I remember you,” I say. “You’re my witness. You’ll be the Real Local Patron they interview when I go missing.”

We both laugh.

I don’t have a lot of coffee shops near me. I mean, I do, but they’re mostly terrible: Starbucks and Dunkin’ have a lion’s share of the market. But Starbucks is too loud, and Dunkin’ might as well hand out Narcan.

I could go to WeWork, but I don’t like it there. A co-working space for loser clones, all looking to be part of a sterile community of themselves.

I don’t want that, for I am a man of the people.

I’ve been a loyal patron of the Capital One Cafe roughly four times a week for the past six months. I’m now close with the baristas. Especially Tina. Tina Thomas – she wears dark eyeliner and can’t be bothered. I like that.

The cafe itself is walking distance of my house, but even if it weren’t, I’d drive. 

You see, after I lost most of my money in crypto, I’ve done my best to be frugal, and at the Capital One Cafe, I receive 50% Off Any Hand-Crafted Beverages when I use the Capital One card that I forgot about right after I signed up for it 10 years ago. 

On the surface, the Capital One Cafe looks as if it doesn’t know who it is. Like someone took a cute coffee shop and bred it with NerdWallet. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that there’s more. So much more.

I pull out my laptop and take a sip of my far-too-large passion fruit iced tea. Because of the 50% off, you always know who’s a veteran by the size of their drink.

As I wait for the Wi-Fi to connect, I study the blonde French woman next to me who has returned to reading. She’s in her 40s and sits on a high stool, her forearms resting on the countertop that snakes along the perimeter of the cafe wall. There’s a plastic Target shopping bag on her right, but it’s not a new plastic bag. It’s wrinkled, just like her, as if it, too, has had a hard life.

“You would go to the Capital One cafe,” my friend Chrissy Lim said to me on the phone last week. 

“Um. Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just like how you wear toe-shoes or those headphones with the customer service boom on them. The place just…you know…attracts a certain kind of person.”

Maybe she’s right. It does feel fitting. Almost Cinderella-esque.

For one, there are power outlets everywhere. I once saw a man set up an external monitor to create his own little mobile office, and my first thought was, hey, that’s a great idea.  

As I’ve gotten more comfortable with the cafe vibe, I’ve started to pace around on calls, yelling about this marketing proposal or that digital sales idea, but at times, I’ve had to keep my voice down, like, a few weeks ago, when I didn’t want to wake up the man sleeping in the red booth clutching his laptop to his chest.

“Vilda haya” is the Yiddish term my dad uses to refer to my Capital One kin and me. It means wild animals.

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We’re not all the same, though. The French woman with the Target bag isn’t wild. She just reads. Today she’s reading a French romance paperback novel.

She picks up her oversized drink and brings the straw to her lips. There’s no way she’ll end up finishing the entire large cold brew. She’ll probably throw half of it out, just because she can.

I look around the cafe and see a husband and wife ordering from Tina. As he taps his credit card to the reader, Tina sighs, almost as if she’s bothered that he’s paying for what he ordered. He and his wife walk to the side of the counter to wait for their drinks. They both have dark brown hair and aren’t in shape but also aren’t fat — perhaps they’re Italian. They hold beach towels and look like tourists who don’t fit in with us locals.

I watch the two of them watching everyone else, as if he and his wife, just like this not-truly-a-coffee-shop coffee shop, are trying to find their place in a world where they don’t belong. The husband spots a lady in her 50s with brown, frizzy hair, sitting at a four-top, alone, clacking away at her keyboard. She’s always here. We haven’t yet met, but she’s one of my favorites. Kathy? Kate? I think that’s what Tina always yells. 

Kate is my favorite person in our ensemble. Each day, she sits by herself at a table covered in manilla envelopes. She looks at a ledger on her screen, searches for a corresponding envelope, slaps a label on it, and then stacks the envelope into her rolling-storage-case, you know, one of those roller backpacks, but instead of a backpack, it’s a lidless plastic box with wheels and a handle. 

The waiting-for-his-drinks tourist watches Kate as she examines, and then labels, and then stacks. She’s a machine. She feels his stare, and so she looks up for one of those micro-standoffs that happens between strangers three to four times/day that none of us ever remember having had. Her eyes, now locked onto his soul, seem to say, “I fucking dare you to judge me.” And then he looks away, reaching for his small drink, like the Italian he is.

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It must be a weird experience for Capital One Cafe virgins. To walk into a place to get an oat milk latte and to have to see advertisements everywhere about the importance of setting aside cash for a rainy day fund.

But it’s not that weird, and the cafe prides itself on not being a pressure-y sales place. Taking a step back, it’s all just a very specific marketing play – some combination of a brand equity building exercise paired with a nice-enough physical space that allows the bank to bait consumers with discounted beverages in an attempt to reduce its banking products’ customer acquisition costs.

There are financial advisors here, too — all wearing blue polos with gold nametags. 

But they’re just around if you need them, for the one-off use case that must very commonly occur when you’re holding a chocolate chip muffin while reading a French novel, and at the end of the chapter, Marie leaves him and moves to a charming cottage in Versailles, which causes you to think that the only thing between you and the closure that Marie has come to know is buying a chateau in the hills, for which you’ll need a mortgage with a low 30-year APR. 

There’s also a security guard.

I think his name is Jeff. Or Max. He always stands inside, towards the back of the cafe, keeping order like he’s supposed to, but I wish he’d help secure the outdoor space as well.

For example, last week, I was very excited to work at the tables and chairs out front, but I chose not to because a man in a green plaid shirt who didn’t look homeless at all was screaming very loudly to no one about how “she deserved it, and all women do because they talk too much,” which was my cue to go work indoors – not that I’m a woman and not that I was planning on talking too much, but my calls do run over.

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Anyway, I figured I’d be better off indoors, but it turns out that on this specific day, I was wrong.

Because that’s the day I first sat down next to the reading French woman whose name I still don’t know.

And that’s the day that someone else chose to sit down next to me.

“Hi, I’m Frank,” said the man on my right, interrupting me while I was clearly working. “How’s your afternoon?”

Something felt off.  I think it was how he was sitting. He had chosen to swivel his whole body to face me instead of just turning his head. When people are too thoughtful about their body language, it usually means something is wrong. Inorganic. Planned.

Don’t be so judgemental, said a voice inside my head. He’s just different. Don’t be a dick.

“My afternoon is good,” I said. “How about yours?”

“Where did you get your sandals?” Frank asked.

Strange. “Oh. Um. Marshalls. It’s right down the street,” I said, pointing west.

“I have wide feet and high arches, and I can’t ever really find sandals that fit,” he said.

The French woman looked up. Apparently, his comment was strange enough to pull her from her prose.

I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going. He asked for my Insta and where I lived, and I gave it because I was trying to be nice, which, I’ve learned, is not a good thing to be. I wasn’t attracted to him, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t hitting on me — he didn’t seem gay, but, then again, green gingham outside with the progressive thoughts on women didn’t, at first, appear crazy.

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“Hey, sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, placing my hands on my keyboard, “but I need to get back to work.”

“Oh, of course,” he responded. “But do you mind if I take a picture of your sandals so I can look them up?”

“Sure,” I said. 

“Just go do your work,” Frank said, looking a bit too excited as he stood from the stool. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just take a few pictures and be out of your way.”

Hoping to allow him to capture the $22 beige flip-flop in its purest form, I slipped my foot out of the sandal.

But that’s not what Frank wanted. 

“No,” he commanded, his voice dropping three octaves while his shoulders tensed. “Keep your foot in.”

Oh, God. Here we go. I looked up with a look that said, “You know you’re in public, right?”

He caught my glare. “I mean,” he said, “you have nice feet. You take care of them well. Not like most people here.” 

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For the record, I don’t have nice feet. On numerous occasions, I’ve been told I have strangely boney toes that are far too long. The same is true for my fingers. As a freshman in college, at every pledge line-up, my fraternity brothers would have me step to the center of the room and have me creepily tap my fingers together like the villain Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. “Excccecelllllent,” they’d force me to say.

“Sorry, Frank. I’m really not comfortable with all this. Could you please just leave? I’d really appreciate it.” That’s what I wish I had said.

“Um…” I began, “fine? Just…do this quickly so I can get back to work.”

And that was all he needed.

Frank dropped to the floor, lying, on his belly, with his stomach on the ground and his phone inches away from my foot. Everyone was looking now, especially the Frenchie next to me, whose name I still didn’t know.

I took a deep breath and pretended to go back to work, and as I stood there at the counter, typing on my keyboard, Frank stayed on the floor, capturing foot fetish images for days to come. C’est un calembour.

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I looked down at him full of disdain, just like Barista Tina would’ve done. But he didn’t notice. 

“Hey,” I commanded, in as strong of a voice I could manage without attracting too much attention. “Can you go?”

“Oh yes. Sorry,” he responded. And then without making eye contact, he hopped up and scurried away.

I didn’t feel good afterward. And I’m not just saying that to say that. I don’t like being the victim and I’ll do whatever I can to not be perceived as soliciting for pity. 

But…because he now had my Insta and knew where I lived, I figured that I one day might see him again.

My friend Chrissy told me to get a police report in case he ended up murdering me and chopping off my feet, but when I called the cops to have something on record, they told me that,

“Maybe you should consider closed-toed shoes.”

I thought about staying away from the cafe for a while, letting the dust settle while Frank distracted himself with some other sandal-wearing sitting duck, but I just couldn’t. The force of 50% Off Any Hand-Crafted Beverages was too strong.

And so here I sit, back in my favorite cafe, next to the only person in the world who might even slightly remember the face of the man who will cause me and my boney toes to go missing.

“It’d be a compliment to think he’d murder you for your feet,” the French woman says to me.

“You’re just saying that because you want that Local Patron interview,” I reply.

“Maybe.” 

“I’m Alex, by the way,” I say, gulping my large iced tea.

“Sophie.”

I hate birthday people.

The Insta-story reposters and 3-day-birthday-weekenders who go out of their way to make sure that everyone knows that they’re still alive. God-forbid they realize that most of us don’t care.

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I know I sound like a curmudgeon, the Scrooge of birthdays, running around and ruining everyone’s joy even though it costs me nothing to allow them to have it. But, to be clear, it’s not that I don’t want people to do what makes them happy. I just don’t like being expected to change my behavior to make up for whatever it is that they lack.

I’m at a fancy bar, standing next to Cheryl, a wavy-haired woman in her 60s. She wears a flowy dress and a couple of expensive-looking necklaces as if to say “I am very relaxed but, if you must know, I also have a lot of money.”

Cheryl lifts up her wine glass in the direction of the birthday boy, who is standing across the room. “Are you and Michael close?” she asks.

“Not really,” I say. “Only hung out with him a couple of times, but he seems great. How old is he turning?”

“Thirty-five,” she says. “Which you should know since you’re at his party...,” and then she smiles a bit, but not in the way I’d like. It’s as if she’s saying “don’t worry, I won’t tell him that you’re a shitty friend.”

“I guess I should know his age,” I say to her, conceding, because sometimes it’s not worth it.

My mother gets like Cheryl at times. Attached to the irrelevant. 

“Where was my Hanukkah card?” she said to me over the phone four years ago. 

“Honestly,” I said, “I totally forgot. Didn’t put it in the mail till today. Sorry,” I said. And then I hung up and rushed to the store to buy a card. 

Cheryl, at the bar, pulls the glass away from her lips and unprompted says, “completely natural childbirth.”

“Sorry?” I ask, thinking that I must not have heard her correctly.

“When I gave birth to Michael, it was a completely natural childbirth.”

“Ohhhh. You’re his mother,” I say, now feeling a bit embarrassed for not having known Michael’s age. Not that I should feel this way. But I do.

“Mhm,” she responds, “completely natural,” which, now at its third mention, implies that there’s something she’d like me to ask.

“And how was…the childbirth?” I ask.

“It was great,” she says. “Michael is a charmer. And that’s not a coincidence.”

“Um. But does that have to do with his birth?” I ask, taking the bait.

“Of course,” she says, laughing at me. “The energy around the child and mother during a birthing session is very important. Epidurals, c-sections…all these are…inhuman. We’re not meant for any of that. Did you know that c-section children are more likely to be obese?”

“I did not,” I say, looking across the bar at Michael, who I can most honestly describe as obese-cusp. Cheryl looks at him, too, but there’s no way we’re thinking the same thing unless maybe she’s thinking ‘can you imagine how much larger Michael would be, had I chosen cesarian?’.

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I, myself, wasn’t a c-section baby, though my mother did have an epidural. Maybe that’s why I love downers: Xanax, Vicodin, weed – anything that diminishes or, even better, mutes. I’d love to blame my mother for this. How nice that would be not to have to take responsibility for my own vices. But that’s not sustainable. At least, not for long. Eventually, I’d wind up as the victim I believe myself to be: rotting away at a pity party for one. Which is probably worse, but maybe not much worse, than ending up like Cheryl, who pities everyone that isn’t her, all the while finding herself constantly proud of accomplishments that are not her own.

“And you know all that excess baby weight that comes with being pregnant?” she says. I don’t know, but she isn’t really asking me. “I didn’t really have to deal with any of it.”

“Oh?” 

“Yeah, I had a great chiropractor put my hips back in alignment and all that weight fell right off. Had him do my friends’ too.” 

I imagine her throwing a newly-mothered-hip-adjustment Avon party. Seemed fun tbh.

“Can any chiropractor-”

“-absolutely not,” she says. “You have to find the right one, and it took me a few calls, but I eventually found him. I know people, you see,” and then her right brow lifts and I’m not sure if she’s implying that I should call upon her for introductions, in general, or if she is specifically implying that she has a chiropractor to help me with the hip fat she thinks I should lose. 

This goes on for a bit. The back and forths of us chatting about something I didn’t point us towards as she takes credit for anything nearby.

We all do this, at times. Incorrectly self-attributing life’s positive outcomes to make up for our lack of self-worth.

Like how I pay my therapist to tell me that my boyfriend wanted to date me because he was attracted to my mature vulnerability when it’s more likely that he wanted to date me because I was regimented about not texting him back.

Or how my mother revels in the idea that she raised my sister and me all by herself because a few years ago when I was in a fight with my father, I sent my mother a Happy Father’s Day card because I knew it’d hit home for everyone in all the right ways.

“Oh hiiii,” says a voice from behind me at the bar. It’s Jane, Michael’s wife, who’s maybe here to save me from her mother-in-law. “So glad the two of you got to meet!” she says.

“Mhm,” I reply. “Cheryl was just telling me about what it was like giving birth to Michael.”

Cheryl nods, proud.

“Oh, isn’t that great,” Jane begins. “Well, don’t let me interrupt that.”

“No no you’re not-”

“-so good to see you, Alex,” Jane says, walking away.

“God, She’s so pretty,” Cheryl said to me. 

“Yes, yes she is,” I reply.

“Nothing but the best for my son.”