They asked me to record a greeting to their group, which I did:

The chat bot thought this video was great. But it also wanted a “cinematic book trailer” and a “landing page.” “That’s oddly specific,” I thought, but not wanting to disappoint my new AI chatbot fan, I sent the AI chatbot a link to my website and tried recording a trailer. And the AI chatbot hated it. And the AI chatbot was convinced all of East London would hate it. No, no, no, this will never do. BUT GOOD NEWS! WE KNOW HOW TO MAKE THESE FOR YOU!

I told the AI chatbot no, I would not like their AI chatbot friends to make me a “cinematic trailer” and “landing page” for my book for a small fee. As a matter of fact, I was tired of talking to this AI chatbot altogether. The AI chatbot’s exacting standards had frankly soured me on the entire East London book club.

Besides, I had an email from a book club in Copenhagen that needed my attention, they were really excited to feature my book!

LET’S DO THIS DENMARK!

I kind of liked the video trailer though, so I thought I would share. Maybe it’ll make its way to East London one day.

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We did it.

We did 100 of something.

Well, I did.

But you noticed, and that counts for something.

But probably not for 100 of something.

Since I started this dumb newsletter over two years ago, we’ve had over 20,900 views and generated $0 of income. Which was exactly what I budgeted. Man, it’s great when something goes according to plan.

Here’s the highlight reel:

See you for next week for post 101.

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December 12th, 2024

Dear Mr. Beaty,

Your dispatch and the delightful dispatches your children sent to Santa Claus warmed the heart of the aging King of the Literary Daredevils.

Congratulations on your new typewriter! For your whatnot: some years ago I read that Ernest Hemingway banged away on his typewriter while standing up. You may find this scrap of information arresting and elect to follow Hemingway’s lead (or not). Some additional chapter and verse on typewriters: gangsters from the 1930s referred to Thompson submachine guns as “Chicago typewriters.” I concluded my first book “The Kansas City Massacre, Volume II, The Digital Edition” with that delicious scrap of evidence.

My current world-record literary stunt is sending Mr. Gary Sadlemyer (the morning protagonist on KFAB1110 AM) a dispatch every Monday and Friday with ungovernable news from West-West Omaha. Tomorrow (Dec 13), dispatch #43 will be mailed. Two of my West-West Omaha dispatches are attached for your bulging consideration.

Merry Christmas & Much Obliged,

Haywood Fudd

My kids must have trusted me that their Christmas lists were successfully posted to Saint Nick since they never challenged me on the topic, but for good measure, additional lists of demands were penned and placed beneath our synthetic Christmas tree. I tried finding a copy of The Kansas City Massacre, Volume II, The Digital Edition online, but without success. I had a feeling that comment was a gag, but then again, what if it wasn’t? What if this magical work about mobsters and machine guns in the central plains really was out there somewhere? Just waiting for me to find it, be educated on Midwestern crime syndicates, and learn fun facts about fully automatic weapons, as told by a man whose only aim is to bring happiness to those he crosses paths with? That, is something I want to believe in.

And even though the only result the Google search on the topic yielded was a 1975 made-for-TV movie that Fudd undoubtedly had seen, I still choose to believe in this digital sequel, living in a far off-realm of the Internet, that seems attainable yet so distant.

Tis the season to believe after all. Or at least it was when I got this letter.

The letters to KFAB public radio host Gary Saddlemyer were different. I had no doubt Fudd actually wrote those, and sent them, twice a week, just as he said he did. He didn’t need to send me proof, but he did. Twice. Which according to his note, were the 42nd and 43rd letters he had sent Mr. Saddlemyer. I never listened to KFAB and never heard of this morning-talk-show-host, but another Google search suggested that he never made use of Fudd’s news from West-West Omaha. If you place “gary saddlemyer haywood fudd” together in a search engine, the query only retrieves a link to my own website—at least those are the only results that Google thinks I want to see.

But Fudd seemed undeterred by this lack of acclaim or recognition. He kept at it, up until Saddlemyer announced his own retirement after a fifty-year career on morning radio. Fudd wrote him until August 4th, 2025. Another 58 letters in all after the two that he had sent me. Making exactly 100 total.

I know this because in 2025, he sent a spiral-bound compilation of them all as my Christmas present.

And as it turns out, Gary Saddlemyer wasn’t the only public figure Fudd had been writing twice a week, but more on that later.

Exactly 100 letters more on that later.

December 9th, 2024

Dear Mr. Saddlemyer,

The latest news from West-West Omaha:

• Nero Haberkorn, 65, of Avoca, Neb., testifies the first things he’s going to ask the supreme architect is why he allowed the NCAA to pass the name, image, and likeness hooey that’s going to massacre any hope of the Huskers to ever win the national championship.

• Henrietta Cordell, 77, of Ulysses, Neb., wears an apron everywhere including to Sunday school, the five-and-dime, and the funeral parlor.

• Klaus Forrester, 72, who roosts near Plum Creek off of County Road 23, which is a country mile north of Bee, Neb., trumpets he wouldn’t live in a big city for all the gold in Fort Knox but that he’d give his eyeteeth for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet near his spread.

• Jack Moon, 85, of David, Neb., smells old.

Much obliged,

Haywood Fudd

December 13th, 2024

Dear Mr. Saddlemyer,

The latest news from West-West Omaha:

• Vernon Cripple, 61, of Staplehurst, Neb., is back to saving money to buy a used tank. “Owning a tank is my sole obsession. I can’t get owning a tank out of my system,” testified Vernon who certifies quality used tanks are divine investments. Vernon previously saved for a used tank in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2021.

• Mayme Dempsey, 81, of a Abie, Neb., says Omaha should give some strapping consideration to changing its name to Omaha-ha for what she certifies are “prima facie” reasons. Mayme remains a whale of a devotee of Johnny Paycheck who achieved country music repute with his ditties “Take This Job and Shove It” and “I’m the Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised).”

• Justus Crawl, 55, of Dorchester, Neb., says it’s not the brutal winters that ruffle his tail feathers, but the number of drivers he encounters on the roads who drive as though they couldn’t hammer a railroad spike into a snowdrift.

• Soothsayer Poe Dansk, 68, of Prague, and Neb., is predicting the world is going out of business next Tuesday between 3:00 and 4:00 PM, but no later than 5:20 PM CST.

• Celeste “Lady Godiva” Feemer, 49, lives outside of Pickrell, Neb., on SW 2nd Road. Lady Godiva’s chock full of pizzazz, oomph, and all that jazz. On Flag Day last year, she blasted through Pickrell on her Harley and the only thing she was wearing was vintage motorcycle goggles.

Much obliged,

Haywood Fudd

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It’s not that I have strong reservations about feeling stupid, I’m a bit used to it, but I’d rather not if I had the option. Which means that in an attempt to sell a book, and thus not feel stupid, you start looking for opportunities. You look at your friends and think, “maybe him?” And you realize that not only does your friend not want to buy your book, he doesn’t want to read your book, because he doesn’t want to read any books, because your friend doesn’t even like books. And you start doubting who your friends really are because in this moment you see how little you have in common with any of them. And they don’t even want to give you a sympathy book purchase.

But they will, if you insist. Which makes you feel really stupid.

And you’re back to where you began and you still have boxes of books in your basement.

Most of my friends and family were enthusiastically supportive of my book, but a handful acted as though I recruited them to join a multi-level marketing scheme. When a prominent “bookstagrammer” I knew didn’t reply to my message about using some free copies for one of her bookstagrammer giveaways, I felt like I had just been turned down as her homecoming date. And then there was the podcaster I knew who was happy to give me advice, but fell just short of actually offering any sort of public endorsement to all of his podcaster friends.

It’s just a really weird thing to try to sell a book.

Since the internet had yet to do all the work for me, I decided to start buying lottery tickets. I bought a VIP package to meet the emo band Emery prior to their Omaha show. When the date came, I gave the lead singer five copies of my book for their six band members. I had miscounted, but one of the guys barely does shit in the band anyways, so he doesn’t need one. My angle was to take advantage of their $500 “LET EMERY WRITE YOU A SONG” promotion, and the lead singer guy was really nice about: taking the stack of five books, saying he would take my $500, saying he would indeed write me a song, and would definitely be looking for my e-mail later on the subject matter. I sent them that e-mail, and the $500, and an excited message with lots of exclamation points. In return, I received a reply from one of the girlfriends saying the members of the band—a band I idolized, listened to fervently, loved interacting in person with—got together and decided they didn’t want to write a song about my book. The guy in the band who doesn’t really play an instrument must have been pissed I didn’t bring a copy for him.

I got my $500 refunded, along with the knowledge that the members of one of my favorite bands talked about me behind my back.

They later re-did their website and clarified that the whole “LET EMERY WRITE YOU A SONG” thing was really meant for dudes with jobs to buy as a gift for their emo girlfriend. I guess that makes sense. But it doesn’t help me sell any books.

Despite the fact that Emery now had five copies of Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity in their possession, I had no proof of it. And now that I couldn’t even pay them to write a song to promote my book like their website said I could, I decided I needed to buy a different lottery ticket.

When “Weird Al” Yankovic and Penn & Teller had meet and greets of their own, I brought copies to give them, and posed for a selfie with the book before forcing them into their hands. They were confused, but nice about it. I repeated the process with Todd Packer and Ryan Howard from The Office, but Chevy Chase never lifted a single appendage the entire time fans of Christmas
Vacation posed for photos with him after a festive movie screening. I was convinced they had replaced the real Chevy Chase with a wax figure glued to a bar stool until my wife said, “thanks for coming to Omaha,” and the animatronic replica of the former SNL Weekend Update host replied with, “of course.”

https://www.csbeaty.com/loser

So Chevy didn’t get a copy of my book and he certainly didn’t tell his agent about me. But I did get a selfie with him. And a Chevy Chase trading card handed out by a member of his entourage.

●●●

It’s not that I expected any of these celebrities to make me famous, but I mean, they could if they wanted to, right? And how would they know if they wanted to unless they had a copy of my book? David Sedaris mentioned on his Masterclass that whenever someone tells him they want to be a writer, he invites them to open for him on tour before one of his readings. So I mean, it could happen, right?

Right?

I decided to find out. I gave David Sedaris a copy of my book when he did a pre-show signing in Des Moines, Iowa and I made it very clear that I was the person who wrote it.

Wrong.

Sedaris was super nice though. We talked about a plastic fetus he received the night before from a pro-life advocate, and I wrote an entire essay about the fun I had that evening at his show. And maybe, you know, he just didn’t think about it? Maybe he regretted not inviting me onto the stage once he realized he didn’t have an opener for his Des Moines tour date? Maybe he was kicking himself for the lost opportunity?

So once the show was over, I went through the book signing line again.

And Sedaris recognized me.

And he was super nice, again, even apologetic that I had to go through the long wait a second time.

And he gave me a very nice signature and inscription to my children.

And sent me on my way back to Omaha, Nebraska.

Well shit.

But it’s hard to blame the guy. His bedside manner with each autograph seeker was truly commendable but he was also eating a steak and potato dinner during the post-show signing and likely not auditioning fans to be his opening act. There was probably some protocol or process for that, but hell if I knew what that was. I didn’t even know the process for getting a woman I had known for sixteen years to give away free copies of my book on her Instagram page.

I started looking for clues.

●●●

Having lived my entire life in a State that is rarely talked about, any mention of where I’m from, no matter how frivolous, jumps out from the page and latches onto my face like those things from the movie Alien. Having recently met Sedaris, I started reading his book Calypso, and once I made it a page-and-a-half into the title essay, I had an alien latched onto my face—pumping alien eggs into my stomach cavity that resembled civic pride and ideas about this mysterious world of becoming an author who sells books and doesn’t feel stupid.

Omaha. There it was. I live in Omaha. My dreams felt closer to home as I discovered this loose thread to tug on.

The essay naturally goes on to describe Sedaris getting a fatty tumor cut out of him by an autograph seeker who then mailed the biological waste to his beach home so he could use it to feed a snapping turtle. The essay’s title “Calypso” is taken from a passing reference to someone giving your cat a secret name behind your back. But Sedaris wasn’t quite through with Janet.

I googled “janet wood interpretation society” and came up with what appeared to be a reputable e-mail address. So I used it. I asked her if we could meet up somewhere in Omaha so she could sign my copy of Sedaris’s Calypso. It felt particularly appropriate since the book cover for this volume of essays was a plank of wood with a smiley face.

Now this request may seem a little bold, but honestly, I send emails like this weekly and anticipate most of them never to receive a reply. I’ve sent celebrity ethics professor Michael Sandel a copy of a college paper I wrote about one of his books and an essay about locker room nudity to stand-up comedian Demetri Martin. I’ve asked Paul Scheer how to locate a DVD copy of season 2 of his sketch comedy troupe with Aziz Ansari Human Giant and asked ex-Christian singer Derek Webb to play at a concert in my basement. Basically if someone I vaguely admire has an accessible e-mail posted somewhere on the Internet, I look for an excuse to send them a message. The majority never reply, and honestly they probably shouldn’t, but as a result of this low hit-rate, you can imagine my thrill when I received the following message fourteen hours later in my inbox:

And that, my friend, was the most exciting thing to happen since the time Jason “Wee Man” Acuña from Jackass mailed me an autographed hockey puck, baseball card, thank-you note, and an assortment of skateboard stickers.

Sensing an opening, I tried to keep the communication going. I really didn’t have an angle. Now that I wouldn’t be getting her signature next to the doodle of a naked woman Sedaris had hand drawn for Devon on the inside cover of one of my three copies of Calypso, all I wanted was to learn as much as I could about this fascinating woman. I asked about her son mentioned in the essay and she said that he was a writer. She sent me a link to a humorous essay he wrote about Papal election procedures. As it turns out, Janet’s son was Sedaris’s opening act the last time he did a reading in Omaha and Jimmy also joined him on a couple of recent tour stops.

So I guess the trick to getting invited to open for Sedaris is to have a mother who has been featured in one of his essays and has also supplied him with a framed sheet of plywood for his beach house.

This might be tricky.

Particularly since my mother has no idea who David Sedaris is and tends to avoid reading anything with curse words in it unless it’s something I wrote. She feels obligated to read those.

She also has a slightly different background than Janet:

But even with the advantage of going to dinner parties with the world’s-greatest living humorist, Janet was empathetic to the struggle of finding your creative voice in a crowded room.

●●●

I had my Omaha book release and celebrated Christmas Day from an urgent care waiting room with other carriers of the influenza-A virus. Once the New Year had arrived, I convinced my family to discard the $50 ping-pong table we had bought from Facebook marketplace so I could turn that cavernous waste of basement floor space into a library and writing study. I paid a buddy to install a fake copper ceiling and stretched the rest of my construction budget by building bookshelves out of hastily stained 2 x 4s. It really did look nice in the end, and the natural wood grain of my new library added a neat character and aesthetic. I hung a few pictures of my favorite authors, but my shelf of Sedaris books felt a bit empty.

I sent my new friend a message to help solve that:

One day later, she replied to my text:

Three weeks later, a package arrived.

If I look closely, I can see the Chihuahua. Or the raccoon. Or whatever I want it to be.

Or, if you look at it just right and for long enough—it could be a snapping turtle who just finished eating the tumor of a best-selling author, looking around for more before disappearing, like the ingrate that he is, back into his foul and riled depths.

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December 9^th, 2024

Dear Mr. Fudd,

If you notice a change in font from previous correspondences, it is due to the use of my Christmas present from my octogenarian distant relative who stumbled upon a beautiful Royal typewriter in pristine condition at a garage sale. At least that’s the story he gave me.

Congratulations on the grandchild and the successful literary assault on the good people of Bliss, Idaho. I trust both events have resulted in unparalleled merry-making by all involved. I enjoyed your Christmas letter, but found the decapitated bull an all too familiar sight. My wife and I once watched the murder of 6 consecutive bulls at the conclusion of the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. My favorite bull was named Gabriela, and the feminine name attributed to him seemed to have really upset the poor fellow. Being murdered didn’t help the situation. When the matador went for the kill shot with his sword, Gabriela thrust herself backward, snapped the sword in half, and charged his assailant. It didn’t end well for either.

I’ve included my children’s letters to Santa since I seem to have misplaced Mr. Kringle’s address and I have some promises to keep regarding posting their annual list of demands. My middle child didn’t bother to write one. She’s kind of like that.

In the name of merriment,

C.S. Beaty

•••

Each time I wrote to Haywood, I added a little flair of my own. I inherited my dad’s stamp collection, which he kept for roughly three years during the mid-90s before losing interest in collecting postage. Not having any other use for the 32 to 34 cent Looney Tunes stamps, I started using them to send my wife postcards. I tried to match the postcard’s theme or location with an appropriate stamp from my dad’s collection, but I was never sure what to do with all the World War II or prominent physicist stamps my dad had assembled. Until I started writing frequent letters to Haywood Fudd.

I found a hipster-stationary store and bought a variety of odd-sized and odd-colored hipster envelopes, but that still felt a bit underwhelming for the treatment Fudd deserved. So, I bought a hot wax seal with the letter “B,” and then a hot wax seal of a bat, and then had a custom hot wax seal of a jackalope made. We were getting there.

But the real joy came from the bonus added content I shoved in each envelope. This same hipster-stationary shop sold collectible Barbie cards from the 1980s, so I selected a few of my favorites to send to Haywood.

Which then led to me keeping every intriguing scrap of paper or other flat item that I could send in a letter. When my mom bought me a very Christian bookmark with some coffee/Bible verse pun, I sent it to Haywood. When I ordered a few jars of root beer-flavored mustard and they came with a “Mustard Gift Guide” from the “Mustard Hall of Fame,” I also mailed that to Haywood. And when I sent Haywood five identical stickers of the University of Nebraska-Omaha mascot Durango the bull, Fudd sent me back a bull sticker with his head chopped off. He did it very carefully.

Early on, Fudd sent me two dollars in each of his letters, but once he learned of my devotion to this correspondence, he scaled back his budget. But on occasion he still burned holes in the paper with an open flame.

When I started regularly writing, I compiled my typewritten unedited essays into a booklet for my family—these were the books I was having made when Mike the Printer first introduced me to Fudd. So when I repeated the task in 2024, I sent a volume to my new pen pal. And in return, Haywood sent me a compilation of his own complete collection of letters to the residents of Bliss, Idaho—gift wrapped and with a Christmas card.

•••

•••

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In my job interview, Guenther asked if I golfed. I told him no. He told me that wouldn’t be a problem—he didn’t golf either—but if I ever wanted to learn, well, it would probably be a good idea. He even said he would have the company pay for golf lessons. During my first week on the job, the US Senior Open was being played at the Omaha Country Club for the first time ever, and my new office excitedly purchased a set of four tickets to the event. As a new member of the sales team, I was granted the opportunity to help fill these tickets, if only I had any idea what one was supposed to do at a golf event that wasn’t even for the normal professional golfers. My co-worker Al had to explain it to me.

“So this is the US Open?”

“No, the Senior Open.”

“What’s the difference?”

“This is for the Senior PGA.”

“The what?”

“The Senior PGA, it’s the older golfers who aren’t in the regular PGA. Well a few of them play in both.”

“You mean like Phil Mickelson?”

“No, no. Like Bernhard Langer.”

“Who?”

“Freddy Couples?”

“Who?”

“God Dammitt. Tom Watson? You ever heard of Tom Fucking Watson?”

“Ummmm…No?”

Al had some serious work to do with me.

●●●

I made the mistake of telling my mom I was trying to get into golf, who—having never learned any of my true interests—latched onto this new pursuit with vigor when it came time to buy me any and all Christmas presents. When I turned 24, my mom instructed Eileen’s Colossal Cookies to make me a golf-themed birthday cookie and when they returned from South Carolina, I was given screen-printed golf balls with the logo of each of the tourist traps my parents had visited. My mom naturally assumed I would be collecting these now. My Christmas present was a cheap range finder, which my mom admitted she didn’t know what it did, but it was the only golf accessory she found that fit her budget. Next, I unwrapped a navy blue golf polo, so I could proudly show off my cup-size like all the other man-boobed golfers who just assumed no one could see their nipples when they wore their polyester-blend polos to the office each and every. Single. Day.

But after buying a hand-me-down pair of clubs from Al at the office, I did have some intention of learning the game. If for anything else so that I could leave the office early—and for days on end—to participate in all the sponsored golf outings. It reminded me of how all the nicotine-addicted coworkers at Pizza Hut got additional smoke breaks while the rest of us were expected to actually work our entire shifts.

As it turns out it probably would have been easier if I just took up smoking.

Al did both things.

He really had life figured out.

He also wore a lot of golf polos to work. And yes, I could always see his nipples.

●●●

I asked an old classmate to teach me how to swing a club. He had been golfing his entire life and even did it competitively in high school, and he didn’t mind all the range balls I was able to expense on my company credit card. At the end of my first lesson, I had not been infected with anything resembling a love for golf.

Tyler never complained about my lack of progress or all the free lessons I was requesting, but I could sense his enthusiasm waning when he started inviting other friends to join us at the driving range. Without his undivided attention, I asked a guy from church who had an obligation to God to say yes every time someone asked for his help, and the two of us rendezvoused at the same driving range where Tyler had done his best efforts with me.

Michael and I only had one lesson, but I did make sure to show him the new golf pullover my work gave me. He was really impressed. It was high quality and only showed my nipples if you got close.

●●●

I was starting to make contact with the ball—most of the time—well, some of the time—and Tyler gave me a crash course on chipping and putting. But I had yet to play an actual round of golf. Our office participated in a weekly golf league for the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineers, and after our installation manager was given a year-long ban due to the time he missed a shot and swung his club above his head and down into the putting green lumberjack-style—we were having trouble filling the required four players each week. I decided my time had come.

Al was against the idea.

Which hurt my feelings.

Which Al didn’t care about.

Despite being a beer league for engineers, people took the ASHRAE golf league pretty seriously. When I ran into an old engineering professor at the driving range, I made a comment about how I had never seen him there. He told me he selected which range he practiced at based on the velocity of the wind flow on that given day. He said, “you know it’s that whole engineering thing, you can never really turn it off.”

Engineers are kind of like that.

Every golfer at the ASHRAE league had a handicap based off their league performance to date. Since I had never golfed in that league, or any league, or in any form—my score wouldn’t be counted that first round and would instead be used to establish my handicap.

After missing the ball entirely on my first tee-shot, I regrouped and made contact on my second swing, hooking it and watching it bounce off the cart path and into a tree line. I hit it again and this time the ball ended up in a tree. Not near a tree. In a tree. About three-feet up, gently nestled in the branches of a pine as if it were the egg in a bird’s nest. I tried swinging my club like a baseball bat at the waist high target, which just made the ball land at my feet after the club head caught the pine needles and shook the entire tree.

The rest of the round went much the same.

In order to keep play moving, there was a maximum score allowed on each hole. Something like seven strokes above par. I was mercy-ruled every single hole and at the end of the round was assigned the maximum allowable handicap. That was the only time I participated in the ASHRAE golf league. I never asked to play again, but I also knew Al would never allow it.

●●●

But I had yet to give up hope. After our Vice President Guenther couldn’t attend the Master’s Golf Tournament due to the untimely death of his mother, he let me take his ticket to escort a couple of customers. I had never watched a golf tournament in my life, on tv or in person, and here I was at Augusta National sitting in the same grandstand as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and yucking it up with a VP of an engineering firm.

“Hey Chris, check it out. There’s Tom Watson.”

“Ohh yeah, how cool is that. I totally know who Tom Watson is.”

I kept getting invited to fancy-ass golf tournaments. I not only went to the Master’s a second time, I also took customers to the PGA Championship and the US Open. The real one. Not the one for old people. I could talk about golf, even if I couldn’t play golf. And for Christmas that year, my mom bought me a series of golf lessons. By the end of these private sessions I knew what a proper swing felt like, and when I aimed my ball at the driving range, well, it went in that general direction.

I was so thrilled that I accepted an invitation from a customer to go golfing. I told him about my lessons and as we drove back to the clubhouse after the round, he tried to encourage me in my new hobby.

“Chris, that’s great that you’re going to start taking lessons soon. I think you’ll really get a lot out of those. That will help your game a lot.”

Fuck it. Golf is stupid. I don’t like looking at man-boobs enough to be a golfer anyways.

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Oh what I would do for a snowplow to run me over…

But as a devoted Batman fan, I have learned one thing about making a difference in this world: you don’t need super powers if you have buckets and buckets of money.

I have some buckets of money, fewer than I would like, and most of it is in a bank and not in a bucket—but because of this money, I can just pay people to write a book review. They actually read the book, and they send an honest review to you. If your book sucks—and it probably does—you get to read the shitty review ahead of time and choose whether or not to make it public. There are two main services that do this: Kirkus and BookLife.

BookLife is the same as Publisher’s Weekly, except it’s…well…I don’t actually know the difference. And then there is a BookLife Prize, which is a different review, and you might when a prize. But neither are technically Publisher’s Weekly reviews, but the reviews are written by the same people who write the Publisher’s Weekly reviews, and you can pay to have them printed in Publisher’s Weekly, but you can’t call them Publisher’s Weekly reviews, but they are.

So rather than trying to make sense of all this, I just emptied one of my money buckets and ordered a review from both of these services. And then apparently I also bought one from IndieReader. Which I don’t remember doing.

And the reviews are good! How about that!

•••

Here they are:

Kirkus:1

•••

BookLife by Publisher’s Weekly:2

•••

The BookLife Prize:3

•••

IndieReader:4

•••

So that’s fun.

If you happened to read Loser* and also liked the book, please add your own review to Amazon, Good Reads, or any other places where you can click a number of stars on things. This stuff actually make a big difference when you’re an unknown. Maybe. I don’t really know. But it makes me feel nice.

If you hated the book, don’t worry about leaving a review. Just buy a bunch of copies to give out as white elephant presents next Christmas. Or you can lie. I’m ok with lying.

You should also look at my website for more book info including: author appearances, photos of me with celebrities that didn’t want to take a picture with my book, bad senior photo shoot images, other things people said about my book, pictures of my hockey puck collection, and a link to my book’s Spotify playlist.

www.csbeaty.com

Thank you everyone who has supported my writing thus far! Those little bits of encouragement go a long way.

-Chris (not C.S.)

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November 9^th, 2024

Dear Mr. Fudd,

I was excited to see your latest correspondence. I know your time is precious as you attempt to bless this world with your beautiful words at an unprecedented scale this holiday season. I wish you much success in this endeavor. I hope the residents of Bliss, Idaho or wherever else your messages end up are as grateful as I am for your poetry.

I have some bad news, the bonsai tree stand in the Hobby Lobby parking lot appears to have migrated south for the winter. But don’t despair. I have an update.

The bonsai tree road stand is operated by a man from Houston that goes by the name of “Thunder Kim.” If you’d like to call him, his number is 832-687-7676—he made sure I had it in case I needed any assistance after I purchased a bonsai tree of my own.

I don’t believe Thunder is his real name, he is very Japanese. He imports all of his bonsai trees from Japan to Houston, and then drives them up to Omaha. I asked him why Omaha? To which he laughed, smiled, and nodded in the manner that Japanese people do who do not have a strong command of the English language.

The ages of his bonsai trees ranged from four years to 26 years old. For each year of age that the Japanese juniper had, Thunder charged an additional $10. It felt like a fair deal, and he gave me complimentary care instructions. I made sure to pick up a copy for yourself. I hope you find them helpful, but this is the extent of my bonsai tree knowledge. If you have further questions, I’m sure Thunder wouldn’t mind if you gave him a call.

Much obliged,

C.S. Beaty

•••

While traveling in non-English speaking countries, I love taking photos of poorly translated English instructions. As someone who spent his first year of fatherhood trying to parent in a foreign language, I’m empathetic to the struggle, but seriously. Bad translations are the best.

Just consider the gondola I rode in Guam that could have said, “please remain seated and do not throw anything outside,” but instead chose to instruct me, “Do not change Seat and Dump outside, please.”

Or the sign in the lobby of a Peruvian hotel that read,

Let’s do that your permanency is agreeable and pleasant TAKE CARE YOUR PERSONAL OBJECTS the hotel don’t know responsibility for losses or steal due that we are in public areas. The management

•••

With a subpar translation, the message isn’t just lost, it becomes an entirely new thing. The challenge of piecing together the meaning of the original text becomes its own activity, and as long as the stakes aren’t too high, the act provides an amusing game. Or at least a funny photo.

I learned a lot about bonsai trees when I finally met Thunder Kim the bonsai tree man, but not how to take care of one. Thunder gave me multiple sets of instructions and sold three small vials of “green green liquid plant food,” but the more helpful Thunder Kim tried to be, the less I knew what to do with my new four-year-old Japanese Juniper. Even the cheat sheet that he insisted I take a photo of left me puzzled:

1.) It is good to fully soak the tree in water for the first time. 2 times in the first week only.

2.) Plant food- Mix the plant food with one gallon of water and water 2 times a week.

3.) Rain water- When it’s raining outside. Rainwater is ok to let the tree absorb the rainwater. No more than 2 times a week.

4.) Sun- No sun or very little sun is ok. Is it is ok with a 24 hour light. Normal conditions are ok as well, such as air condition, heater, and animals.

I tried following Thunder’s instructions as best I could. But I couldn’t really understand how to rectify all of those things I wasn’t supposed to do more than two times a week. It kind of seemed like everything was “ok.” This ought to be easy.

I took the tree out to our patio a few times each week. I let it out when it was raining. I took pictures and showed it off to my friends. Things were looking great for my little tree, until I started comparing the current color of the tree to the color from my first photos. The second my four-year-old Japanese Juniper came into my house, it started its gradual death.

It turns out those things are pretty damn hard to take care of. I must not have read the instructions carefully enough.

•••

Frankly, I thought the bonsai tree would last a lot longer and provide a lot more material for Haywood Fudd letters than it did. I imagined it as some ongoing saga, some new hobby I could periodically update Fudd on with all my new bonsai tree knowledge and experiences. But I never really cared about bonsai trees in the first place, and the death of my own tree certainly indicated that. I was always more interested in Thunder Kim, the bonsai tree stand man. It turns out I wasn’t the only one.

Shortly after purchasing and murdering my Japanese Juniper, the Omaha World Herald newspaper ran a story about “the Omaha bonsai guy.” Apparently he had quite the social media following. People seemed more intrigued in him than the art of bonsai trees. Well, most people. Everyone but Noah Lenser, who responded to a Facebook post asking, “where is the bonsai tree guy parked today?” with the specific location of “up your ass.”

Not helpful Noah.

But other than Noah, people loved this “bonsai guy” and his mysterious full-size van filled to the brim with potted plants. Full-sized vans tend to get a bad reputation given the improper conduct people seem to do in full-sized vans, but now we all had a usage of the vehicle we could get behind. Thunder Kim’s small business was so popular that the Omaha World Herald re-ran the story in its Best of 2025 year-end recap.

But like the dead stump I now use for decor in my basement, my interest in bonsai trees atrophied. It was just as well. Fudd had also seemed to move on to new topics. His next letter to me was his own recap of the year in the form of a Christmas card.

The message, albeit odd, made complete sense to me.

•••

Dear Yuletide You,

If there are burn marks on this jolly dispatch, consider the scribbling source. Consider this too: mailing Christmas cards is teetering on the cheerless precipice of extinction. Some velvety synonyms for extinction include kaput, pfft, defunct, belly up, and doomed.

Everyone is jim-dandy. Sing it: Jim Dandy to the rescue... Jim Dandy to the rescue.

Our granddaughter made her majestic appearance on November 7. She’s also beautiful and breathtakingly perfect. Watching her sleep and listening to her make muffled cooing noises while she’s nuzzled in our arms is pure bliss.

In April, a sinful tornado with oodles of scabby intentions and credentials mauled our town. While others judiciously sheltered in basements, I fortified myself with a beaker of general anesthesia and charged outside to do battle with this swirling tempest. With the wind and rain horse-whipping me, I shook my fist at the man-eating cyclone while baptizing it with a bona fide and virtuous cussing.

Our travels caused us to mosey like insubordinate tumbleweeds and to sideswipe into some of you in 2024. Boosting to get back on the road, we are reposing in Palm Springs during Christmas week with cousin Hunky Gordy where we’ll zigzag through the hidey-holes and haunts of old blue eyes. We return from Palm Springs for four days before bulging to San Antonio where Mrs. Fudd will conduct high-stakes business and I’ll serve as an impromptu tour guide at the Shrine of Texas while stashing myself inside my deteriorating gorilla suit.

We visited a couple of potential sanctuaries in 2024 where we were considering relocating. City ambassadors of two of these cozy communities extended invitations to Mrs. Fudd but not to me. During meetings with these emissaries I couldn’t resist the immaculate temptation to puff on an ill-bred cigar, wear knockoff Elvis sunglasses, sport a sleeveless threadbare T-shirt with a fading picture of Farrah Fawcett emblazoned on it, while randomly issuing strangled grunts of muddling questions and blurry testimonials.

In the ladylike town of Bliss, Idaho (population 300), a disheveled cluster of glassy-eyed, hidebound literary adrenaline junkies anointed me to once again chaperone them to literary Shangri-La. What this de-facto hooey means: I remain The King of the Literary Daredevils. Mrs. Fudd isn’t ohh so amused.

Merry Christmas and Much Obliged,

Haywood Fudd

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October 16th, 2024

Dear Mr. Fudd,

It’s getting colder, which means that I am in the midst of the thankless job of gradually ripping out all of the plants in my wife’s garden and placing them in our garbage bin. It’s about a two-month process since I refused to purchase those large brown paper sacks, so I can only properly dispose of one garbage bin of garden at a time. I could probably start the process earlier in the year since my wife inevitably loses interest in said garden around mid-June, which annually coincides with when there are vegetables that require something to make use of. Some people use vegetables, we let them sit on our counter for the duration of the summer and leak vegetable goo down the kitchen drawers and onto the hardwood floor. It’s an odd hobby, but it seems to make my wife happy. Me, not so much.

Last year I attempted to plant my own herbs to capture some of the thrill my wife seems to enjoy with witnessing the gradual birth and death of an object, so I bought a lemon verbena plant. I don’t know what one does with lemon verbena, but I heard about it in a book once. It’s a plant that smells like lemon. I know what you’re thinking, “you’re just talking about lemons.” I’m not. Lemon verbena, it’s like lemons, but without the lemons. Gradually the plant lost its lemon scent, which I felt was odd, but I was new to gardening. I attempted to make a syrup out of the enormous plant, but it tasted awful and took forever. While I was in the process, my mother came by the house and informed me that I was in fact, not making a syrup out of lemon verbena, but a common garden weed. How was I supposed to know? I had taken good care of the weed though, I was rather proud of it.

Much obliged,

C.S. Beaty

•••

My daily trips to the mailbox were now met with greater anticipation. My boss had taught me how to send for autographs through the mail about a year ago, but I had run low on B-list celebrities willing to sign a hockey puck. Since my growing autograph election had stunted its growth, checking the mail had also grown less exciting.

Until now.

It was still early phases in our relationship. The first few dates had gone well, but now Fudd and I were getting to know what each of us was like when we didn’t feel the need to impress one another. When we didn’t get all glammed up before a night on the town. We were inching toward the wearing sweatpants and farting in front of one another phase of any meaningful partnership, but it was still exciting. Now that we were six letters in and things felt serious, I started bragging about my new pen pal with the people I cared about. It was about time they knew who this special person in my life was.

I started with my wife.

“This has got to be the weirdest thing to happen to you this year.”

I think she understood.

I went back to our matchmaker, Mike the Printer, and told him about Fudd and I. He was thrilled the two of us had hit it off. I emailed him scanned copies of our correspondence thus far, and nine minutes later, Mike the Printer sent me a response.

“Thanks, I think this is going to be the best reading ever.”

•••

Fudd’s letters corresponded with a creative, albeit somewhat lonely phase of my life. After adopting three kids, every single meaningful relationship I had prior had been impacted. I lost friends. I felt estranged from the people who supported me before becoming a dad, meanwhile trying to become a dad to a three-year-old, five-year-old, and eight-year-old who didn’t speak the same language I did and had never had a meaningful relationship of their own. No one in our new family knew what this thing was supposed to look like or what to do with one another.

There were only a few constants between the before and after of this abrupt life transition, but one was my boss. He had always been in my corner, even if it meant giving me life advice that was counter to what he probably should have said as my employer. He taught me life was short. Working hard was often overrated. Professional ambition is often a fool’s errand. And life gets better when you learn to care less and enjoy it more.

He loved it when I told him about Haywood Fudd:

“My two thoughts:

1) this man needs NO psychedelic drugs and

2) this is what self actualization must look like. Best proof of reincarnation I have seen.”

•••

When Haywood’s next letter arrived in the mail, I was smitten.

•••

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1. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski

2. Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff

3. The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

4. Becoming Dr. Seuss by Brian Jay Jones

5. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

6. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

7. Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

8. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

9. Boomtown by Sam Anderson

10. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

While my wife was recovering from invasive receding gum surgery—where they sliced a strip of flesh from the roof of her mouth and stitched it onto her lower jaw—she read a couple of Holocaust books. Her rationale was that it would be harder for her to feel sorry for herself while reading a memoir about surviving a Nazi concentration camp. I think it worked, though her mouth still looked like it really fucking hurt.

It wasn’t my plan, but perhaps there’s a reason why I read so many books about terrible things while “sheltering in place” and “social distancing” during my first-ever global pandemic. There was something about reading these firsthand accounts of awful events that made me feel less angry about the state of the world. I guess eating take-out ramen and watching Tiger King isn’t as bad as: 9/11, the London bombing, dying on Mount Everest, the rise of Hitler, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the impact of institutional racism, being held as a political prisoner during apartheid, and living in Oklahoma to cover Russell Westbrook.

I also started journaling way more. It’s not like I had met much else to do, but I was acutely aware of just how weird this moment in history was. I thought I should keep a record of it. The University of Nebraska-Omaha library even encouraged the practice, and made an open invitation for journals during COVID to be donated to their collection to go alongside their diaries from the Spanish influenza outbreak. So I ramped up the practice to a new level of discipline and spent every morning of 2020 recounting the previous day’s events alongside the reported cases of COVID and COVID related deaths in whatever city I was in at the time. Once the shutdowns began, I did not miss a day.

But here’s the thing about writing during a pandemic. It’s pretty boring. So your journals are also pretty boring. Nothing was really happening, but also with where I was in life, I was waiting for things to happen. Kids. Work. Church. Life’s purpose. I felt myself inching toward resolution in each of these areas until someone in China ate a bat on a stick and the world told me, “NOPE. YOU’RE NOT DOING SHIT.”

And yet, at the end of the year, much of my life was indistinguishable from the 2019 version of myself. It was an inflection point. And inflection points don’t look any different from what immediately preceded it, until suddenly everything goes a different direction.

•••

1. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski

First off, let me say I have no idea how anyone could write a book with their spouse. I guess it helps if you’re both authors and religion professors. Maybe that spousal dynamic helped with the book. People get sick of one another. The Inklings have this reverence as “the greatest friend group ever,” but the two key figures, Lewis and Tolkien, weren’t even on speaking terms at the end of their lives. There’s no doubt that those meetings at The Eagle and Child were pure magic. But magic isn’t real. It wears off when somebody figures out what the gag was. And then people get mad when you make Santa Claus a character in your young adult novel and they stop being your friend.

And yet each year I read a biography of C.S. Lewis because I am still enchanted by his life. I long for the camaraderie and joy that he describes. Even though when he describes it, it feels like he’s longing for something other than what he has at the time of his writing.

Before I left a church, I was ushered into a waiting room before the important pastor was scheduled to see me. I was holding a copy of this book and this pastor—a friend, a person I loved—asked about it when he walked in and found me reading. I lit up while describing it. I was giddy, really. And then we did that awkward hard transition where the tone gets real serious, someone says “well..”, there are a few deep breaths, and then we talk about the thing that we knew we came to talk about. I told him I hated his church. I hated the way the church treated me. I hated the way the church treated my wife. I hated the way that he himself had never stuck up for me when things got hard. I told him I was never coming back. And I told him that I hoped he took what I said to heart so others may not feel this same hate that I still do.

We left on O.K. terms. He even read this book after I enthusiastically described it to him.

He told me later he couldn’t get into it.

•••

2. Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff

I read this book in a sweaty tent that was filled with fireworks. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the most patriotic moment of my life, and it felt fitting (in a weird way) to read a book about the people who experienced these attacks while selling explosives for the 4th of July. There was this moment of unity back then. Of single mindedness and shared purpose coming out of those attacks. Kind of like the early months of COVID when we all felt like we were in this thing together.

And then post-9/11, like post-COVID, people decided we weren’t in it together after all. We became defined by divisions and bickering as sides were drawn about the proper responses for this and for that. We politicized the events. We lost friends over things we saw differently. Things became stupid. Then people became stupid. People thought we were stupid. We thought they were stupid.

A lot of them were stupid.

But it’s helpful to go back. To remember what we saw and agreed about. To be reminded of shared tragedy. To try to get along.

Because every once in a while, something completely unexpected happens and we wonder why we were so preoccupied with petty fights and finger-pointing when there are things in life that really matter.

•••

3. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

This is how Larson opened his narrative history of Winston Churchill and London during World War II. In his Kansas City book talk I attended on March 10th, 2020—the last formal gathering I went to before COVID restrictions ended gathering of any kind—Larson described the bombing of London as “essentially fifty-seven straight 9/11’s. On any given night you knew hundreds would die.” The response of the English during this time was noble, their resolve only eclipsed by the reality that so many had it even worse during this bleak period of our history. Just as how Spanish influenza was forgotten in favor of World War I, the Blitz became a footnote because of the horrors of everything else those dickhead Nazis were up to. Maybe that’s their most remarkable feat, that they managed to relegate fifty-seven straight nights of bombing one of the world’s greatest cities to a secondary atrocity.

Larson tells gripping stories of how the Brits coped, one of these practices became the basis of his book research. The English encouraged people to keep a journal.

•••

4. Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones

Meanwhile, back in the United States, Theodor Geisel enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps to create propaganda and cartoons that “instructed U.S. soldiers on military practices and procedures, usually by showing the comedic and sometimes horrifying consequences of not following protocol or instructions.”2 The main character was named Private Snafu.

This guy also wrote about some cat and a green guy.

•••

5. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Dude this book is insane. Krakauer climbs to the top of Mount Everest, a bunch of people die, then everybody is like, “well fuck. I guess that’s what happens on Everest. Let’s keep going.”

I’ve read all Krakauer’s books, but this one I saved for last. I’m glad I did. It’s easily my favorite.

•••

6. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

I generally try not to include multiple books by the same author on these lists, but this one was just too good to leave off. It’s kind of like the prequel to The Splendid and the Vile. Sort of. It follows the account of the United States Ambassador to Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. You can imagine he was pretty busy during that time.

Larson and Krakauer both went on my all-time favorite author list after 2020. It was a beautiful year for discovering authors, even if it wasn’t beautiful in many other ways.

•••

7. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

These book descriptions are feeling a little repetitive at this point.

This book was also the shit.

And the Soviets were also terrible.

And bad at building nuclear power plants.

And if you want to know what nuclear radiation actually is other than something that’s “bad,” Higginbotham’s description in Chapter 2: Alpha, Beta, Gamma is the best explanation of a scientific topic I have ever read in my life. And that’s coming from the guy who wrote the 2013 Architectural Engineering graduate project with the gripping title of: “The Effect of Sample Dimensions on the Corresponding Compressive Strength Between Concrete Cores and Standard-cured Molded Cylinders.”

•••

8. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

Instead of just picking one period of American history, Jill Lepore decided to write a book about THE WHOLE THING.

It’s stunningly ambitious, thorough, and readable.

Spoiler alert: there are a bunch of racists.

•••

9. Boomtown: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, It’s Chaotic Foundation, It’s Apocalyptic Weather, It’s Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming A World-Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson

I guess Jill Lepore’s book was a little light on all the parts about Oklahoma City. Good thing we have Sam Anderson to fill the gaps.

I heard about this book from a delightful podcast episode titled “The Worst Way to Start a City.”3 Oklahoma picked the worst way of doing a lot of things. And thanks to Sam Anderson, I now love them for it.

•••

10. Long Walk to Freedom the autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Oh yeah. Apartheid was also fucking terrible.

•••

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October 8^th, 2024

Dear Mr. Fudd,

I’m sorry to report that I’ve yet to make it out to the bonsai tree stand out on Dodge Street. I was in the process at one point, but was distracted at a stoplight when a black convertible pulled up in the lane next to mine. The driver wore a shirt that looked like he was headed to a meeting with his bowling team, and the make of the car was one of those middle-of-the-road manufacturers that communicates, “hey I own a convertible but not a nice one.” He seemed to settle for what his budget allowed after his bowling dues were paid in full.

The rear-view mirror had an air freshener dangling from it advertising “Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax.” Now I am familiar with sex, and with wax, but I’ve never considered combining the two of them the way that Mr. Zog apparently had. I remain unclear as to the proper application of the product, and the air freshener was lacking in additional detail. Perhaps it is a bowling alley product, or something used for the removal of pubic hairs, or something meant for the assembling of scented candles—hence why they would diversify their product lines into the tangential market of air fresheners.

The bowling shirt sped away as soon as the light turned, at a speed inappropriate for the Millard North school zone we had both found ourselves in. His Nebraska license plate stated “SHOWME.” Again, the lack of detail was troublesome to me. Someone who purchased sex wax in the quantity that deems him worthy of a complimentary air freshener is not someone that I think would be discreet about what he wants shown toward him, but again, this driver proved the exception. Perhaps he’s from Missouri, or a fan of the movie Jerry Maguire.

Much obliged,

C.S. Beaty

I was still feeling my way around the type of correspondence I wanted to have with Haywood Fudd. When he was at his best, Fudd was painting elaborate nonsense scenes depicting bizarre characters whose mannerisms forced the reader to respond, “how does someone come up with this?” Like an alternate reality game, Haywood blended the real world with the strange corners of his imagination and thrust them upon the unsuspecting postal customer without any context. This blending of the absurd with the ordinary gave Fudd his charm. Even if some people, like one of the commenters on Kmart 29’s Reddit thread, “didn’t care much being toyed with.”

That wasn’t really the way I wrote.

After trying some gag in my first letter about the character “Pepsi” and an imaginary fight I had with him concerning a Ferris wheel, I felt the same way I felt when I was tricked into accidentally accepting a part time job at a temporary tax preparation storefront inside the Conestoga Mall which required me to dress up as Uncle Sam and pass out flyers for tax preparation services: stupid. What Fudd did with such mastery and gusto did not come naturally to me. So, I crafted one rule for my letters to Fudd from here on out: always tell the truth.

Needing material, I started seeing the world differently. I looked for the absurd in the ordinary while I walked my dog and drove to the library. I took notes in a pocket sized journal and realized that the more minute the description the more ludicrous the situation felt. As my brain constantly vivisected “why do I think this is funny and how would I describe it to Haywood,” I felt, joy? Happy? Excited? I realized I loved being toyed with. I loved being in on the joke, making something into a joke, and being the butt of the joke. And I didn’t really care if anyone else found my own observational ramblings on life funny, because I thought they were funny. I realized if I was amused, it mattered less if others were. And going through life looking for things that amuse you wasn’t a bad way to spend a day.

And Fudd kept writing me back, so he must have thought it was kind of funny too. Or maybe he just needed another excuse to write down his own absurd observations on life, even if his observations bent reality.

●●●

Last summer, after eight months of alternating letters with Fudd, my family took shelter from the rain in a Galveston, Texas surf shop. We spent longer inside than we would have liked due to the downpour and lack of transportation available, but we made friends with the surf shop owner who happened to also be from Nebraska. To wait out the rain, I browsed this surf shop’s inventory more thoroughly than I had ever browsed any other surf shop’s inventory before. As one might imagine a surf shop in Texas run by an expatriate Nebraskan would, they had ample, newly released, “Gulf of America” swag. It made my heart hurt. But then I saw a cardboard endcap displaying rows and rows of Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax. I had never bothered to Google the product. It was funnier to me without that knowledge of what it actually was. I guess it’s for surfboards or something. Part of me was sad for having the joke and the mysteries spoiled, but then again, I would have never noticed the Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax air freshener in the first place had I not been looking for something trivial to brighten my afternoon drive that I could write to Haywood Fudd about.

So I started looking for the next thing to write to Haywood Fudd about. The world was full of them.

October 12^th, 2024

Dear Mr. Beaty,

The following is the latest news from West-West Omaha:

· Lyle Wheeler, 70, who lives West of cedar Bluffs, Neb., on County Road X, is a devotee of folk music. His all-time favorite folk song is “Sweet Betsey from Pike.” He’ll sing it upon request, two period Lyle testified he believes he sung the Diddy over 600 times period the first part of the tune goes like this:

Oh, don’t you remember

Sweet Betsey from Pike?

She crossed the wide mountains

With her lover Ike

And one yoke of oxen

And big yeller dog

A tall Shanghai rooster

And one spotted hog

Doodle-ang-fall, di-id-all

Do-lang-fall, did-ay

Doodle-ang-fall, di-id-all

Do-lang-fall, did-ay

· Chet Earp, 70, of Snyder, Neb., disconnected his doorbell. Chet disconnected his doorbell after a door-to-door window salesman rang at last Wednesday. Chet isn’t saying when he’s going to reconnect the doorbell. Depending on the brakes, Chet disconnects and reconnects his doorbell three or four times a year. Chet is blissfully unaware if he’s related to Wyatt Earp, the famous Old West Lawman.

· Faye Ratcliff, 66, of Shickley, Neb., was knocked for a loop when some pranksters put an eight-foot tall cement Sasquatch in her rose garden, but she reports she’s gotten used to the cement Sasquatch. She’s going to spray paint it like pink.

· Conrad Haskell, 64, of Arlington, Neb., colossally wants to move where the action is. Conrad’s wife, Sabrina, wholeheartedly agrees. “Arlington is so quiet on Saturday nights that you can hear Sunday morning coming,” testified Sabrina, 61, who is an acclaimed former go-go dancer from Butte, Montana.

Much obliged,

Haywood Fudd

King of the Literary Daredevils

PO Box 345

Elkhorn, Nebraska 68022

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October 1^st, 2024

Dear Mr. Fudd,

I read your “Strange Letter,” how is Pepsi nowadays? It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, but we never really got along, at least not since the Ferris wheel incident. It’s funny how something so trivial can leave such a big impact on a relationship.

I was excited to get your letter, but I had a false alarm earlier in the week. I received a handwritten letter in perfect cursive and eagerly tore open the long form horizontal envelope expecting a correspondence from yourself. Instead, it was a letter handwritten by Walter Graves inviting me to attend a Jehovah’s Witness Bible study. He didn’t give me any details on said Bible study, but encouraged me to visit the Jehovah’s Witness website for further details. I elected not to, but I get the sense that Mr. Graves may feel the need for a friend, his address is below if you care to provide him one:

Walter Graves

14811 Paul Plaza

Omaha, NE 68154

Send Pepsi my best, and tell him I’m sorry. Maybe that’ll get the bastard to admit he was wrong.

Much obliged,

C.S. Beaty

•••

Haywood Fudd is a pen name, but to the recipients of his letters the nature of his quest is a mystery. Since I had the benefit of Mike the Printer, I knew the author of my letter was an actual person. Others weren’t so lucky.

The only internet record of Fudd is a Reddit thread titled “r/ARG-Strange Letter” started by someone who received a message from Haywood mailed to his home. In his letter, Fudd described how his friend nicknamed “Pepsi” called him “to ask how long I thought it would take to roast a hot-dog by holding it right above bubbling, snarling, red hot lava.” He told Pepsi, “depending on the breaks, two minutes plus or minus.”

I know little of Reddit. And I knew nothing about the letters “ARG.” But thanks to my buddy Mike the Printer, I did have some secret knowledge that made all of the Haywood Fudd internet conspiracy theories I had just gained access to ohh so much fun.

“I got a weird letter in the mail about a month ago addressed to me in my current address. Thought it might be an ARG, but it’s personally addressed to me and hand signed in sharpie. Any thoughts?”1

-Kmart 29

And let the games begin.

An ARG is an “alternate reality game.” If you’ve never heard of those then you probably had a girlfriend in high school. According to my own internet research, an ARG is an elaborate stunt that blends the digital and physical world and never admits to being a game. It consists of a series of esoteric puzzles that can only be solved by utilizing the full power of Mountain Dew-fueled online message boards. An ARG may look something like: noticing there are certain letters on the back of a Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt that are mysteriously capitalized, entering those letters into a web browser, placing the results into a program that measures the frequency of a sound wave, putting those results into a program that generates a given dial tone, corresponding the dial tone to a series of GPS coordinates that locate every pay phone in North America, sending a representative to each of those pay phones at an appointed time determined by a string of code buried within the inner flap of a milk carton, and then answering the payphones when they ring in order to learn how to unlock an Easter egg in the Halo 4 video game.

And after Kmart 29 got his letter from Haywood Fudd, something like this seemed more likely to him than just a guy writing a letter because he thought it was funny.

Man the internet is great.

“What a bizarre letter. I want to say it is some sort of strange ARG, but it could easily be the ramblings of some random guy. I couldn’t find much searching the name Haywood Fudd online, besides a YouTube channel with literally nothing on it and an inquiry about how much a pack of unopened Evel Knievel beer is worth… If it is an ARG, your best bet might be to try and figure out what PBS show about volcanoes aired around December 31st 2022, since the letter was apparently typed up on New Year’s Day of this year, and Mr. Fudd claimed he watched a show about volcanoes ‘last night.’ Perhaps that volcano show has some sort of clue?”2

Kmart 29 said he would give that a shot.

Lacking the temerity to mount a full blown alternative reality quest of my own, I instead waited patiently for the mail to arrive.

•••

October 4^th, 2024

Dear Mr. Beaty,

Thank you for your dispatch dated October 1. October 1 is one of my top five days in the Julian calendar.

Regarding your request that I scribble a letter to the Jehovah’s Witness, one Mr. Graves, I propose you address this matter in your own outré literary modus operandi. I’m currently stitched up and conducting another world record literary stunt and have no time to spend tweaking a bedeviled Jehovah’s Witness.

Thank you for the bookmark. I will, as is my wont, put it through the paces.

Know this: Gillespie’s hobby is wrestling empty pizza boxes. When Gillespie and his Mrs. are through eating the pizza, Gillespie drags the empty, greasy pizza box out of his front yard and goes full on berserk on it. It’s a sight to behold.

One of Gillespie’s favorite wrestling moves is to stand on the railing of his front stoop, leap high into the air, and to come down on top of the empty pizza box with a giant elbow smash. Another Gillespie’s favorite moves is putting an empty pizza box in between his legs and strangling and squeezing the pizza box until it’s flatter than a German potato pancake. When he’s really amped up, Gillespie takes a metal folding chair and proceeds to beat the empty pizza box to cardboard pulp.

I inquired why Gillespie wrestles empty boxes. “It’s nuanced. Used pizza boxes and I have a history,” he testified in response.

Gillespie wrestled with 714 pizza boxes over the past 17 years, his record being 712- 2. I attempted to interrogate him about his two losses. “I don’t want to talk about it. It bamboozles me why people are interested in knowing how I lost to two pizza boxes instead of asking about my 712 wins,” tooted an aggrieved Gillespie.

Gillespie’s bowling average is 178. His bowling average goal for 2025: 210.

Much obliged,

Haywood Fudd

King of the Literary Daredevils

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And if you could read an account of what they were thinking, would you?

There’s likely a part of you that would jump at the opportunity to read something like that, and then another—perhaps bigger—part of you would be terrified of it. This tension between longing to be known, yet scared to actually know someone, defined so many people’s experiences in high school. And none of us ever talk about it. Even as adults. At least not about all of it. Not the weird parts. Not the embarrassing parts. Not the absolutely, gut-wrenchingly, terrible parts. And because we never talk about it, when the next generation of high schoolers start feeling those same awful, awkward, and agonizing growing pains—they think they’re the first people to have ever felt this way.

And even as adults, it’s still weird to think about. So we pretend like none of it happened, at least not the way that it really happened.

●●●

I spent my high school years convinced I was a loser, and it wasn’t until recently when I started realizing that my “cool” classmates also felt like losers a lot of the time. They may have responded to it differently than me. Used different coping methods. Chosen different masks to wear. But we were all suffering from the same chronic case of “insecure (and most of the time, horny) high schooler.”

I was the kind of guy who would have driven all you women insane in high school. I don’t mean that in a good way either. I was nice. Funny. And completely clueless. I’d go out of my way to be kind and funny around women, and then—once we started to get to know each other—panic. Shut off all communication in complete terror. And go home sad and lonely and wonder why no one loved me. You can probably guess I also listened to a lot of emo music when I was in high school. I couldn’t read any of those “signals” that the 80s teenage romcoms tell me that women send out.

Seriously ladies, you would have loved me. And then hated me.

Moms, you would have just loved me. You had absolutely nothing to worry about if you saw me hanging out with your daughter.

So, if you want to know what went on inside the mind of a teenage boy who was kind of like that, you’ll find this book fascinating.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t much.

●●●

Trying to fit in as one of the most universal human experiences there is—but the irony of an environment like high school is that, while we’re trying to find our place in it, we fail to realize that everyone else is doing the exact same thing. We assume that everyone else has this thing figured out. We think that they are content, established, and thriving. And we assume we are the only person who feels out of place. And those people we compare ourselves to are simultaneously comparing themselves to us. They think we’re the ones who have it figured out. They think we are the ones who have found their place. And we want them to think this, so we act along—projecting some false reality that slowly wears down the confidence of our peers as they likewise wear down ours.

We all assume the other person has the secret and we all end up travelling alone.

So it’s no wonder why this dynamic makes high school a breeding ground for the most fucking awkward time of our lives.

But thankfully. As an adult, a lot of these stories are also really, really, funny.

●●●

I didn’t set out to write a book about high school at first. A few years back I bought a manual typewriter and started writing essays. It was therapeutic in a way, and years later I still write the first draft of everything—including this particular essay—on a typewriter so I don’t get overwhelmed by the need to make everything perfect the first time. Many of these essays are left unpolished and I put little thought into connecting one with another. At a certain point, I started writing about high school. I wrote about my favorite English teacher. I wrote about a short-term mission trip I took during the summer. I wrote about joining the high school’s trap shooting team. And then I had the idea to write about all the girls I had a crush on.

Like everything I’ve written, the spark came unexpectedly. Something would happen in my normal routine, and it would remind me of something I hadn’t thought about in years. This time, I was eating at McDonald’s with my six-year-old daughter and observed what appeared to be two young adults on a date. My initial thought was, “who would ever go on a date in McDonald’s? What a trashy thing to do.” And then some synapse fired that had been dormant for years and I was reminded, “ohh yeah. I did that once.”

I took my first homecoming date to McDonald’s.

And I thought. Wow. I was such a loser. That could be a funny essay.

I sat down to write about that experience, but as I was outlining the story, it made more sense to talk about a summer romance I had in order to put the homecoming date in context. And then I thought it would make more sense to talk about the first girl I asked out in order to put that summer romance into context. And I just kept backing up until I started with the first girl I kissed. As a preschooler. On her driveway. By the time I felt I had sufficiently covered my awkward stories about girls, I had typed 105 pages on my typewriter.

I realized I had more than just an essay. This was a book.

●●●

I think there are two reasons why people read memoirs:

1. They read memoirs to learn about someone who is completely unlike them.

2. Or they read memoirs to hear about someone they can relate to.

During this process I read as many memoirs as I had recommended to me. If you’ve read Solito by Javier Zamora, Educated by Tara Westover, or We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson, you probably know what I mean by that first category. These books floored me. I had never heard first-hand accounts of what it was like to illegally cross the border, be raised in an ultra-fundamentalist Mormon home, or be grow up in a rainforest.

But the types of memoirs that guided me were more like: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, The World’s Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key, or even Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. These were people who had very normal experiences—normal to me at least—and when I read them, I felt as if I was talking to a friend. A friend who understood me. These books made me feel less alone. These books made me feel known. This was the type of memoir I wanted to write.

Other than the tone of the book, the first thing I wanted to establish was the setting. Setting is anchored by two things: time and location. The book was intended to be a coming-of-age story about finding your place in life. This type of story is as common as disappointing football seasons in Nebraska, but it is the setting that dictates what makes my story either novel or familiar. This question of “who are my people?” is universal, but the way you find the answer is entirely dependent on the setting.

To illustrate this idea, I opened the book with a story about the island of Taquile in Lake Titicaca and the unique dating rituals that evolved in this setting.

“In addition to the floating islands, Lake Titicaca has forty-two “natural islands.” After leaving the floating island of Isla Pato Corazón, we boarded a ferry for a two-hour trip to see how island life differed on one of these permanent sites. Our tour guide grew up on one of these natural islands and told us how things worked where he was from. His native language was Aymara, an indigenous language spoken by the first water settlers. Not all the islands speak Aymara, and our tour guide’s Spanish was rudimentary enough that he and I could converse without confusing one another. He told us about mermaids and fishing, but his best story was how he asked his wife out on a date.

When his grandfather was a lad, it was tradition to take a flute to a particular beach and play a beautiful melody. If a young lady was impressed­ (or turned on) by the flute playing, she approached the flautist. They started chatting, and if things clicked, they got married. Over generations the art of flute playing was lost. Technology changed and kids no longer had an interest in learning skills where a digital alternative was available. Just as email and MSN Messenger replaced sonnets and letter writing, listening to woodwind music couldn’t compete with the sensual beats available through radio signals. But despite the progress of the industrial age, a dude still needs to figure out how to get a date. And conveniently, instead of learning the flute, now you can just buy a boom box.

When our tour guide came of age, he left his island and voyaged to the far-off shores of the mainland. Fighting back the demons of congested traffic and avoiding the sirens of knockoff Nike apparel sold on a street corner, our hero exchanged his life savings of disposable income to purchase a portable CD player from a home electronics store. Like John Cusack in Say Anything, the eligible bachelor picked the most stirring serenade from his music collection and returned to the beach of his grandfather to blast the love song in the vicinity of the island’s young hotties.

I asked our guide what he played to meet his wife. It was an easy question.

“Enrique Iglesias. Claro.”

…

But different rules have evolved on different islands. To an outsider, a culture’s customs can sound arbitrary and absurd—but to those within, the rituals seem completely natural. Habitual. Instinctual. The place you live defines what you consider normal, and it isn’t until you look from a distance that you can see how strange those “normal” practices might be.

And on the island of Taquile, everything centers around knitting a hat.”

This introduction serves as an allegory, illustrating that the only reason we find these customs weird is because we are not from that setting. People from Lake Titicaca may find the practices a bit odd, but they’re normal. It’s just the way things are done. And in Grand Island, Nebraska circa 2005 to 2008, the customs were just as odd. But they were normal. Familiar. And I wanted to point out how our customs were just as ridiculous as knitting a hat to determine your love life.

“Peace Lutheran Church came up with a brilliant money maker. Ostensibly to give kids a safe place to congregate on the weekends—but mostly to raise a shit ton of money on sales of cans of pop—this church opened their gym on Friday nights so middle schoolers could listen to radio versions of rap songs and grind on each other. I never learned what a middle school courtship was supposed to look like, other than it involved grinding on flat-chested girls at a Peace Dance.

Peace Dances intimidated me, but one couldn’t participate in the middle school social scene and ignore them. I never went alone, but I never went with a girl. Louis, Mike, or Austin would promise to meet me at the entrance, and we’d go in as a pack. At least until they spotted someone in their Top Five and left me on my own.

To prepare for each dance, I carefully selected my best Hawaiian shirt from Old Navy and accessorized with a shark tooth necklace I purchased from the Science Museum of Minnesota. Every fiber of my clothing was saturated with Axe body spray. My favorite scent was the crushed mint and rosemary of “Phoenix”—the blue can. I also had a discounted Walmart variety pack that was meant to be given as a Christmas gift set. The sampler came with two cans of “Essence”—the one with a red and blue dragon, scented with black pepper and cedarwood. I sprayed a line of Phoenix straight down the chest and a blast in each armpit, always over the top of the shirt. Not satisfied with the result, I repeated the process with Essence and completed the bouquet of fragrance with a short blast from the mandarin and sandalwood of “Kilo.” The green can. I also bought a jar of hair gel from the dollar store, but with no discernible hairstyle to keep in place, I simply ran a greasy comb dipped in goop straight through my bangs so my scalp could harden into a bike helmet. By the time I was ready to leave, my chemical smell radiated like a freshly opened pine tree air freshener.

The first Friday of each month, a line of pre-pubescent middle schoolers formed outside the locked entry of Peace Lutheran Church, wrapping itself around the nursery’s plastic playground equipment. All of us horny sixth graders paraded ourselves out of our parents’ cars like a movie premiere before segregating into cliques. As our sausage fests did annoying middle school kid stuff, we sneaked looks at our female classmates with caked-on makeup and crop tops in violation of the school’s dress code.

The fronts of our pants a little tighter, us losers watched as the boys with girlfriends entered the dark gym, bobbing their heads to Nelly. The rest of us hid in the line to buy cans of pop. We needed something to hold in our hands as we hugged the wall for the evening. Gum was strictly prohibited since it ruined the carpet, so chaperones canvased the sweaty mob with flashlights and paper cups. If you were spotted moving your jaw up and down, they darted across the floor, shined the flashlight in your face, and put the cup to your mouth to spit out the gum without saying a word. Repeat offenders were bounced out by whichever dad was guilted by his church small group into volunteering.

I never had any romantic moments at a Peace Dance. I don’t recall ever dancing with a girl, and certainly never rubbed my crotch on one. I mostly remember studying the felt banners displaying Lutheran symbolism and trying to convince someone on my football team to stop saying he was going to kill himself because his girlfriend dumped him.

I had no idea what the fuck we were supposed to be doing. So I did nothing.”

As I weaved together the narrative, I tried to find a few themes to unite the various stories. My editor said that the controlling idea was, “we gain wisdom and confidence when we think beyond ourselves and realize our peers are just as insecure as we are, despite appearances.” Yeah, that was a pretty good summary, better than anything I had come up with. This is why you hire an editor.

In my more amoebic mind while writing the book, I had a couple of things I kept coming back to. One was a line I thought of while walking my dog.

“That’s the thing about high school. We are all just shitty to each other.”

I didn’t know where that line would go exactly in the book, but it captured some of the insights I had gained throughout this journey. I shared the line with a writer friend of mine, and he added the rejoinder, “we’re all just shitty to each other because we lack the tools to know how to be any other way.”

That was a helpful addition.

The other story that I knew I didn’t want to write was a romantic comedy. I have always been frustrated with the John Hughes Sixteen Candles, and even Adam Sandler, movie endings where everything leads to some big catharsis when the awkward loser makes out with their dream date who is clearly out of their league but charmed nonetheless by the protagonist’s dorky naivete. As someone who was a complete dork in high school, I knew this was bullshit. The dorks didn’t get the hot girl. They just sat around and felt bad about themselves until they grew up later in life and figured out who they really were. I wanted to write a story about that kind of person, with all the tension of an 80s teenage romcom without the cliché happily ever after ending. Because I thought this resembled real life more accurately. It certainly resembled mine more accurately.

The only book I can think of that accurately reflected this was The Count of Monte Cristo. In the movie, the main character gets the girl, but not in the book. He goes after the girl, that’s kind of all he does, really. But he doesn’t get the girl. And this ending was so disturbing to our romantic sensibilities that they changed it in the 2002 movie version. In my first draft, I quoted two entire pages from this brilliant ending, but it was removed after some early readers told me they thought it was lazy to just rip off Alexandre Dumas for a couple of pages. But the idea still penetrated through to the soul of the book.

I still think this is the greatest passage ever written. And I knew I couldn’t write something that beautiful. So I decided to make this book funny and add some stories about accidentally peeing my pants while pheasant hunting.

●●●

One reader described the book as a time capsule for millennials, and I think the description is fitting. I was heavily influenced by cultural moments at the time like: emo music, purity culture, and the transition to digital technology. I vividly remember the days when both the iPod and the iPhone were released while I was in high school, and I saw the before and after. My freshman year no one had a cell phone, then a few people got a Motorola Razr and a limited texting plan. By graduation, no one spoke to each other verbally anymore. I was also late to receive my own cell phone, so I felt the loss of not having a portal to this digital world where everyone else seemed to live. Those moments were heavily influenced by the time I came of age.

But then there were things like: Boy Scouts, competitive trap shooting, marching band, and garage bands where I looked for an identity of my own. These stories may be different than your own, but I think you can substitute any of those groups with the activities you were associated with during your own high school years and feel some empathy toward me while reading. This quest to find your place may be the thing we all have most in common.

Because that’s the thing about high school, no matter how alone we thought we were at the time, we all went through our own version of pretty much the exact same thing.

And now, I want to give you all permission to laugh about it at my own expense.

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Dear Mr. Fudd,

I’ve always wanted a pen pal. My brother had one once, it was an old neighbor girl who moved to Minnesota. I heard stories of this family growing up and had to pretend that I knew them and cared about them when we visited on summer vacations, but no one ever wrote me a letter. I think it was my parents’ idea to have them write one another, maybe to help spark a romance or to alleviate the pains of the hot girl from across the street from moving away. Jason told me they only sent a couple of letters, but that was more than I ever got.

There’s a roadside Bonsai tree stand that I drive by off of Dodge St. I always see an older Asian guy setting up racks and racks of Bonsai trees on makeshift plywood shelving. It’s kind of like the guy who sells sweet corn from the back of a pickup, but instead it’s Bonsai trees. He never has any customers.

I wonder how one gets into the roadside Bonsai business? I never realized how little I know about the entire industry. Are there Bonsai tree farms? What’s a Bonsai tree go for? I think I might buy one, but I don’t actually want to take care of anything living. Maybe he sells maintenance plans. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Much obliged,

-C.S. Beaty

•••

When I started writing routinely, I did so without a plan. I wanted to write down the things on my mind, that was about it. I bought a typewriter so the impulse to edit would be removed from the creative process, and after about a year-and-a-half, I had written enough essays to fill a book. Not necessarily a good book, but enough words and pages to bind them all together and write a title on the spine. So for the Christmas of 2023, that’s what I did.

I had yet to decide the means of sharing my writing with the world, so I started smaller. I printed and bound about ten copies of my essays and distributed them to a select few friends and family. The response was mostly positive, like a polite positive. I think everyone understood the effort and care I had put into my writing, but whether it was something more than that—more marketable than that—none of us knew. But I kept writing.

I wrote enough to print a follow-up volume for Christmas 2024, and when I went to chat with Mike The Printer about my latest project, he told me about a fan I didn’t know I had.

I wasn’t the first person to compile my esoteric ramblings into a Christmas present for friends and family, and the similarities between my writing and one of Mike’s other best customers were too coincidental to not bring to my attention. He told me he held back a copy of one of my books and passed it along to this mystery man. And this man approved. This man who I never met, went by the pen name Haywood Fudd.

There is little to no internet trail for Haywood Fudd. In an age of algorithms and curated digital news feeds, Fudd’s chosen medium is entirely analog and anachronistic. He probably puts in as much work as any ass-shaking, disgusting-food-eating, Tik Tok starlet—but he’s not doing the work for the clicks. He’s doing it because he thinks it’s funny and it brings him joy. And it brings others joy. Or so I assume, I’ve never asked him.

Fudd calls himself “The King of Literary Daredevils.” If you read his work, you’ll learn he’s a big fan of Evel Knievel. Most people haven’t read all his work through. Most people don’t get that opportunity. Most people only get a single letter. Written and addressed just to them. A letter from a man they’ve never met, but who thinks it would be funny to send them a letter.

The first stunt I heard of was Fudd’s 2023 assault on the good people of Bliss, Idaho. Somehow, inexplicably, Fudd had located a directory of the name and address of all 226 residents of this small rural town. And sent them all an original letter. Only one person wrote him back—George Freeman—and he dedicated his compilation of letters to him. The same compilation that Mike The Printer was in the process of assembling when he told me about Mr. Fudd.

I was hurt by this. As a person who has bled over a typewriter and felt a mediocre reception, many times, it seemed a travesty that someone would devote so much creativity and effort to an ingenious stunt of this sort and only have a single admirer as a result. I set out to change that.

Eight days after writing that first letter, I received a reply. My first reply.

September 25th, 2024

Dear Mr. Beaty,

Thank you for your September 17 dispatch. I received it while lathered in a thick and luscious coat of e’lan.

Regarding pen pals, I was once contacted by a lady doing hard time in Missouri in 2004 or 2005. She offered to send me body pictures for as I recall $10. I sometimes wonder about her in the wee, wee hours of the night.

Bonsai trees. I would be most appreciative of any information you uncover on these trees. I have this perfect place for a small cops of these trees so long as they don’t require daily watering during the blistering summers.

Know this: I may wanted man on the Googlers. Fire up the Googler and search on Haywood Fudd. You’ll see a link to “strange letter.” The purpose of this paragraph is for you to know exactly who you’re dealing with—the undisputed king of the literary daredevils. As of this epistle, I have written over 1000 letters to perfect strangers. I’m on a literary mission.

If you can think of nothing else this Thanksgiving to be thankful for, I beseech you to get down on bended knee and thank the supreme architect for gravity. Without just the exact amount of gravity, mankind would be doomed. Doomed! Gravity is that crucial.

Much obliged,

-Haywood Fudd

King of the Literary Daredevils

P.S. As is it my want. My raison d’etat, I reply to dispatches with two $1.00 bills.

P.P.S. Kawasaki let the good times roll.

Kawasaki let the good times roll.

Get a board and you’re gonna say, “let the good times roll.”

So I wrote him back, and he wrote me back. And a year-and-a-half and over 50 exchanges later, we’re still at it.

Introducing a new As Told By C.S. Beaty production: Letters to Haywood Fudd.

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The North Pole, Inc. had enormous success in their rebrand from St. Nicholas to Santa Claus. Coca-Cola aside, royalties were flowing from partnership deals with shopping centers who wanted to increase holiday traffic by encouraging children to come visit Santa and tell him what they wanted. Macy's department store in New York City latched onto the concept early on—incorporating the Santa Claus likeness into their annual Thanksgiving Day Parade and providing the setting for a feature length film called Miracle on 34th Street about a senile man that believed he was Santa.

"We thought the project would shine a light on mental health along with generating a lot of excitement around the new brand. We were right about one of those."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Through Cauliflower's efforts, Santa became ubiquitous. And lucrative. Interested parties were lining up to use the Santa image in their seasonal marketing. However, The North Pole, Inc. did permit The Salvation Army to use the likeness of Santa without royalties for their annual kettle drives.

"It's Christmas after all."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

In 1823, Cauliflower hired a poet named Clement Clark Moore to write a document encapsulating the essence of the new Santa Claus. It was an idea inspired by Nicholas's work on the Nicene Creed. He had seen first hand how a comprehensive text could effectively unite the public's perception of some supernatural being, otherwise the character's essence is left up to individual interpretation. But to make it more fun, Cauliflower decided the Santa creed should rhyme. And have pictures. The poem was a great success.

Cauliflower's team steadily grew and decided it needed to expand the Santa mythology— sparking a century long effort to craft an entire north pole universe in the public eye. Market focus groups were conducted extensively, yielding many important insights. Regional biases were uncovered in various global markets, leading to a slew of subtle modifications to the Santa iconography. Father Christmas, Papa Noel, and Kris Kringle monikers were coined. In some instances the Santa Claus image was reworked entirely, such as the case of the Yule Lads in Iceland. In the Germanic countries an antagonist tested well, so Cauliflower introduced Krampus and Belsnickel. But eventually the focus groups kept coming back to the same conclusion: "Santa needs some friends."

"None of the focus groups responded to Mrs. Claus, so we decided not to spend much time on creating her image beyond the cursory, but the reindeer and the toymakers both seemed promising."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Cauliflower created two marketing teams to focus on the reindeer and the toymakers respectively. The reindeer team was led by the former zoologist Chestnut, and the toymakers was led by Crumpit's nephew—a bright up and comer that had been born at the north pole named Steven, but Nicholas called Capybara. Chestnut's team had trouble coming up with a marketing plan for eight identical beasts of burden, they needed a star to focus on. A reindeer had just been born that had an odd nose pigmentation that Chestnut had been attempting to bottle-feed with little success. The reindeer herd had rejected the calf, forcing Chestnut to raise it into maturity. Nicholas found the calf unsettling and had even suggested euthanizing the infant since it was clear that the other reindeer wanted nothing to do with it, but Chestnut was adamant that the calf be spared. Chestnut named it Rudolph, and since Nicholas didn't want to get too attached to the reindeer, he never came up with a nickname. Inspired by Rudolph, Chestnut suggested that his team create the reindeer's marketing plan centered around the most physically distinct animal in the herd.

"The legend of Rudolph is all made up, which is why looking back the whole thing is so superficial. As someone that lives with genetic dwarfism, I regret how we singled out a single physical characteristic and focused exclusively on it. We felt the nose had to have some sort of utility in order to be accepted, which hasn't really aged well. The whole 'Rudolph got made fun of a lot’ bit, that part was true. We thought that if we made the nose glow, it would serve a purpose, but it just reinforced stereotypes that someone's worth is dependent solely on how useful they are. Even Santa comes across as an ass and reinforces this superficiality through the Rudolph storyline. I wish we had gone a different direction, but the concept tested incredibly well in focus groups."

- Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Despite what the marketing plan suggested, not all the reindeer loved Rudolph's new-found fame. Rather, they resented him for it. Lacking the nutrients that could only be provided from reindeer milk, the bottle feeding proved unsuccessful. Rudolph didn’t survive to adulthood. Despite the TV shows and song lyrics suggesting otherwise, Rudolph was never physically fit enough to accompany Nicholas on a sleigh ride and certainly would have never been permitted by the rest of the reindeer herd to lead them. But Rudolph's likeness became the second most valuable intellectual property owned by The North Pole, Inc. other than Santa Claus himself.

"The public loved him, which is ironic since everyone in the north pole hated him. I suppose maybe there's some cosmic justice in that in a way, but I don't know. Sometimes marketing plans just don't feel right even if they're successful. That's kind of how I feel about the whole Rudolph initiative."

- Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

From Toymakers to ‘Elves’

Capybara's toymaker team came up with a marketing plan in parallel with the reindeer team, but since the Rudolph concept tested better, their plan was rolled out more gradually. ‘Toymaker’ didn't resonate with focus groups, and the odd deformities of The North Pole, Inc.’s employees were hard to explain in a manner that children understood. So Capybara looked for a clean storyline that wouldn't rely on pity to get the public to respond.

"The Lord of the Rings was really big at the time and it kind of clouded our thinking. We came up with the concept of assigning a mythical creature to represent the toymakers— and the elves were the most noble in the Tolkien books. We were frankly a group of outcasts that had been shamed by society, so it was our attempt at rewriting that script and instilling a little pride amongst our employees. But that's not really how it worked out once the elf narrative left the north pole. The toymakers gradually resembled dwarves or hobbits, which was the complete opposite of what we were going for."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

With the efforts paid toward crafting the Rudolph narrative, there wasn't much budget left to do a proper roll-out of the elf image. After Cauliflower hired songwriter Johnny Marks to come up with a Rudolph jingle and Gene Autry to sing it, the marketing budget was tapped. The idea of ‘elves’ was introduced, but in a muted manner compared to the gargantuan efforts paid toward both Santa and Rudolph. As a result, the general public crafted the archetype of the ‘elf’ largely on its own. Eventually The North Pole, Inc. had to embrace the idea of small, childlike cherubs rather than the regal, warriors they had intended—or risk losing a potential revenue stream in licensing to the public domain.

"We had Tolkien all lined up to do an entire north pole mythology surrounding the elves. He had a bunch of 'Father Christmas' letters worked up as prototypes, but we couldn't afford both him and Gene Autry. And frankly, Tolkien was much more amiable. We always intended on revisiting the elf brand and kept Tolkien on retainer, but after the public image of what an elf was took hold, there was just little we could do other than roll with it. But we resisted for a long time, I mean, it was personal to us. This was who we were."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

The setback on the elf image was hard on the marketing team, but they decided to pivot and play the cards they had been dealt. Eventually Cauliflower greenlit an elf-themed film project by New Line Cinema starring Will Ferrell and Capybara pushed out a concept called 'Elf on the Shelf' in order to tidy up the whole naughty/nice list plot holes in the overarching north pole mythology.

"There's no such thing as a naughty and nice list, there never has been. Everyone always gets presents. I'm not even sure how that rumor got started, but I think it was by parents to encourage good behavior. I don't blame them, but it took us a while to spin that concept in a way we could monetize it. We were also upset with the failed elf launch, but Capybara's team found an innovative solution to solve both problems with the 'Elf on the Shelf' idea. It wasn’t the elf image we wanted, but nevertheless, it was a success. It just took a little longer than we were used to and had more stumbles along the way."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Licensing and Trademark Protection

With so many properties and trademarks providing the primary source of revenue to fund The North Pole, Inc.'s toy manufacturing and delivery services, protecting those brands required a vast team of lawyers and legal experts. Crumpit tasked a crotchety ‘elf’ known as Cratchety to be The North Pole, Inc.'s General Counsel. Like most of the elves that had relocated from Turkey, Cratchety had a life before he came to the north pole. Cratchety had previously been employed as an attorney but was disbarred and disgraced for drunken misconduct in the courtroom. But he was a whiz on copyright enforcement, aggressively protecting The North Pole, Inc.'s growing stable of properties. Cratchety sent out cease and desist letters to corporations using unsanctioned Santa likenesses in their advertisements, and an idea for the Tim Alan movie ‘The Santa Clause’ was conceived based off a legal review by Cratchety of punitive measures for theft of Santa’s belongings. Cratchety’s expertise became invaluable to Nicholas and Cauliflower, though not every issue was resolved to his satisfaction.

"That whole 'Grinch' thing really pissed me off. I mean it's a cut and dry case. This Seuss character flat out says, 'with this hat and this coat I'll look just like Saint Nick.' What more evidence do you need that they were infringing upon one of our assets? It's trademark violation, plain and simple. But since the Grinch was green and he was mean, we had a hard time getting a judge to see the case our way."

-Cratchety, General Counsel, The North Pole, Inc.

The North Pole, Inc. and Theodore Seuss Geisel eventually settled outside of court for an undisclosed sum. Cratchety advised on a growing list of other concerns beyond copyright issues. There had long been allegations of Nicholas performing illegal surveillance of children and unlawful breaking and entering. When the elves unionized in response to The North Pole, Inc. placing a growing emphasis on supply chain management and third party distribution rather than direct toy manufacturing, Cratchety became involved in negotiating The North Pole, Inc.’s first collective bargaining agreement.

"The employees really hated it when we announced we would no longer be making our own toys and instead relying on outsourcing to China— and the partnership agreement with Walmart to allow for parents to purchase toys directly and bypass delivery by Santa drove the wedge even further. But a company has to adapt. You don't survive nearly 2000 years in operation without making some tough choices."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Succession Planning

Nicholas was growing tired, but his plans for retirement took an unexpected turn when Crumpit surprisingly died of pneumonia.

"I always knew Crumpit would be the next Santa, we were just waiting for the right time. Frankly we knew the two of us worked better as a team, but I didn't want to be CEO forever and Crumpit deserved to be allowed to move out of my shadow. But his death shocked everyone. I suppose the average lifespan for a person with the medical conditions Crumpit had is about 60 years and he made it to age 1,721— but still none of us saw it coming. It was an awful time."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

With Crumpit deceased, Nicholas doubled down on his own efforts and shelved any talks of retirement. He promoted Capybara to COO to replace his uncle, and the youngster brought a new view to The North Pole, Inc. Under Capybara's leadership, The North Pole, Inc. started to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and analytics, allowing Nicholas to compensate for his aging workforce. The complete supply chain was reworked using Lean Six Sigma, and testing began on using autonomous electric vehicles in place of magic reindeer.

With Capybara in place, Nicholas once again started putting an eye toward retirement. But he had his doubts that an analytical and antisocial figure like Capybara could ever embody the jovial cherub that the entire Santa brand had become. But did that still matter? Did the homely image of Santa mean as much as it used to to the financial success of The North Pole, Inc. in this digital age?

Cauliflower was another potential successor, and someone that fully understand the importance of the Santa branding— but he lacked some of the financial and operations acumen necessary to keep a business financially solvent that gave all of its products away for free.

Or was it time to consider an outside hire? Nicholas had toyed with the idea of forming a board of directors and even performing an initial public offering to shore up some of their cashflow troubles. But would an outsider keep the magic alive, especially since investment bankers don’t believe in magic?

•••

Discussion Questions

1. How did The North Pole, Inc. become successful?

2. How did The North Pole, Inc. differentiate and insulate itself from competitors?

3. Is The North Pole, Inc. financially volatile? Describe the threats that they face from the various market conditions and their financial exposure.

4. If you were Nicholas, what would you do regarding succession planning?

5. What would be the pros and cons of taking The North Pole, Inc. public?

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It's December 26th, 2024 and Nicholas is exhausted. He has been at the helm of The North Pole, Inc. for 1699 years and the world is changing. What had started out as a small hobby of whittling wooden trains and gifting them to the neighborhood children in his hometown of Patara in modern-day Turkey, has since become the world's largest and logistically complicated charitable gifting and expedited package delivery service. The 2025 Christmas would mark the company's 1700th year in operation, and Nicholas was beginning to wonder if the time had come to put forth a serious succession plan. Frankly, the old ways of doing things didn't seem to be working anymore, which for a nostalgic man like Nicholas, created some serious questions about whether or not he was still the right man to lead his l,872 employees and herd of 8 (sometimes 9) reindeer. Did a business model based entirely on gift giving in lieu of profits even make sense anymore?

•••

Becoming Saint Nick

Nicholas of Myra was born on March 15th, 270 AD to a very religious family. His parents, Theophanes and Nonna, were active in the local church of Patara and encouraged Nicholas to get involved in the community at a young age. Nicholas's uncle was the Bishop of Myra —a city nearby. His parents were very wealthy, and the family would join Nicholas’s uncle annually in distributing gifts to the less fortunate throughout the region of Lycia. This act of delivering gifts— particularly to children— made a huge impression on young Nicholas.

"At the time, the whole concept of 'Christmas' was a relatively new one. The church hadn't been around for that many generations, and a lot of the holidays and traditions were still being figured out. It was my uncle that first had the idea of going around and giving gifts to children as a simple way of celebrating the birth of Jesus, the idea being that if they got a present it would help them see the birth of Jesus as a gift as well. I'm not sure how many kids really understood that association, but they sure liked getting presents. And it made me thrilled to see their smiles. It became my favorite thing to do each year."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas began planning ahead. He would study which gifts the kids responded to most favorably and began crafting a surplus as soon as one Christmas ended to prepare for the next one. Before long, making toys was a year-round hobby, though it was still just a hobby. But making and distributing toys wasn't the only activity of Nicholas's that soon grew into a passion, he became fascinated with magic. His uncle gave Nicholas his first magic set during one of the annual toy distributions, and Nicholas became infatuated with it. He would put pieces of straw through drachma coins and fascinate his family with simple mentalism tricks that made it appear he knew what they had been doing when no one was watching. His magic tricks grew more and more elaborate as he practiced, and soon rumors spread that Nicholas possessed clairvoyance and supernatural abilities.

"Ho, ho, ho. It was great fun. People will believe anything if they really want to. Deep down, we all want to believe that magic is real. If you can tap into that, you can get away with just about anything. That is, as long as people think the magic isn't harmful. Once you start losing trust, and people don't want to believe anymore, then the whole thing unravels."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

With this principle of using magic for the common good, Nicholas's reputation went from jovial to transcendent. Rumors started to spread. Residents of Lycia claimed that he could calm a storm at sea and had chopped down a demon-possessed tree.

Artists depicted Nicholas raising three children from the dead after they had been murdered by a butcher. Allegedly the butcher had pickled the children in brine with the intention of selling them as pork. Pork was hard to come by.

On another occasion, townspeople claimed that Nicholas had rescued three girls from a future as prostitutes. The story went that for three consecutive nights, Nicholas deposited a sack of gold down their chimney. The idea was for their father to use the gold as a dowry and marry the girls off instead. No one ever saw Nicholas in the act, but his reputation for stealth and generosity made him the prime suspect. Nicholas never admitted to anything.

The rumors troubled Nicholas and made it harder and harder for him to efficiently get through town without being bombarded with requests for gifts and magic tricks. As a result, he became a recluse. Nicholas moved outside of the community to a remote area of Mesopotamia, which quelled some of the town gossip and gave him ample time to refine his toymaking craft.1

•••

Forming The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas expanded his toy distribution service to the areas surrounding his new home. Around 300 AD, at the age of 30, Nicholas hired his first employee— a small, paunchy outcast that Nicholas nicknamed 'Crumpit.' His real name was Larry.

"I had frankly bitten off more than I could chew. Each year more children would hear about the gift giving and would send me a letter asking to be included. I've always had a problem telling anyone 'no’ to anything, so I looked for help. I found Crumpit begging on a street corner. He had an odd look to him, some sort of disability that had stunted his growth and made him unemployable at any of the markets throughout Lycia. I took pity on him, and taught him how to whittle in exchange for room and board. After a while, it seemed as though Crumpit was running the whole toy making process himself and all I was doing was giving the gifts away once each year."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Without Crumpit, Nicholas likely would have remained simply a jolly old man giving away toys to boys and girls in ancient Turkey— not the international celebrity and pop culture icon that he is today. However it was a brush with church politics that ultimately led Nicholas to pursing this charitable career path full-time.

“I was working as the Bishop of Turkey at the time after my uncle put in a good word with the church leaders. I was excited about the gig, but I was really doing it out of an obligation to my uncle. He never married since priests spent so much time doing other things, though he could have since the clerical celibacy didn't get established until the 12th century. But still, I was the closest thing he had to a son. So I took the job and I hated it."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

In 325 AD, a church council was called at the city of Nicea by Emperor Constantine. Constantine had used the Christian religion as a political tactic to unite his empire. Disputes had arisen throughout the church regarding the nature of Jesus, which threatened Constantine’s unification strategy. He sought to who put an end to the divisions and shore up his approval ratings. And like any good politician, Constantine used the most effective means available: long, tedious debates. As the Bishop of Turkey, Nicholas was required to attend, but found the proceedings cumbersome and frustrating, at one point slapping a fellow participant.2

“There were over 1000 people there, and everyone seemed to have an opinion. There was grandstanding, hair-splitting, and hell-raising. We were stuck in this stuffy palace for over a month and a half, and all I could do was think about how none of the kids I gave toys to really gave a shit about any of this. Don't get me wrong, I think the Council had a lot of good things come out of it, but by the end of it, I had had it with church politics."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

The main outcome of the Council of Nicea was the Nicene Creed which formalized the canonical beliefs of the Christian Church for the first time. Nicholas signed the creed, but shortly after left his post of Bishop. He had different plans.

"The Council was crucial for the Church, but I had seen how the sausage was made, and frankly, it had spoiled my appetite for sausage. When I got back from Nicea, Crumpit presented me with an elaborate business prospectus he had worked up regarding how to take the toy manufacturing to the next level. I was at a crossroads, and sensed that if I didn't take Crumpit's ideas seriously, he may leave and start out on his own. So I told him, 'Fuck it. Let's do this.’”

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Headquarters Relocation

When Nicholas's parents passed away, he was the sole heir to their vast fortune. As a bishop, he had little need for the inheritance and instead invested the entirety of it in various speculative enterprises. He was an early investor in wheel technology— though he always preferred the simple elegance of the sleigh, "fewer moving parts" he'd always say­— and purchased numerous tracts of land, particularly in Western Europe and Scandinavia. He began to vacation frequently in Spain, and would spend much of his time in the country when away from Turkey. But it was a failed investment in an uninhabitable wasteland that proved to be the one that would change his fortune forever.

"When I first purchased the north pole, I thought that the return on investment would occur from the exportation of ice. At the time, no one had thought of mechanical refrigeration, so I had this crazy idea that we could harvest ice from the glaciers, and then ship it all throughout warm climates like India or Africa so wealthy aristocrats could chill their beverages. The idea was ahead of its time. The transportation of glacier ice proved to be too costly. The concept caught hold later on after I had already divested of all my infrastructure and I was just left with a useless chunk of frozen tundra."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas had tried to sell off this north pole property numerous times unsuccessfully, but the location became a centerpiece of Crumpit's expansion plans. By moving to the north pole, Nicholas and Crumpit would have enough real estate to expand their operation indefinitely and be logistically located to be equidistant to nearly every location above the equator. At the time, colonialization had yet to move much further south, so the Christmas celebrating nations were largely concentrated in Europe. The plan was too large for two people, but Crumpit had considered that as well. From his time on the streets, Crumpit had befriended innumerable deformed beggars in need of stable wages. Given their living situations, these vagabonds were more than willing to relocate for the promise of room and board. Nicholas loved these odd employees. He found them cheerful and hardworking, more than willing to labor around the clock in appreciation for their jobs. Nicholas could never remember any of their names so, like ‘Crumpit,’ he came up with festive nicknames. These monikers became so widely adopted throughout the north pole that hardly anyone used their Christian names. Many of these workers had been addicted to opium or alcohol prior to their employment, which could make their behavior erratic and childlike— though this characteristic proved to be helpful in the development of several new product lines.

With the workforce riddle solved, Nicholas and Crumpit turned their attention to distribution. From the failed ice harvesting exploit, Nicholas knew that moving large quantities of material from the north pole was expensive and difficult. Ships had trouble navigating the glaciers and industrial airplanes had yet to be invented. The harsh climate severely limited their options.

"We considered your traditional cattle and pack animals, but none could survive in the temperatures of the north pole. We tried, it’s best not to talk about what happened.”

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

The relocation began without any plans for toy transportation in place. Nicholas considered that he might have to take a Christmas or two off in order to find a solution, but providence provided an answer when a pack of wild reindeer were spotted roaming through their construction sites. An environmental impact study took place and halted construction for three months while Crumpit and Chestnut— a former zoologist that had found himself homeless after getting mauled by an orangutan and addicted to painkillers during his recovery­— studied the movements of the reindeer herd. The factory site map was redrawn to accommodate the reindeer habitats, but as construction resumed on Mechanical Toy Warehouse #3, the reindeer only encroached further.

Chestnut had an idea.

"Everyone wants to know how we domesticated wild reindeer and taught them to fly, but frankly I get tired of the question. If you explain magic, it ceases to be magical, and I'd rather not have that. Penn and Teller don't stand up after their performance at the Rio Casino and explain how they perform each of their tricks, and if they did, they wouldn’t have a paying audience for very long."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas would give a similar answer whenever pressed about any of the magical elements of his craft— “trade secrets” he'd say. This included explanations regarding how he visits every house in a single night, how to enter homes without chimneys, and how he has avoided being diagnosed with Type II diabetes after a thousand year diet of nothing but milk and sugar cookies.

•••

Financial Woes

Like any start-up, Nicholas anticipated running at a financial deficit in the company's early years, but after several centuries, The North Pole, Inc. had still yet to turn a profit. And the fortune Nicholas had inherited from his parents was dwindling.

"It turns out that a business model based on giving away your product for free isn’t sustainable in the long run."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

It was this realization that truly transformed The North Pole, Inc.

"People have no idea how we stay financially solvent, and I like it that way. It's part of the mystery. But truth be told, it's simple really. All we do is sell licensing."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

It really is that simple, yet The North Pole, Inc. has became one of the largest corporations in the world through simple, yet incredibly effective, marketing and branding. The genius came from a ball­ bearing assembly line supervisor whom Nicholas called Cauliflower.

"Nicholas would often come into our plants to inspect the process. He was always in a good mood and had the weirdest laugh. We started making fun of him for it. It was in the break room over lunch where one of the workers was giving an impression of his now famous ‘ho, ho, ho,' that it dawned on me. This should be a catchphrase."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Cauliflower pitched the idea to Crumpit, who had since been promoted to the company’s very first Chief Operations Officer. But Crumpit was skeptical. A catch phrase would only do so much, what Nicholas really needed was a complete rebranding. Crumpit promoted Cauliflower to Chief Marketing Officer and tasked him with overhauling the image of Nicholas. It was through this effort that Saint Nicholas was transformed into Santa Claus.

"The exact process of how Nicholas reached sainthood isn't clear, but it seemed that it mostly stemmed from his work during the Council of Nicea, even though Nicholas himself always loathed that time. But as a result, some started to refer to him as 'Sinterklaas.' We wanted to retain the honorific title, but make it a little more palatable to the non Roman-Catholic audience. So we worked with a few different advertising agencies and landed on 'Santa Claus.'"

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

With a new name and catchphrase, Cauliflower also thought Nicholas needed a makeover. The signature look of a red suit with fluffy white trim was based off an old jacket Nicholas had been given by a girlfriend he met while in Spain during the offseason. The coat was meant to resemble the jacket of a matador, but Cauliflower removed the sequence and elongated the waistline, combined the outfit with the work boots Nicholas wore while tending the reindeer stables, and came up with the idea for the hat after one of the elves got drunk at an after-Christmas party and put a stocking on his head. Santa later married that young Spaniard, but few know that Mrs. Claus's biggest contribution was the simple purchase of a red coat for her boyfriend. Cauliflower began pitching the new ‘Santa Claus’ to established corporations and found a willing partner in the Coca-Cola Beverage Company to use the image in their winter advertisements. The ads proved enormously successful. To date, the licensing deal with Coca-Cola remains one of the largest annual sources of revenue for The North Pole, Inc. and is the second most lucrative licensing deal of all-time, trailing only the Air Jordan brand partnership between Michael Jordan and Nike.

"Look, 'believing in Santa' and 'Christmas cheer' are all fine and good, but those don't pay the bills. Cash does. People don't like how commercial Christmas has become, but what they don't realize is that Santa could never have stayed afloat any other way. Unless you want to start paying for elf wages, reindeer food, and toy manufacturing costs, Christmas is going to have to be commercial. There just isn't any other way."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

But Cauliflower and his team weren’t done working Christmas marketing miracles. Shortly after the success of the complete Santa re-brand, they hit another marketing home run in the form of a beast of burden with a genetic mutation.

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It did not leave the same smell on his breath though, fortunate since when he woke up he was already late for work. It was hard for Stanley to find a job. He was unkempt, overweight, and old. He had stopped shaving a long time ago, and his white whiskers hid what remained of his face. And ever since his Eugenie died three years ago—almost exactly 3 years ago—he had little reason to search for something new. She was always the planner. Decades ago, when Carol was born, Eugenie had insisted on life insurance policies. Stanley thought it was all a little silly—going to a Doctor who would take your blood pressure and then feed the data to some actuary who determined how long he would stay alive as to not bankrupt the insurance company underwriting the policy. Luckily for Stanley, they didn’t do a very good job. Eugenie had proven their math wrong. So Stanley could afford booze.

“God dammit Stanley. You know most places just get volunteers to do this right? You’re fucking lucky. I don’t pay you to be a pain-in-my-ass.”

“Sorry Charles. I know. I know. I’ll try to do better.”

“Try? You can’t even commit to anything?”

“I’ll do better period it won’t happen again.”

Stanley hated lying, but he did need the job. He needed a reason to go somewhere.

By the time he reached his post, his uniform being buttoned as he walked through the back corridor past the rows of vending machines and turning at the food court, the line was sad. When he started this gig two years ago, the lack of demand for his services surprised him, but he could never have predicted that it would decline further in just a few more seasons. The magic wasn’t there, at least not like it was when he used to wait in line. With Carol. And Eugenie.

These days, most of the storefronts were empty bays—the Gap Kids turned into a model train association office, the “Made in Nebraska” now a “For Lease.” The seasonal calendar store that was once relegated to a series of kiosks dotted through the center of the main fairway now had their pick of real estate and permanent displays to set up shop for the two months of the year that they needed them. Once the Spirit Halloween moved out, they moved in. And the rest of the year the space sat empty. Hopeful. The lights still worked, the furniture was in good shape. A single security lamp shone next to the EXIT to ward off any burglars. But empty.

It wasn’t what Stanley remembered.

He felt bad, but only because he knew Charles had enough stress without having to wonder what time Stanley would clock in. But, he also knew being a little—or more than a little—late wouldn’t have any real impact on his productivity for the day. It was even harder to be alone, when you’re pretending to be someone everyone wants to see. And when you had to pretend you weren’t hungover. Pretending you didn’t have to drink. Pretending the lack of customers didn’t bother you.

But despite what he told Charles. It did. He knew Charles couldn’t hear the truth. Charles already knew things weren’t the way they used to be, but Charles was pretending too.

Larry was walking by with his wife Janice. They were always there, walking the corridors each morning since the winter air made it too cold for the duck pond by their retirement village. Stanley didn’t meet them until last year. He didn’t notice them at all his first season, he was too busy—well, busy enough—but gradually with each lap and polite wave, it became too uncomfortable for Janice not to say something instead of half-wave with a half-smile. Larry with a half-nod and no smile at all.

“Well, where are all your customers?”

Janice thought she was being funny the first time she said it. As if Stanley hadn’t noticed. As if he hadn’t heard the exact same thing—or some form of it—from every parent when they were surprised to find out there wasn’t a wait for Stanley’s attention. Stanley always acted like it was the first time he had heard it. As if that parent—or more likely as the years went by, a grandparent—was the first to observe this shift in demand. Stanley usually pretended he didn’t hear them. He never knew how to respond and stay in character.

“Didn’t there used to be some people taking photos?”

That was Janice’s next ice breaker when her and Larry made their way back around the circumference of their indoor walking track. There used to be. But those helpers went away. People had smartphones now. No one wanted to pay $25 for a photo package. All they needed was a quick shot for an Instagram reel and the appropriate hashtag. Not that Stanley knew those were the names for those things. He never had someone to explain it to him.

“Hey Stanley, Merry Christmas.”

This time it was Larry. Gradually, he started taking over the small talk. They moved slower now. Larry had a cane. His back pain had reached a point where Janice talked him into getting an MRI and a cyst was found near the base of his spine. Nothing life threatening, but required surgery. And a cane. The doctors told them to stay active, so Stanley still saw them in the winter. And the slower pace increased the time it took for the couple to loop around Stanley’s roped off Christmas village. And Larry liked taking a break at the bench next to the recycling bin, each time complaining how no one knew what to throw into it.

But then Larry would respond to Janice’s gentle teasing, plant his cane firmly against the linoleum, push himself upward, and start the next lap.

And Stanley would get back to work.

•••

Stanley had shown up to work on time, but it didn’t make much of a difference. He was out of limoncello, that was a treat, and he was out of money. And didn’t have anything to celebrate.

Larry and Janice hadn’t been around for a while. Janice told him they were taking the next few weeks to fly to Georgia to visit their son and his wife. They had just had a baby a few months back, but because of Larry’s back they couldn’t travel to see their new grandchild. It was hard on them—seemingly harder on Larry than Janice—to be told to wait, but eventually the doctor gave him permission to travel. They made arrangements that same day. They had a direct flight in the evening of the following day, and gave Stanley their news on their morning walk. He was happy for them, but he knew that meant he wouldn’t have a friend for the rest of the season.

And he had yet to decide if he would sign up again next year.

He didn’t think so.

He wasn’t sure if there would even be a job available.

He didn’t know why there would be.

He had a few customers that day, but not many. The interactions were always over more quickly than he would have liked. And the gap between visitors grew longer and longer.

A woman wearing an apron started walking in his wing of the mall. She wasn’t a mall walker, Stanley recognized her uniform from when he used to get lunch at the food court before starting his shift. She carried a platter of samples, chunks of chicken that had been speared with a toothpick and handed out liberally to draw customers to the Asian Express Chinese restaurant. Stanley would always get a sample, when he ate lunch at the food court, before grabbing a Sbarro slice of pepperoni. He liked the chicken, but he didn’t like all that extra stuff they put in the food. And Sbarro was cheaper.

He didn’t recognize the woman, though she looked familiar in the way that everyone who worked at the Chinese restaurant looked familiar. Her platter was still covered in samples. She made her way toward the bench near Stanley and dumped all of the remaining chicken in the recycling bin.

With a blank expression and the platter dangling from her side, the woman walked back toward the food court.

The next day Stanley saw her again. She held out a toothpick clutched between her thumb and index finger, tempting the few customers leaving the calendar store with an appetizer to lure them her way to the food court. They politely refused. The next couple, not so politely.

The woman would drop her smile as they walked away, painting it back on when a man holding a JCPenney bag rounded the corner and crossed her path. He didn’t look at her. The woman kept looking at him. There was no one else to look at.

She walked toward the recycling bin with a defeated gaze. She lowered the tray and began tilting it.

“Hey! That’s the recycling! Hey! Hey! The garbage is on the other side!”

The samples were half gone when the woman realized Stanley was yelling at her. She acted like she hadn’t noticed him until just then.

“Ohh, sorry. I didn’t think it mattered.”

With what remained on the platter, she walked towards Stanley.

“Well, to most people it doesn’t I guess. But the blue tops are supposed to be recycling.”

“Yeah I know, I just figured it was more for show than anything. Like to pretend we cared about the environment, but really all the trash just gets dumped in the same place as the rest of it.”

“I don’t know I guess. Honestly, I don’t really care. I just thought you should know what it was supposed to be for. In case you didn’t know.”

The woman smiled. It wasn’t the same smile she gave when handing out samples. It wasn’t as prominent as that one. This smile was softer. Slight. Natural.

“Why are you handing out samples all the way out here anyways?”

“I go where the people are. I figured they wanted to come see you.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha, well you’re wrong there.”

“I thought you had a different type of laugh.”

“Ohh Jesus. OK fine... ho ho ho. Happy?”

“Yeah. That’s better.”

“Want to know a secret? I’m not actually the real Santa.”

“No shit? No wonder no one comes to see you then.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“Wanna sample? They’re cold. I always make too many. Way too many.”

The woman extended the platter towards Stanley, what remained of the teriyaki chicken bits glistened where the grease had started to harden into a rind.

“No thanks. I don’t really want one.”

The woman’s soft smile grew, just a bit. Only a bit. But Stanley noticed.

“Where’s the garbage?”

“Over on that side.”

•••

Stanley had the next day off, but when he got to work the following day—late, again—he had just enough time to grab a granola bar and some Advil before getting scolded by Charles. It wasn’t as bad as all the other times. Charles seemed to be a little less concerned than before. A little less, hopeful.

Stanley flipped the sign from “Santa is currently feeding his reindeer,” to “Santa is brought to you by the Oak View Mall, please visit our website for inquiries about leasing.” He checked the boxes stashed inside the cardboard gingerbread house to see if there were any candy canes left to give out to kids. There weren’t. They had bought fewer this year, and Charles had warned that once these were gone they weren’t buying more. They were sick of having extras at the end of the year and trying to figure out what to do with them. Stanley broke down the empty boxes and started walking toward the recycling when he heard a shout echo through the empty corridor.

“Hey Santa, I brought you a present!”

It was the woman with a platter. Stanley could see small curls of steam coming off the quarter sized bits of chicken breast.

“These ones are fresh, I tried bringing you some yesterday but you weren’t around.”

“Yesterday was my day off. I am kind of hungry, those smell pretty good.”

“That’s the whole idea. Back when we were busier we only gave out hot samples, but now we don’t go through them as fast. And they don’t stay fresh very long when you have to walk around to find people to give them to.”

Stanley grabbed a sample. It tasted like he remembered, the generic salty chicken flavor identical to all food court mall Chinese restaurants.

“Thanks. I think this is actually going to make me hungrier.”

“Well, take another then. I’ll end up throwing half of them away anyways.”

She placed the platter down on the bench and sat Stanley joined her on the other side of the chicken.

“So how’s this all work anyways?”

“How does what work?”

“The whole Santa thing.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know about Santa?”

“Well I get the basic idea, the whole goes down the chimney and gives you presents thing. But what’s the point of having one in a mall?”

“Well. Kids go up and tell Santa what they want for Christmas.”

“But don’t they know it’s not actually Santa? I mean at least you have a real beard, most of these fake Santas working here just look like they’re wearing a wig. One of you is even black.”

“I think kids know it’s not the real Santa, most of them anyways. Did you think it was the real Santa?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you were a kid, did you think it was the real Santa?”

“We didn’t do Santa. We didn’t do Christmas. I didn’t think anything about it at all, other than all my white friends seemed really excited about it.”

“You didn’t celebrate Christmas?”

“No my family isn’t from here.”

“They don’t celebrate Christmas in China?”

“We’re not Chinese, we’re Vietnamese.”

“Well. close enough.”

“What do you mean close enough? It’s a completely different country.”

“Yeah but, it’s like close to China.”

“The United States is like close to Mexico. Does that make you Mexican?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah... Unfortunately, I think I do...”

The woman’s face looked like someone had just refused her sample. She started getting up.

“These are getting cold, I better keep moving.”

Before Stanley had a chance to respond the woman was on her way.

•••

Stanley finished shoving the cardboard boxes into the recycling, noticing there was an old candy cane stuck to the packaging tape on the bottom. He ripped the candy cane off and put it in the pocket of his red coat.

The rest of the day went by slowly. He only saw four families, one of the kids smelled terrible and another was way too fat to comfortably sit on his lap—but insisted nonetheless. The whole sitting on the lap thing was a lot more uncomfortable than it once was anyways, both because Stanley was getting older, but also from the stern gazes he seemed to get from each parent. Charles came by and told him he could go home early.

Stanley flipped the sign back to “Santa is off feeding his reindeer,” and started walking back toward the changing room where he stored his street clothes. As he took off his red coat, he felt the broken candy cane he had rescued from the recycling. He hung up the coat, and started heading toward the garbage can in the food court, so he could dispose of it properly. He could smell chicken.

He turned and saw the woman with the platter a few yards behind him. He started back her way.

“Here, take this. In appreciation of the samples earlier.”

“Ohh, it’s Santa. You look different without your whole get-up. What is it?”

“It’s a candy cane. We used to give them out to kids, but we ran out. This was our last one.”

“It’s broken.”

“It still tastes the same.”

“I don’t like peppermint.”

“Ohh, well. OK. I don’t really either.”

“Let’s split it.”

The woman sat the platter down in front of the cash register. As Stanley ripped open the cellophane packaging, he started talking.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“About how Mexicans are the same as Americans?”

“No, not that. I mean, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to offend you. But about why kids keep coming to the mall Santa even if they know he’s not real.”

“OK, why is that?”

“Well. When my daughter started getting older I knew that she knew Santa wasn’t real, but she always wanted to go see him each year. To the point where it became kind of weird. Like how she seemed too old. All the other kids in line were way older than her, and it was kind of uncomfortable waiting in line with her.”

“Did you still take her?”

“I didn’t want to. But my wife still would. I would just wait on the bench for them while they waited in line. I was kind of embarrassed really. But Carol really loved it.”

“Is Carol your wife?”

“No Carol is my daughter. Eugenie is my wife. Was my wife.”

“So why did your daughter still want to go then?”

“I think it was because she still wanted to believe in something, even if she knew it wasn’t real. Like there was still a part of the magic. Even if she knew she wasn’t supposed to believe in it anymore. And to move on from that would kind of ruin the whole thing. Make it less special, you know?”

The woman was sucking on her half of the candy cane, and Stanley put his to his mouth. No one said anything for a little while.

“Does anyone ever ask Santa what he wants for Christmas?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like all those kids coming with all those demands and lists of things they want, but does anyone ever ask Santa what he wants?”

“Some kids bring me pictures they drew.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I guess not. I don’t think so. I guess I’ve never noticed. I can’t think of a time.”

“Well, what does Santa want for Christmas?”

Stanley sucked on his candy cane as he thought. He thought of Eugenie. He thought of Larry and Janet with their new granddaughter. He thought of Carol.

The woman took off her apron.

“Are you hungry? I know how to make something other than chicken teriyaki.”

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What Just Happened?

After the final dismissal bell rang, it was a long walk back to the band room.

My last class was English, which was a nice way to end things. I looked forward to those discussions even though I had little in the tank at 3:36 p.m. Mr. G.’s classroom was on the opposite end of the school from where I parked my red Isuzu pickup. The truck was a hand-me-down: handed down from a previous owner to my oldest brother, who then handed it down to my next oldest brother, who then handed it down to me. It had a manual transmission, no power steering, a different shade of red on each panel, and a threaded pipe welded to the tailgate where the original bumper had fallen off. I should have been embarrassed by this automobile forced on me by my parents, but I loved it. It was completely unlike all the starter cars my friends had been gifted, and it gave me an easy way to stand out from the masses—from my classmates whose personalities would melt together if left exposed to the high school environment for too long. It was nice to be forced to be a little different.

Like the rest of the kids in marching band, I had been at Grand Island Senior High before the sun had burned off the morning dew. The parking lot outside the band room was adjacent to the soggy grass fields where we soaked through tennis shoes while practicing marching drills. They always watered the lawn right before we showed up, which once led to our band director halting rehearsal and demanding the athletic director come outside to see what we had to put up with. I’m not sure it helped much. Marching band wasn’t exactly a priority at our school. I learned to pack a change of socks and stashed the soggy ones next to my winter coat in the back of the band room. Throughout all four years of high school, I never once bothered to learn where my locker was. Piling my things on top of these filing cabinets served my purposes just fine. No one messed with the drummers’ stuff piled in the back. The only kids who went into the band room were band kids, and the drummers were not to be fucked with. At least not to be fucked with by other band kids. Outside the walls of the band room we were prey, but within them we were lions.

Noah Woods and I walked side by side for the first half of the route until he exited the main doors to track down his car. Noah was one of my closest friends and probably the only person I didn’t try to prove myself to. I was pretty sure I hadn’t turned Noah into a Christian yet, but I was working on it. He had been to our church’s youth group a few times and even agreed to go on the church’s spring break trip to Denver with me. I was making progress and was determined to convert him—but frankly his lack of interest in his eternal damnation was starting to piss me off.

Noah and I had been friends since middle school when we bonded over watching sports and Quentin Tarantino movies. It was at Noah’s house where I finally finished watching Kill Bill: Volume 1. My mom let me rent it from Blockbuster several years earlier after I told her it was one of my older brother’s favorite films, but she insisted on watching it with me and powered down the DVD player when the opening scene centered around a male nurse selling Uma Thurman’s comatose body for sex to a trucker named “Buck who likes to fuck.” From all my mom’s years working at a hospital, this must have hit a little too close to home. Or maybe it was because I was thirteen at the time.

I passed the mural of our school logo painted over a concrete brick wall—a pair of luscious palm trees in front of a gorgeous sunset, beckoning us to a place far away from the corn fields of central Nebraska. Because of our nonsensical city name of Grand Island, our school and our town as a whole had an island motif forced on it. We were the Islanders, which only made slightly more sense than the Vikings at the nearby Grand Island Northwest High School. I suppose one school liked ships and the other liked where the ships docked, neither of which really fit with the landlocked scenery outside our high school windows. We gave our respective schools more appropriate nicknames: the Islanders would say the Vikings went to “Cow Pie High,” whereas the Vikings returned the favor by calling our school “Drive-by High.” Neither school’s administration accepted these write-in ballots for naming rights, but the monikers fit.

The “purple island” was ahead—a plywood mountain covered in carpet where the anime club kids played Magic: The Gathering. I considered making a pit stop at the nearby snack shack named Hula’s. Hula’s was run by the Special Education students and sold gallon-sized chocolate shakes for $1. Sometimes my mom would buy me a Hula’s punch card, which the workers with Down syndrome often forgot to punch. I probably should have told someone. I started going to Hula’s less and less after childhood obesity concerns reduced the serving sizes available in public schools. These changes devastated Hula’s business, and the impact was felt. I not only lost an easy 1200 calorie snack at the end of my day, but the lack of customers also made it harder to eavesdrop on the conversations of hot girls. I greatly missed the casual mentions about how “shaving your pubes if you’re a girl makes total sense, but I wouldn’t want my boyfriend to do it.”

Anxiety is my motor. In addition to saving the souls of my friends from eternal damnation, the toils of the day ended with a list of homework to be completed, activities to show up for, and work shifts to cover. And the doomsday clock on my time at high school was ticking. Where was I going to go to college? What was I going to study? How was I going to pay for it? Those questions dragged on my subconscious like seaweed building on a tow line. I felt I would get to those to-do items—eventually­— but there were others I wasn’t so sure of. As the youngest of four kids, I knew the patterns. I had seen it play out three times ahead of me in the lives of my older siblings. You were supposed to leave high school with a stable of lifelong friends and an established love life. Granted, that’s not exactly how it played out for my sister or either of my two older brothers, but that was how it was supposed to work. I needed to make friends who could be my groomsmen on the day I married my high school sweetheart— but for some reason we were all just kind of shitty to each other.

I entered the main corridor where all five of the school wings met in a central spillway. Any hopes of catching up with my friends would have to be put on hold, as the halls were now deafening with Islanders fleeing from captivity. During my high school orientation, I was taught to hold up my hand with fingers splayed to get a rough idea of the layout of Senior High’s floorplan. The 500 wing was the thumb, the 400 wing the index finger, and so on. I was now in the center of the palm, along with two-thirds of the school body, half-way to the ring finger where I could exit the fingernail to reach my pickup.

I took the long route to avoid seeing Mike Beckton. Mike is my best friend. And I hate him. We did everything together, which meant his car was parked next to mine from early morning drumline practice. I wasn’t mad at Mike, I never really was, but we were overexposed. There was a constant comparison between us in the eyes of the Grand Island Senior High social elites. I was smarter than Mike and arguably better at drums—but that didn’t translate to popularity. Mike unfairly compensated for his faults by being confident. I never knew if Mike felt like we were competing. He never acted like it when we hung out. But then again, neither did I.

Mike and I even dressed the same, the only difference being that the taco seasoning body odor smell of my black drumline hoodie was mixed with the sulfur of gun smoke. I was on the trapshooting team. Mike played soccer. We both owned black studded belts purchased from the recently opened Hot Topic at the Conestoga Mall and had grown our hair to shoulder length to the chagrin of our parents. Our t-shirts were carefully selected from the undersized options of esoteric bands. Some of my shirts fit better than others—I never knew what size to wear since my body was constantly going back and forth from pudgy to skinny based on the timing of growth spurts. Mike and I both wore skateboard shoes despite the fact that neither of us knew how to skateboard. He usually chose DC as his brand of choice, though I had worn Vans ever since my older brother bought a pair. I never got into wearing girl jeans like Mike, though. I tried a pair on once with him at American Eagle. He bought them. I didn’t. But I did make the mistake of telling Alexa Whitney my girl jeans size and successfully made her hate herself.

I was almost out of the school. I passed the bench where I drank a pint of chocolate milk from a vending machine each morning and rounded the corner into the fine arts section of Grand Island Senior High. The band room was adjacent to the choir rooms, which meant I had to dodge the awkward theater and show choir losers before joining my fellow band geeks. However, there was one member of the show choir I never minded seeing. In fact, it was my favorite part of this route each late afternoon. Right before pounding through the crash bars of the band room door and presenting myself to my fellow musicians like Kramer entering Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment—I smiled and said “oh hi” to Jackie Wilkerson. Seeing her blonde hair and bright eyes was the highlight of this walk. Maybe the highlight of my entire day. I always wanted to say something more to Jackie, but then again, she never said much more to me. But we were both there. Each afternoon. For that One. Brief. Moment.

The exchange was always over fast. Too fast. She knew she couldn’t enter the band room, and I knew I wasn’t allowed to fraternize with the choir kids not that either of us wanted to. Capulets and Montagues don’t mix.

But we both seemed to like seeing each other.

There she was. Her feet shuffled a bit to slow down her pace. She gave her customary smile and greeting—and I returned the favor with a smile and fake surprise of my own. But as I pulled away to exit the hall, something broke the pattern. Jackie paused. She hesitated for just a moment.

And Jackie Wilkerson kissed me square on the cheek.

I stood in the corridor frozen in place, but Jackie kept moving. When I thawed, I looked over my shoulder to locate my favorite soprano. All I could see was her blonde ponytail fading into a crowd of highschoolers like a shark fin sinking back into the ocean.

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What I Did On My Summer Vacation

As the Incans expanded their empire, several indigenous groups fled to the islands of Lake Titicaca to avoid conquer. While the Incans were good at climbing mountains, they were shit at swimming. So, like the second Avatar movie, which is just a water version of the first Avatar movie, a group of castaways sought a liquid sanctuary. They isolated themselves from foes, but also from everything else. They cared for their families and looked out for their friends. They became self-sustaining and culturally incestuous by adapting their way of life to their new surroundings. And for centuries, little changed.

Incredibly, these islanders still exist. Even when the Incans were no longer a threat, they decided to stay put. After the Incans came Fernando Pizarro, who planted the Spanish flag in conquest and taught savages to become proper Catholics. After Spanish rule came Simón Bolívar, who reclaimed South America so it could be ruled by oligarchs. After oligarchs came drug lords, socialists, corrupt corporations, and more oligarchs. As the outside world shifted and civilizations crumbled, the residents of Lake Titicaca sold fish and stayed out of trouble.

Commercial fishing and environmental hardships have made it harder to sustain a family with a net and a boat, so today most of the islanders make money from tourism. My wife told me about these people while she was planning a trip to Peru. She’s a high school Spanish teacher and each year someone in her department gets to take a group of students to a Spanish-speaking country. Her turn was coming up, and she had heard great things about the two-day excursion to visit these island people. Because my wife is popular with the students at her high school, she had no problem filling the trip with enough bodies to earn a free ticket for both her and me. So, in the summer of 2024, the two of us joined thirty other students and chaperones to see these islands for ourselves.

Lake Titicaca has over a hundred man-made floating islands crafted out of reeds. As they grow, the roots of the reeds naturally intertwine underwater, and using primitive handsaws, the islanders cut out cubes of these roots and lash them together. The blocks are left to sit for about a week so the living roots can weave the parcels together and form a floating mass. Dried reeds are thrown on top to form a matted surface, and then the island is move-in ready.

Stepping foot on one of these floaters feels like you’re walking on a waterbed. A single island is a few hundred square feet and home to a handful of households consisting of families and close friends. Scant solar panels provide the most basic of electricity, but there is no indoor plumbing. Only outdoor. In a lake. There seemed to be little privacy, but despite spending several hours meeting numerous families, I never saw anyone pooping outside. They figured out how to make it work. People are good at adapting to their surroundings.

We were given a presentation on floating island life by the president of Isla Pato Corazón. The various islands rotate hosting visitors so the lucrative tourist dollars can be spread throughout the communities. Most residents spend their days creating items to sell, like elaborate tapestries or miniatures of the elegant boats crafted from the same reeds their homes are built upon. From collecting duck eggs to waiting for a motorboat to take kids to school, the mundane tasks necessary in any culture are shaped by their environment. Including romance.

In rural Nebraska, teenagers drive to a secluded cornfield to make out in the front seat of a Toyota Camry, but in the floating islands they use a “bota romantica.” Just large enough for two full-grown adults and bedded with loose reeds, these sex rafts are shared between islanders for when the need arises. It takes some advance planning, but if a couple wants alone time away from curious eyes and attentive ears, one of these woven canoes can be checked out and discreetly piloted into the thick cover of the growing reeds so the two can get freaky.

I taught the canoeing merit badge during a summer job at a Boy Scout camp, so I am very familiar with what maneuvers would be difficult to perform in a boat. Having sex is one of them.

I bought a miniature bota romantica as a souvenir. I sent my wife a postcard of the full-size sex raft as a memento of our trip.

…

I was impressed but not surprised that these islanders figured out a fix for this intimacy problem. As the foggy sex car scene in Titanic vividly demonstrates, adolescent resourcefulness knows no bounds when the need for some fondling arises. But the problem I always found more confounding wasn’t what to do once you’re horny, but rather: how do you find the woman willing to be the skipper on your boner boat in the first place?

In addition to the floating islands, Lake Titicaca has forty-two “natural islands.” After leaving the floating island of Isla Pato Corazón, we boarded a ferry for a two-hour trip to see how island life differed on one of these permanent sites. Our tour guide grew up on one of these natural islands and told us how things worked where he was from. His native language was Aymara, an indigenous language spoken by the first water settlers. Not all the islands speak Aymara, and our tour guide’s Spanish was rudimentary enough that he and I could converse without confusing one another. He told us about mermaids and fishing, but his best story was how he asked his wife out on a date.

When his grandfather was a lad, it was tradition to take a flute to a particular beach and play a beautiful melody. If a young lady was impressed­ (or turned on) by the flute playing, she approached the flautist. They started chatting, and if things clicked, they got married. Over generations the art of flute playing was lost. Technology changed and kids no longer had an interest in learning skills where a digital alternative was available. Just as email and MSN Messenger replaced sonnets and letter writing, listening to woodwind music couldn’t compete with the sensual beats available through radio signals. But despite the progress of the industrial age, a dude still needs to figure out how to get a date. And conveniently, instead of learning the flute, now you can just buy a boom box.

When our tour guide came of age, he left his island and voyaged to the far-off shores of the mainland. Fighting back the demons of congested traffic and avoiding the sirens of knockoff Nike apparel sold on a street corner, our hero exchanged his life savings of disposable income to purchase a portable CD player from a home electronics store. Like John Cusack in Say Anything, the eligible bachelor picked the most stirring serenade from his music collection and returned to the beach of his grandfather to blast the love song in the vicinity of the island’s young hotties.

I asked our guide what he played to meet his wife. It was an easy question.

“Enrique Iglesias. Claro.”

…

But different rules have evolved on different islands. To an outsider, a culture’s customs can sound arbitrary and absurd—but to those within, the rituals seem completely natural. Habitual. Instinctual. The place you live defines what you consider normal, and it isn’t until you look from a distance that you can see how strange those “normal” practices might be.

And on the island of Taquile, everything centers around knitting a hat.

Taquile is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is recognized as having some of the best knitting on the planet. Once you understand the stakes, it’s easy to understand why. As soon as his son is born, a father is required to knit him a hat. The hat is floppy with frills on the edge resembling doilies, and the kid has to wear the thing everywhere he goes. This mark of childhood follows him through his awkward teenage years, and before he can shed this embarrassing bonnet and call himself a man, he must prove himself. And that means knitting himself a new hat.

And unless he wants to be a total loser, he better do a damn good job.

To transition from childhood to adulthood, the young man knits a long cap with a red bottom, white top, and a multi-colored pom-pom. This particular design means you’re single, and if you are ready to mingle, that pom-pom gets flipped to the side like the tassel on a graduation cap.

So, let’s say you finished your hat, and you think you did a pretty good job. How do you get the girls to notice you?

If the knitting is nice and tight, there won’t be a lot of floppiness. The hat will stand nice and stiff on top of the young man’s head. If a young woman sees his erect cap sticking above the other boys’ flaccid hats, she knows the bachelor took the task seriously. He’s probably the kind of guy who would take a relationship seriously as well. If you want to know who the shitty boys are, they’re probably the ones with the shitty hats. If a hat catches her eye, the young lady will approach the young man and let him know she appreciates his knitting. So far, so good.

Meeting your girlfriend’s parents is nerve wracking. It can take a while to build trust and earn their approval, but in Taquile the process is streamlined. When the girl brings the boy to meet her parents, the dad plucks the hat from the lad’s head and fills it with water. And they wait. For two minutes. If the hat holds without any serious leakage, the couple has their blessing. But if he did a shitty job and knitted some loosely crocheted hipster beanie, then the whole thing is off.

In the words of my guide: “The parents, they will hate this boy.”

A leaky hat is almost impossible to overcome, but in every culture a daughter’s tears hold a special power over even the sternest of parents. If the girl really loves the boy despite his lazy character and lack of attention to detail, she can appeal the ruling by begging her folks for a second chance. But he can only get one. That’s it. He better not fuck it up. It takes several months to knit a proper hat, and the boy has to start from scratch.

But if this next hat is good, the young lady has found her soulmate. They can start the wedding planning.

…

I bought a hat as a souvenir. It’s floppy as hell. I never was good with women.

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Classmate Chris Beaty reflects on high school—the good, the bad, the ugly—in his new memoir2

High school is a strange in-between—the place where you start to figure out who you are, but also where you never quite feel like you fit in. It’s full of firsts: friendships, crushes, heartbreaks, big dreams, and awkward stumbles. It’s messy yet transformative, the bridge between childhood and whoever you’re becoming.

Chris Beaty knows these contradictions all too well. Today, he’s a successful young professional in Omaha, building a life with his wife and three children. But roughly two decades ago, he was just another wide-eyed freshman finding his way through the crowded halls of Grand Island Senior High.

For Beaty, high school was a maze of confusing encounters, quiet insecurities and a few painfully embarrassing moments that still make him cringe all these years later. But, looking back now, he’s come to appreciate his high school experience—in part because it helped shape him into the person he is today, but also because he’s realized high school is just … awkward for everyone.

Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity

Book cover courtesy of Chris Beaty

Beaty (GISH class of 2008) reflects on his formative years in his first book, “Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity,” out later this month.

Beaty and I were high school classmates and friends, so reading his book was a fun trip down memory lane. I chatted with him to learn more about his burgeoning career as a writer, as well as what it was like to reflect on his time at GISH. Here’s what he had to say.

The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Kuta: What inspired and motivated you to write this book?
Chris Beaty: I’ve always wanted to write, but I never knew what I was going to write about. I’ve always enjoyed writing and I had in the back of my mind, ‘OK, yeah, one day I’ll write a book,’ but I didn’t know what it would be about, necessarily. Around 2022, I bought a typewriter. It was just a fun thing to mess around with, and I started writing essays. I started writing as a means of processing life, and it was almost therapeutic in a way. At that point, everything was in essay form so, a lot of the stuff that made it into the book initially existed as just different essays.

I was writing a lot about high school and I don’t really necessarily know why, but I think I was just reflecting on that time of life. But what prompted the book was, I was with my daughter, I think she was around six or seven at the time, and we went to McDonald’s for lunch. We saw these two people who looked like they were on a date and I thought, ‘Who in the world would go on a date in McDonald’s? What a trashy thing to do.’ And then I remembered, ‘Oh, I took my homecoming date to McDonald’s. I did that once.’ And so I decided that’d be kind of a funny essay—you know, this loser kid who takes his homecoming date to McDonald’s. And so I sat down to write that and then I went, ‘Well, in order to tell that story, I should probably back up,’ because that happened my sophomore or junior year [of high school]. So I backed up. And I just kept on backing up until I thought of the first girl I kissed on her driveway, before I even entered kindergarten. I just kept writing and, eventually, the pages started to stack up. So, I decided this might not be an essay, this might be a book.

SK: Aside from your own memories, what did you use for source materials?
CB: Often, I would write something and then let it sit for a while. And then I’d remember later, ‘Oh yeah, that happened too,’ and I would add to it. It was almost like this iterative process. Once you put yourself back in that frame of mind, then all these memories start coming back.

I also read through as much Grand Island stuff as I could. I read “The Night of the Twisters” by Ivy Ruckman. I watched the movie. I went back to Grand Island a couple of times. I went through every yearbook I had. I did not interview anyone for it, so it’s definitely just my perspective.

SK: What’s the reception been like so far?
CB: I reached out to a lot of people after I wrote the book, just to let them know about it. Nothing’s been bad. Everyone I’ve talked to has been very excited about it. But I’m still kind of not sure, right? I’m not sure what to make of [the feedback] because it’s such a personal book. It’s all about awkward high school stuff. And some people just don’t like to go there, so I don’t know.

SK: What was it like to think back and revisit all these memories? What emotions did writing this book bring up for you?
CB: Some of it was super fun. Just thinking about the dumb stuff we did and just remembering those stories and giggling as I was writing. It was as if you’re meeting up with an old friend again. And some of it was just brutal, honestly. Each of the chapters is kind of anchored around a relationship I had, for better or worse, during that time frame. None of them worked out in the end, at least not in a romantic sense. So, every one of those interactions had an element of regret with it. You try to put yourself back in that situation and experience it the way you experienced it at the time. But, at the same time, now you have a little bit of knowledge, right? So you’re thinking of stuff you could have done [differently] that would have made it go better. All these times you thought you were being smart or smooth… when, really, you were just being an idiot. It’s like, ‘Just tell her how you feel, man, and if she doesn’t feel that way, that’s OK.’ There were a few of those that were just really hard.

I can think of a couple of times where I was writing and I just had to stop and collect myself again. A few of those moments got captured on the page, too. There’s a little transition paragraph I wrote just reflecting on those moments in life … those turning points where you made a decision one way or another. The girl I took to McDonald’s… at the end of that homecoming date, it was very clear she had a level of interest in me and I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. And to this day, I regret the way I responded. And it’s not that I regret the way my life turned out, but I regret the way I responded because I had no reason to treat her the way I did and just kind brush her off and whatever. But I just freaked out. And I can see that now. But at the time, I was just immature.

SK: Did this whole process shape the way you’re thinking about parenting your own kids at all?
CB: Maybe in some ways. When I was growing up, I felt like I was doing something wrong by having feelings for girls. I was depressed and insecure and anxious and all these things. I felt like there was something wrong with me for feeling that way, and so I think a lot of it is just remembering what it was like to be in that place. That’s really helpful for me as a parent.

I teach college kids now and I really think my biggest strength as a teacher is just that I’m not that far removed, I still remember what it was like to be a college kid. I don’t give assignments that I think are stupid because, if I think they’re stupid, then the college kids definitely aren’t going to get anything out of them. So, I think just that level of empathy is important, whether you’re parenting or teaching or whatever.

Reliving those moments and placing yourself back in high school, it certainly helps you be empathetic, even though my kids’ lives are going to be different than mine. But there’s also this universal human experience that I think everyone goes through, regardless of the generation, of feeling awkward and trying to figure out romantic interests and all that.

SK: Has writing the book changed how you think about high school?
CB: Yeah, I think it has. It has given me a sense of closure on this chapter of my life, as opposed to, before, I just wanted to ignore it. I moved away from Grand Island and I just wanted to pretend that whole chapter of my life didn’t happen. I wanted to become a new person, to reinvent myself when I left Grand Island and moved to Omaha for college. I didn’t really keep up with my friends from Grand Island, we just slowly went our separate ways and, honestly, that was a conscious decision for me at times. I just wanted to move on.

But, now, I still feel like it is in the past, but I have a sense of closure. It was still OK, it was still good. It was weird, but I’m still thankful for that period of time. I’m still thankful for where I grew up. I’m super thankful for the people.

And this goes back to your earlier question, but it has been so fun to reconnect with people from that period of time. And just the support and interest I’ve gotten from people [after I posted about the book on Facebook]. It’s all these people that I thought I would never see again. And it’s just a reminder that these are still good people. We went through a really weird time together and we’ve moved on. Hearing what some of my friends are up to now as adults, it gives me a sense of pride. We could laugh about things that we couldn’t laugh about then, and just realize we all went through something together. And that was really cool, even though it worked out differently for each one of us. Everyone I’ve reconnected with, we have shared that same sense of, ‘Yeah, [high school] was really weird, but man, it’s great to hear from you now.’ So, I think it did give me a sense of belonging again, and a sense of being OK with where I’m from. Not that I was ever ashamed of it, but just more so being proud and claiming it.

SK: Who is this book for? Who’s your ideal reader?
CB: I think there is a general appeal in the same way that people love “Sixteen Candles” and all those teenage rom coms. There’s hopefully a lot of nostalgic references from that time period, even for people outside of Grand Island. Anyone who has ever tried to hook up with a girl over instant messenger, I think they would like at least a part of this book. We’re never going to have that experience again. We can all look back at that and be like, ‘Wow, what were we thinking?’ I thought the stakes were huge, getting those stupid emoticons just right and picking the right song lyric. We all need to get together and make fun of that.

But, also, anybody from a small town, even if their town didn’t have a fiberglass cow that seemed to move from steak restaurant to steak restaurant. They probably have something like that and they can laugh at that.

I would also love for a high school kid to read this book and think, ‘Oh, wow, people have always felt the way that I feel right now. Even if it’s not OK now, it’s going to be OK in the future.’ That’s really the heart behind it. Life keeps going on, even if it sucks at the time. That’s just part of growing up.

SK: I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but the book really is a time-capsule for millennials.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That stuff was really fun to write about … the Axe body spray and things like that.

SK: What are some of your other goals for the book?
CB: I hope it finds an audience. I hope it finds some eyes. I hope it’s successful, in some sense that just allows me to keep writing. I hope people from Grand Island feel like it gives us permission to laugh at ourselves a little bit. I just want people to have a sense of pride in having a book about Grand Island. I hope the city rallies around it in a way that makes them laugh at themselves in a good, healthy way, because frankly, we have a lot to laugh at ourselves about.

Chris Beaty

Photo courtesy of Chris Beaty

SK: What tips and advice would you share for someone who is in high school right now?
CB: I just felt so much pressure on myself. And, in some sense, I just needed somebody to tell me, ‘Chris, none of this really matters right now.’ I think we put so much pressure on kids to make good choices and work hard and, you know, don’t stay up too late. And there are probably kids who really need to hear that. But at the same time, for me, I just need somebody to tell me to just chill out. And I had a few mentors who were like that… When you hit those moments where people are like, ‘Dude, just chill out, none of this is that big of a deal,’ it could be life-giving because it gives you freedom to make mistakes and not beat yourself up and everything.

And I wish I would have taken more risks. I wish I would have asked more girls out. I wish I would have gone to more things. I wish I wouldn’t have been so concerned with saving everyone’s souls and getting them to youth group and converting them to Christianity and [more focused on] just being a kid and having fun and making mistakes. I thought I had to get everything perfect and get everything right, and I think that really stunted my development and maturity in a lot of ways. I always had a little of a class-clown vibe at times. And I think that was probably me acting out from just the insane pressure I’d put on myself to be the best at everything.

I just wish someone had said to me, ‘If you’re not the section leader for the drumline, it doesn’t matter. If not every single one of your friends becomes a Christian, it’s not your fault that they go to hell, even if that’s your theology. Just chill out, you don’t need to put the weight of the world on your shoulders.’

SK: What’s next for you?
CB: I’ve got two other books that I’m working on right now. One of them is kind of a sequel of sorts, about getting married and adopting three kids from Colombia. And then I have an aunt who was in the movie “Nomadland.” She played herself in the movie, she goes by the name of Swankie. I’ve been working with her to write a biography of her life, so that’s been a really fun process. Other than that, I’ve been trying to do podcast stuff and writing essays and everything. We’ll see where it goes. I have a full-time job and a part-time job on top of that, but writing is what I really love to do, and I do it by choice.

SK: Where can people find “Loser*” if they want to read it?
CB: You can buy it on www.csbeaty.com. There’s a bunch of other fun stuff on there too.

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