(December 2024)

Good morning to all inhabitants of the world.

I sit here and look out of the window and drink my morning coffee. It was hard to get around this morning, as it is most winter mornings for me. I’m not exactly springing up out of bed full of energy and joy. It is much more like waking up from a hibernation, repeatedly, every morning. Slow and unwilling. I usually actually do want to get up and go do things in the world, but it feels so difficult to do that, when it’s grey and dark, and you’re cold. The gap between where my energy level needs to be and where it is is massive. But not so hard to bridge that gap, I have learned, with various techniques such as drinking copious amounts of coffee immediately upon waking and taking cold showers and using Luminette light visor to blast 10,000 lux of light into my eyeballs. I always love saying, “ten-thousand lux of light” because it sounds like such an incredible number. 10,000 lux baby. That’s what these Luminettes are pumping out into my retinas. A mini-sun.

I am writing because I really have nothing else to do. This is easy enough for me to do because I don’t have to go anywhere, and it doesn’t cost me any money, and is generally a good way for me to spend my time, and it makes me feel connected to people. Even though I’m kind of just talking to myself. It’s fun. And there is some good stuff I want to write about, that all happened just yesterday, particularly one episode, that was serendipitious, and will probably make you feel warm and fuzzy in your heart, so here it is.

I’m at Starbucks doing my duty to capitalism and the world, and it is something like 5:30 pm, where I have now served hundreds of guests and made hundreds of drinks, and am getting pretty worn out, because it takes a toll on you. Three pretty girls walk in, at this time there aren’t many people in the store and we’re kind of chillin’, the main hordes behind us. They come up to the register, and the first girl smiles and I say hi, and she says, “Do you have the sugar plum cheese danish?” No, sorry, unfortunately we don’t have any more of those. She says, “How about the cheese danish?” I think we have those, let me check. We do. She gets two of those, pays. Actually knows how to work the payment card reader machine, which is always nice, because it seems that 80% of people actually run into some kind of trouble with the machine, that requires me to intervene, which when you think about how we’re serving hundreds of customers a day, gets pretty tiring, to constantly have to make the same comments over and over and over about the same defects of the machine, and the main problems are that the text on the machine is too small, and people can’t read it without their glasses, and sometimes they don’t have glasses, or they don’t realize that there is a tip prompt occuring, which they wouldn’t because the machine doesn’t make any noise, and I’m learning that most machines ask for the tip after you pay, which makes sense to me, but our machine asks for the tip first, and does not beep or anything to tell you that it is first prompting you, so I pretty much have to tell everyone, as they put their card down on the machine and wait patiently or say, “Am I doing it right?” or “It seems like nothing’s happening.” I have to tell them that there is a tip prompt on the screen, and then be ready for whatever their reaction is to that. There is a third issue which has nothing to do with me or our machine in particular as much as that it seems that most people, even young people struggle to understand how to use the machine properly, and how to use their cards, regarding the prompt answering and the tapping and the swiping. I don’t really understand that because they act like they’re never used one of these machines before, and the way that people try to tap their cards or tap and then insert after they’ve failed the tap, or whatever they’re trying to do, it’s not that hard, in my opinion. I know they’re all different but they all tell you what to do, if you just follow the steps that are being given to you by the machine. But that does require you to slow down and read, and every machine is kind of different, so you can’t just do the same thing with every machine. I agree that that is annoying. Our machine is one of the most inferior ones, I noticed and commented to codename Stacy Hamilton (our fearless leader and General Manager) within the few three days of me working on POS (point of sale) at the Starbucks. I saw how every customer struggled through it and how awkward it was to use and immediately thought, this machine sucks, and we need a better one. Then I took a trip to Waffle House, and saw that that was absolutely the truth, because the Waffle House payment device blew our pathetic Cummins Station payment device completely out of the water, by having a large, bright screen that you could easily rotate to the customer, that was a touch screen, that beeped whenever a new screen that required an input popped up, and that had large, clear font. That’s the payment device we need, and that’s not the one we have. The other issue with our device then is that it isn’t a touch screen, and I have to say that so many times a day, after giving the customer a chance to try and figure it out for themselves, when they go to tap on the screen several times and realize nothing’s happening, and then the quick people see that there are tiny buttons below for selecting an option, and other people don’t, and they start hitting buttons randomly, or just don’t do anything, and I have to say, “Just push one of those buttons there.” Or, “Sorry, it’s not a touch screen.” And then have to make jokes about how it’s an inferior machine or how it really should be a touch screen or something like that, and they say, “Oh, they’re all different!” Or they apologize for not realizing that or something. None of this is the customer’s fault, I think it’s all the machine and the process, and it’s annoying, and I think about how much easier it would be if we could just pay in cash, and I would just get their money and we didn’t have to go through this whole rigamarole with the cards and the machines. Handling cash is much more fun for me too, because I get to do the math, and I get to touch money, and who doesn’t like to touch money? The customer also has to do more work of getting their cash out, and I have to do less work of telling them everything about how to use our inferior machine and why their card isn’t working, etc. I love it when people pay with cash.

Now, I will say that when people pay with the Starbucks app, it is amazing and the best thing they could do, because it’s so easy. All they have to do is scan their barcode, and it gives me their name, so I can say, “Thanks, _____!” And they almost always have enough money on their account to pay, and I just push a single button and the payment is handled. That is as easy as it gets, like magic. That’s better than cash. But then when they pay with the app, they don’t tip, because there is no way to tip with the app, as many kindhearted and generous Starbucks customers have mentioned, and when I talk to Stacy Hamilton about it, she says, “All I know is they’re working on it.” It must be very low on their priority list. “Their” being Starbucks. It’s not causing a critical failure of their app, so I’m sure it is. But the customers have been indignant about it, and moreso than I ever have been, which is cute. I have had multiple customers who have expressed outrage at not being able to tip us through the app, who are much.. I am looking for a specific word here, something like righteousness. Indignant is the right word I think, that they are indignant over them not being able to tip us, and they are upset at the unfairness of us not being able to receive their tips, and they’re so spirited about it that they even rile me up, and get me saying, “Hey, yeah, that isn’t right! You’re right! We should be getting more money!!” And then they leave, and I tell Stacy Hamilton to tell codename Michael (this is a running joke, because Michael is our incredibly passionate and enthusiastic Starbucks corporate man who comes around and makes sure we’re doing the things we’re supposed to be doing, and tells us how to fix the syrup pumps, that are devised through arcane pump technology, and that nobody else has the mechanical genius to figure out how to fix, and gives us suggestions on what to do better), I tell Stacy Hamilton to tell Michael that the customers want to tip us through the app, and he needs to fix that, and the joke is that because Michael is the Starbucks guy he can solve all of our problems and fix everything for us, so whenever we have a problem, tell Michael, but he actually has not been able to fix any of our problems, and notoriously does not fix any of our problems, and maybe it is not even his responsibility to fix any of our problems, but just pass them on to someone else, and so nothing gets fixed, but it’s fun to tell Stacy to tell Michael to solve our problems. Except this last time that I told Stacy Hamilton to tell Michael about letting customers tip us in the app, she was not happy to hear this again, and she angrily repeated that Michael has no way to fix these problems, and has nothing to do with solving these kinds of problems, and he already knows anyway, and stop asking her to ask Michael for help, and that “they’re working on it”.

That was a long tangent about the payment machine that the first of these three pretty girls had successfully navigated, but as you can see I have some thoughts about this machine and our payment process, being the POS (point of sale) king at our Cummins Station Starbucks. So the first girl got her cheese danish, after not being able to get the sugar plum cheese danish that she had really wanted, but she didn’t seem too disappointed, and the next girl stepped up, smiled at me, I said hi, and she said, “Hi. Do you have birthday cake pops?” No, unfortunately we don’t have birthday cake pops. The last time I had looked was earlier in the day, and all we had then were cookies and cream cake pops, and they don’t sell that fast, so I was confident then when I told her, “Sorry, we only have cookies and cream cake pops..” And she was so disappointed, and I tried to think of what to say to console her, and I said, “But you know, they’re all kind of the same..!” But as I said that, I knew it was a lie, because they’re not all kind of the same, they’re all very different, the Birthday Cake Pop, and the Snowman Cake Pop, and Chocolate Cake Pop, and the Cookies and Cream Cake Pop. They are all totally different, and she immediately called my bluff and said, “They’re not all the same!!!!” And I said, “No, you’re right. They’re not.” And she said, “I’ll get the cookies and cream cake pop.” So the last girl steps up and smiles, and I say, “And what would you like that we don’t have?” Because as you see, that I had disappointed the last two girls, of course this gal also would like something that we don’t have, but she asked for a cheese danish, and we did have that, except now that was three cheese danishes, and now I wasn’t sure we would have enough, but we would cross that bridge when we came to it. So they had all placed their orders, three cheese danishes and a cookies and cream cake pop, and I moved over to the food station to get it going, and found that we had exactly three cheese danishes, perfect, but to my horror, there were NO cake pops AT ALL. NONE.

Now, I was about to have a crisis. This pretty girl who I had so disappointed with not being able to get her her birthday cake pop, and settling on the cookies and cream cake pop, at least it was something, it was still a cake pop, but to now have to go back and tell her, “Sorry, turns out we just don’t have ANY cake pops AT ALL.”, I couldn’t do that. It was going to break my heart. So, with this in my mind, praying for a way out, I go to the back, prepared to hunt and scavenge up any cake pop I can possibly find. Even if frozen, I could make it work by heating it, maybe, but ideally there would be some kind of cake pop already thawed, on our thawing rack, and it just hadn’t been taken up into the food station, and that’s exactly what I found. On the top rack of the thawing rack, I found the most glorious thing I had ever wanted to see on this day, and it was one carton of birthday cake pops. One carton, containing three pink birthday cake pops. And then I was overjoyed, because not only did I not have to go back and tell her that we didn’t have any cake pops, but she was going to get the cake pop that she really wanted, the cake pop of her dreams, and you know when someone really wants something, it sucks when they can’t get it. When those girls really want their Pink Drink and we don’t have any Strawberry Acai for them, (this was one terrible day), they are devasted when they can’t get it. There’s nothing else that will be as good, you will only have to settle for something less, when you really have a craving for something in particular. I get it. So the fact that I could get her what she really wanted, instead of totally disappointing her again, was enormous. And then as I went back to the warming station, heated up and bagged the three cheese danishes, I had the brilliant idea to make the surprise even better, and I threw an extra cake pop in the bag just for fun, because I was feeling so joyful (don’t tell Stacy Hamilton), and when I handed the food to them I said, “Three cheese danishes and a cookies and cream cake pop.” Not revealing that I had in fact just given this girl TWO birthday cake pops, and then I walked back over to the food station and pretended to be busy with the clean up, and not stare, but I wanted to catch her reaction, so I gave it a few seconds, and then glanced over and saw her in the middle of opening the bag, and seeing the birthday cake pops inside, and she had the biggest smile on her face, like it was Christmas morning and she had just got the best Calico Critters or My Little Pony or keys to a new BMW. You could have taken a picture of her face right then and used it on those facial emotional recognition games, and it would have been the 100% perfect picture to represent abounding joy, her smile was that perfect. And I think because of how her reaction was reminding me of someone opening the best Christmas present ever, I shouted out, “Merry Christmas!” And I was happy, and they were happy.

That’s what it’s all about, right there. That is the joy of being a barista and working at Cummins Station Starbucks. Those are the kinds of moments you live for. And that’s one reason why I like the job, and like working with people in general. I can handle a day of six hours of nonstop action and grinding, to get one moment of giving a pretty girl the cake pop that she really wanted and making her smile.

There was more action than just this serendipitous cake pop event however, as every day contains so many small dramas and thrills. In a single day at Cummins Station Starbucks, there are hundreds, if not thousands of noteworthy events, on most days. It’s why I haven’t even written about it yet, because there is more content coming in than I can possibly handle, no human, no mortal can write about everything that happens that deserves to be written. In the first three weeks or two months of me working there, I would write down these legendary events, quips, interactions, events in my notes on my flip phone, and I would have paragraphs, every day, so many lines, and eventually I just had to quit, because it was too much, and unending. I will give you an example, more, of what a day is like, because yesterday was yet another rousing and jam-packed day, as you have now already seen by the little cake pop story, which is the most charming, but there are many more stories I can tell you even within that single day.

Car Wash gave Queen two Jim Beam shooters. Car Wash is an older man, that we are not sure if he’s homeless, although he has that quality that makes him at least fall in with that crowd, of being lost/displaced, and a little strange, but he’s not dirty or smelly, so he must have somewhere that he’s going to get cleaned up, and he doesn’t seem like he’s suffering all that much. He has a pleasant disposition, even though he’s kooky, and wears a santa hat, and shuffles around the store, sitting right next to Stacy Hamilton’s battlestation and drinking his drinks and bumming cigarettes off of other quirky customers that he befriends. Two days ago, he had asked for two cups of ice, and had gotten two coffee refills, and also wanted cups filled with milk on the side, and had a can of something that he had brought, so that at one point I looked over and saw that he had six cups of various drinks on his small round table, all right to the table that Stacy Hamilton worked at, and he was sitting there drinking them, like he was at home in his living room, and I had to tell that to Stacy, because she doesn’t like this guy, or anybody who just hangs out in the store and tries to talk to her and the rest of the staff too much, and doesn’t spend enough money, and asks for cups of milk and ice and $0.50 refills of coffee. I learned yesterday that this man goes by the name of Car Wash, because Queen said, “Car Wash just gave me two shots of Jim Beam. He said he doesn’t drink.” And I was confused, because she said car wash, and I was like, how do you get shots of Jim Beam from a car wash, or what am I missing here, and she talks quietly anyways, so she had to explain that our new regular told her to call him Car Wash. So at the end of the day, we are supposed to close the store at 6:00 pm, but we had a troop of young basketball girls come in and order 10 crazy drinks, and the very first drink, I handed to the girl, and she said, “Umm, excuse me.” And I said, “Yes?” “This is supposed to be iced…..” And I took a moment to process that, because that meant I had to remake her whole crazy drink, and that was just the first one, and I laughed, and high-fived her and said, “That’s a good joke. You are joking, right?” She was not joking. And then I got to work remaking her drink. So we were not finished with them until 6:15, and while making all of their crazy drinks, and I did have to remake another because it was the wrong size, and while Queen and I were slammed trying to crank out all of these drinks and get them out of the store, they were all watching, and I heard one girl say, “I would hate to be a barista.” And I thought, In moments like these, yeah, it’s not the most fun job. We didn’t even get to start closing down the store until 15 minutes after we were supposed to be closed, and we had so much work to do, cleaning, prepping, throwing away, taking out trash bags, wiping, shutting down, counting the drawers and the money in the safe and the tips, etc. etc. etc., and I made a joke about needing a shot, and Queen said, “I’ve got the Jim Beam!” And so we shot back those Jim Beam shooters, and that did really take the edge off, and got us through the rest of that night. We were still hard at it when the building lights shut off at 7 pm, which I thought signaled the end of our closing, whether we had anything left to do or not, but Queen said, “We can’t leave it like this!” (We totally could have.) And so she turned her phone flashlight on, and kept scrubbing, and I worked in the near pitch dark, throwing away the food in the display and wiping it down. Car Wash’s Jim Beam shooters came in handy that night, and I thought, we may have just started a new tradition of night time closing shots.

Car Wash, three days ago, paid for his $0.50 (it’s actually $0.55, because, taxes) coffee refill with pennies. We were in the usual positioning when this happened, with Stacy over to my right, me at the register, so that she was there to witness Car Wash drop an enormous load of pennies down onto the counter. This is one major area where Stacy Hamilton and I diverge, because otherwise we actually agree on many things related to the job and the store. I personally am overjoyed and enthralled when customers do such things as pay for their refills with pennies, because it’s hilarious, and I am ready to have a great time whipping fruit flies to death with a wet rag, because it’s great fun, and Stacy does not have time for these kinds of annoyances and trifles, and does not find them as funny as I do. So, Car Wash paid for his refill with pennies, and that’s when I learned that Stacy hated him, and wished he would never come back to the store. He also gave Queen, I’m just remembering, a Puma Ferrari sweatshirt, yesterday, when he had given her the Jim Beams, because he said, “People just give me clothes sometimes.” This man is a real character, but he is a sweetheart. (Update from the future: The beast has been unleashed. Car Wash has shown his ugly side.) Stacy does not like characters like this, but I had to tell her, when learning that she was not a fan of him, after he paid for his refill with pennies, and he dropped that huge load of pennies down on the counter, and I did not bother to count them, when she had said that he drives her crazy, I had to argue that he was at least better than the hot water splenda man. The hot water Splenda man is another one of regular characters who comes in almost every day, and asks for a large hot water with four Splendas and cream, and then pulls up a chair and sits at the wheelchair accessible station (a table that is meant for someone in a wheelchair to use), and watches YouTube and does whatever else he does all day. The large hot water with four Splendas and cream is free, as he knows, and he probably brings tea bags and puts them in there, instead of paying $3 for tea from us, and so this guy who has now been in our store almost every day since we’ve opened, has yet to spend a single dollar at the store. It doesn’t really bother me, not as much as it bothers Stacy Hamilton, but a few days ago when we were really slammed, he came up to the register and said, “Two things, a large hot water with four Splendas and cream AND a large cup of ice.” And this time, I was a little irritated, because he had the audacity to also ask for a large cup of ice, and we were so busy that I really felt annoyed at having to also get him his free drinks and to make no money off of them. At least Car Wash is a paying customer. So yesterday, that is the day after Car Wash had horrified Stacy and paid for his coffee refill with pennies, when he had come in and made his first order of the day, I couldn’t help but ask him, “And are you going to pay with pennies this time?” Stacy was again over to my right, and I knew she would also be horrified at these words, and I was going to get in trouble for saying them, but I couldn’t help it. I needed to ask him about his pennies. He said, I’m sure to Stacy’s relief, “No, not today.” Or something like that, because he is hard for me to understand, and he then proceeded to tell me a lengthy story about getting small change from collecting recycleable trash from his neighbor’s trash can when he was a kid, and the entire time he was telling me this story, I could feel Stacy’s eyes burning into the side of my head, and after he had walked away, she said, “Why did you ask him that??” This is an example of why I may be helping to drive Stacy to an early retirement.

(I was on a streak of writing posts, althought not publishing any of them, and this was number 6 or something in the streak, which ended right after this one, and was probably the greatest post streak I’ll ever have in my life.)

I’ve kept the streak alive. I’ll continue to do so.

All I have to do is write something, of any length, about anything at all.

What I would like to write about.. is emotional contagion. This is something I’ve been thinking about. At least, that’s what I’m saying I want to write about. Is that really what I want to write about?

Maybe, no.

I am tired.

Well, it’s been a good streak.

That I’m keeping alive, with this little writing here.

Write a little, write a lot, it’s all the same to me,

but write not a little bit at all and the book will never be

Type a little, type a lot,

tip tap type away

You never know if you will live

To type another day

some things are red

some things are blue

some things are green and grey

I’ve seen so many colors before

But my favorite, I cannot say

(it’s purple)

money money money

it makes the world go ’round

is having too much a problem?

that problem I haven’t found

dolphins swim

dolphins jump

dolphins dance and play

dolphins come and splish and splash,

and then they go away

horses horses horses

horses make me sad

they make me think about the things

that I have never had

People think I have a cat, but the cat doesn’t matter to me

I only keep the cat around because I have a flea

Chocolate is as chocolate does

Chocolate does alright

Strawberries do as strawberries did

Strawberries do it nice

Vanilla was as vanilla is

Vanilla always will be

But Pistachio is the flavor for me

As it always has been

Josh and I have a new roommate in the 805B household. SHE very clearly does not have antisocial personality disorder, and is not only just a normal person, but much better. She’s a kickass musician. And today, she cleaned the bathtub, which was funny because before she moved in about ten days ago, Josh and I “cleaned the bathtub”, in preparation for her arrival. So we thought we did. Our new roomie, Hope, showed us today what a clean bathtub really looks like. That bathtub was brand spankin’ new. She described the various colors of sludge that were dripping off of her sponge, as she squeezed out the remnants of what she had sponged up in her scrubbing, she educated me on the various cleaning products she employed, her weapons in the fight against the grime, and I listened, I nodded, I looked, and commented, “Man, I didn’t think it was that dirty!” And she said, “It’s your boy blindness.” Boy blindness! My god, are we blind? But we must have been, to think that our bathtub really was clean.

Last night Hope was crocheting, which meant that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and her ears were free, which meant that she was a perfect target for me to tell stories too. I had tried, many many times to tell stories to Josh and He Who Must Not Be Named (ex-roommate), and never succeeded. (Update: only several days after this post was written I successfully read Josh not only one, but TWO stories: The Sagacious Monkey And The Boar and The Goblin Of Adachigahara. I was up late, creeping, and Josh came out of his room distressed because he was unable to sleep. He has recently been having trouble sleeping. He was so desperate for reprieve that he consented to storytime, and as he laid on the couch and I read him these stories, I noticed that he was vaping furiously. I commented on this and suggested that maybe it wasn’t helping him sleep. Actually, I said something like, “Vaping??? Before bed??? Sleep problems???” It became a gag in the house actually, especially when He Who Must Not Be Named‘s best friend for life that he met a few weeks ago (but we don’t know the truth, perhaps they have known each for years) was over, and I would go into my room, and grab Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Japanese Fairy Tales, and begin reading, and bestie would start laughing, and He Who Must Not Be Named would be triggered and shout “Put that f****** book away right now and don’t read another word.” Actually he would say something more creative and inventive than that, but sadly I’m not able to imitate him. He had a special and charming way with words. But in case you were thinking I was harrassing the poor girl, I was not, and asked her first if she would like to hear a story of my Fortnite escapades, that had happened earlier in the day, and she said she would like to hear it. I will tell it to you now too because it is a good story, and it should be forever immortalized in binary.

Fortnite is a Battle Royale game. That means it’s like the Hunger Games, where everyone has to kill each other and one person is left standing. There is a variant of the game where you can have a squad, which can be up to 4 people. You and your squad are on a large island, running around and picking up weapons and things, and building ramps and platforms and walls, and trying to kill everybody else and be the last squad standing. They actually call it “elimination” in the game, and when you eliminate somebody, they get teleported away by a little teleporter machine. So, you may be comforted to know that actually when you shotgun someone in the face at point blank, or mow them down with your submachine gun, they aren’t actually dying, just being eliminated.

I joined up with 3 random people, and this was my squad. I am not good at the game but I have good tactics and decent reflexes. I can beat the average gamer but not beat anyone who actually knows how to play the game. My moments of glory are few and far between. But on this day, I had what was shaping up to be my most incredible moment of glory ever. My squad had made it all the way to end, fought and ran and battled our way through, until we were against one other squad. I had with me one partner left at this point, and we were separated, and they got taken out. I was the last man standing for my squad. The map is shrinking now, because of “the storm”, that constantly closes in on the island, and gradually forces everyone into a smaller and smaller space. The players left in the game were now all cramped together – there’s no running, except there is hiding, because you can build walls and stuff to protect yourself, or to build a tower and go high up above everyone, but that’s hard to do if you suck at the game. Anyways, it was just me and three other people left. I was in a decent position on top of the remnants of some fort that someone else had made already. In this fort, there were a few weapons. I picked up a sniper rifle, and immediately after that, spotted at some distance away a player under a tree. I looked down the scope, lined up the shot, sniped them, boom, they went down. Already, me landing the shot was a big deal. When a player “goes down”, they can crawl around pathetically like a little baby on their hands and knees, and can be revived by a teammate for a short time, and if they aren’t shot again. A teammate came to revive this player that I had sniped, and did not protect themselves by building walls around themselves (a bold move), and was further disrespecting me by wildly spinning in a circle as they stood next to their teammate (like this was a game or something), so I looked down the scope, lined up the shot, and sniped them too. Boom, they went down, now two players down, crawling around on the ground like babies, and suddenly, in mere seconds, what was a 1 v 3 was now a 1 v 1. There was just the third player to worry about, and sure enough, just like the second player ran up to their downed teammate, the third one came running up too. They were however, lucky enough to be standing behind the tree, obscured, unable to be sniped, and in a flash I realized what I had to do. This was my moment of glory. I was running on instinct now.

My final victory move required to me to use an item called a shockwave grenade. The shockwave grenade will send out a concussive blast that will not hurt you but will blow everything around you apart, and will send you flying in the opposite direction relative to where the grenade is. Players use this blast to launch themselves over to enemies and surprise them, or to blast away to safety. I was going to now do the super-pro Fortnite shockwave grenade move where you launch yourself over to where the enemy is, and blast them in the face with your shotgun. I have been on the receiving end of such a move many, many times. It hurts. You’re cowering in fear, maybe you’re reloading, trying to revive a downed teammate, praying for escape, when you hear the sound of the shockwave grenade going off, or (another nightmare sound) you hear the sound of the enemy using their plunger gun to pull themselves over to you, signaling your doom. The enemy player then comes soaring down out of the sky and guns you down with a shotgun blast to the face. As I said, I have been “eliminated” in this way many times before.. But now the tables had turned. I was to be the grenade user, to be the hunter, the doombringer, here and now.

I prepared my shockwave grenade. All three of my eliminated comrades were watching me, all three of them witnessing my sniper prowess, I’m sure sitting up in their chairs, throwing their hands up, screaming “Yes! He’s doing it, he’s doing it!!!”, praying for me to bring home the #1 Victory Crown, and now they were about to see my true power. I began to run forward, building momentum, and then I threw the shockwave grenade down, to launch myself across the ditch and over to that final opponent, and when I threw the grenade, I threw it too far out in front of me, not giving myself enough time to jump in front of it, and it detonated and threw me 100 feet backwards, in the opposite direction of my doomed enemies, and directly into “the storm”. I was eliminated immediately. The game was over. A big #2 came up on the screen.

This Fortnite failure, to put it into perspective for you, if you’re still not getting it, was like having an open dunk, a runaway dunk for the game-winning basket, that will give you the 2 points you need to win the game because you’re down one. There’s a second left on the clock, and you run up to dunk the ball and win the game and achieve the greatest glory, your hero moment, and when you jump up to dunk that ball and become a total legend, you hit your head on the rim of the basket and knock yourself out, and lose the game. To the shock and horror of your team, of all of your fans, and to the joy and jubilation of your rivals.

This is exactly what happened in my tragic game of Fortnite.

After the telling of this Fortnite story, I asked Hope to rate the story. Her feedback is important for me to better calibrate my storytelling algorithm for her, giving her the high quality stories that she needs and deserves. Hope, for knowing almost nothing about Fortnite, rated this story an 8/10. I was quite surprised at this high rating. Feeling embolded, fired up with this quite high rating of what I felt was, while a good story, a simple gaming tale, I proceeded to tell her another story, the great story of when my Grandpa came down into the basement to avoid the rest of the family at a family gathering (actually he just wanted to chill with the coolest member of the family) and watched me fight an enormous demon-wolf-girl to the death, an extremely difficult boss that I had been trying to beat for weeks in Bloodborne, and how amused he was by this, and she rated it 9/10, because it had a Grandpa in it, and because even though he might not have really known what it was all about it, he was still proud of me for defeating this demon-wolf-girl. Hope has a good rating system. And the third story I told her then, this was a very important part of calibrating the stories for her, in the story-telling algorithm, was the famous Japanese fairy tale that nobody knows, The Jellyfish and The Monkey, and Hope rated that story a 10/10.

A 10/10! This is a good new roommate we’ve got here.

The other bit of writing I wanted to do in this post was inspired by a story that Hope told me recently. I had this thought when talking with my sis about her friend texting with a guy, and how he sent her some poetry, and she didn’t know how to respond, so she asked all of her friends about it. They analyzed it together. “Why did he send this?” “What does it mean?” “What should I say back?” These kinds of things. And I thought, especially because he had actually sent her poetry, that it was just like what happens with the poetry exchanges in many of the stories in the Anthology of Japanese Literature. These are snippets of stories that are all written in the early days of Japan, around 1000-1300 (the ones that I will reference), and many of them deal with romance and courtship, and escapades. In almost every story about romance, the initial courting is done via exchanging messages of poetry, through a secondary person, like a servant or friend, and friends, members of the court, servants, etc. are consulted in the analyzing of the meaning of the poems and messages, and in the response. It’s a team effort, and it’s just like what we do nowadays, over dating apps and iMessage. I’ll give you some examples.

From The Captain of Naruto (late 13th century):

(Context: The emperor sees a pretty lady and wants to get with her.) The Emperor summoned a secretary, instructing him to follow and report the lady’s destination. When the secretary had overtaken her, the lady who understood and meant to mislead him somehow, beckoned him to draw near, and with a smile said, “Tell His Majesty, ‘Of the young bamboo.’ I will wait here, I promise, until I receive his reply.” The secretary, never dreaming that she might deceive him, assumed that she merely wished to arrange a rendezvous and hurried away. The Emperor, on receiving this report, felt certain that she had quoted a line from a poem and inquired what it might be. None of those in attendance, however, were familiar with it, and Lord Tameie was sent for. “It is an old poem,” he said without hesitation.

“Tall though it be, what can one do with the useless lengths of the young bamboo with its one or two joints?”

The Emperor is smitten, and has his secretary track down this woman. He sends her his reply via a letter.

“Was it an empty dream or did I really see the young bamboo, that morning and night I yearn for with a love that is torment? Tonight without fail.”

In response to this letter, the woman replies (she’s not happy because she’s married and doesn’t want to meet the Emperor (hence the sobbing), but her husband (the Captain) thinks she should as they kind of have no choice, because, you know, he’s the Emperor). Sobbing, the lady opened the letter, beneath the words, “Tonight without fail,” wrote in thick black ink the single word “wo”, and refolding the letter sent it by the messenger.

The Emperor does not understand the meaning of this mysterious single wo, and again consults his team of specialists to help shed some light on it.

The Emperor, seeing the letter returned, and no different in appearance than before, was about to conclude reluctantly that it had been without effect, when he noticed that the knot was carelessly tied. He undid it and beheld the word, “wo.” Ponder over it as he would, he could make nothing of it. He summoned several ladies-in-waiting who would be likely to know and asked them about the word. One of them said, “Long ago a certain prime minister wrote the word ‘moon’ and sent it to the daughter of Izumi Shikibu, a lady well versed in such matters. She may have spoken of it to her mother, for she readily understood and wrote beneath ‘moon’ the single word ‘wo.’ That is the allusion, I imagine. ‘Moon’ meant that he would be waiting that night for her to come. And in answer to a summons from above, men should reply ‘yo,’ while women say ‘wo.’ The lady went to him, and he was more in love with her than ever. This lady too will surely come.”

She did go to see the Emperor, and the Emperor loved her, and she wasn’t happy about it, and the Captain (her husband), received great honors and favors afterward. And this story actually comes with a rare explicit moral, which the author writes out at the end.

A prince is to his subjects as water is to fish. However high the prince, he should not be guilty of arrogance or contemptuousness; however low his subjects, they should not be disordered by envy. Emperor Gosaga’s gracious feelings and the Captain’s generous sacrifice in the present story deserve to be remembered as examples of truly noble conduct. It is indeed natural that from the earliest times it has ever been said that between the prince and his subjects there should be no estrangement, but bonds of deep sympathy.

Notice that there is no mention of the wife’s sacrifice, the wife who was kind of blackmailed into getting it on with the Emperor against her will…. Nice.

When Rachel told me about her friend’s story of having the poem sent to her and all of her friends trying to understand what it meant and how to respond, it made me think of these poetry exchanges like in The Captain of Naruto, where the Emperor literally does the exact same thing, summoning his ladies-in-waiting and having them analyze the poem that the Captain’s wife sent, and what it meant. And I just think it’s amazing that 1000 years ago, in a completely different society, and 1000 years into the future, with different technologies, in an entirely new society, we are doing the exact same things. These moments of realization, that humans still be doin’ the same things they’ve always been doin’, is one reason why I love reading old literature so much. Some things never really change. Don Quixote really made me feel that way, because of the humor. Everyone siding with a crazy person (Don Quixote) and deciding to pretend that a sink basin is a famous magical helmet to mess with the owner of the sink basin (who is arguing that his sink basin is not a magical helmet), was funny 500 years ago in Spain, and it’s funny now, 500 years into the future, in Tennessee. That’s just funny stuff.

Only a few days after learning about the sis’s friend story of the guy sending the poetry, Hope shared with me another similar story that actually ended in success. She helped her best friend to land her current boyfriend, because of her tactful message writing on Hinge (a dating app). Hope’s friend had matched with a guy she was interested in, who was a chef, and had written on his profile, “Just a chef looking for his server.” Something like that. Now, the friend wanted to write a message in response to this line, but didn’t know what to say, so she went to Hope for guidance, and Hope came up with a great line. “I may not be a server, but I know how to serve.” Good line, right here. Serving is modern slang, like stunting, or flexing. Looking good. This guy responded with something about making dinner for Hope’s friend, and again Hope had another stellar line. “You bring the dinner, and I’ll bring the dessert.” And the rest was history. They met and are now dating.

Hope told me this story and again I was thinking, this is just like how it was done in the old Japanese days, except it’s with phones, over dating apps. This back and forth, wordplay, banter, via writing, curating the perfect message, asking your team for help, your girls, your homies, analyzing the meaning of the messages.. They be doin’ all that stuff in Japan a thousand years ago, and here we are in the 21st century, and we’re doing it still, over iMessage and Hinge. (Does anyone pass notes in the classroom anymore? That must still be happening.)

Here is another example, of courtship via poetry and writing, in The Lady Who Loved Insects (sometime before the 12th century).

(Context: There’s a weirdo girl who loves insects and natural things and doesn’t like to blacken her teeth because she thinks it’s unnatural. Blackening your teeth with iron filings was a custom in Japan back then, for whatever reason people come up with for doing something like that. I read that it turns out that it was also good for your dental hygiene, so they were really onto something there. This weirdo girl attracts the attention of some guy, and he makes her a fake snake to try and “give her a fright”, and he succeeds somewhat.)

Among those who had heard gossip about the girl and her odd pets was a certain young man of good family who vowed that, fond of strange creatures though she might be, he would undertake to give her a fright.

The girl’s family decides that because this guy went to such great trouble to create a mechanical snake for her, she should write a reply, and so she does. …taking a stout, sensible-looking sheet of paper she wrote the following poem, not in hiragana which she never used, but in katakana: “If indeed we are fated to meet, not here will it be, but in Paradise, thou crafty image of a snake.” And at the side was written: “In the Garden of Blessings you must plant your seed.”

The footnotes say that, about the Garden of Blessings line, The snake must by good behavior get itself reborn in some more dignified incarnation. And she is referring to the creator of the snake.

Now, the Captain of Horse sees the letter she wrote to the snake-maker-boy and wanted to meet this interesting bug girl. He went to the house and saw her gleaming white teeth and was scared, but oddly attracted to her, so he sends her a poem.

…using the juice of a flower stem as ink he wrote the following poem on a piece of thickly folded paper: “Forgive me that at your wicker gate so long I stand. But from the caterpillar’s bushy brows I cannot take my eyes.” He tapped with his fan, and at once one of the little boys ran out to ask what he wanted. “Take this to your mistress,” he said. But it was intercepted by the maid, to whom the little boy explained that the poem came from the fine gentleman who had been standing about near the gate. “Woe upon us all,” cried the maid, “this is the handwriting of Captain So-and-So, that is in the Horse Guard. And to think that he has been watching you mess about with your nauseous worms!” And she went on for some time lamenting over the girl’s deplorable oddity. At last, the insect-lover could bear it no longer and said, “If you looked a little more below the surface of things you would not mind so much what other people thought about you. The world in which we live has no reality, it is a mirage, a dream. Suppose someone is offended by what we do or, for the matter of that, is pleased by it, does his opinion make any difference to us in the end? Before long both he and we shall no longer even appear to exist.”

She writes back to the Captain: “By this you may know the strangeness of my mood. Had you not called me kawamushi (hairy caterpillar), I would not have replied.” And the Captain replies, “In all the world, I fear, exists no man so delicate that to the hairtips of a caterpillar’s brow he could attune his life.”

That’s some good banter right there.

There was one more example I wanted to share. This is from Yugao, a chapter from The Tale of Genji. (Context: Prince Genji is in some outskirt of the capital, in a neighborhood of commoners, visiting his old “wet nurse”, who cared for him whilst he was a young lad (he’s now 17). While looking at pretty flowers he receives some writing, is intrigued, and so is the beginning of a new amor.)

How Genji receives the first writing: There was a wattled fence over which some ivy-like creeper spread its cool green leaves, and among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts. “They are called Yugao, ‘evening faces’,” one of his servants told him; “how strange to find so lovely a crowd clustering on this deserted wall!” And indeed it was a most strange and delightful thing to see how on the narrow tenement in a poor quarter of the town they had clambered over rickety eaves and gables and spread wherever there was room for them to grow. He sent one of the servants to pick some. The man entered at the half-opened door, and had begun to pluck the flowers, when a little girl in a long yellow tunic came through a quite genteel sliding door, and holding out toward Genji’s servant a white fan heavily perfumed with incense, said to him, “Would you like something to put them on? I am afraid you have chosen a wretched-looking bunch,” and she handed him the fan.

After his visit with the nurse, Genji looks at the fan and notices the message. (I’m skipping ahead here.)

As they left the house he looked at the fan upon which the white flowers had been laid. He now saw that there was writing on it, a poem carelessly but elegantly scribbled: “The flower that puzzled you was but the yugao, strange beyond knowing in its dress of shining dew.” It was written with a deliberate negligence which seemed to aim at concealing the writer’s status and identity. But for all that the hand showed a breeding and distinction which agreeably surprised him. “Who lives in the house on the left?” he asked. Koremitsu, who did not at all want to act as a go-between, replied that he had only been at his mother’s for five or six days and had been so much occupied by her illness that he had not asked any questions about the neighbors. “I want to know for a quite harmless reason,” said Genji. “There is something about this fan which raises a rather important point. I positively must settle it. You would oblige me by making inquiries from someone who knows the neighborhood.”

Genji wonders if it was written by a woman. He writes back: “Could I but get a closer view, no longer would they puzzle me – the flowers that all too dimly in the gathering dusk I saw.” This he wrote in a disguised hand and gave it to his servant.

That’s all for their exchange of writing – Koremitsu delivers the message and arranges a meetup between them, and a new love is born. But again, it starts with writing.

I feel like this is where I could write some kind of analysis about all of this, or share some profound thoughts. I don’t really have any though. I’m just amused by the similarities. You can infer certain things through iMessage, still, just like Genji could infer from the letter he had been sent. What emojis are used, what acronyms, word choice, gifs, references, spelling, punctuation.

(I have deer photos for you from Shelby Park. That’s for next post.)