Scattered Things

These are some things I like.

[writernotwaiting]

An Evening (wasted) With Tom Lehrer: stream MP3s download RAR Revisited: stream MP3s download RAR That Was The Year That Was: str

Fearing such hits as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “National Brotherhood Week,” “The Masochism Tango,” “The Element Song,” “Be Prepared,” and “Lobachevsky”

[neil-gaiman]

I was explaining Tom Lehrer to friends a couple of nights ago. And now I've learned he has left his songs to us...

[neil-gaiman]

Lots of people worried that he's dead. No, he's still alive (hurrah!) -- I just meant the songs are in the public domain:

as he explains:

I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.

The latter includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.

Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.

Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.

In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

NOTICE:

THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.

Tom Lehrer

November 1, 2022

Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer DISCLAIMER STATEMENT I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007,

[amadcap]

What a cool dude.

[amadcap]

Saw this video awhile ago and it got me thinking about making a modern version. Any cool artist interested?

[flockofdoves]

i’m screaming..

social media is really so much

[deelgathor]

[boffin-in-training-deactivated2]

pay attention to the last sentence lads

[amadcap]

I also made a short film in lockdown. I did everything myself to figure out what I'm good at. The short basically tries to answer the question, can you be too anxious to die? So let me know what you think.

[amadcap]

I put my newest music on Spotify. I have no idea how to promote it. Enjoy.

[amadcap]

I Woke Up Old

So I'm thinking of throwing a small get-together at my house for my birthday. Which is unusual for me since I hate my birthday but I've been thinking lately about the past as one does. I think it started when I hung out with an old friend and realized just how long it had been since I had seen him. That snowballed into thinking about all the other people I haven't seen in at least a decade and, well, here I am thinking about celebrating something I'd rather ignore.

Just before the world shut down, I went to see They Might Be Giants with my old friend Logan. I hadn't seen Logan in at least five years and I was thrown off when I realized I had forgotten how to hang out with him. It took a bit before I could find that rapport you develop with certain friends over time. Friendships, like any relationship, must be nurtured. They evolve or they die on the vine.

I've never been easy to be friends with, I imagine. First off, I don't drink and when you're in your teens and twenties, at least where I'm from, that cuts you off from 75% of social life. No one is ringing me up to "go to the bar". Is there a band playing? Then what the hell am I gonna do at the bar? And after declining the handful of party invites you might get, people just stop inviting you. I don't want to watch a bunch of people get drunk and they don't want some sober Debby downer souring the mood. It's also hard to stay friends with me because, over the last 17 years, I've almost always worked the midnight shift. So unless you are also exclusively awake at 3am, it can be hard to have a consistent text conversation with yours truly, not to mention trying to actually hang out. With these parameters, it's hard to maintain friendships and near impossible to have a romantic relationship, but that's neither here nor there.

So, I get it. Between those factors and just getting older and busy, people drop off. It's natural. It's just that every time I drive somewhere that used to be familiar, it's completely changed. Everywhere I go, I see my own ghost. I feel like I put my head down to survive in this capitalist nightmare and woke up one day without my old friends, old hangouts, or really much to show, for how much I worked. I worked my ass off at shitty jobs, bought a house, and tried to do the things I love and I look around and wonder why I bothered.

So yea, I think I'll invite some people over just to see them. See how they're making it and if they feel as lost as I do. Maybe give out a few hugs and have a laugh. Most people probably won't come. Not only do I have a bad track record for throwing parties no one comes to but we are all older now. Most of my old friends, at least the ones that aren't dead, have spouses and kids and careers. To most of them, I'm just a memory. A funny story they tell at parties about this weird guy they knew who did this or that crazy thing once, a long time ago. In the end, that's all we all are, so that's fine. But maybe I'm not the only one looking for roots to keep them grounded for the continuing storm. I guess we will see.

[amadcap]

Room 278, St. Joseph Hospital

If you would have asked Mac a few months ago, he would have told you he was 82 years young. Aside from the occasional common cold or flu and the run-of-the-mill case of the chicken pox back when he was a kid, he felt fine all the time. Although he had retired a while ago, Mac still took commissions for carpentry out of his garage. He and the wife had somewhat successfully raised two kids, who went on to give them grandkids. None of their offspring had changed the world or become billionaires by any stretch but they didn’t end up in jail either and that’s really all you’re aiming for as a parent. You just try not to screw them up too much and get them out of the house and on their own. Just this last Christmas, Mac was watching his grandkids and thinking about how excited he was to watch them grow up and everyone assumed he would get to do that. He was fit as a fiddle, as the old adage goes.

That was then though. Today, from Room 278 of St. Joseph Hospital, the reality was a bit more grim. Over the past few days, his family had come by for a last goodbye, all of them trying to put on a brave face but failing. Tonight, Mac was alone, his wife sleeping in the waiting area after not leaving his side for months through the test that turned up a strange growth to the radiation to the surgeries to now. She’s earned a nap.

Mac tried to look down at his body lying in the hospital bed but all that he could make out in the dark room was the tubes and wires that prodded and attached all over, turning him into a marionette of sorts. The only noises in the room were the hum, clicks, and beeps of all the machines on the other end of those strings that were now externalizing the functions his body had, until recently, done automatically his whole life. Like a lot of things in life, you really didn’t appreciate all the things that you have, like the ability to breathe on your own, until it was gone.

As Mac stared down at his unfamiliar form, he tried to retrace his path here. ‘How did this happen?’ his mind would chime. ‘Why don’t I get better?’. Macs body seemed far away and his mind struggled to place itself in it. Mac could still understand the world around him. He could still feel and comprehend and this was by far the worst part of the whole affair, he figured. His mind felt trapped in a body that felt alien, a body that had failed him. If he could, his brain would jump out of that hospital window, down some sheets tied together like he saw in the old cartoons his kids watched on Saturday mornings and flee. If it could, he’d just go back home. Back to his garage to fix something with new hands if he had to. Right now, his hands couldn’t even fix themselves. They had become useless to him.

The strength it took to hold up his head had become too much, so Mac rested it back on the mound of pillows he’d been brought over the last few weeks. The oxygen tube in his nose started to itch but he just tried to ignore it like he was trying to ignore the slow dull ache that was his whole torso. Mac had worked on the line for 45 years before the plant was shipped overseas and the CEO made off with their 401k’s, so he was used to being sore in more ways than one. He’d come home all the time unable to turn his neck to the left or with tiny cuts and burns in strange spots. He usually took it in stride but this pain here in this bed wasn’t something you could take an Aspirin and a nap to take the edge off of. It was a pain that was new and scared him if he’s felt like being honest. At 82, new things are almost never good things.

Laying there, staring at the ceiling and listening to his blood begrudgingly pump, Mac tried not to think about dying. Unfortunately, trying not to think about a certain thing almost always results in only thinking about the thing you don’t want to think about. So, though he tried to resist it, his thoughts turned to his end. Even laying here struggling to take each new breath, he still worried about bills. He didn’t have much in the way of life insurance so his wife would most likely have to sell the house. The next chance he got he would write down how much she should sell his tools for so she wasn’t ripped off. He hoped one of his kids, maybe all of them even, would find a place for her. He assumed they had already had that conversation amongst themselves out of earshot so they wouldn’t worry him. Yet here he was worrying anyway.

Mac again tried to shake these kinds of thoughts from his mind. After all, there was nothing he could do about it now. His gaze wandered over to the flowers on his bedside. They were also dying and also couldn’t help it. Mac didn’t have many friends but the ones he did have he’s had for a long time and they had all sent store-bought cards wishing him well. He felt like he had let them all down for some reason. He had been there for them since childhood and them for him. Now what would they do without him?, he wondered but he knew the answer to that already. They’d keep doing what they had been doing with him which wasn’t much.

One friend, Charlie, he had been friends with since his childhood, when they both just happened to live next door to each other. That’s all it really takes as a kid to make friends, proximity. He simply saw a kid in the next yard who also happened to like comic books and now here they were a few decades later, sending get well soon cards to each other. Back then, Charlie wanted to be a race car driver and Mac wanted to play ball when they got older but Charlie was far too nearsighted and an accident in his teenage years put some shrapnel in Macs’ shoulder that ruined any chance of him stepping into a bullpen. They both ended up on the line and kept close. Funny how quickly you can adapt.

Macs train of thought was interrupted by a coughing fit that lasted almost a minute. As he tried to catch his breath, a nurse came in and fiddled with his oxygen tank before wiping the blood that was dribbling down his chin off. While she was in his room, she checked his blood pressure and took down all the measurements from the machines Macs strings were attached to on the clipboard hanging from the foot of his bed without a word. Once she had done her rounds, she smiled left as quietly as she had come. This behavior bothered Mac before but now he understood. Before, he would pester her with questions about his condition but now he understood, there was just nothing to say or answer she would have that would assure him. So he just laid there and tried not to look as embarrassed as he felt.

That was by far the worst part of being sick as far as he was concerned. It made him feel useless. He was a burden and it was humiliating. He could feel something inside of him wasn’t working and he wished he could just reach in and fix it like everything else he came across in life. But Mac wasn’t some house pipes or a piece of wood. Even cars end up in the junkyard eventually, he mused. I guess that’s where I’m headed now too. But he knew that wasn’t true. He was headed to a furnace and then he would be scattered to the winds and forgotten like almost everyone who came before. Once that thought took hold, it was impossible to shake and Mac silently cried.

Mac wanted to stay awake but his eyes had become so heavy. He wanted to stay awake long enough to call his wife in and say goodbye or long enough to see the sun again. He wanted to talk to Charlie about comics or head to the corner store for baseball cards with him. He wanted another chance to step up to the mound, bad shoulder and all. He wished he could rip these tubes out of him, cut these strings and run out of the cold hospital and into the fresh winter air. He just wanted to keep his eyes open. Maybe for a second, he thought, Maybe one more second.

The next day, the sun rose, the stores opened, people were stuck in traffic, birds started their flight south and in Room 278 in the St. Joseph Hospital, fresh sheets were brought in and the room was made ready for the next patient.

-

This story is the next installment in a series of shorts called Small Moments, about the slices of time in life that seem quiet but are anything but.

[amadcap]

The Road West

The radio started to break up as the station Claire had on slowly got out of range and began to fizzle into static. Only intermediate phrases broke through the white noise. This just gave Claire something to do while the road was flat and straight. She was sick of country music anyway.

“…deep in my bones,” the singer crowed. “I want to get home to y-“ Static.

Claire reached for the tuning knob and scanned the airwaves. The radio wasn’t the best. Hell, the car was a rust bucket that only had a radio. The 30 plus year old Buick had bench seats with stains from past trips, a small leak by the left front tire, no air, no spare and not even a tape deck. As long as it can make the trip, Claire thought when she bought it back in Mansfield, where she had been staying for too long, off a man in a gas station lot.

“It might not look like much but it’s a damn workhorse.” He promised. “This motor will run till the body falls off.”

She was desperate to get out of there and the man could probably tell. But the car was only $400 and she could junk it once she got to Santa Fe. After she forked over the cash, the man seemed shocked. She had asked no questions or even taken it for a test drive. The whole trip was built of hope and sheer willpower. She kept spinning the tuning dial but nothing would come in. She switched it to AM and kept twisting. Maybe she could pick up some crazed talk radio or a madman preaching for the apocalypse. No luck.

Claire wasn’t shocked she couldn’t pick anything up. After all, the country is so flat out this way, if there was a radio station within broadcast range, she’d probably be able to see the damn broadcast antenna. It had been a few hours since she had blown through St. Louis, just stopping for gas and some snacks before clearing out. Might be close to Oklahoma at this pace. Claire couldn’t tell. Just seemed like farms as far as she could see. She was in a different America now. One of early risers and hard workers and simple folks who shot straight or so she’d been told. She was a city girl to them and she didn’t know what to make of it. She didn’t have the time to stop and figure it out either.

In the passenger seat sat the snacks Claire had bought at her last pit stop. Some two pump station that had more cigarette brands than drink choices. She reached into the plastic bag and pulled out some beef jerky. It was important to have plenty of snacks when on the road. Beef jerky, candy for the sugar rush, energy drinks you don’t mind having warm and a few honey buns to soak up the energy drinks. She got peanuts because she had read somewhere that’s what mountain climbers used to keep their energy up. All this junk almost certainly wasn’t good for her but everyone knows whatever you eat doesn’t count on road trips. There are no diets on the road.

The tires hugged the pavement as she sped along, cruising at about ten over the limit. Claire looked out at the endless flat land and thought of all the things she wishes she’d had the time to pack. All that was in the suitcase she had locked up in the trunk was maybe two changes of clothes, a toothbrush, some cash and the antique ring her grandmother had passed down. That’s all that had really stood out to her as important when she packed not even twelve hours ago. Everything else could be bought again and she had to get out of there before her husband got back from the bar. She was in such a hurry to get out of that trap of a small town, with its small people, that she hadn’t even bothered to leave a note. That’s for the best I suspect, she thought as she chuckled to herself. Keep him guessing.

She had been trapped in that apartment for years now and trapped somewhere else before that. That was until last night when she had finally just had it. She simply couldn’t do it anymore. So she did what people had been doing since the dawn of time in America. She fled West. She went West for freedom. She went West for opportunity. She went West for anonymity. She went West cause she had to.

Claire pushed on a few more hours, sucking up all the sugar she could and using every trick for staying awake she had learned from the truck drivers she’d come across, before her lids just got too heavy to prop up. She wouldn’t be making it to Santa Fe tonight but at least she was far away from where she had started. So Claire pulled off the side of the Will Rogers Turnpike and killed the engine. It was the dead of night now and she figured she’d be far enough from the road not to cause or attract trouble. She was much too tired to find a proper place to sleep and she doubted she had enough cash anyway. In fact, Claire had barely locked the doors and climbed into the backseat before she was out like a light.

After a few hours of deep sleep, Claire was woken up by the distant sounds of coyotes howling for no other reason than they could. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She turned the key to check the time but, unbeknownst to her, the car’s clock reset when you shut off the engine. She decided to stretch her legs and take in some fresh air before headed back out, so she turned off the still static radio and climbed out into the open field.

As Claire got out and looked up, she nearly tipped over as she looked up at the night sky. There above her was the Milky Way with countless dots of lights, like a deep purple river from horizon to horizon. Back home, the most you could see on a good night was the Big Dipper if you were lucky and here she was with the whole universe staring back at her. Some people she knew said when they thought about how big and infinite the universe was, they felt small and insignificant. But Claire just felt free. A billion stars were just a billion places to go. For the first time in a long time, Claire felt like she could do anything.

-

This story is the next installment in a series of shorts called Small Moments, about the slices of time in life that seem quiet but are anything but.

[amadcap]

The Night Before

James grabbed his phone and checked the time. It was exactly 1:13 am. It had only been four minutes since he last checked the time. It felt much longer. Everyone says you shouldn’t check your phone in bed because the light of the screen keeps you awake. James didn’t know if this was true but he realized it probably didn’t help. He rolled over and closed his eyes. Although, with how nervous he was, it felt more like he was staring intently at the inside of his eyelids.

If we need to be there by six, James reasoned, then I have to leave by five fifteen. Which means I should be awake at five. If I fall asleep now, I can get almost four hours of sleep. That’s enough. I can work on four hours sleep.

James had been doing this kind of time arithmetic since he laid down at eleven. Since then he had got up for something to drink twice, checked his phone at least ten times and rolled over more than he could remember. All this trying to sleep was really wearing James out. The problem was James’ body was ready and willing to sleep but his mind had a lot to say and none of it was helpful. Aside from his brain counting hours on the clock, it was thinking up constant plans and contingency plans should these fail for every conversation possible on his first day tomorrow. He tried desperately to remember everything his new boss told him during his quick orientation about what his job actually was. Running through that day in his mind, he tried to remember the names of everyone he was introduced to.

The blonde guy, James thought, with the goatee. Justin? Josh? It was definitely a J name. Then there was the middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun. Anna maybe? Fuck me. She even made a joke about her name. Why can’t I remember?

James had done all the things you’re supposed to do to remember peoples names. He shook their hand, looked them in the eye. He really concentrated on it but all that was left now was the memory of how hard he had focused on remembering their names. Would they really judge him for not recalling their names after only one meeting? What kind of freak can even pull that off? How do you ask someone their name for a second time? James doubted he could call them by the descriptions he had come up with. They were not likely to take kindly to ‘cute girl with nice butt’ or ‘tall guy’ or ‘the ginger one’.

Rolling back over, James checked the time again. 1:15 am. Sweet Jesus, how can time move this slow? He rolled back over, this time onto his stomach with one leg bent in the manner of a dog pissing on a tree. He thought about the outfit he had laid out for tomorrow. A sensible plaid button up and dark clean jeans. Was that too informal? Once again he tried to think back to what the nameless people he met were wearing and came up blank. What was the point of having a memory at all if you can’t call on it when it’s needed?

James’ leg started to ache so he maneuvered onto his side. The cute girl with a nice butt popped into his mind. He wondered how long it’d be before he embarrassed himself in front of her. He’d probably say something really dumb first day the way his brain worked.

“Hi. I’m James. The new guy.”

“Oh yea. Hi nice to see you again.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot your name.”

“Oh sorry. It’s *inaudible*”

“Nice to meet you again *inaudible*. I’ll have to remember that so I can stop calling you ‘cute girl with a nice butt’ in my head.”

And then he’d be maced and fired. It probably wouldn’t happen quite that bad but in his mind, it’d actually somehow end up worse. He was sure he’d find a way to say something so dumb he’d get jail time or deported and sent to a remote island. As far as James was concerned, the chances of him saying something dumb were always highest on his first day.

This would be the fourth job in five years for James. He had been a fast food worker, a stock boy, a taxi driver, and a janitor before he found the job he starts in just over four hours. Fast food was by far the worst. People get so agitated over their cheap and greasy food. That’s why that was the only job he quit. Being a stock boy was boring and kept strange hours. He had been fired for falling asleep standing up. Taxi driver wasn’t too bad, aside from the drunks who couldn’t wait for him to pull over before blowing chunks all over the backseat. Little did he know he’d move on to being a janitor and cleaning up puke and messes much worse than that constantly. Losing both those jobs hadn’t been his fault. The taxi company told him to leave after missing too many days trying to take care of his mom. It didn’t help that’d he had been using the cab for trips to the hospital. After he lost the job, it was always awkward to call a ride and have a former coworker pick him and his dying mother up. After the cancer won out is when he had to start cleaning the local middle school at night. That didn’t last long. He just couldn’t get it together and just stopped showing up. He was a wreck then.

James started to work his foot out from under the blanket. He was getting too hot but the air outside his wrapped body might as well be ice. After an intense battle with an inanimate object, James settled on a half covered, limbs akimbo situation. His mind raced over every detail he could possibly plan for tomorrow or today if he was being technical. Was there enough gas in the tank? He planned out his exact route. Should he skip the highway? It had been years since he had worked a morning shift and he couldn’t remember what traffic is like at five in the morning. Should he make coffee or would they have some at work? He had already packed a lunch. A ham sandwich with cheese, an apple, and some chocolate milk. Is that the kind of thing adults eat at work? After dwelling on it for far too long, he decided he was now far too self-conscious about looking like he was in first grade showing up with a brown bag and chocolate milk to bring the lunch he packed. He would have to go out for lunch. What kind of food is even around there?

Frustratingly, James reached for his phone and opened the map. Scrolling around his new workplace, he found a quick and easy burger place where he knew the menu by heart. Before he locked his phone he couldn’t help but check the time. 1:19 am. How? Entirely flustered, James went back to his obsessive thought spiral.

The route to work was sorted. Lunch was planned. Outfit laid out. What else was there? What was he forgetting? That’s right, James recalled, I need that direct deposit form. He had filled it out the night before and left it on the kitchen counter next to the pile of overdue bills that had been collecting. He would need to take that in as well as his tax forms. It had taken him all day to find his old checks to get his account number off of them to fill it out. It turned up in a box of things he had yet to unpack from his mothers' house and like any other time you go looking for something amongst old boxes, he lost most the day to old memories. He had spent a few hours at least going through old photographs and journals before he remembered what he had gone in there for in the first place.

As the minutes dragged on, James ran out of things to think about. He had planned every second from waking to the drive home, practiced every conversation he could conceive of having and came up with a rudimentary system for remembering peoples names. He had worried about what his cat would do without him. He allowed himself to picture getting married to the cute girl with a nice butt. He had missed his mom. After many different sleeping arrangements and checking the time once more, at 1:27 am, James finally fell asleep. It was a shallow and fitful rest but he was asleep. When he woke up in the morning and drove to work, the traffic gave him time to run through it all again.

-

This story is the next installment in a series of shorts called Small Moments, about the slices of time in life that seem quiet but are anything but.

[amadcap]

The Funeral

The ground is almost as damp as the air in the cemetery today. The dirt crumbles at the edge of the fresh hole dug for the box Maureen's husband is sealed and decomposing in. Maureen stands at the head of the hole trying not to fall in herself. She’s wearing her best black dress but in the hectic past few days forgot to iron the creases out. So she’s standing there with what looks like two giant crows feet exploding from her armpits. She was incredibly embarrassed and was sure everyone was judging her, which aunt Judith was from Maureen's left-hand side.

Not many people had shown up for their final goodbyes. Besides aunt Judith, who only came to dress up and spy material for gossiping about later, there was son Jack. Jack looked like he too was resisting the call of his fathers grave and who could blame him. He and his dad had been close. Liked the same sports, the same movies and hated the same people. Jack was only fifteen and was now gonna have to face becoming a man without a source of insider information. Maureen had no idea what she was gonna do with him. She wanted to just hold him and protect him from all that was coming but if she did that, he’d see it as her as the overbearing mother digging her claws in. The harder she clung, the deeper he’d hurt and the farther he’d flee once he got the chance. But if she tried to give him space, he might see her a distant and cold uncaring mother, like her mother was with her. Maureen would soon trade places with her husband than her mother. Is there a right way to be a mother to a kid these days, she thought.

Next to Jack was her brother-in-law Aaron. Maureen didn’t think even owned a suit. She doesn’t know where he dug that one up but it barely fit. He looked like an insurance salesman who had a growth spurt. She was sure he was only here for the will. Other than that, there were a few other people she didn’t recognize but would pretend to know later and the priest who was on the other side of the hole jabbering away. Maureen only caught pieces of his monotonous speech. Something about death and life and fragility and God. He went on and on about God. Maureen thought his voice sounded like the hum on a high voltage power line but that would mean there was something dangerous behind it. It was more like an idling car in a garage and had the same effect if you weren’t careful.

Maureen wasn’t sure who brought the priest. Her husband was never the religious type. They had spent most Sundays on the couch with the TV on mute, pecking at the crossword and dreading work on Monday. Guess I’m on my own with that crossword now, she thought. Maybe the priest just came by and saw an opportunity to preach. That seems like something those priest types did, she thought. The priest was just like aunt Judith as far as Maureen was concerned. They both sat in judgment of everyone and everything and were always on the prowl for a chance to yap. The only differences as far as she could tell were that the priest had a uniform and got paid for it.

No one from her husbands' shop had shown up. He had worked there some 30 years doing the same thing. At first, it really bugged Maureen that none of her husbands' coworkers had shown up to see him off but as she thought about it. It would be a bit weird to come to a coworkers funeral. As far as they were probably concerned, he was just the guy who ran the machine on the day shift. She thought about her own coworkers and if she’d go to any of their funerals. Probably not, she thought, I couldn’t afford to take the day off work. Her husbands boss had sent a nice condolences card. A kind gesture from his secretary most likely. She would still have to fight him for her husbands' last paycheck and 401(k). A dead man can’t retire after all.

Maureen clenched the cold earth in her fist that she had scooped out of the pile next to the hole when this ceremony had started. She wished this priest would just shut up already. She was sick of staring at this chasm in the ground, sick of studying this wooden box she spent too much money on to just have her husband to lay around and turn to soup in. She didn’t want to hear another damn word about God until her own funeral and even then she’d skip it. She just wanted to throw this clump of dirt over the box, grab her son, say their goodbyes and get it over with. She picked up that impatience from her husband. His biggest complaint about anything was that it was too long. Every movie, every line, every time someone called him. Wrap it up. Get it over with. Well, now it was over with, at least for him. She hoped it’s what he wanted.

The priest finally shut his holy book and his mouth. Everyone took turns tossing their handful of dirt on the expensive maple box. Maureen and Jack had a silent ride home where they changed into something more comfortable. They ate a dinner of casseroles left over from the viewing and “Sorry for your loss” cakes from well-meaning neighbors and distant family. That night they both dreamt about that hole. Aunt Judith called all her hens and talked a mile a minute about Maureen's dress. The priest got paid and went off to give his stump speech at some other gap in the ground. The bulldozers went to work and so did the worms.

This is the first in a new series called Small Moments. Stories on the little slices of time when life seems quiet but is really anything but.

[amadcap]

What It Means To Be a Fan of a Thing

You may or may not have noticed but the biggest movies being released these days are based on characters and stories found in comic books. Disney alone has made enough off Marvel movies that it could be a small nation. It might also surprise you that more people go see movies than read comic books. Which means not everyone seeing these movies are rabid Wednesday Warriors who just need more of the thing they already love. So it stands to reason that some people in those theater seats might be itching to become fans of these characters and that’s great! But where do you start? What does a fan of something do outside of buy stuff? Or maybe you are already a fan of something and need a refresher on what you should be doing to be welcoming to these new fans. Let me try to help you out.

I can understand some peoples trepidation with fandom as a concept. Fans of things are often portrayed as a know-it-all who looks for any chance to make someone feel like an idiot for not being able to recall some useless factoid. This is kind of behavior even has a name, gatekeeping and it definitely exists more than it should. Between all the people freaking out over a female Doctor on Doctor Who (which had it’s highest ratings in a long time, suck it) to every thinly veiled hate group called WhateverGate you can scrape from the bottom of the internet, I can see why someone would be intimidated. Nevertheless, besides that being a small but admittedly loud percentage of fans, that’s exactly why you should be a fan. The more fans there are of something that aren’t like those trolls, the less of them there are. That is the first job of any fan. Make more fans.

Maybe though you’ve run out of people to seduce into your fandom and no one is biting. Maybe you just want some outside perspective on this thing you love so much. That’s when you have to go searching for others like you. The internet is both great and terrible for that. No matter what you’re a fan of, there’s guaranteed another person out there who loves it too and wants to nerd out over it with you. That’s a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, that also means there is now more than one dingus out there who thinks the world is flat. Some good, some bad. Such is life. There are also more conventions and meetups to go to than ever over very specific things. Chances are you’ll not only run into people who know much more than you that you can learn from but also new fans that are just as confused and eager as you used to be. That’s your chance to take them under your wing. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been a fan of a thing or how you became a fan of it. All you have to do it is love it and share it.

If you want to become an expert though, you’ll first have to learn as much as you can about the thing you want to be a fan of. You don’t have to know everything but you should want to know as much as you can. That is why in order to be a fan of anything you have to be curious. Like Marvel movies? Check out the comics. Follow the directors. Watch the behind the scenes stuff. The biggest suggestion I can give you is to not follow characters or franchises as much as follow the people who make the thing you like. It’s not a matter of Marvel v. DC or art house v. blockbusters. If you like a Batman comic written by someone you’ll probably like the other things they write. Same goes for any other medium. Once you figure out what you like you can find who you like and support them directly. The more support they get, the more cool stuff they make and everybody wins.

Another way to find out about more stuff related to your fandom is by finding people who talk about this stuff as a job. That’s right. Being a nerd about stuff can turn into a job. There are humans out there right now doing the research and taking in the good with the bad just to give you an informed opinion about what’s going on in the fandom you love. Not only will these people turn you onto cool stuff you might not have found otherwise and have insights you haven’t thought of but they are usually great examples of how to be a fan. People like Hyper Heroes, Fangirling and the podcast from my local comic shop, Super Skull Show, are the gold standard for how to love a fandom. Hector Navarro from Hyper Heroes alone does a million shows spreading his love of everything from comics to animation to film and he does it with passion and kindness. Be like Hector.

I happen to know that Hector has been an out and proud nerd since he was little but due to the success of movies like Black Panther and Wonder Woman, a lot of fandoms that once seemed like it was all straight white guys like me are changing to better reflect the actual world around us. Some idiots are real upset by this because, as I mentioned before, they like to be gatekeepers. These people, best that I can tell, have come to confused loving a thing with a thing being an extension of who they are as a person. So anyone that is different from them feels like a threat. That is dangerous and counterproductive. Besides what should be obvious reasons that racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. are evil, there are much more selfish reasons, if you need them, to want people who don’t look and live like me, a straight white guy, to make the thing you are a fan of. It should seem apparent that the more variety in the types of people making the thing you love, the better the stories will be. It’s really that simple. Some comic characters have been around for 80 years. That’s a long time to not have any change happen to a character. So have Thor be a woman. Half Black, half Latino Spider-Man? Yes, please. Of course, Wonder Woman is bi. Get some Diana. Just keep making the stories fresh and interesting and I’ll be there. I have listened to (and made) a lot of sad white boy music. I got that down. Give me a perspective on life I can’t get for myself. Our society often breeds division. Let’s use these fandoms to make our own ideal culture where anyone can be a fan. Come one, come all.

What do you do now though? You found something to be a big fan of but you’ve read everything or watched every episode. You’re constantly hanging around other fans and exploring the culture you’ve found. What’s next? It’s time to add to that culture. Like I just pointed out, the more people contributing to something, the bigger and better it will be. This doesn’t mean if you like painting you have to become a painter. There are a million ways to become a part of the fandom you love. Using painting as an example, you could help run a gallery for local artist or write about your favorite styles. If you’re not much of a creative type, help an artist who’s just starting out with the business side of things. As a guy who used to try and make a living off his art and do the business end of things, I cannot stress enough how appreciated that would have been. You will be a hero. As I mentioned before, I love music. So, of course, I started a bunch of bands and my own (failed) label but I also started DJing an overnight show on the local college station, WCBN. I was on the air for nine or so years putting on the strangest show I could. It was just another avenue to show my love of records. The best part is I was in a place filled with other weirdos like me who loved music and knew so much about things I never would have found otherwise. So get involved any way you can. Look at what you can do well and how you can apply that to your new found community. We will all be better for it.

Not only are there many types of fans but there are so many things to be a fan of these days. There’s not just comics, movies and music. Join the giant tabletop and RPG community and start playing D&D and mastering Time Bandits. Like to put together an outfit? Become a cosplayer. There are whole conventions now just for people who are way too good at looking like video game and anime characters. Maybe you’re into rocks. Cool. Be the local rock nerd. Go hiking. Get one of those cameras on the end of a microscope and look at sand. Get into history or astronomy or even math. There are totally other math nerds out there waiting for you to help them with the unsolved problems of math history. It doesn’t matter what or how many things you love, only how you love them.

That brings us to the dangers of fandom. How does one go from just being interested in something to tweeting death threats to creators you don’t like? I’m sure there’s some scientific reason but honestly, I do not know how people (mostly dudes) can lack the self-awareness to go down that dark road. What I can offer you are some things to remember that might help you stay the best fan you can be.

There’re two mantras of sorts that you should keep in mind so you don’t become Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. First, you have to remember, just because you like a thing, doesn’t mean you own it. You may recall the uproar over Star Wars The Last Jedi. Some longtime fans weren’t thrilled with some of the choices made in the film. A group of geniuses even thought to crowdfund money to remake the flick they disliked it so much. I’m not saying you can’t not like something from your fandom. I love film but hate 2001: A Space Odyssey. What I am saying is not liking a movie is not a pass on threatening someone’s life or harassing the stars until they literally quit the internet. All that for a movie about light swords and human-shaped dogs flying around a galaxy fighting each other because one family has some stuff to work out is a bit much. Calm down. One movie isn’t going to ruin your childhood or destroy everything you already love. They will keep making things. Some you will like and some you won’t. By all means, be critical of the things you’re into. That’s how things get better. But it’s gotta come from a place of wanting to make it better. Marc Bernardin from Fatman Beyond is a wonderful example of this. Unlike his cohost, Kevin Smith (who I also love), Marc isn’t averse to tearing something apart for its flaws. Unlike most though, he backs up his points of contention and offers up solutions. Like most parents, he isn’t mad that it happened, just disappointed it wasn’t better. The goal should always be for better, stronger fandoms. It shouldn’t be something you feel like you have to defend but instead celebrate.

The other mantra I subscribe to I got from the radio station. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean it’s bad. This is something I run into a lot with people and is something I had to work on myself when I was a teenager into my adulthood. A lot of my crowd are punk rock, weirdo types who are genetically disposed to pop music. That’s fine. Not everyone has to like pop music just like not everyone has to like punk. But just because you don’t like pop music doesn’t mean every pop musician is the worst thing to happen to the world and anyone who is into pop music should be put before a firing squad. Once again, chill out. Not everything is made for you. Sometimes you just don’t like a thing, not because it’s terrible but just because it wasn’t made for you. A recent example of this is the small contingency of folk up in arms over the new She-Ra cartoon. From what I gather, She-Ra is not sexy enough for some old fans of the original show? I’m not sure exactly. What these people don’t seem to comprehend is the show was made for someone else. When the decision was made to remake She-Ra, I doubt 40-something dudes were part of the equation. Unless they have daughters that want toys for Christmas and even then, it doesn’t matter that they like the show. Just that they like their kids enough (or peace and quiet enough). It’s a new thing creating a new generation of fans. So let them have their joy.

Basically, that’s what this all comes down to. Find your joy and share it. Then let others enjoy whatever they have. It’s a rough world out there and these weird little obsessions and interests are sometimes the only place people can get together and not try to kill each other. (Unless your fandom is video game shooters, then do your thing.) There are few places as magical as a packed theater for a midnight screening of an anticipated movie or a counter at the local shop, talking about the cool new thing. These seemingly innocuous fandoms people get so invested in can inspire change and breed empathy. Some people need Superman to have a role model to live up to and give them a model of morality. Some folks need foreign cinema to show them just how big and yet how small the world is. Some people use a love of animation to imagine a better world. Other people like math for some reason and that’s cool too. It’s all just first steps in coming together to share some bliss with each other and hopefully go from there to build a better world. Apathy is out. It’s all about empathetic nihilism now. Nothing really matters so let’s just enjoy it.

[amadcap]

What The Hell Are We Even Doing?

Here we are in 2019. We have somehow managed to not blow ourselves up or unleash some new AI overlords. No super disease has swept through humanity, wiping us out in an unstoppable wave of diarrhea and vomit. We started at the bottom of the ocean and now we’re here. Good on us.

I’ll start by stating the obvious. I am no social scientist nor do I have any sort of degree, diploma or authority on this or any subject. I am just a dude who thinks too much and choose to write it out instead of, I don’t know, have friends. Despite that, I am a human being who lives in the world. During that life, I have almost died in several, increasingly stupid ways, I have lived in my car, done some traveling but not really enough and most importantly, I have met a good number of other human beings. It was unavoidable, they’re everywhere these days. So whatever I say comes not as much from study but from just wallowing in the world around me and keeping my eyes and ears open. My life has in no way been exhaustive and is just one of about 7.5 billion experiences. Take it all with a giant bag of salt.

About 12,000 years ago humans started building places to live and stopped all their roaming around. They got together to build and farm and do whatever else they thought to do that long ago. As the kids say, but why though? What is the advantage of civilization over hunting and gathering? Well, no one really knows for sure but I think we can safely assume it wasn’t for the benefit of one person. When the prehistoric humans first started to settle I’m almost positive that Adam, Steve, Mary, Alice and Bob came to a nice looking valley and didn’t say,

“You know what Bob? We all decide we really like you. Why don’t we just stick around here for a while. We will do all the work and you just sit over there and chill. We’ll take care of you.”

I’m sure Bob was a great guy but it seems doubtful that the massive effort it took to start rebuilding the world didn’t happen for his sake. Who knows? Maybe the early citizens just really liked farming or maybe they thought they could do more and get farther in life together. Maybe they were just tired and the conversation went more like,

“Fuck, I am sick of walking. Let’s just rest here for a while. You know what? Let’s just rest here forever. Let the meat come to us. Or grow some corn. I don’t care. I just can’t walk another inch.”

Whatever the reason, they came to build settlements and settled down. I think this may be the only time we had it right. Everyone helping each other out and building cool stuff and inventing writing. It was good times except for all the disease and imminent death. Between the first homes 12,000 years ago and today we messed it up. Bob must have really impressed everyone and we started working for kings. We came up with religion and started dividing ourselves over our differences. Thus began this odd cycle we’ve trapped ourselves in. We make a bunch of progress, we get bored, and we go nuts killing each other. In fact, that’s probably the only thing we have continually progressed at, find new and inventive ways to end life.

So what is it we want? What is the goal of this grand experiment we have going? I don’t want to get all political on you (Who am I kidding? Of course I do.) but you may have guessed I lean pretty far to the left. I’m the kind of guy who makes Bernie Sanders look like a centrist. So this may just be me but, I’ve always felt the goal of it all is to make life easier and better for as many people as possible. I, like a lot of people in the western world, wake up almost every day to go to a job I don’t like to earn just enough money that, if nothing goes wrong, I can survive on. I do all this so my bosses boss can send his kids to expensive colleges and buy a yacht. Then I die. This is a dumb system. Not feeding, housing and educating everyone on the planet because, according to our made up system that is only a few hundred years old, some people can’t afford it, is also a dumb system. We don’t know why people started civilization but I can hazard a guess it wasn’t so most everyone could work themselves to death to allow a handful of billionaires to use the planet and the surrounding solar system as a playground.

You may feel I’m oversimplifying things, and I am but, I feel like any complications that arise from trying to do the most good for everyone could be solved if 8 billion minds were working on them. If you look through a history book for even just the highlights, it’s obvious the only time we move the needle is when we’re working together. Curing disease is a group effort but, so is genocide. So we gotta set our sights on something. It’s dangerous for us to be directionless. Humanity has a thousand problems that need to be solved. We could easily fix them if we just set this machine of civilization on them. If we could cut it out with our strange tribalism, if we could stop bothering with who talks to what invisible friend, if we could shut up about who is sleeping with who, that would be 8 billion people thinking up solutions to our problems and not just a handful of people looking for ways to profit off them.

That may sound like some sort of utopian dream and that’s because that is exactly what it is. Isn’t that the goal? If it isn’t the goal, what the hell is? It will probably never happen. People will always fight. There will always be bigger and harder problems. But I would rather those problems be in the pursuit of perfection rather than mere survival. I want problems like building a Dyson sphere, curing all disease, getting the fastest internet possible or exploring the oceans. I’ll take those over fighting to get enough to eat, killing over drinking water or making it in some post-apocalyptical hellscape any day. I must be crazy.

So is this the best we can do? Is working at least 40 hours a week for 40 years to benefit a handful of billionaires really the best we got? We worked ourselves up for 12,000 years and all we can muster is Donald Trump? One of my least favorite things that rolls mindlessly out of peoples mouths is, “That’s just the way things are.” or something similar. What they should say is, that’s the way things are right now. The world didn’t magically form like it is today. It took a lot of work and bloodshed and care to get it like this and if we don’t like it, then we keep working at it to make it better.

How do we make it better though? I’m not suggesting it’s all a wash and that we should throw it all out and start again. I don’t think we have another 12,000 years to do that even if it was a good idea. No, we’ve done some good work and come up with some smart systems. Humans just need to be better about two main things. First, we need to recognize when something isn’t working and drop the parts that don’t work. We keep what does make sense and just alter it so it does the job better and for more people. Good examples of this are capitalism and organized religion. At the time I’m sure they were great ideas and really pulled the human race forward. Religion gave us community and a sense of morals in a hard world. But we can get those things now without the mystic or the cult-like fanaticism. Superman taught me my moral code and he never told me he was sending anyone to hell. Capitalism brought us out of feudalism and made us an industrialized world. But now that we’re here it’s gone a bit haywire. The pursuit of profits trumps all reason and logic. Does that mean we go back? No, we just make something better and when that stops working we make something else. That’s what life is. A struggle of progress toward not perfection, just improvement.

I’m no hippie. I despise the line of thinking that tells people that positive vibes and optimism will solve all the worlds problems. It will take work and sacrifice and more work. But we can do whatever we set out to do. So universal income? Sure let’s try it. We (America) will have to work on universal healthcare first but we are slow learners I guess. There’s no more oil or plastic? Ok, we find another way. The only way we do that though is accepting that we can’t keep doing what we are doing. That means no finding a way to better use oil. Why split our attention like that? Plus, all that stuff is so 20th century. Keep up. Give us something new. One of the main problems we will have to overcome if we want to survive till the next century is our habit of deifying the systems we create. The economy is not like a tidal wave. A tidal wave comes and the best you can do is prepare for it. We invented the economy. If we don’t like what it does to the world at large, we can change it. If we are gonna get anywhere at all, we have to stop letting our creations control us.

The hardest part of all of this won’t be deciding what to keep and what to leave in the dust of history or all the work we have left to do. What will truly be difficult is getting past our selfish human nature. The problems we have to solve won’t go away overnight. It will take generations before the fruits of our labor show some results. I may be an anarchist but I realize throwing a brick through a Starbucks window isn’t going to instantly make a free and equal world. I know I’m never going to see that world in my lifetime unless the scientists solve the aging problem, which they won’t be able to do without a lot more people working on it together. It’s called a struggle for a reason. Planting seeds for trees that cast shade we won’t enjoy as I believe the old adage goes. All I can realistically hope to do is help push the world in a direction that could one day give birth to an ideal world. Reality v. The Ideal. That is the true struggle for us all.

That brings us to 2019. I know a lot of us feel lost and bored. There’s a general sense of inevitability about the tide of bullshit that comes at us every day. A lot of us feel helpless. But we are not. We have the means and resources to make things better and so at this point it’s just a choice. I think we’re making the wrong one. All we have to do are small things to drag the world toward a better place. Punch a Nazi, feed someone hungry, take to the streets or let someone vent to you. It may be a small thing but 8 billion small things add up. In the end, the thing that will save us is the same thing that can destroy us. Ourselves.

[amadcap]

Love Is Not The Answer

I hate to say it but as much as I love The Beatles, they lied to us. They weren’t the only ones mind you. For as long as mass media has been a thing, the moral of a lot of stories is “Love is the answer.” or “Love is all you need.” etc. Whether it’s a pop song, a novel or a blockbuster movie, some character usually really struggles with life until they just give themselves over to love. Then the strings kick in and the choir sings and we get a happily ever after. Some version of this has been pounded into our heads for so long that people have actually started to believe it. Well I hate to be the one to burst your bubble but, you need a lot more than love to get by and, if you’re lucky, be happy.

First, as with any discussion, let’s define some terms. To paraphrase Raymond Carver, what are we talking about when we talk about love? There are many types of love. I’m sure you’ve seen some diagram of the Ancient Greek definitions of their five to seven types of love. You love your family differently than you love your friends and love them both differently than your lover (hopefully, that is). But the kind of love we’re discussing is romantic love and according to the pop culture around us, it is the real linchpin of a meaningful existence. That special someone. Your one true love. All that jazz.

According to this line of thinking there is one person out there that is going to come by and get rid of that deep existential dread that nags at you every night. Someone who will complete you, who will give you a reason to live. One person out of eight billion people that just happens to live near you, speak the same language and are actively looking for someone just like you to complete them. Besides the statistical unlikelihood of this happening, it’s a dangerous thing to drill into peoples heads. You, as a person, are not complete unless you find someone else, a better half, and if you don’t find that person, you will die unhappy. What kind of twisted message is that?

It is no secret that I am no fan of the hippie “free love” attitude or the romance flick message that love solves all your problems. To be fair, I am basically a fifty-fifty split of a bitter old man and fifteen-year-old emo kid at my core, so I might be a bit biased. But also, maybe I’m just being hopeful. If love is the only thing that matters, then my whole life is a waste after all. I haven’t had any love of the sort you find in these movies in a LONG time and I doubt it’ll ever come my way again. Plus, love will not pay my mortgage or cure any disease I come down with. Love won’t feed me and I’m hungry much more often than I am lonely.

Why would I want my love to be free anyway? Free love implies that love is a cheap, worthless thing that I can afford to just give away. Love, like respect, should not be easy to get from someone. It should be hard earned so when you do get there it has weight and meaning. Love itself is not a necessity but a luxury. This isn’t to say it isn’t a great thing to have, but you don’t need it to survive and enjoy life.

Smarter and funnier people than me have covered how the search for love can waste your life. The stand-up special from comedian Daniel Sloss comes to mind. But if love isn’t the magic bullet for happiness, what is? Well, I got some bad news for you. There is no one thing that will fix everything wrong in your life. Life just isn’t that easy. Magic solutions for life are best left to the religious and gullible. You’re going to need a whole list of things to enjoy life even a little and love is pretty low on that list. Let’s run through it.

The first thing you’re gonna need is security of some kind. This is a vague concept and cast a wide net but in my mind, this usually means financial security. Love will not pay my mortgage or put food in my stomach. Someone can love me more than anything but that doesn’t mean it’s going to keep the hospital from billing me when I get some disease. Nor will it stop the disease but I digress. If you’re broke, without a job and in dire straits, love is pretty far from your mind. It’s only once you stop having to constantly worry about surviving that life can have any deeper meaning. This is why I’m such a big believer in the social safety net. The less energy we spend individually trying to get by, the more energy we can use focusing on loftier ideals.

Life, despite what you may have heard, is long. Days drag on. Eventually, nothing feels new and exciting anymore. Your job is monotonous and when you get home, you’re too tired to do anything. Life is just a downer sometimes. If you’re going to get through it, you’re going to need a healthy dose of curiosity to spice things up. A healthy appetite for the new and strange will liven up this long march to the grave. A desire for a fresh perspective or the occasional trip down a rabbit hole can lead not only to a break from the everyday grind but maybe even a way out of it.

Curiosity on its own isn’t good enough, however. You are going to have to focus that thirst for something new into a goal. To get by in life you need something to aim for and the motivation to work towards it. Recently, Hank Green made an interesting video about this very thing. It’s a simple idea really. We just need something to do. Being in love is great but you still have to spend your time somehow and you have to have a reason to get out of bed to do it. It’s not like the movies where, once you fall in love, the credits roll. Life doesn’t stop until it does so you’re gonna need to keep busy. Sometimes this reason is just that there’s nothing else to do. But that will only take you so far. You have to set a goal and justify why that goal is going to make your life worth the effort.

If you’re going to make that treacherous journey out of bed each day and get by in life chasing your goals, you will absolutely need a thick skin. If you’re trying to accomplish anything in life, other people will make it their mission to stop you. You will face countless rejections, objections, and criticisms. The world is simply a mean place to live which means you have to get tough. The ability to recognize when something matters and when to just let something roll off your back will keep you from having a mental breakdown. If every little bump in the road causes you to fall into a pit of depression, it’s going to be a long hard road. You just need some armor to protect you from the cruel, uncaring universe and the petty people in it.

Lastly and most importantly, to get any sort of meaning in life, you’re going to need a generous helping of empathy. When people rattle on about love being the answer or how you should love everyone, I think they are getting love confused with empathy. You don’t have to love someone to care about their well being. All being empathetic means, if I can be crass for a second, is giving a shit. Once you are secure enough in your own life, you should work to spread that security to as many as you can. Your curiosity should extend to other peoples perspectives and, once you find people worse off than you, their struggles should motivate you to help. You have to be tough enough to care. A willingness to risk your skin is an inevitable and necessary ingredient in bringing meaning to life. You can do all that without falling in love.

Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I may just be full of it here. It has been a very long time since anyone has had any interest in me romantically. So some of this might be coming from a bitter, lonely, jealous place. Right now, my job sucks, I’m barely making it financially and all I have to show for my time on the planet are some crazy stories and a basement full of unsold records. So my life often feels like a thirty year waste of time. But I do really think my life can be meaningful without someone special in it, although that would be nice. I just got to take my own advice. After all, if I’m not living my life for me, why live it at all?

[amadcap]

Defense of a Device That Does Just One Thing

I know what you’re probably thinking to yourself. “Oh great. Another article about how phones are evil.” as you roll your eyes. While that is sort of what this article is, I’ll preface it by saying, I like my phone. Phones are great. The modern cell phone is a device that has reshaped the world, in some ways faster than we can keep up with. But what I also like in the devices I own, is a purpose, a desire or need to be filled or fixed. I have no need for a smart speaker. This probably pegs me as an old man, but I don’t mind going to a store or looking something up with my fingers on the aforementioned phone I like. I have no need then for a tiny box listening in all the time just in case I need toilet paper. It is a solution to a problem I don’t have.

The thing about smart speakers or cell phones or voice remotes, etc, that is supposedly attractive to the consumer is that they do a lot of different things. Take the cell phone, which I can speak to better since I have owned a few of them. It can make calls, send texts, take photos or video, surf the web (as I’m sure all the youths still say), stream music and movies, control my lights or thermostat, play video games and, hell, I can even write or edit things I’ve written (like this article) on it. It’s a magic miracle rectangle in my pocket. But does it do any of those things well? Does doing a lot of things add up to something valuable?

My phone can take some high-quality photos but it doesn’t have the control you get with a Nikon or Canon. It can record audio but if you’re making a record you might want to go with a few SM57s jacked into a Tascam at the very least. I love a quick castle defense or match three game but when I’m really looking to get into a virtual story, I’m booting up a console or my PC. And as for writing, phones are fine for texting but no one is writing the great American novel with just with their thumbs.

Let’s focus on a device that does just one of the things my phone can do, my iPod Classic. Well, I say iPod Classic when I should say Classics since one of them is full so I had to get a second. For those of you uninitiated, the iPod Classic was the original iPod from Apple. It was a little black, silver or white box with a small two-inch screen and a revolutionary for the time click wheel. It had a mind-boggling 160GB of storage and almost all of it was dedicated to one thing, music. It was simple. You just put as much music as you could into iTunes and plugged it in. A few minutes later it was all there, ready to scroll through at your leisure, stored in your pocket.

The iPod was made for music nerds like me. It could hold my whole library, arrange and sort it any way you could want, simple and clean UI and most importantly offered a distraction-free music listening experience. It wasn’t without flaws. The 30-pin connection gets filled with junk easily, iTunes itself has a lot of trouble with anything more complicated than one record by one artist and who knows why they never put in a hard drive that didn’t spin. Instead, they just discontinued it a few years ago. I was obviously devastated. Now if my iPods give out, which with a spinning hard drive one solid bump or fall will do the trick and all I will have left is my phone for all my portable music listening needs.

So how does my phone stack up when it comes to listening to music? Well, I have a Galaxy S9 Edge and it comes with two music apps, one from Sprint and one from Google. Both are part of that group of apps that come with a phone that no one really wants and, if they can, usually uninstall them. Bloatware I think it’s called. The offering from Sprint is especially bloated with the landing page set to the store where you can buy songs, bundles and ringback tones. Remember those from the dawn of the cell phone? You’d pick a song you would want to blast at anyone who dared to call you, friend, family and potential employer alike. If I had music on my phone, I would only be able to find it in this app through a few menus but the main focus is to get the end user to spend money. Most of this goes for the Google Play app as well, which I have used in the past when my iPod was broken. But along with all the previously mentioned problems, it also will lose songs as they disappear from the service, ruining the flow of records and playlist. Google is more subtle with their store but only because it will play ads between songs. I don’t know about you but nothing throws off my groove like a Squarespace ad.

Of course, ads are also a problem on other streaming services like Spotify or Youtube but those will disappear once you subscribe for a certain amount a month. So for five bucks plus your phone bill, you can stream as much music as your data plan will allow as long as you have a connection. Essentially, you end up paying $100+ just to listen to some music that you don’t even own (owning media v. renting access to it is a whole other article for another day). Now compare that to just having high-quality audio on a hard drive in your pocket that just works, distraction-free for one price. Which of these devices is going to enhance your music listening experience?

I am in no way saying the iPod is a perfect machine. If it were still around today I could think of a few things I’d change. First, you obviously put in a solid state drive with as much memory as you can fit in that small package. Swap out the old connector for something more modern. Since it’s Apple, it’ll be their proprietary USB-C garbage but still, it’s less space for dirt and junk to build up in. Add some wireless sync in there and while you’re at it, if you really have to, add a WiFi connection for anyone who has to have Spotify, or in this case, Apple Music. All the things I would add in this imaginary re-imagining of my iPod though would be serving one purpose, to make listening to music a better experience. Your phones only goal is to keep you on your phone for as long as possible and that is the one thing it does that very well.

Most applications on a phone are only surface deep. The music app is made to get you to buy a few songs or stream whatever the company post on the landing page. Your camera is mostly used to take quick snapshots or clips and post them to some social media platform. The screens aren’t really the IMAX experience and the microphone is barely able to make calls. The thing is, that is fine for most people. But if you’re looking for a deeper and frankly more enjoyable experience, you’re going to eventually need the right tools for the job. Filmmakers and photographers need a camera that is dedicated to being the kind of camera they need. Recording artist of all kinds need a device with its sole purpose being capturing audio or being an instrument. The last thing you need while laying down a beat is your mother calling in the middle of it. Even things like drawing and painting, even when done digitally, are best left to programs and tools that were brought into this world specifically for people who draw and paint. It’s more expensive and has a learning curve but I feel that, in the end, it’s needed. It all just depends on your needs. If a phone can get you by, that’s great but in the end, you need the right tools for the job.

Aside from your specific needs, having a device that is made for one thing is all around a nicer time. A dedicated device, as opposed to your phone, offers a distraction-free ordeal. No notifications, texts, calls, emails or ads. When I listen to a record, the only interruptions I have are the ones I allow. When you’re at a movie, there’s a reason they want you to turn off your phone. It is a place and medium designed to use most of your senses to capture all of your attention, which is required to properly enjoy the movie. The same goes for any other media you might want to consume or create. It deserves your full undivided attention.

So while my phone is a miracle box that allows me to do many different things, sometimes you just have to focus in and have a gadget made that only does one thing. Every photo I take doesn’t have to be for Instagram and every song I listen to doesn’t need to be counted and logged. Everything I tap doesn’t need to be recorded and used to sell me more things. My iPod may not let me shoot video or tweet or even stream music, but it does offer a designated place more all my music right in my pocket and it does it well. I’ll take that any day.

[amadcap]

Things I’ve Learned Cleaning Up After People

One thing you should know about me is I’m a midnight guy to the bone. At almost every job I’ve ever had, I’ve worked the midnight shift. I’ve flipped burgers, stocked shelves, unloaded trucks and cut plastic all between the hours of 10pm and 7am the next morning. I’m obviously not the only one either. There are many more like me, out there in the middle of the night, burning the midnight oil, as they say. Some do it because, like me, they want to work that shift, and some are in it for that precious shift premium. Although all these graveyard shifts have been very different jobs, the one responsibility they have all had in common is cleaning.

Yes, in those midnight hours are when things are cleaned by humans like me and not magical elves. Once the sun is down, an army of zombified people go out all across America and probably the Western world, into the office buildings, convenience stores, supermarkets, theaters and anywhere else you can think of, armed with brooms, mops, trashcans, and rags to clean up your mess. Chances are at 3am wherever you are, there is someone close by making a trip to a dumpster, wiping down a window or has their face squarely in a toilet. The world is filled with toilets and someone has to clean them.

Most people I’ve met who have never had to clean up a spill in aisle five think of that kind of work as beneath them. Cleaning up after people is for illegal aliens, teenagers, and ex-cons as far as they are concerned. It’s disgusting work and the people who do it should be paid the minimum wage until they get better jobs. Of course, the people that say that kind of thing deserve to have the contents of a public bin emptied onto them in their sleep because they could not be more wrong.

Cleaning, in general, is hard work. Cleaning a place of business is a thankless, back-breaking, uphill enterprise. It takes a superhuman amount of self-discipline to wake up every day and do a job you know will suck and an even larger amount of fortitude to scrub up messes most people would burn their house down to avoid cleaning. It is because of this that cleaning as a job is one of those life experiences I think everyone would be better off as a human being if they had to do it for six months, along with working with the public and living in your car. If everyone had to push a mop around for a time in their life they might learn some valuable lessons that would make their lives and everyone else’s lives infinitely better. But since I seriously doubt I’ll be able to get teenagers to clean any better than their parents and instill in them these morals before they turn into unbearable adults, I’ll try to condense what I’ve learned over the years into a convenient, shareable article.

The first thing that really struck me when I first started cleaning as a job was just how dirty everything is. People and the public places they spend their time are disgusting. I could probably write a whole article describing in detail every gut churning thing I’ve cleaned up in an attempt to cause you to lose your lunch but I’ll spare you. Needless to say, I’ve cleaned up EVERY bodily fluid multiple times, including but not limited to dried tampons off a wall, human feces that spelled out ‘SHIT’ across a different wall, a pile of used condoms off the top of a trash can, an over-flowing diaper also spewed over the top of a different trash can and most recently some chunky mystery meat stuffed into the sink drain of a men's room. But even those extreme cases aside, the filth that accumulates naturally over the course of a day is surprising. Being alive is a messy thing and our environment reflects that. Just like in your life, things get messed up or worn out. That’s entropy and it’s fine. Everything will crumble, falter, break and get gunked up. All you have to do, in life and at the job, is clean it up and get ready for the inevitable next mess.

I say the next mess because there will be another mess to clean. In fact, it will probably be the same mess you’ve already cleaned back again. One of the most frustrating things about cleaning for a living is just how Sisyphean a task it is. If you stick around the place you just cleaned long enough you will literally watch your hard work come undone. Regardless, it has to be done. If you don’t deal with it, the mess will only accumulate and get worse. Nothing goes away on its own. Life takes maintenance. Whether it’s small things like cleaning and laundry or the bigger stuff like doctors appointments and personal relationships, you have to keep on top of it or it quickly falls apart. One spill, if left unattended, ingrains itself into or onto anything it is spilled on and eventually grows mold. Don’t get me wrong, I am a king of procrastination but there just comes a point that you have to do the thing you’re putting off. Even if it’s just gonna get messed up again.

The trick to making this less torturous is to realize the difference between when something has to be clean and when something just has to not be a mess. If you’re working in a hospital and you’re prepping the OR, I imagine things have to be CLEAN, but when working at 7-Eleven, where customers are constantly coming in and walking over your freshly mopped floors, you just have to keep things stocked and the coffee brewing. If someone spills something, mop it up and if the trash is full, take it out. No one is expecting the store to be clean enough to perform open heart surgery in. In real life, sometimes it’s impossible to clean up a mess you’ve made. It’s just too big and would take too long to fix. It happens. It’s at those times that your best bet is to patch it up the best you can and move on. If you linger, other parts of your life will suffer for it. When something happens that is too catastrophic to fix right away or you just don’t have the time, resources or energy to properly clean it up, all you can do make sure it’s not a complete mess and move on. The world does not stop for anyone and some days you just gotta do your best to keep up.

Despite the fact that being alive is a messy business, you’ll find out very quickly if it’s your job to clean that there is not a building on the planet designed with the janitorial staff in mind. Right now, my second job is cleaning a big art house theater on the weekends. It’s a 90-year-old building that seats almost 1,600 people complete with chandeliers, an organ that is from the theaters opening and millions of small crevasses for popcorn and candy to wedge itself into. There are plenty of dark corners where no broom, mop or vacuum can reach. So while it all looks nice and pretty, the place you have to clean, and the world, were not built with you and your task in mind. That doesn’t mean you get to skip cleaning it though. That just means you have to pay attention and learn the landscape if you want to even come close to accomplishing any level of orderly. Just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean the problem or mess isn’t your responsibility. You can’t just leave it for the next person because that next person will always be you. Much like any other problem in life, it’s just a puzzle to be solved.

When it comes down to actually getting the job done, there are many tips and tricks to make it easier on yourself and almost all of them can be applied to life outside the workplace. In fact, one of the first things you learn when cleaning any place bigger than your bedroom is to clean top to bottom. You dust countertops, wipe down windows, etc, until gravity does the work of bringing it all down to the ground. Then all that’s left is to sweep it up and mop. If you do it any other way, you’re going to have to sweep up and mop multiple times. Not everything in life has one best way to do things but there is usually a solid method to start with if you’re looking to tackle a problem. You encounter a problem, find its root cause and work your way through it until you find its source. Find the top and work your way down.

Maintenance should be routine. I can still tell you the order I cleaned things at the convenience store I worked midnights at for seven years and at what time I did each step each night. If you can make a routine out of the upkeep in life, then when extra problems do come along, you’ll have all your bases covered and a method to deal with whatever additional mess has come your way. I’m not saying your routine has to be so rigid that any deviance from it throws your life into disarray, but if you have a baseline for where you should be in a night, then you’ll know just how far behind or ahead you are when those other problems come up. For me, that baseline is my routine.

One thing about cleaning I tell people, that at first seems counterintuitive, is that in order to properly clean, you sometimes have to make a mess. Think back to any time you’ve had to do a deep clean on your house. The first thing you do is grab everything out of your closets and hiding places and throw it into piles. You sweep out all the hidden dirt and dust from under your bed or behind the couch and push it into the open. Then you might dump any soiled dishes into the sink or filthy clothes into baskets. All the once hidden grime in your life is brought into the open and now your place is gonna seem much worse than before you started. After that, you have to dive in and start getting things clean again but you can only truly do that after you bring what was once secreted away out into the open. Then comes the real gross part. Anyone who has ever done any cleaning knows, you’re gonna end up with most of that mess on you. You are at some point going to be elbow deep in grime and gunk that stinks and sticks to your clothes. By the end of a shift, the building may be clean but you will be absolutely covered. But in my experience, that’s the only way to get anything done. You have to dive in unafraid of getting dirty for the sake of the task at hand. The solution to some problems is sometimes buried elbow deep in years of neglect and decomposing garbage and you have to be willing to get in there if you want to move forward.

Cleaning is no different from other jobs in that it affects you outside of work. People who work at a fast food joint often can’t continue to eat at that particular place ever again. They have seen the sausage get made, sometimes literally, and it has turned them off from the whole endeavor. This did not work on me, I still love White Castle, but I digress. Some of these ripples actually end up making you a better person. It only takes one night of scraping and scrubbing just to have some drunk come by like a tornado through your store destroying your hard work to make you more careful and considerate in the future when you’re out in public. It only takes being covered in goo from changing one trash bin full of half-empty cups of soda to make the connection that trash bins aren’t all wormholes to some trash dimension. Whatever you throw away in there an actual human being is going to have to deal with so maybe you’ll look for a sink before chucking a half-full Coke in there (it’s a pet peeve). Basically, doing a tough, thankless job will teach you to be empathetic and thankful for the people who are willing to do the dirty work of keeping the world running. You’ll maybe even realize that the work they do is much more vital than whatever the hell it is hedge fund managers and the like do. With that newfound empathy, your attitudes and, more importantly, your behaviors change, making it easier for those people to get the job done which will make them less stressed and happier, so on and so on, until it snowballs into a kinder world. Or, at the very least, if that’s too utopian for you, no one will think you’re an asshole.

There are definitely some people out there that we all know who, when they make a mess in a public place, think (or even say out loud) that they don’t have to deal with it because that’s someone else’s job. Yes, they are technically correct. There is someone like me whose job it is to clean up whatever someone like them might leave behind. But not only does not give you a free pass to live your filthiest life but also speaks to a larger issue in society. Just because it’s not your job doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help out if you can. Imagine a world where instead of your own convenience as your prime concern, we all made everyone's comfort a priority. If you drop something, just pick it up. It’ll save someone else that much time and effort in their day. It all comes down to looking out for each other even when we don’t have to. If everyone did that maybe the planet wouldn’t feel like such a filthy nightmare existence constantly. Who knows?

Now, that’s not to say that if you slap your tall glass of sugar syrup all over the table and floor that you should insist on “helping” by throwing a few napkins on it, essentially putting a bandaid over a tumor. Sometimes you make a mess that is just too big to handle on your own. It is ok to ask for help from someone who has the proper tools and experience to help you. Just find someone around and fess up to your mess and they will most likely be happy to help. Like I said before, messes are inevitable so there is no need to be embarrassed. It’s much better to seek help than to just sneak away and leave the mess for someone else, even if it is their job. Whether it is a mess you’ve made, a project you need help on or just seeking a better understanding, the best thing to do in some situations is to seek out someone who has trained and who has the proper tools to help. That could be finding the janitor or finding a therapist. You do not have to (and I might as well be saying this in a mirror right now) figure everything out on your own. Find the proper tools and the people who know how to use them. They will be happy to help.

For thirteen years I have spent a lot of my time sifting through the trash disasters people leave behind them. My whole adult working life has been one piss covered bathroom after another. My blood may be part cleaning fluid by the time I die from inhaling too many of their fumes. In the end, though, I think it has made me a more empathetic and kinder person. I’ve become someone who’s not afraid to tackle disaster areas and get elbow deep in the filth if that’s what it’s going to take to make the world better. All the same though, if I see you making a mess, expect a fight.

[amadcap]

What The Hell Is Wrong With Me?

I try to live my life as a mix between a science experiment and an art project. I think of a weird thing to do with some aspect of my life and then take the results, hang them on a wall and call it art. Some examples of this include interviewing my ex-romantic partners on the radio, planning my own funeral as a birthday celebration, spur of the moment road trips packing only a camera, etc. It’s not an ideal way to live but it’s working for me.

My latest experiment is a bit excessive, even for me. It started, as most things do for me, as a joke about having been single for almost twelve years now and having only a vague idea why. Friends would say, “I don’t know why you’re single. You seem fine to me.” and I’d have no definitive response other than “I’m just a weirdo who doesn’t go out.” or the ever quippy, “I can’t afford it.”. We all assumed it was because I’m a curmudgeon, hence the pen name, but somehow grumpier, crustier people than me are happily coupled. Why not this old man? Why can’t I do that? Essentially with my latest experiment, I hoped to get closer to answering a simple question. What the fuck is wrong with me?

This new endeavor can be found (at least until I stop paying for the hosting fee that is) at wouldyoudatethisguy.com. If it’s later than that and the website has been retired to whatever void old websites go to, the site was basically a one-sheet personal ad. Complete with photos, likes & dislikes, flaws, what I’m looking for and a very cheesy video I made of me giving a tour of my house while reiterating the info on the page. At the end of the page is (or was) a link to a survey that asked people to rip into me and see if what they found was any good. I could have just found a therapist but this seemed like more fun.

Dating Video

Video for wouldyoudatethisguy.com

I think I’m funny.

So, why do this? If you’ve read this far, that’s the one thing I’m sure you’re asking. Well, as I mentioned, I’ve not been in a committed relationship in about twelve years. In fact, it’s been around six years since I’ve so much as held the hand of someone. I’ve asked a few different women, with very different personalities, if they’d like to date, but each has kindly and tactfully turned me down. Now, instead of taking the red-pill, incel, blame all women approach, I took a closer look at the situation and realized I am the only common denominator in all my relationship woes. So, therefore, the problem must be with me.

Also, if I’m being really honest, I’m just fucking lonely a lot. I work all the time just to come home to my cat, Leonard, who admittedly is adorable (more on that later) but his life advice stinks. I’m far from being alone in being lonely. We seem to live in a time where loneliness is rampant and actual becoming a full-on public health crisis. The UK even found time around Brexit to appoint a Minister of Loneliness. But since I’m in the US, where I’ve been without health insurance as long as I’ve been without a partner, I don’t think that will help me much, so I guess I have to help myself.

So, in a truly scientific endeavor, I made the website and survey, the most accurate and scientific of tools. I tried to present myself as honestly as I could, for better or worse. Both my virtues and my vices. So let’s go over the results and see if we can figure out what makes me so undateable.

HYPOTHESIS AND INTENT

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. This experiment is not, as one response put it, “-a trick to get girls to talk to you?”. The survey is completely anonymous and I collected no data that gave me a way to contact anyone. In fact, I only received one Instagram, one number, one email and one person who left their name but they only did so just to offer their services in making a better dating profile. I, obviously, did not reach out.

So if this isn’t a strange misguided attempt at finding a partner, what is it? Well, I figured if there is something wrong with me that keeps people from wanting to date me, I am unaware of it. Over the years, I’ve asked out at least a half dozen women and only one has said yes. I’m smart enough to know it’s not because “all women are crazy” or anything like that, so it must be me.

So if there is something that makes dating me such an unthinkable thing, what is it? And just as importantly, am I willing and/or able to change it? Survey says-

DEMOGRAPHICS

Let’s talk about who was brave enough to take this survey.

As you can see from this fancy word cloud, this was a real white woman affair. In fact, I only had a handful of non-white people fill out responses. I don’t know why this is, maybe I just know too many white people or maybe non-white people saw the ad I put on Facebook and, rightfully so, thought it was some white people nonsense.

I did appreciate all the men, gay or straight, that responded but there was a massive gulf in the tone of those responses. While the gay men were kind and very flirty, even if they weren’t interested, the straight boys were very upset at me. Apparently, self-improvement and feminism is gay. But I’ll get into that later.

Also, to highlight just how long it has been since I’ve been in the dating world, there were a lot of people who were not a man or woman, gay or straight. I had to ask a coworker a lot of definitions for all the new-to-me things you can be. I think it’s great but I had trouble when it’s was just the beginnings of a spectrum of sexuality coming into the mainstream culture. I must seem so boring. In the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of sexual expression, I’m like black coffee and toast.

One of these new (but not really) types that were a big chunk of my survey responses were people who are polyamorous. I found this to be a very interesting and probably a healthy trend since everyone else who sent in answers that were in a monogamous relationship almost unanimously said they’d rather date me than whoever they’re dating, in some sort of “grass is greener on the other side” kind of situation. Maybe more people should start varying their source of emotional support and sexual satisfaction. Food for thought.

DO YOU LIKE ME? YES OR NO?

These stats do not paint a particularly hopeful picture of my romantic future. The graph makes it look better than the numbers do. Only 28% of people said they would date me and most of the ‘Other’ category was “Maybe” and “No and here’s why…”. Also, as I said before, most of those willing to date this mess of a person were in their own messy relationships. As one Eastern European responders said, “I’m just in a relationship with the wrong guy”. She then went on to chastise me for not taking care of my mental health. Sometimes people give the advice they need to hear.

THE POSITIVES

As we dive into the nitty-gritty of this…whatever this is, I have some good news and a lot more bad news. Let’s start with the good news, which, aside from one very nice European woman who said I reminded her of Kuzco from one of my favorite movies, The Emperor’s New Groove, can be broken down into two main attributes people perceived from my page.

The first positive thing people said about me when pushed, was that I’m open and honest with how I portray myself, flaws and all. This I take as a compliment as I pride myself on my openness. If you hang around me more than a few times, I’m sure to share an incredibly personal tale or any emotion and thought running through me, regardless of how appropriate it might be, without much prodding. There are only a handful of things in my life that I’ve only told one or two people and even fewer things I’ll take with me to my grave. But I admit, this isn’t out of some altruistic sense of being “myself” at all times and is instead a way to weed out people I wouldn’t get along with anyway. If I’m unapologetically myself constantly than it is less likely I’ll waste my time around people I don’t mesh with. A coping mechanism if I’ve ever heard one but you gotta read the room somehow.

The second compliment I got a lot is that I’m “so brave” for putting something like this out into the world. Coworkers, who have experienced first hand the conception and execution of this experiment, have expressed a similar sentiment. Saying things along the lines of how they would not be able to withstand some of the abuse I was reading to them through laughter. This is something I wholeheartedly disagree with. There’s nothing brave about being a narcissistic weirdo. Abuse is relative, at least for me. I just don’t care what some Eastern European, self-proclaimed white supremacist, that has taken a few precious minutes out of his surely busy schedule, to call me names has to say. As I reassured my coworkers, there’s nothing they could say that I haven’t already told myself. Which leads nicely into the bad news.

THE NEGATIVES

Just as in my real life, the people who filled out this survey really did not like me. But, unlike my real life, these people didn’t have a real reason to dislike me as much as they professed to. I guess it was more instinctual for them. Regardless, among the sincere constructive criticism, some trends did emerge.

First off, while some praised me for my honesty, others were very put off by the prospect of it. I think this reflects more on the person taking the survey than on me. As for my part, what I meant when I talked about being “…more than brutally honest, I’m unnecessarily honest.” is that I am lazy. I don’t have the energy to tell the little lies that seem to keep most relationships going. For example, if my partner made a big mistake with something and left something in ruins because of it, I wouldn’t sugarcoat what had happened. I wouldn’t offer empty sympathies like, “it’s ok. It’s not your fault.”. But what I would do is be honest as well as offer solutions. Saying, “You fucked up but here’s what we can do about it.” is more my style.

The main fear that people had about my style of honesty, as well as my “negativity”, which I’ll get to in a minute, was that it was a veiled excuse to be an asshole. The thing is, I’ll fully admit I’m an asshole. I don’t need a veiled excuse to tell anyone that. But to me, there is a distinction between an asshole and an outright dick. The difference is an asshole like me is just going about their day when someone inserts themselves into their life and instead of being nice about it, they let their inner venom out. On the other hand, a dick is someone who is on the prowl for someone the can be mean to and fuck over. When someone asks me if they’re annoying and I say yes, I’m an asshole. When someone calls a complete stranger on the street fat and ugly, they’re a dick. Oscar The Grouch and Dr. House are assholes while your hight school bully and Alex Jones are dicks through and through. Aside from the being fictitious or not, there’s a wide gulf there.

I’m not trying to defend the fact that I “don’t suffer fools gladly” as I’m sure my eventual obituary will read, but after working midnights at a convenience store for almost a decade, among a bunch of other reasons, it’s just how I approach the world. I come from a place where you have to be a little mean to get by. Right or wrong, I don’t think I’d be able to change that now and I’m not sure I’d want to. But to those who think both assholes and dicks are the worst, there might be some comfort in this quote from E.M. Cioran that just might glimpse my future.

“We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.”

Along with my uncomfortable level of honesty, people seemed to be real turned off by my so-called “negativity”, which I expected. If you haven’t gathered it by now somehow, I’m a pessimist through and through. I plan to write more on the subject in the future, which I’m sure people will just love, but basically I see life as pointless and absurd and that view of the world frees me up to try and live as authentically as I can. The prism of pessimism allows me to find what I dislike in the world and make efforts to change it. To put it plainly, if you don’t like my no-bullshit-the-world-is-messed-up-and-we-need-to-change-it attitude, you don’t like me.

Let’s move now from the problems people had with me in the present tense and look to my future or, in this case, a lack thereof. One of the biggest of the issues people found was the absence of future plans for my life. It seemed to them that the only thing I knew about wherever I wanted to go with my remaining years and whatever I wanted to do, I wanted to do it without children. The thing is, they’re right. I, like a lot of people, whether they admit it or not, have no idea what I’m doing. In fact, I probably have even less idea of what I’m doing than most. You see, I’ve always been a mess mentally. I have several attempted suicides in my past along with a host of other mental kinks. So I wholeheartedly did not expect to make it this far in life and I had no plan. Boy does it show.

When I was close to turning 28 and realized I wouldn’t be joining some of my unfortunate heroes in the 27 Club, I had what I’m sure is the first in a series of life-crises to come. I was still trying to be some sort of rockstar while living in my parents' basement, working a dead-end job, driving a van and spending all my money on putting out and buying records. I was a walking cliché. So I quit music, something that had previously been the only thing to make me happy, got a “real” job, bought a house with a mortgage and signed a lease on a hybrid in just under two years. I did all the things you’re supposed to do as an adult in America. But now what? Do I regret all the dream chasing I did? Not at all because I have some weird stories about almost dying from it. But I don’t miss it either. Here I am now though and barring any undiscovered tumor or tragic car accidents, I’m not kicking the bucket anytime soon. So what do I do with myself until then? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m just doing the same thing I’ve always done. Taking it as it comes and hoping I survive. As long as I’m not living in my car again, I consider it a win.

The only thing I am certain of in my future is I will spend it without children of my own if I can help it. Being alone for so long has done it’s part to keep me on track in that regard but it has also significantly narrowed my dating field. Almost everyone I know is chasing little genetic copies of themselves around. Part of the reason behind being so anti-offspring is the aforementioned mental problems that I feel would be cruel to knowingly pass on to a kid. I know what it was like to be that kid and I wouldn’t want to risk putting anyone else through that. Plus, kids are expensive and I can barely feed myself most of the time. How would I be able to afford growing a whole human?

People lecture me all the time about not having children. They tell me it’s a phase and I’ll change my mind but I’ve been saying I don’t want kids since I was 15 and I would still go out and get a vasectomy right now if I could afford it. That right there should be the first sign that I’d be a bad father. There are enough unwanted children in the world without me adding to them. When I got to an age when all my friends started getting married and spawning little ones, everyone thought I’d suddenly get envious and want one of my own. When in fact the exact opposite happened. Being around a screaming, shitting, puking bag of germs caused my sperm to commit a mass suicide. I’ve never been happier to be alone. This may seem harsh but I just don’t have that parenting bone in my body. I like having spending money and a quiet house too much I guess.

One last theme I noticed in these responses was a worry around me stating that I “…don’t take very good care of myself, mentally or physically.”. I have no real defense for this. I make an effort to better myself, just in strange ways. This survey is a prime example of that. The only thing I can really say about it is, I don’t drink and I don’t do any drugs. Instead, I eat greasy gas station food and drink nonstop sugar and caffeine. Everyone has their vices and those are mine. I should probably work on that though but I don’t see any pressing reason to. With no one special in my life, who am I hurting other than my own guts?

So yea, people, on the whole, were not impressed with me. But that was the point of this whole endeavor anyway. To find constructive criticism and decide if those criticisms were valid and actionable. The thing is, not all the criticisms were constructive. Which brings us to, not more bad news, but hilarious news.

THE WEIRD AND MEAN

This being the internet, my website attracted more than just the curious and helpful. It also brought out the weirdos, the hilarious, the trolls and the outright nazis. Because of course it did. There are two universal truths on the world wide web. Whatever it is, someone hates it and someone jacked off to it. It might have been the same person.

In an attempt to get eyes on the survey from outside my immediate circle, I took out an online ad promoting it. For some reason, that ad really took off in Eastern Europe and if they’re anything to go off of, I won’t be stopping in Bulgaria any time soon. These responses were vicious and I’ve probably never laughed harder.

These complaints are all over the place. A lot of guys took this opportunity to call me “gay” and other, harsher terms for gay, which sent me into flashbacks of my middle school experience. One word used a lot was “cringe” or “it gave me the cringe” as the kids seem to say. One woman from “right behind me” provided me with the very specific insult, “It might look like something Michael Cera would take as an inspiration for his next role.”. I’ll be sure to call his agent. Another person skipped every question save the one about what they didn’t like and just wrote a single word, “pretentious”. That made me laugh almost as much as the gay Greek man who, in response to being asked if he was single, said, “we havin’ fun”.

Not every joke landed though. Aside from the worn-out, “you’re gay bro” approach, plenty of people left messages I’m sure they thought was funny. Some of them were maybe part of some Gen-Z humor I just don’t get, like the person whose main comment was “[c o n t a i n e r]”. Kids these days, with their meme humor and their snapchaps or whatever. Then there was the sizable group of responses that identified themselves as goblins and threatened to eat my toes. This might have been the more innocent version of the surprising amount of people who identified as “Apache attack helicopter”. I thought this was a strange inside internet joke I was unaware of or some astonishing coincidence but was then informed by a coworker that this a slight again trans and nonbinary people. Everyone knows it’s a funny joke when it has to be explained. These people are a prime example of the aforementioned dicks.

If there were any prevailing opinions among the more extreme feedback, it was a distaste in my politics. I didn’t need this survey to know that fascism and far right politics are on the rise across the Western world but damn Eastern Europe, you’ve got a big Nazi problem. At least a third of responses, almost exclusively made up of straight men, made references to me being an “antifa cuck” or a “feminist cuck” or, to mix it up, simply a “cuck pussy”. They’re a real clever bunch.

Now, of course, this is exactly the reaction I wanted from people like this when I mentioned my politics. Anyone who openly admits they are a white supremacist is not welcome in my life. Some of these dudes had to prove how macho they really were by really digging into me. The best of all these was Respondent #209 with answers like, “You are not cool. Stop trying to be cool. This experiment will accomplish nothing. Get a real job, please. (Note: I made the whole website and wrote most of this article on the clock at work) Get proper education.” and, “He is a failure in life with no future, trying to make something of himself by begging for attention online. I only made this fake profile to show him how much of a failure he is. Please, stop trying to make something of yourself when you are actually a nobody.” and my favorite, “…he is so ugly he deserves to die in the worst possible way.”. He was a real charmer.

Speaking of charmers, other prime examples of the master race tried to convince me to change into one of them. They told me to “bulk up”, get a Richard Spencer-esque haircut and buy a suit. One respondent pulled a YouTube-like move of relentlessly recommending I check out Jordan Peterson, the misogynistic philosophy professor who is problematic for a lot of reasons. My response to him is the same thing I keep trying to tell YouTube recommendations when it suggests Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan or Bill Mahr. “No, YouTube. Make them go away forever and get back to the Marblelympics.”

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION ABOUT MY CAT

Moving on from the worst of people, let’s talk about the best of the animal kingdom, pets. This one was a simple calculation. If you answered ‘No’, you went right in the trash pile as far as I’m concerned. You can have your problems with me all you want, but Leonard is precious. End of discussion.

ANSWER SOME QUESTIONS

I got a lot of specific questions and comments that were not easily answered in the general terms I’ve been using. So I figured I use some space here to go through them, list style.

#28: “Are you down to explore abandoned buildings, go on three am diner runs, wander around?” Yes to all three. I only eat at 3am in diners.

#189: “Have a shower, discover grindcore and go get ’em champ!” My dude. I used to be one of the hosts on WCBN’s The Seizure Experiment. It was all metal, punk, and noise. I once saw Full of Hell in a 10x10 room as part of Berserker Fest II. Who do you think I am?

#200: “…it would be important to know how you treat family relations (too close to family, or hate them, etc)” I am not close with my family. We are cordial at best. Which is fine. We are just different kinds of people.

#211: “Where do we go after we die?” Nowhere. This is it. So stop using some sort of afterlife as an excuse. (And my favorite color is orange.)

#213: “I’m really interested on how you come up with this and why… can we talk? ahahah kiss” See the whole article above.

THINGS I COULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY AND CONCLUSIONS

So, was this a perfect experiment? No, obviously not. The sample size wasn’t large enough and it had too narrow of a demographic. It’s also more than likely impossible to present yourself in the span of one page and a video on the internet. One of the main responses I got was there wasn’t enough information on the site to make a decision as to whether I was dateable or not. Maybe I should have linked my social media to get those follows and have my notification bell rung. But that wasn’t the point.

This complaint about needing more information also confused me though. This site offered much more than your average dating app. Any platform I’ve swiped on, which has been many, you get a few hundred characters and maybe six photos to sum yourself up and convince potential partners to message you. If anything I think I gave people too much information, as usual.

The truth is I have a decent idea what the reasons I’m single are. Mainly it’s that I never leave my house unless that is, I’m going to work. True, I work a lot between the two or three jobs I hold down at any one time, so, therefore, I’m out of the house a lot more than your average agoraphobic hermit, but most of these jobs have been overnight shifts, more often than not working on my own, just like everything else I do with my time. I love going to the movies alone. I love eating alone. I love the quiet that surrounds me when I sleep in on a rare day off. No obligations. No pressure. It’s the kind of peace and quiet and time to self reflect you can only get with no one else around. I thrive on that.

To be honest, the only time I notice how lonely I am is when I’m out in public. Being around couples on the street just highlights my lack of any meaningful connection to anyone, if there is such a thing. As I go out and run errands I can’t manage to do in the middle of the night and I run across enticing people, I have one phrase that starts to loop in my head. ‘I’m going to die desperate and alone.’. Over and over until I fall into a deep depression and crawl into bed for a few days. The only thing that helps, ironically, is being around a couple. All the bickering and the venom and the passive-aggressive nonsense, always leaves me feeling better off on my own. To borrow from Kafka,

“No, if one takes it by and large, I have no right to complain that I am alone and have nobody that I can trust. I certainly lose nothing by that and probably spare myself trouble. I can only trust myself and my burrow.”

I’ve been doing stuff on my own for so long I don’t remember how to do it any other way. How do people meet each other? What do they say? I don’t know how to flirt. Whenever I do go out in public I will inevitably cross paths with someone I think is attractive but I am just supposed to walk up to them and blurt that out? I have no other excuse to interact with them. Plus, have you seen the sexual crime statistics in this country? If I was a woman and I saw a dude that looked like me approaching me, it’d be throat chop, knee to the groin, mace and go. It amazes me that any white men have partners after the shit we’ve pulled the last 2000ish years. Yet they do, but not me. I have no idea what you’re supposed to do out in the real world. I might as well be another species.

My point is, maybe, in fact, more than likely, I’m just not gonna find anyone and that is ok. Not everyone does. Comedian Daniel Sloss has a great special called ‘Jigsaw’ that dissects Western cultures obsession with finding “the one” and in it he mentions how statistically unlikely it is that, out of the seven billion people on Earth, there would be only one for me and they would live anywhere close to where I live. It’s just as likely that I’ll never meet the right person and I have to learn to be ok with that, which I think, on my best days, I am.

One of the main flaws with this experiment, and all online dating for that matter, is that there are just some things you can’t convey online. Plenty of people said they’d have to interact with me in person to see if “there was chemistry”. There’s a lot of merit to that. When you only have some words and a video on a website to work with, it comes out a bit one-sided. Interacting with people, like any performance, is changed and fed by the audience, who in this case is the potential partner. You have to read the room, so to speak, and give someone the once over with your bullshit detector before you know if someone is a waste of time or not. That’s something it’s very difficult to do on the internet.

Now, that is not to say this was all a waste of time and money. First and foremost, I found it hilarious and I’ve done much dumber and more expensive things for jokes. But I also gleaned an outsiders perspective on myself that I will be taking into account in the future. The traits I thought people would point to as the things that are wrong with me were barely mentioned while things I hadn’t even thought of were. Perception is fickle like that.

One thing is definitely true. I had already been told in the past that I have high standards as if that was a bad thing. From this survey, I’ve realized that maybe those standards are there for a reason. I do not want kids and it would be unfair to any preexisting children for me to pretend otherwise. I am a pessimist. I’m a funny pessimist, but still a pessimist none the less and that’s just not something I want to stop being. Also, my left-wing politics are a reflection of my very left-wing values. So if you’re some alt-right cheerleader with a hard-on for Ben Shapiro, it’s not gonna work out. These things are all dealbreakers and I’d rather be kind of lonely sometimes than miserable with someone I don’t get on with at a fundamental level.

On the whole though, I think the main thing wrong with me is that I was so convinced that there is something wrong with me. That’s not just me crawling even farther up my own ass. I should say, there’s nothing any more wrong with me than there is with anyone else. I’m not perfect by any measure but no one expects me to be. I’m not a Prince Charming or a white knight or whatever else Jordan Peterson wants men to be. I have my strengths and my weaknesses but I try to work on those weaknesses when I can. That’s all I really can do. At the end of the day, I’m just a Midwestern punk weirdo who has a rough exterior but cries at movies, reads constantly, eats shitty food and who wouldn’t mind being with someone if the opportunity arrives. All I can do is continue to figure out my own life a day at a time, trying to live as authentically as possible and occasionally asking someone if they’d like to team up and figure it out together. Here’s hoping someone takes me up on that offer someday. Short of that, a big pay raise and a good therapist couldn’t hurt either.

[amadcap]

Automation

I

Jack woke up to the sound of his alarm at 6:15 like he had as long as he could remember. Without looking, he shut the alarm up and, with great effort, pulled himself out from under his mountain of blankets, stripped down and stepped into the shower. Sensing his presence, the shower lathered, washed and dried Jack in exactly thirteen minutes. In that time, Jacks kitchen had come to life and made his breakfast of two eggs, a side of toast and a tall glass of artificial orange juice, as it did every other morning. Jack took his clothes out of the printer, a white tee, and grey slacks again, and sat to eat. He tried to take his time but the plates were abruptly taken away exactly eighteen minutes after he sat down. Jack tried to relax for a bit as the kitchen cleaned itself but as he watched and pondered the scrubbing bot making its way speedily across the floor, the chirp of the office chair interrupted the peaceful silence. Jack sighed and went to start his day at work.

“Hello Employee Jack.” a synthetic voice said from the tiny speakers. “Good morning. You have 25 new products and services to review.”

“Ok. Let’s get it started then.” Jacks voice was still dry and cracked from the long period of disuse the nights before. The chair was an old model Techflection 20D. A curved metal case housed four small screens, two overhead speakers and faux leather cushioning for comfort. The first screen in the two by two grid flashed on with a photo of the replacement bolt Jack had ordered last week for the scrubber bot. On the bottom two screens appeared five empty stars. In the last screen a small animated, androgynous face appeared.

“Out of five stars, how would you rated the SCRUBBO DRIVESHAFT REPLACEMENT BOLT?” the synthetic voice asked from the eyeless face on the screen.

Jack poked at a perfect five stars. He didn’t know if he thought the bolt really warranted a perfect score but he thought the house might get upset if he gave it anything less. Plus, the scrubber bot was working fine, so it must have worked.

“Wow. Five stars. Please tell us why.”

Jack hated this part. He was never really sure what to say. It’s not like he was particularly passionate about any of these items, especially some small bolt he only ordered out of necessity. What is he supposed to say? Oh, this bolt changed my life! I’ll never look at the world the same. I have built it a shrine in my closet and every night I leave a little mess for the Scrubbo to eat up as an offering to my new gods. It was just a tiny bolt. One of billions most likely. It worked. There was nothing more to it. So Jack just stuck with his default answer.

“It was delivered promptly, was easy to install and cost next to nothing. Would buy again.” he flatly told the face.

“Wow. that’s good news.”. The face smiled and twirled a bit. The image of the bolt was replaced by the logo of Dronobot Deliveries and the stars reset. “What did you think of the drone from DRONOBOT DELIVERIES who delivered the SCRUBBO DRIVESHAFT REPLACEMENT BOLT?”

Jack once again tapped a full five stars because once again ‘Indifferent’ was not an option.

“Wow. That’s great. Did the drone seem to be in full working order?”

Jack thought for a second and could not distinguish that particular drone from the legion of other drones that had flown to the 10ft high windows of his 38th-floor apartment to drop off assorted knickknacks. So, he once again recited his stock answer.

“It was in perfect order. Silent and quick. Would use again.”

“We are on a roll now.” the face encouraged him. “We better take a breather.” The face whisked itself away and all four screens started playing one video.

“Getting frustrated with your Auto-Shower home module? Wish there was a better way?”. The screens displayed a shower not unlike Jacks, floating freely against a blue, wavey background. “Maybe it’s time to try the new Auto-Shower Plus!”. Animated bubbles wipe up from the bottom of the screen replacing the model shower Jack had with very similar shower but with a chrome plated stand and a third knob between the two Jack already had. “The Auto-Shower Plus home module has heat saving technology that cleans and dries exactly one minute and forty-five seconds faster than the old model. Get to breakfast that much quicker! Get your Auto-Shower Plus today!”. The video ended and an option to buy this new module blipped on all four screens. Jack swiped it away to get back to work. He had no use for a new shower. This one was fine. The face returned.

“Shall we continue?”

The stars reappeared and the next item was presented. It was the audiobook of ‘A Complete History of Criclone: The Weather We Made”. Then it was a camera he ordered as a gift. Then an ad for smart sheets. Next was the automated plant pot that he kept forgetting to program for his dying fern. Then a pair of nano thread socks. Followed by an ad for the Turbo Engine extension for the Scrubbo. This went on until exactly 4:10 when Jack was allowed to clock out for the day. He crawled back to his bed and turned on his entertainment screen.

This routine had gone on for years and would continue for years. Jack would wake up, get into his Auto-Shower Plus, dress, eat, work and spend the rest of his night watching AI dramas and Deep Dream Reenactments until he drifted off to sleep. Around 7pm each night, Jack would order dinner from one of the seemingly infinite delivery services. Some would send the drone to his window along with anything he had ordered while watching the ads during the day. Sometimes the food would be sent via an old drone that scuttled up from the lobby of his building and slid his dinner through a slat at the bottom of his front door. The slat was basically a smaller mechanized door at the bottom of the six-inch steel front door that opened just enough to let deliveries in then shut again to keep everything else out. Jack was always annoyed when they sent these old drones because it meant he had to get up and cross the apartment for his food but he supposed he needed the exercise. Regardless of the dinner, Jack would take it in bed and leave the bulk of the clean up to the scubber bot.

After a particularly long day of reviews and ads, Jack had worked up a real hunger. He decided to order a pizza from one of his old favorites, Bloopza. He had completely forgotten that they still sent up a delivery bot the old way. Three and a half minutes exactly after ordering a triple cheese and ham pizza he heard the mechanical gears of his delivery slat opening with all the effort of something so low tech.

“After dinner,” Jack thought to himself “I’ll have to order a new door. I’m sick of this.”

The slot opened fully and a deep red pizza box started to be shoved through. Jack begrudgingly got up and started to cross the room. As Jack approached the door he heard the unmistakable sound of grinding gears. The bot delivering the pizza had only squeezed the box about halfway through before giving up. The delivery door inside the front door was trying it’s best to shut despite the six-inch deep dish pizza in the way. Jack in a panic grabbed the box and pulled but it was really wedged in there in a way only a mindless delivery bot could shove it in. Cheese was starting to ooze from the cracks in the grease-stained box and a small wisp of smoke was starting to come from the mechanics of the door.

Maybe the only way out of this is through, thought Jack as he gave up on pulling the box free. He wasn’t particularly in shape. He had ordered an automated exercise machine years ago but he only used it once. It might as well be modern art now but he still gave it a five-star rating. Jack slid on the slippers he hadn’t worn since he bought them and tried to remember how to open his door. Even though he was rushed as the smoke from the slat thickened and the sound of grinding gears gave way to bits of metal snapping inside the door, Jack still noticed that his door was so old it still had a handle and deadbolt. This door must be some sort of antique, he thought, turning the knob.

Jack pulled the door open for the first time since moving in, leaving a trail of steaming cheese and grease stains as the pizza box dragged across his floor. The hallway was dark and smelt stale. The pizza bot was long gone by now but Jack was already planning to leave a strongly worded review during work tomorrow. He’d make sure that thing ended up in a scrap-heap. To make matters worse this pizza was obviously ruined so he’d have to order something else once all this was done. Preferably something delivered by air this time.

Trying to use the problem-solving part of his brain for the first time in a long time, Jack assessed his predicament. The unmovable object that was the pizza box had reached roughly 80% of the way through the slot before halting while the unstoppable force that was the slot door weakly and repeatedly slapped against the top of the box. With each small thud, more cheese discharged from the seams of the box and gears inside the door were further stripped. Jack readies himself in the empty hall, grabbing the front door by its outside handle and bracing his foot against the back side of the box containing his now ruined dinner. With all the strength a person who sits or lays down 23 hours a day could muster, Jack pulled the front door towards him hoping to force the pizza through. Jack, the box and the door all groaning together like a chorus of bodybuilders.

With a wet rip, the pizza box finally fully reaches the inside of the apartment. The mechanics on the door snap the slot shut, now scorched and scratched but still coming down with force. Jack jumps back out of fear he might lose his foot to the mechanism even though it had already proven it wasn’t even powerful enough to get through cardboard. In his panic, Jack lost his footing, tumbling into the wall across the hall.

*click*

Without Jack holding his front door, it slowly shut, leaving him alone in the dark hall. As he watched the door shut, Jack felt that moment of clarity everyone has when you’re making a mistake. Like when you miss a step on the stairs. You have just enough time to realize you’ve missed a step and that you’re going to fall and it is going to hurt but not enough time to do anything about it. After the door clicked shut, Jack sat in disbelief in the quiet of the abandoned hall. As the moment of calm reflection past, panic set in. This was Jacks first time out of his apartment in years and he somehow had managed to lock himself out, without a phone or his credit cards. Jack might as well be in the jungle. He had really messed up this time.

“No, no, no, no…” Jack repeated as he shot up and started working the door handle. Locked as he had feared. He knew it would be locked. He never unlocked it because no one ever came over. The only way the door ever opened was the little slot that was now as good as welded shut after its battle with his lost dinner. He searched his pockets in vain knowing full well that the key card was right where he left it when he had moved in. Second drawer down on the far end of his kitchen. Jack frantically tried the door again.

Now in a full panic, Jack looked around at the rest of the hall hoping to find something or someone that could help. His door was the only one that had not been upgraded in the years since he first brought boxes of his stuff off the elevator. Everyone else had fingerprint scanners or retinal scanners even, while Jack had his ancient keycard in the style of those old hotels. Jacks door was so primitive that even if he had a screwdriver he could take the handle clean off or he could pry open the damaged slot. He looked at the blackened slot and wondered if he could fit his finger in the gap between it and the floor.

After nearly ripping his fingernails off in the process, he had no luck. Looking around for other options proved fruitless as well. There was no emergency glass to break or phone to use. All that was around him was his neighbors’ fancy doors. Jack decided to do something he was really out of practice with, talking to people. He recalled meeting one of his neighbors when he moved in but that was about it. Jack knocked on her door, waited for an answer and tried to remember her name. He was coming up blank but he was desperate so he knocked anyway and waited.

II

Anna was excited to finally have a neighbor close to her age. The lady who had been living next door must have been double her age and would never come out of her place unless it was to talk to the cops after she had called to register a noise complaint. If it wasn’t for the body monitor chip she wore, the medical droids might have never come to take her. Anna felt a bit guilty about the relief she had now that the old lady was gone. It was sad but also, she was old and Anna was excited to potentially have a neighbor that would stay out of her business and maybe become a friend. Was that so wrong?

Earlier, Anna had caught a glimpse of the guy hauling boxes out of the elevator. Average would be a generous description but it didn’t matter. As long as he doesn’t bang on the walls every time she was watching a movie. Outside the window, his furniture was being flown in by drone. He had decent taste, she’d give him that. That was a giant bed for one person though. Maybe he wasn’t alone. She really hoped he didn’t have kids. If he had kids, Anna would become the old lady calling in noise complaints. That is not a fate she was ready for.

This new neighbor didn’t seem to have any house plants being delivered. An excessive bed, an Auto-Shower, a strange chair with screens all around it but no house plants. Maybe Anna could get him one for a house warming gift or apartment warming gift in this case. Do people still get each other house warming gifts? When she moved in a few years ago, the old lady had baked her a disgusting casserole that Anna took one bite of before throwing it in the incinerator. When she bumped into the old lady in the hall the next week she wanted her pan back. Anna tried to explain that she had thought it was a disposable dish because no one used actual dinnerware these days and that she would order her a new one but the old lady wouldn’t have it. One mistake was all it took to sour that relationship I guess.

As she found her tablet to search for the proper house plant to buy her new potential acquaintance, she tried to fill in what details of his life she could from the things being air-lifted past her window. Other than the strange chair and massive bed, the only thing that really caught her eye was his massive entertainment screen. It must have been one of the new models that rolled up onto the ceiling. That settled it for Anna. She had to get herself invited over for a movie night. This guy must have a killer job to afford a screen like that AND an Auto-Shower. Meanwhile, she could barely afford to take the light rail to her job after rent. What could he possibly do? Maybe he was some big shot and she just didn’t realize it. She never was much for the business or gossip feeds. What if he was some sort of criminal? Anna could be living next to some high rolling kingpin of the underworld. Maybe a credit fixer or a prime cracker. She better pick out just the right house plant, she worried, I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of a guy like that.

Anna finally found a fern and had it delivered to the lobby. She checked herself in the mirror fixing herself up to make a proper first impression. Once all was quiet in the hall, she went downstairs, making sure to take the stairs, to the front desk. The fern was a little taller than she had thought, coming up to about her waist. From the lobby, she could see the moving truck parked outside, the newest resident loading boxes onto a dolly was trying to rush. Anna turned to the man at the front desk.

“What’s going on out there?”

“Oh, this happens every time someone new moves in. They park the truck out front and everybody gets behind them thinking they won’t be long. Then there’s an argument about taking up the space. Happens all the time.”

“Oh, I see.” Anna peered out the window trying to spy the potential family she had imagined. “Know anything about the new person?”

“Not much. Just that he’s got a lot of boxes of useless crap.”

“Is it just one guy?”

“As far as I know. Why?” A grin started across his face, “Looking for a boyfriend?”.

Anna rolled her eyes.

“No. I just don’t want any stupid kids living next door to me.”

“Sure. Sure.” he said chuckling.

“Whatever.”

She left the front desk annoyed and went back up the stairs. Well, at least he isn’t a hitman or something, she thought. Hopefully he has enough room for this miniature pine tree she was now trudging up six flights. As she got to her floor she stopped to catch her breath and listen.

After a few moments, with which Anna practiced what she would say and how to explain the foliage, the elevator dinged around the corner. She took another deep breath and left the stairwell. She tried to time it just right so it didn’t look like she was lingering, which of course she had been.

“Oh. Sorry I didn’t see you there. You must be my new neighbor. I’m Anna and this is actually for you.”. Anna handed over her gift and tried not to look embarrassed by its size.

“Uh, thanks.” Jack set his boxes down and took the potted menace. “I’m Jack.”

“Nice to meet you, Jack. You need help with those boxes?”

“Oh no, I got it.” He set his gift just inside the door to his apartment and turned to pick up his stuff. “I’m almost done anyway.”

“Cool. Is it just you?”

“Um, yea. It’s my first place even.”

“Awesome! Free at last right?”

They both forced a chuckle which was followed with an awkward silence you could have the Beijing Line Rocket through. There, in the hall, Anna scrambled for something clever to say but all she could think about was how dumb her housewarming gift looked sitting just inside his door, looming like it was trying to hide and ambush Jack when he stepped inside. There was no way this master of small talk here is going to take care of that thing, she thought. I have sentenced that plant to death.

“Well, I better hurry and finish up. I have a moving truck parked out front so…” Jack gawkily craned his neck toward the elevator.

“Oh right!” Relief washed over Anna as a clear exit from the conversation was presented to her. “Sorry. It was nice to meet you.”

“Yea. You too.”

“Once you get settled I’m right next door. I’m a pretty good neighbor. I’m quiet and all that so, no worries there.” She extended her hand. Jack shook her hand and turned back to his dolly. “And if you ever need anything,” Anna called after him, as he was shutting his door. “-don’t be scared to knock.”

III

“Anne? Anne, are you there?” Jack had been pounding on the door for a solid minute to no avail. Maybe her name wasn’t Anne. Maybe it was Anna? Angie? Amber? “It’s your neighbor, Jack. I’m locked out.” Nothing but silence. “Hello? Is anyone in there?”

After a few more minutes of desperately knocking, Jack moved down the hall and tried every other door and with each of them he was met with silence. Surely someone was home, he thought. Then again, by this time he was normally working. That’s gotta be it, he figured, everyone is at work. If that was the case, I just need to get downstairs where the lobby boy should be working.

Jack lived on the 37th floor of the GilberCo Tower on the outskirts of New Detroit. GilberCo Tower stood 300-floor megastructure and was built by and named after one of the old billionaires from the early 21st century that bought the old city up on the cheap before declaring a “renaissance” and erecting these housing towers over the old neighborhoods. This building had an ancient Greek theme for some reason, column and trim had a Parthenon façade from the front doors to the bathrooms and those right-angled spirals were everywhere all throughout the lobby. Whoever this building shared a name with must have had a thing for it. Didn’t matter now. All of those billionaires were dead and forgotten. The only reason Jack knew any of this was because of the blurb in the real estate listing that tried to make it seem like it had double the old world charm. The rubble of Ancient Greece restored to its former glory over the rubble of the human industrial age.

Luckily for Jack and everyone else in the building, the Greek theme stopped after the lobby. The rest of the building was the same plain grey steel and concrete that every other housing tower was made of. The 37th floor looked the same and had the same layout as the other 299 floors. The elevator was in the center of a U-shaped hallway, opening to the bend of the U. What would be behind the elevator were doors, one was a stairwell and the other was a service shaft for bots. Each floor had twelve tiny apartments evenly spaced from one end of the hall to the other. There were no windows and the only light came from old recessed lighting bouncing off the ceiling. It was always cold, dark and unexplainably damp in the hall which is why no one really left their apartment unless absolutely necessary or at least one of the reasons Jack never left his apartment, ever really.

After Jack had tried every door on his floor, he pressed the button to call the elevator. There was a loud crunching sound but according to the screen above the doors, the elevator was stuck on the 14th floor. Jack mashed the call button as fast as he could and when that didn’t help he kicked the doors as if that would fix it. When it was definite that the elevator was not working, Jack figured he’d have to take the 37 flights of stairs.

While Jack had been pacing around his floor, knocking on doors and impatiently waiting on the elevator, he noted just how dirty everything was. Cobwebs clung in every corner and crevice. There were deep black muddy tread tracks lead from to the bot service doors to everybody’s stoop. Most were faded into the beige carpet except for the several tracks that led to Jacks door. There was an industrial janitor bot that was supposed to do every floor every day. I guess that is broken as well, thought Jack. Just like the elevator. I wonder what is working. In the years since Jack had stepped into this hall, this place had become a real dump.

Jack pushed against the door to the stairwell but it did not budge. Behind the door, Jack could feel the weight of metal debris and assorted trash that had piled up, blocking his way. Jack hadn’t realized just how much those janitor bots did to keep this place running. How long had they been non-operational, he wondered. With the state of this floor, he imagined it must have been a long while. Jack pushed again with all the strength he could muster after his outburst with the elevator doors and frantic knocking. With an unnerving screech of metal on metal, whatever was up against the door gave way to Jack.

As messy as the floor Jack lived on had been, the stairwell made it look pristine by comparison. From landing to landing, all there was to see were piles of discarded trash, bots and even a cybernetic limb or two. There was indecipherable graffiti scrawled across almost any space on the grey concrete walls. Most of the lights were burned out, leaving the passageway bathed in a flickering orange light that was only supposed to be on in emergencies. From Jacks perspective, he could even see a few stairs missing. Maybe then janitor bot wasn’t broken, Jack explained to himself. Maybe he was just overworked. Either way, Jack would be sure to complain about it when he made it to the front desk. This is why I never leave my apartment. As far as Jack could tell, the piece of metal that had been blocking his way was a large chunk of the handrail that had rusted through and fallen on a separate pile of refuse and pinned itself against the door. Using his foot to clear this chunk of metal out of the way, Jack was able to squeeze through the opening and into the stairwell. As Jack started his long trek carefully down the stairs, the door to his floor clicked shut behind him.

Just as the door clicked shut on one side of the hall of the 37th floor, on the other side the other door opened. Out of the bot service shaft rolled two armored security droids, making a B-line for Jacks door. As they stalked down the hall, weapons drawn, the screens on their chest ran the code these types of machines used to communicate. From the first bot, a high powered laser scanned everything in front of it from the main optical lens as the other did the same with the hall behind them. Methodically they made their way to Jacks door where the scanners picked up the damage left behind from the pizza delivery gone wrong. From what the sensors could pick up, whatever happened here left only a robot like them injured. Humans did not give off smoke when broken. Humans did not bleed oil. Both bots charged up their photon rifles. A cold, harsh voice blares from a hidden speaker.

“END-USER JACK 3704! OPEN THE DOOR!”

“YOU HAVE NOT CLOCKED IN FOR YOUR REQUIRED SHIFT! OPEN THE DOOR AND COMPLY!”

“A SERVICE BOT HAS BEEN DAMAGED! A REPORT MUST BE FILED! COMPLY!”

A few moments pass before security stops sending code to each other and instead their screens start filling with the programming language that connects them to the system in Jacks house and opens the locked door. The droids cautiously go inside.

“END-USER JACK 3704! PLEASE COME OUT AND COMPLY!”

After a few hours of descending flights and flights of stairs, sitting in some mess littering everything to take a breather every third or fourth floor, Jack finally made it to the ground floor. Only walking from his bed to his office chair and back to his bed again, every day for as long as he lived here had taken a huge toll on Jacks fitness levels. He didn’t know how he’d get back up without the elevator or being carried.

Opening the doors, Jack expected to see the large pillars and marble floors of the luxurious recreated Ancient Greece that GilbertCo Tower was known for. Instead, he was met with a place that more closely resembled the actual Ancient Greece as it stood today. The pillars were now what could only be described as ruins. The only light in the giant room was coming through the story high windows that faced the street which let in large beams that were filled with drifting dirt and dust. As Jack rounded the corner a new light source started to buzz in his peripherals.

Behind the front counter where Jack expected to see the lobby boy waiting to help anyone with a question or to help carry their bags or, in Jacks case, let them back into their apartment after being locked out, was instead an immense screen glowing blue.

“Hello.” a familiar voice echoed from the screen throughout the lobby, “Welcome to GilberCo Tower. How may I assist you?”

Jack approached the front desk cautiously, keeping his eye out for the lobby boy or any other person he could flag down and ask for help. He had kept his ears open on the long way down for the sound of anyone else who lived in the building moving about but it seemed that everyone on his floor and every floor below his, worked elsewhere and no one was home.

“Uh, hi. My name is Jack and-“

“I’m sorry. I cannot understand. Could you please speak up.” boomed the screen.

“Right, sorry.” Jack cleared his throat. He was realizing that it had been years since he had to speak any louder than his shy indoor voice. “My name is Jack and I live on the 37th floor. I accidentally locked myself out and would like help getting back in.”

“I’m sorry but replacements for lost keys cannot be issued without filing a report.”

“I didn’t lose my key. It’s in the apartment. I’m locked out.”

“That is unfortunate. What is your apartment number?”

“Apartment 4. Floor 37.”

“Hello End-User Jack 3704. How may I help you?”

“I told you. I’m locked out.” Jack was starting to get frustrated and once again started to look around for the lobby boy so he could stop talking in circles with this glorified software. “Where’s the guy who works the front desk? I want to talk to him.”

“I’m sorry but his job has been automated. He became redundant. Automation is the future! How may I help you?”

Great, Jack thought. I’m stuck with this elaborate phone menu as my only help. “I need to get back in my apartment. I locked myself out.”

“To unlock your door, just slide your key card and insert it into the loc-“

“I know how to use the key. I just can’t get to my key.” If this screen had a neck, Jack would ring it.

“Location data shows one key for 3704 on the 37th floor.”

“Yes, I know. That’s what I’ve been tryi-“

“The second key is at 515 E. Jefferson in the Ann Arbor District of New Detroit.”

“Wait, what?” That address sounded familiar and Jack couldn’t place it at first. He had forgotten there even was a second key. After a minute of ignoring the screen repeating itself, he recalled exactly where his spare key was. When Jack moved into GilberCo Tower all those years ago, he had given his spare key to his parents at his dads’ insistence. Not long after he moved out, they moved to the Ann Arbor District to retire. If only his dad had listened to him, seethed Jack to himself, he’d still have his spare key and wouldn’t be in this mess.

“Can you call me a car to take me to that address please?” Jack requested of the front desk.

“Certainly. A car will arrive in seven minutes.”

“Thanks.” Jack replied instinctively. Something about how he was raised made him always say please and thank you, even to A.I. like this obnoxious front desk. He always felt like a dope after but he couldn’t help it. Why would he thank a screen? It didn’t know any better. It didn’t care.

Eager to get away from this rudimentary chatbot and out of his crumbling building, Jack made his way to the front door. For the first time in some years, Jack would be setting foot outside and though the situation could be better, he was a bit excited. All he had to do was find his parents, survive an overdue visitation with them, get the key and come back home. Easy as could be.

But as Jack left the front lobby of GilberCo Tower and stepped into the street, an eerie feeling ate away at his excitement. Jack remembered the streets of New Detroit being filled with millions of cars and shuttles taking people anywhere in the forty square mile city, sidewalks filled with pedestrians, food trucks and musicians. New Detroit was loud and bustling. The streets Jack currently walked out onto however were empty and quiet. The roads and sidewalks were clear of any living thing. He stood still and listened intently for signs of life but the only thing he could hear was his own breathing. Up until this point, Jack had figured that it was just his building that was in disrepair and it was just a coincidence that no one was home. But now, standing in the vacant city, Jack started to think that something might be seriously wrong.

IV

As Jim pulled his cab up to GilbertCo Tower, his two fares continued arguing, not noticing they had reached their destination. Jim started to roll down the separator between the front and back. Instantly, the roar of their heated argument cut into the silence he had been enjoying.

“-just saying, it’s not even a real job!”

“Sure it is! I clock in and get paid to do a thing! How is that not a job?”

“But you don’t do anything! You don’t make anything! It’s not a job unless you make something.”

Jim couldn’t help but interject himself at this point. “Yea. I just drive a cab as a hobby.” There was an awkward silence as the father gathered his embarrassment. “Anyway, we’re here.”

Everyone piled out and Jim popped the trunk to help them with the luggage and boxes they had stuffed in there with great effort. The father helped as the kid, who was the one moving into GilbertCo Tower, kept an eye out for the moving truck so he could wave them down, as if the truck driver couldn’t find the tallest building in New Detroit. These people from the old suburbs, thought Jim, were always so paranoid of something going wrong downtown. It was rare for them to travel any farther east than the Telegraph Line, despite promises from politicians that a light rail station would attract more folks to the city, and when they did cross the threshold of city limits, they assumed everyone was just as turned around as they were.

The father pulled out his phone to pay. Jim judged by the size of his tip that he must have been well off or incredibly embarrassed. Either way, it was a nice way to end a shift. Once the payment went through, they exchanged a silent nod and parted ways.

As Jim hopped back in his cab, he caught one last glimpse of the father and son picking up their shouting match as they unloaded the moving truck, holding up traffic as they did. Shaking his head, Jim started the cab up and started toward the station to turn in for the night. Jim had been driving this cab around for twelve hours a day, seven days a week for almost thirty years now. He remembers New Detroit before the buyouts and the consolidation. He could get you to any part of town with his eyes closed at this point. Jim had every kind of fare you can picture, from the rude to the rich and the sane to the sick. Yet, despite the city’s best efforts, he made it back to the station every night. Jim was a cab driver and he was damn good at it.

As Jim made his way towards headquarters on Fort and 3rd, his phone started to buzz.

“Hello. Car 27 here.” Jim answered from muscle memory.

“Well hello Car 27. Is my husband around?” creaked a sarcastic voice through the phone and into the car speakers.

“That depends on what his wife wants.” Jim quickly quipped. Janet, his wife, always knew just when to call with an errand. After fourteen years of a routine marriage, they had each others schedule down. She knew right now that he would be lazily making his way back to the depot just as he knew she would be just getting home from the office and printing up something for dinner.

“She would like him to pick up some red wine on his way home if he could.”

“I guess I could do that.”

“Thank you Hun. How was work?”

“Oh, the usual nuts.” Jim thought back on the fares he’d picked up that day. The arguing father and son, the junkie wacked out on epi-octane that he swore was prescription as Jim dragged him out of his cab, the crying mother he dropped off at the cemetery. It had been a longer day than he thought. “How about you?”

Janet let out a tired sigh, “Well, the bossman is stressed out because we are behind on the latest conversion at the Ford General conversion. The Big One is on his ass about it and of course, that rolls down to me.”

“Shit always does.”

“Even in the future.”

That was Janet's catch-all phrase for the constants in the universe. “Things can always get worse, even in the future.” she would say, or “Even in the future, money can buy your innocence.”, etc. There were just some things she felt were always true, no matter what technology came around.

“Then Amy overheard Sam talking about her in the break room and that started the whole office rumor mill churning.”

Jim couldn’t fathom how his wife had worked so long in an office. Your boss constantly over your shoulder, the never-ending drama over the smallest insignificant bullshit and never any time to yourself. Jim would take the occasional dangerous freak over that incessant monotonous stupidity of co-workers. At least the stupid people that got in his cab were different each time and eventually, they left his cab. Even if he had to drag them out.

“Long story short,” she continued, “it was a long day. Hence the red wine.”

“Gotcha. Well, I’ll be home with the finest corner store vino available in about an hour.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you then. Love you.”

“Love you too dear.”

Jim hung up and made his turn onto Fort towards the depot.

As Jim rolled past the Cobo Storage Complex onto the block the depot sat, he was met with a traffic jam of other cabs all pulling in at the same time. The other drivers seemed to be as confused as he was by the congestion. Usually, their stop times were staggered to keep cabs roaming the streets non-stop but, according to Dwayne, the driver stuck in the lane next to him, everyone who wasn’t already heading in had been called in for some kind of mandatory meeting. After about fifteen minutes and only moving a few feet, dispatchers instructed everyone to park on the street and make their way in, taking anything in your cab you need. Jim lucked out and found a spot around the corner on Lafayfette. He grabbed his phone, wallet, and keys. Everything else in the cab was property of the company. Jim was never much for having tacky crap in his cab, never wanting to get too comfortable.

As Jim turned the corner onto 3rd to walk back to the gathering crowd of cabbies, across Lafayette a raggedy man whose voice carried over the traffic, stood in the median. He was dressed in a moth-eaten, too-small brown suit carrying a cardboard sign that read ‘AUTOMATION BRINGS THE ORDER OF GOD. REPENT’. Jim couldn’t make out everything he was ranting about but he knew the spiel. This strange, cult-like devotion came from an extreme use of reductio ad absurdum. If chaos is evil, then order is God’s will and automation brings order. Therefore, the automation of all things is God’s will and we should all just lay down and die, or something like that. The preacher noticed the influx of potential converts and started to really throw himself into his sermon.

“Everything has its place in heaven and Earth! Order is a mandate from God! Give yourself over to the process!”

The masses seemed unconvinced and moved on, just as Jim did toward their meeting.

As the full fleet of the Overman Cab Company poured into the garage, they were met a makeshift stage made of discarded pallets. Jim had never seen so many people in the garage at once. There were drivers here that he had never met. Nothing about his surroundings was screaming “good news”. Jim expected his boss to get up on stage and explain to everyone what was going on but instead, his bosses boss, the actual owner of Overman, emerged from the back office and climbed on the pallets and started to hush the crowd.

“Alright, alright. Settle down.”. The owner, who Jim had never seen before and couldn’t remember the name of, was dressed in a nearly exact Brioni knock-off smart suit. Any one of the rings on his fingers could have paid off Jim's mortgage. Once the crowd was settled he continued, “I know this is unusual but I have an announcement.”

The crowd was quiet now. Jim felt his feeling of dread spread through his fellow drivers. Before he spoke, they all sensed what was coming.

“There’s no nice way to put this but I’m afraid you’re all being let go.”

The attentive silence gave way to an uproar from the crowd. Jim didn’t have the energy for anger. Instead, his knees started to feel like jelly as a vision of the bills piling up on the kitchen table flashed in his mind.

“Alright, ok, calm down.”. The owner fruitlessly tried to calm the crowd. Jim noticed the two massive personal security droids hovering behind everyone on stage. “Your last check will be mailed out. As of now, you’re all trespassing and I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”.

With that, he turned, descended the stage and disappeared, taking his droids with him. Despite the warning, the gathered drivers did not disperse. Instead, among angry cries and vulgarities, the whole front row tried to rush the stage. From the back of the stage, the personal security drones turned on a dime and tased the whole line of former employees turned rioters. Jim tried to make his way to the exit as the pandemonium spread and the police drones started to surround the depot.

“THIS GATHERING IS UNLAWFUL! PLEASE CEASE AND DISPERSE!” wailed the drones in unison.

Jostling through the crowd Jim desperately searched for a way out. With the exits to Fort St blocked off, Jim made a bee-line for the sole exit on Third. Somehow over the cacophony of the sounds of police drones, tasers firing and the rioting masses, Jim could pick out the street preacher still making his plea to the crowd of sinners.

“Give in to the power of the Lord! Do not resist his will! His agents are here with the gift of order to our directionless lives!”

Jim burst through the door to Third just as the drones spread tear gas into the mob. Third Avenue was calm and vacant by comparison but Jim could see more police drones in the distance making their way in the depots' direction. Overhead a luxury car, that Jim assumed belonged to the owner, took off and made a quick exit. That seemed like a good idea to Jim and he did the same, leaving the coughing, screaming chaos behind.

Once Jim felt he was far enough away from the danger of being tased and arrested, he stopped sprinting and took stock of where he had ended up. Without even realizing it, he had made it past the casino and all the way to Grand River. Without his cab, Jim had a long walk home and the last thing he wanted to do was hail a ride. Before anything else, Jim needed a drink.

So, like anyone else who made it out of headquarters unscathed, Jim slumped his way into a bar and spent money he would need in the next few weeks on shots of whiskey. After a blurred few hours, he called a few friends hoping to get a ride. After reaching a few voicemails, Jim finally reached a friend who could take him home. It would take a while for them to get to Jim so he ordered another shot and continued to rehearse what he would say to Janet when he stumbled in the door, drunk, without groceries and unemployed. He finished his drink and left the now empty bar to go outside, get some fresh air and wait for his ride.

“I got some bad news dear.” Jim rehearsed in his head, “They fired me. No warning. No reason. Just didn’t want to pay for a human being anymore.”

“Owners are always looking to pinch every penny.” she would say, “Even in the future.”

It had gotten late and the street was empty. The massive ancient temple that had sat across from the bar for over a century, made a dark shape across the sky. Jim decided to take refuge in the empty lot next to the bar. As he leaned against the brick trying to keep the thoughts of his future at bay, a noise from behind him startled him into the present. Jim turn around and stumbled.

“Who’s there?” The silhouette crept closer but remained silent. “Today isn’t a good day to fuck with me man.”

From the shadow rolled a police bot with its gun drawn.

“Citizen Jim Cunning.” the machine cracked.

“Yea. That’s me.” Jim was suddenly sober and started to sweat out any whiskey that was still in him. He didn’t know how but apparently they had tracked him from the depot. “What do you want? Haven’t robots done enough to me today?”

“Citizen Jim Cunning. You have been designated ‘UNEMPLOYED’.”

“Thanks for the reminder. What of it?” If a robot could have a tone, Jim didn’t like this cop's attitude.

“Unemployment makes you redundant. Redundancy must be corrected.”

Before Jim could say anything, there was a flash and a silence that was only broken by the sounds of the city and of a police bot slowly rolling away.

Janet sat at home with an empty wine glass checking her watch. Jim was not answering his phone and it had been years since he had been this late. She wrapped up his dinner plate and put it in the fridge and made camp on the couch. After a few more hours of mounting worry, she could no longer keep her eyes open. It would be the first night of many she slept alone.

V

The excitement Jack felt from going out into the world for the first time in a long time gave way to dread as he registered the empty streets from the curb where he was waiting for the car that had been called by the front desk computer. The sky was gray with dust and dirt. Jack noticed that his white shirt and gray slacks were already getting dirty which is might be a first for him. He wasn’t sure how these printed clothes would hold up to actual use beyond his apartment. Jack wished he had put his actual shoes on as well. Those shoes that had never been worn of course. They were hiding in a closet somewhere. Instead, he only had his cheap slippers, which, although he had given them five stars, he knew for a fact would not hold up. He already had to replace a few pair just from putzing around his apartment, since they fell apart so quickly. They were a cheap two-star product if he was being honest.

As Jack inspected his inappropriate footwear, the autocab pulled up to the curb. Jack snapped back to reality and hopped in.

“Hi. I need to go to 515 E. Jefferson, Ann Arbor District please.” Jack said into the division screen. After a moment, an automated voice tried to bark from the broken speaker.

“That’ll be one hundred…and….sixty seven dollars. Please insert your card into the slot.”

Jack felt around instinctively for his wallet, which he knew was in his coat which in turn was in the closet of his apartment that he was currently locked out of. Hopefully, Jack thought, explaining this to this machine won’t be as fruitless as the lobby AI.

“Actually, I don’t have my wallet. I can pay you when we get there.”

“Please insert your card into the slot.”

“I don’t have my card. Can I pay you-”

“INVALID. NO FREE RIDES.” screeched the speaker. Before Jack could respond, the cab sent a shock throughout the back end of the cab. “EXIT THE VEHICLE.”

“Ok! Ok!” Jack tumbled his way out of the cab and onto the sidewalk. As Jack tried to recover from the shock, the cab door slid shut with a loud *THUNK* and peeled away.

As Jack laid on the dirty sidewalk, looking up at the sky, he finally stopped thinking of his inadequate attire. He was locked out with no money and no ride and no one around to help. He was truly screwed, as they say.

The more Jack thought about his situation in fact, the harder it was to breathe. He could feel an invisible belt-tightening around his chest which his heart was simultaneously trying to break out of. Jack could feel dirt and dust absolutely everywhere. It was mixing with the cold sweat that had suddenly covered him and it was burning in his throat like he had swallowed oil. Jack was acutely aware of the spin of the Earth beneath him. All he wanted to do was get away from the spiraling globe, back to the safety of his apartment but he couldn’t seem to muster the will to leave the sidewalk.

The last time Jack had felt this way was also the last time he left his apartment on this very sidewalk. He had come down to pick up a package or something like that, in the days before air delivery service. He would have given anything back then to make all the people disappear. The noise and the congestion of it all then was overwhelming. After he had been helped back to his apartment, Jack calmed down and decided the only interaction he needed with the outside world could be done through a screen, if at all.

Jack closed his eyes and tried to take a few deep breaths. Jack focused on his breath. His breath and the wind through the empty city. When he opened his eyes again, they came to focus on the singular light, on the 37th floor of the Gilbert Tower. Where could everybody be?

After what seemed like a lifetime, Jack was able to use his lungs again and stand up. He dusted himself off and started across the road. All I have to do, he thought, is find a way to my parents. Maybe there is a phone I could use or, since everyone seems to be gone, a car I can just take.

As Jack roamed further and further from his home, the desolation of New Detroit became clearer and more pronounced. Every business had been neatly boarded up with ‘REDUNDANT’ spray-painted across the boards. Unlike any movie Jack had seen about the end of the world, the streets were relatively clean. There was no trash drifting in the wind or abandoned cars, unfortunately for Jack. Not that he knew how to steal a car anyway.

Jack struggled along for a long while, trying every door, attempting to peak through every window in hopes of finding some sort of lifeline but everything was sealed shut. All there was to see was miles of empty streets and boards over windows repeating ‘REDUNDANT’. The only thing Jack noticed that stood out were the little green lights on the cameras that were attached to each street lamp. Seems strange that the cameras should still be working if there’s no one to watch or be watched, Jack noted.

While Jack desperately searched for a way to contact his parents, he tried to plan out what he might say. The last time he talked to either of his parents was when he moved out and that hadn’t been the calmest of talks. They had tried to call him over the years but Jack was never in the mood. He hoped he could remember their number or if not, hoped he could talk to some kind of operator that was more helpful than the other automated systems he’s interacted with lately. Hopefully, it dawned on Jack, someone answered.

This troubling thought was interrupted by a loud clash down an alley. Jack jumped back into the present just to only catch a blurred shadow across the way.

“Is someone there?” Jack called out in the seemingly empty street. “Hello?” Jack rushed over and tried to find the source of the noise. Nothing. Jack was still alone. He could feel the dust start to sting in his lungs again and the world start to spin without him.

As Jack looked around trying to get a sense of where he was, he noticed a glowing screen about a block away on the corner. Being the first definitive sign of life Jack had encountered since the cab, he jogged over, doing his best to ignore his pounding heartbeat.

Although Jack felt like he had been walking at least a few miles already, it had only been a few blocks and he found himself on the corner Madison and Brush near the Great Caesar Arena, which takes up a few blocks on its own. Standing tall and slowly spinning and shining bright even in the day was a LED, spinning sidewalk ad for a different automated taxi company. As Jack got close, his face bathed in the deep Egyptian blue light, white text read ‘Cloud Coast Cab’ and a hidden speaker became audible.

“Hello there.” A smooth male voice coaxed Jack closer. “Take a ride with us at Cloud Coast Cab. Where it’s smooth sailing to anywhere you want to go. Try your first ride free today!”. The screen presented a large button across its touch screen. Jack reached out in a daze. Somehow he found just what he needed. Hopefully, this cab wouldn’t electrocute him.

“Good choice.” the voice cooed in response to Jacks touch, “Enjoy your free ride and see you soon.”

Within a minute, Jack spotted one lone car, the same blue as the advertisement, rolling down Madison towards him. It pulled up and the car door slid open. Jack hesitated before climbing inside.

“Where to?” asked an unseen voice.

“515 E. Jefferson, Ann Arbor District, please. But I don’t have my card on-”

“Name?” the voice interrupted, apparently uninterested in any details.

“Jack. I live in GilberCo Tower. In 3704.”

A long moment passed before the voice responded, “Thank you END-USER JACK 3704. A message has been sent to your device. If you enjoy the ride, sign up!”.

The cab started down the road and Jack began to breathe easier. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about how much farther from his cozy home he’d be in a few minutes. He took deep breaths and focused on them as he exhaled and inhaled. He would just pop into his parents’ house, have a long overdue awkward conversation, get his extra key, borrow some money to get home and crawl into bed and try to forget his rough day. It was almost over. Jack tried to reassure himself and relax.

Out of the large front doors of GilberCo Tower, two security droids rolled onto the street, scanning the ground as they went. A trail of slipper prints lit up under their electronic eyes. As they followed the footsteps to some sort of scuffle on the curbside, an alert came through and ran across the screens on their chest.

‘SUSPECT SPOTTED. HAILED CAB IN ARENA SECTOR. HEADED TO ANN ARBOR DISTRICT. DISPATCH TWO UNITS.’

The two droids stood for a moment processing the new information before going back to their original protocol, rolling back into the large empty tower with one light still on, up on the 37th floor.

VI

Jack,

I don’t know if or when you’ll see this. I can’t for the life of me remember your address (I was never invited over) and I don’t trust the bots with any electronic message or to get this letter to you. They wouldn’t consider a handwritten farewell very efficient now, would they?

I know we haven’t spoken since you left all those years ago. I’m not sure why. I know you and your father had a disagreement when you left but I don’t think that would be enough for you to stop speaking to us. It’s fine, I guess. It doesn’t really matter anymore anyway. Still, it would have been nice to see you at his funeral. Maybe you have a good reason for not talking to us all these years. Maybe you couldn’t. Maybe they got you first.

I pray that isn’t so. I’ll leave this here, in your old bedroom, just in case. I’d imagine your job of- reviewing (was that it?)-is much less redundant than your dad’s plant. They shut it down only a week before they- well, a week before he died.

They laid them all off of course. Everyone in the entire company, from the CEO down. Then, one by one, they all died. That’s when the rest of us realized what was going on. Hopefully, you’ve caught on as well. Maybe it’s happening slower downtown. I haven’t checked the newsfeeds in weeks. I’m afraid of what I’ll find. Plus, the news is all AI-generated these days. Who knows what logic these machines use to determine who stays and who goes. Maybe I should stay on the newsfeeds and pretend I’m involved. It’s too late now anyway.

I’m afraid of everything without your father around. The only time I left the house was for work but they made me redundant a week ago. So it’s only a matter of time now. I flinch with every noise in the house from fear it’s the bots coming for me. I cook everything I can on an old gas stovetop your father had for camping. That’s how they got Mrs. Douherty next door ya know. You remember her? The nice lady who would sneak you candy when you would help out around her house. Well, she was using the stove and it wouldn’t light. They just filled her whole house with gas and locked the doors. What if they shock me through the thermostat or cook me in a bath? I could wake up one night to the freezer sucking the heat from the house, encasing me in ice like some kind of cave-woman. They really have us cornered.

I remember back when we started converting this house into a smart home, way back before you were even born. It was so amazing, almost magical. The lights could be any color and you could automate them to the sunrise or make it look like you were home when you went on vacation. Every screen became a smart screen. We used to have this little device, back in the day before holograms and AR contact lenses, that you could talk to and order things from. I’m sure it seems quaint compared to the things you’ve grown up with but for us it was miraculous. We didn’t think about it before installing cameras, microphones and remote access in our homes. The convenience was just too alluring.

There were growing pains of course. By the time you were born, most stores had closed. The only ones open sold more machines that would make going to any kind of store unnecessary. Everything became automatic and cheap. Your bullheaded father, of course, was one of the last people we knew to keep driving. He loved that car and it took a lot of prying to get him to give it up. We ended up getting a pretty penny for it from the Henry Ford Museum. So it worked out.

I still remember the day you were born so clearly. They put me in what was back then the newest auto-ambulance model. The paramedic, which was like a doctor who traveled with the ambulance, injected some concoction into my IV and I was out. While I was under, they pulled your father out of work and he was there when I woke up an hour later, holding you. I had never seen him so proud, not even with his car. You looked so small in his arms. He would not let go of you until we got home later that night and put you down to sleep. You would think he built you himself, out of spare parts and elbow grease.

We did our best raising you. I hope you know that. It wasn’t that it was hard to raise a kid but, quite the opposite actually. The whole world was so easy. If you needed food, you could print it. If you needed to get somewhere, the auto-cab or bus could take you. If you needed to know anything, it was at your fingertips at all times. Who needed parents when you had the bots? That’s probably why you moved out so young and how you found it so seemingly easy to not talk to us for all those years. Parenting had become obsolete without us realizing it, I guess. We had been replaced and what’s worse is we did it to ourselves.

After you left, the house was quiet. Your father and I went to work and came home. Same time every day. Same dinner every night. Watched TV and went to sleep. We were still in love, I don’t want you thinking we were ever not madly in love with each other. We just didn’t have anything to talk about is all. Nothing truly changed in a day to day sense. Everything just slowly got cheaper and easier. There was less and less to do. We were trying to save up to “escape to the countryside” as your father put it. I thought of it more as a potential retirement plan. That’s what’s on the card in this envelope and you’ll see just how little we managed to scrounge together. It was a nice fantasy to keep us going. You have to have goals in life after all.

Anyway, I’m not sure how this quick note turned into this rambling letter. I must be getting sentimental in my old age. I’m sorry. You can have the card with our “escape” fund on it if you’re in need. I won’t be going anywhere any time soon, that’s for sure. I just wanted to say that I miss you, Jack. If you’re ever lonely in your big white tower, the world and your mother, are waiting for you, Jack. If you get this and I’m…well…if I’m not there to give it to you, I love you. Of all the inventions and contraptions in this efficient world, you’re the best thing I ever made and I never stopped being awestruck by how genuinely wonderful you are.

Charles should be here soon with my rations. I hope I’ll see you soon.

Love Forever,

Your Mother

VII

A small credit card dropped from the letter as Jack finished reading it. Jack picked it up and read his fathers’ name across the front. His dead fathers’ name. His dead father whose funeral he missed because he was too scared or stubborn to leave his little room. A room he had been hiding in for longer than he wanted to admit. While he was hidden away, having every need and whim served to him by robots he summoned on a screen, the world, including his parents, as far as he knew, had been wiped out. He should have ordered Chinese instead.

Jack wanted to be surprised by this realization but the long ride here to his childhood home had been a desolate one. The theory that everyone was just at work died in the first minutes of the drive. From the back of the auto-cab all that passed by the window was row upon row of boarded-up houses, businesses and apartment mega-complexes. Everywhere the word ‘REDUNDANT’ sprayed painted in deep red, meticulous letters across every entrance. Museum mile, ‘REDUNDANT’. The ring of suburbs with its million tiny homes, ‘REDUNDANT’. The whole of St. Lazarus hospital district, ‘REDUNDANT’. Over and over, as far as Jack could make out.

Even the Ann Arbor District, where he grew up and still in his memory as an open university town filled with parks and rich college kids skipping class, had become a ghost town. Now there was nothing but boards and spray paint. When he was dropped off, Jack told the auto-cab to wait while he found a way inside but it seemed his free ride was over.

“UNKNOWN COMMAND.” the speaker in the division had barked at him. “ACCOUNT DELETED.”. Then, without warning, sped off around the corner and out of sight.

Jacks’ childhood home matched all the others. Perfectly cut plywood was nailed over any and every opening. After Jack circled his old house, it took him a full ten minutes to pry the board away from the front door, just for it to be locked.

‘Of course, it’s locked.’ he thought ‘What is it with me and doors today?’. As a kid, if he was locked out and needed to sneak back in, Jack would climb in through the kitchen window that didn’t lock properly but that was boarded up like the rest of the house and Jack was not interested in spending another ten minutes prying plywood. After starting to freak out again, Jack remembered his parents hid their spare key under their old fashioned welcome mat. They were the only people Jack knew that still had one and he could not be more thankful for their stubbornness. If only good ideas were hereditary.

The house was dark and empty. To Jack, it felt like some far off cave, undiscovered by man. Almost everything was just as he remembered it. The pale blue paint in the kitchen, the grey tile in the bathroom and of course his thick wooden bedroom door. Jack could viscerally remember laying in his bed at night, trying to sleep, staring at this door, imagining his future or reliving the day before or even just trying to get his brain to shut off so he could sleep in the years before they had smart sleep mask.

It was in his old room where Jack found a letter from his mother, along with the credit card, on his old dresser. Now all he had to do was find the spare key to his apartment. That is if he can make his legs move again. While Jack was reading the letter, his legs seemed to have lost their bones. Just like in some saccharine movie, Jack had fallen back onto his childhood bed and now found himself unable to get up or able to stop himself from sobbing. ‘How could this have happened?’ he thought, ‘How could I let this happen?’.

After the auto-cab sped off around the corner, it sent off a message to central HQ. ‘ENDUSER JACK 3704 LOCATION UPDATED. ENDUSER JACK 3704 AT 42.276210,-83.743183. TERMINATING PROGRAM’. With the message sent, it pulled itself into an empty street-level spot and shut itself off for good.

Once the message is sent out, two doors rattle open at the automated police station on Main Street five blocks over and two armored bots rolled out and headed towards their newest target.

Jack wiped his eyes and took a few deep breaths to release the stinging sensation trapped in his lungs. He hadn’t realized that crying wasn’t going to help him now. What Jack needed now was a plan.

As far as Jack could see, he had maybe three options. He could try and run or hide from whatever was coming. It was safe to assume something was coming at some point. Jack couldn’t think of anything special about himself that would leave him off the kill list and he couldn’t figure out how he hadn’t been taken out already. The problem with that plan was that Jack couldn’t think of anywhere to hide that technology wasn’t already. Even the millions of acres of corn between here and the Rockies was stalked by automated farm tech. Plus, there is no running faster than the electronic pulse it takes to send a message from the servers to the Enduser.

So if he couldn’t run and he couldn’t hide, Jack only had one hope of surviving. He had to get back to work and to do that he had to get back into his apartment before anyone, or in this case, anything, noticed he was gone. If ordering and review useless crap off the net was what was keeping him alive, he would keep at it for as long as he could. At the very least it would buy him time until he thought of an escape plan.

The thing is, Jack wondered if it wasn’t already too late. He had never missed a day of work. How could he? The commute was ten steps round trip. Even when he caught the most severe stomach bug in his life, he still pulled himself to his office chair and gave a few items five stars and order Nano-Meds before blowing chunks in his old toilet. But if this letter his mom left is any indication, it doesn’t take much to become redundant. Unfortunately, this was the best chance he had. Jack had to find that key.

With one more focusing breath, Jack stood and started searching. He tore through his old room fairly quickly with no luck. All he found were things that brought back once lost memories of his childhood. Old toys, drawings and old tablets with ebooks still on them. He would stay up way past his bedtime watching comics and internet celebrities under his blanket. If there wasn’t such an oppressive threat looming, Jack could have spent all night reminiscing with his childhood things. His spare keycard obviously wasn’t here so he took one last look at the room he grew up in before moving on to the rest of the house.

Luckily for Jack, there wasn’t much house to search. At most, it had only ever been the three of them and even back then housing was sparse. Even having this two bed and one bath was a bit extravagant. The first place he looked was his parents’ room without any luck. All that was in there was neatly folded clothes, a properly made bed, and stale air. He couldn’t find it in his room or his parents’ and it wasn’t on the counter or coffee table. His key wasn’t even in the coffee tables item history. Jack started to panic thinking maybe his parents had lost it or kept it on them which would mean they took it to their grave.

‘If I had something I had no designated place for,’ Jack thought, trying to calm himself, ‘where would I put it?’. He looked around the now tossed home as it dawned on him. ‘A junk drawer.’ the thought, like a lightning bolt, came to him, ‘Everybody has a junk drawer.’. That is where he kept his key so maybe his parents did the same. Good ideas weren’t hereditary but maybe habits were.

He frantically rifled through the kitchen drawers until he found one that seemed to have no theme or purpose. He frantically shoved away empty pens, faded receipts, and assorted screws. In a fit of panic, he pulled the whole drawer out and dumped it on the counter. Then there, on top of the pile of assorted useless junk, was just what Jim needed, his spare keycard.

Just then Jack heard a squealing sound from the area of the front door. Like a frightened rabbit, Jack whipped around. A screw that had been attaching the board over the doorway to the house clinked to the ground and rolled under the gap under the door. There, casting a shadow in the fading sunlight making its way under the door, was two large wheels just like the ones attached to standard police bots. Jacks first instinct was to just explain to them what had happened and tell them he was on his way back to his apartment to get back to work. He’d explain that it was all an accident and that’d it never happen again. But Jack then thought back on all the interactions he had already had in the last 24 hours with AI and how well that had gone and decided to just run instead.

Jack snatched his spare key and stuffed it into his pocket next to the credit card that carried the balance of his parents’ dreams of escape. As fast, but as quietly, as he could he made his way to the bathroom on the opposite side of the house. In the bathroom was a window just big enough for Jack to squeeze through. He hoisted himself on to the tank of the toilet, opened the window and with all his might, kicked the plywood board that was secured over the opening. Luckily for him, this board had been here a while and broke off in only two kicks, taking some of the siding on the house with it. Across the house, two more screws clattered to the ground.

Jack landed less than gracefully in the alley that let out on Maynard. He did his best impression of the spy movies he had rated in the past, keeping low and darting from cover to cover. He wasn’t particularly good at it but fortunately for him, he was the only one around. So no one saw when he tripped over the curb or smacked directly into The Cube sculpture trying to duck under it. While no people were around to see his lack of dexterity, several security cameras did and started a live feed directly to the two police bots who were sweeping through a home that was supposed to be unoccupied but showed signs to the contrary. With their new information, they swiveled back to the door and slowly but surely followed the feed.

Despite the obstacles, Jack made his way to The Quad. What was once a park full of yuppie students scrolling their feeds and downloading class lectures, was now an overgrown park with broken ad screens glitching to life as Jack ran by them. The police bots giving chase didn’t need the feed. They could just follow the glow of screens that haven’t been on in years. A path lit up with ads for products no longer in production. Throughout The Quad the silence was broken with slogans and deals.

“Remember! Only Milliamp Energy can get you through your next all-nighter! Get one today!”

The police bots started scanning the area for human heat signatures. The live feed showed the redundancy headed southeast, darting behind anything he thought would conceal him.

“The new ScrubberBot X7 can keep even the filthiest dorm room clean! Order one now and have same-day drone delivery!”

Jack dipped down into the tunnel under the West’N’Ready Hall. He could hear the sound of approaching commercial broadcast and thick rubber tires. Jack desperately tried to formulate a plan.

“Try the new Auto-Shower Plus! Better in every way! Five stars say END-USER JACK 3704.”

The patrol units executed maneuver #740 and split up. One kept following while the other sped its way around to the exit of the tunnel their prey just entered. The bot following behind crept forward and opened the compartment on what would most would call its shoulder to reveal a loudspeaker.

“ENDUSER JACK 3704. YOU HAVE BEEN FOUND UNSATISFACTORY AT YOUR CHOSEN OCCUPATION. YOU ARE NO LONGER EMPLOYABLE AND ARE NOW REDUNDANT. PLEASE COME OUT COOPERATE.”

Jack bolted for the other end of the tunnel, unable to hide under the blaring blues, purples, and reds of the screens lining the passageway that chirped like mad with special offers. He was surrounded by things he had bought and reviewed just to throw away and earn enough credits to buy more stuff to review. It was a useless life but still a life he wanted desperately to get back to now. He ran as fast as he could but before he could reach the darkened opening at the other end of the tunnel, a police bot skid around the corner, blocking his escape. Jack turned started back but the other bot was already covering that exit.

“Wait! Please! I was just locked out of my apartment. It’ll never happen again! Look!” He held out his spare key. “I’ve got a spare key. I can get in and work now! I’m not redundant! I can wor-”

A shot echoed through the tunnel, silencing the screens. Jack collapsed into a heap on the pavement. He tried to form words but he couldn’t in time. It was too little, too late for Jack and he drifted off.

The police bots rolled back into their lockers at the station. They had tossed the body into the mobile incinerator that had been summoned while a tiny army of scrubber bots from the dorms nearby wiped down the tunnel pavement, cleaning up any trace of blood. Another redundancy, a drain on the system, corrected. Another bug squashed.

The roller doors clicked shut and the police bots shut down. The mobile incinerator pulled back into its garage and the scrubber bots docked themselves back into their charging stations. Everything once again was running at max efficiency. Now, without any Endusers, the human element had been removed from the model. Without the risk of human error, sectors of the city started to shut down one by one. First the non-essential services like advertising and AI prime time. Slowly to auto-cabs and ambulance drones. Before long the constant hum of an electric, automated city died down and the only sound you could hear was the wind twisting through the empty skyscrapers.

Once again the world was quiet. Nothing was running things because, for the first time in a long time, there was no one to run things for. As for the last Enduser, all of their subscription services had been canceled, debt erased, and records archived, including a B&E and resisting arrest charge. Black marks on an otherwise spotless record. All of this information was saved just before all the archives were shut down. Finally, after the whole city had gone dark, the last remaining light on the 37th floor of GilbertCo Tower clicked off. Leaving the world to whatever was left and whatever would come next.

Epilogue

Darrell popped two more Aspirin in his mouth and looked for his drink to wash them down with. His desk was littered with empty energy drink cans and finding the one he was currently nursing took a second. As he swallowed the pills, he took off his glasses and closed his eyes for a split second. Drowning in the artificial light of both the overhead fluorescents and his computer screens, tiny knives were now twisting their way into his cornea.

When he closed his eyes, all Darrell could see was code. He’d been sitting at his desk, squashing bugs and running test, for over twelve hours now. The janitors had come and gone and the same coworkers he had wished goodnight to last night, came in hungover with coffees again without him moving from his chair. He was close to done but it was also already close to noon and any minute now a higher-up would come by for a status report.

‘ERRORS:27’ The dialogue box read as it popped up. Darrell sighed and put his glasses back on to scroll through the list of errors.

“How’s it coming?”. Alice appeared over his center monitor from a bordering cubicle.

“Well, I’m down to 27 errors.” Darrell replied.

“From?”

“3,000-ish.”

“Wow. That must have taken all night.”

“What gave it away? The mountain of energy drinks?”

“It was more the bags under your eyes.” She smiled and ducked back down behind the divide between them.

Darrell started scrubbing through the code and editing the inessential. After ten minutes of this, he had to get up and stretch before his right leg fell asleep. He wandered over to the vending machine. Over the course of the night, Darrell had eaten all of the nutrient bars that were in C4, so now he had to decide between all the less healthy options. He settled on the trail mix since it at least it had stuff in it that wasn’t pumped full of sugar. He put in his two bucks and press B6. The bag started him but got caught on the end of the spiraling ring, trapping itself against the glass.

“Oh, come on.” Darrell, defeated, muttered to himself. He tried to shake his snack loose but it only settled into being stuck the more he rocked the machine. After a few minutes, he gave up and went back to his desk, hungry.

“Hey.” Alice saw him come back from the break room, empty-handed. “Where’d you go? Did you run a lap or something?”.

“No. I went to get something to eat but the vending machine decided I didn’t need it.”

“Hmmm. If only there was a business that dealt exclusively in the efficiency of machines.” Alice sarcastically gestured around to the office they were in. 

“Yea. If only.”

“Well if there was such a company, the Head of Automation there would be looking for a progress report from you in his office.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Darrell checked the progress of the latest debugging. The screen read only three errors, which is exactly what he needed. Three errors was essentially no errors since there were still three values he needed management to give him the OK on. He packed up his laptop, headed to the end of the cubicles and knocked on the heavy mahogany door with the plaque that read ‘Alex Martins. Head of Automation’.

“Come in.” a voice behind the door called out. Darrell opened the door and shyly slid inside. “Ah, Darrell. Just who I wanted to see.”. Alex was in the middle of tying his tie. He was making sure it matched the rest of his expensive suit in the mirror he keeps in his desk drawer. “I hope you finished coding our latest and greatest flagship program.”

Darrell sat down and opened his laptop.

“I just did actually sir. I just need a few things from you and it’ll be finished.”

“Good, good. I needed to make sure it was done before the speech I’m giving tonight. Hopefully, I’ll see you there?”

“Wouldn’t miss it, sir.” Darrell lied. He would rather do anything else. Mainly sleep. “I just need three things before it’s ready.”

“Ok, hit me.”

“Well first, I need you to put in the password for the city database so I can run this outside our intranet.” Darrell handed over his laptop and Alex pulled himself away from the mirror long enough to type in a long series of characters into the proper field.

“First thing…done.”

“Awesome. Thanks.” Darrell started scrolling to the next part of code that needed attention. “Next, I need to know what the marketing department thought about the term Enduser. Did they give it the pass or did they find something better?”

“I guess Enduser will have to do. The best they could muster was Future Ex-Worker.” Alex scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Bunch of overpaid, liberal arts pansies.”

“Alright, Endusers it is.” Darrell didn’t think it sounded great either but he didn’t care. It was less work for him this way. “Lastly, redundancies.”

“What about them?”

“Once an Enduser is determined Redundant, what should the system do with them?”

“Well, we won’t need their data anymore,” Alex thought out loud, “so I guess just delete them. Save the memory space.”

“Sounds good.”

Darrell scrolled near the bottom of his window and found the line of code he needed. Where it read ‘REDUNDANT=YES; VALUE=’ he filled with ‘DELETE’.

Darrell snuck into a seat in a dark corner of the auditorium behind the broadcast cameras. He figured this would be a good place to sneak in a nap and the more Mr. Martins talked, the quicker he’d be out. He found a comfortable position just as Mr. Martins made his way from the wings to the podium on stage. Everyone rose and applauded, except Darrell who decided to just listen to the speech with his eyes closed. He was out like a light before Mr. Martins began.

“Thank you. Thank you.”, the well dressed Alex Martins addressed the crowd. “Please take a seat. I invited all you hear today so that we may all take a bold new step together into a bright future. The future we are now on the precipice of is one of no more need for labor unions and wage disputes. No more will people toil at meaningless jobs. No, with us here at AutoPilot Inc. at the helm, we will teach this world to maintain itself. With our new AI lead work placement program, we will be able to determine what jobs can be automated to ensure our modern world runs at a modern pace with no efficiency lost. Finally, the market will truly be free. Free from the limitations of minimum wages and holidays. Free to pursue perfection without wasteful spending. Yes, ladies and gentleman, I’m here to lead you to the future. And that future is automated.”

The crowd, which was mostly employees and stockholders, erupted with applause. Darrell slept straight through it without so much as a dream.

END