Who's scruffy looking?

By Zach Hively

​I never planned on sprouting a beard.

In fact, for many years there, I went entirely beardless. Then I hit puberty. I continued to go beardless for several presidential administrations thereafter, but not for lack of trying.

Frankly, the best beard I grew between middle school and middle age* was the first one. An adult suggested I might try using the electric razor I had received for Christmas. The reason for my razor was not apparent to me until I locked myself in the bathroom and got close—real close—with the mirror.

There! And there! Actual hairs growing straight out of my neck!

I lopped them off and felt, maybe for the last time, like a real man. A man who had to shave. A man who did not yet realize how awful is the burden of shaving, but a man nonetheless.

Oh, I tried to equal that first beard from time to time. I sported chin bristles and minimalist sideburns for a little while in high school, but still I had to shave everything in between on the reg, as if with purpose, lest anyone realize that no actual hairs grew anywhere in between.

Otherwise, I went clean. Going clean meant calculating the upper limit of how many days I could avoid shaving my mug before that weird blank patch on my cheek became unavoidably apparent. Then I’d stall for another week before shaving.

Until one fine month in 2013 when I just … didn’t.

I remember it well. It was September, and the delicious scent of pumpkin spice was just hitting the air, which was still a novel marker of time’s progression. (This was back before autumn merchandising kicked off in earnest on Boxing Day for the entire year to come.)

An acquaintance, or perhaps it was my girlfriend, commented on my beard.

My beard?

I scrambled to the bathroom mirror like I was oblivious and thirteen all over again. Only I didn’t have to look so close this time. My face was, in fact, furry. And if I may say so—which I may—this incidental beard improved my face, primarily by hiding it.

Beards have come into fashion since then, and fallen back out, and probably come back in again. I couldn’t tell you where beards stand now, or what styles are preferred by the five or six men whose opinions are worth anything.

​I just know mine is not going anywhere.

Its length will always land between “clearly on purpose” and “saving up for my first Harley.” I will trim it as seldom as possible while still ensuring it can’t wind up in my own mouth in my sleep. And I will use it—never on purpose, but it happens—to make friends.

Guy friends, that is. We guy-like individuals are not notoriously capable of bonding over much more than, I don’t know, mustards? Whereas I have witnessed lifelong friendships form between non-guy-like individuals over—and I am serious here—laundry detergent. Laundry detergent is clearly far too substantive for us guy-like folks.

But. If you want the delight and wonder of hearing guy-adjacent people discuss essential oils and preferred fragrances, bring up beards. (Note: This outcome is more likely if everyone involved, no matter how much we don’t talk about it, has a preferred laundry detergent.)

Because yes: Even if it took a dozen years, this beard of mine is no longer just my least inconvenient headshot accessory. It is a style choice, and part of my physical being. I will write down other guy-like people’s advice on shea butter and argan oil, whatever an argan is. I will promptly forget ever to lookat that advice, but I will know it exists. And I will remember to use my specialty beard brush at least once per pumpkin-spice season.

It deserves my care and attention, my beard does. I’m grateful it finally came in, and that it has filled itself in by now. Even though it is turning salty, it still hides most of my zits. Which is really why it’s staying put.

​And how do I make them stop?

By Zach Hively
​
Why do people talk to me?

This isn’t entirely about the brothel next door (which I told you about last time). But it is also about the brothel next door. I had a perfectly good ignorance going until the neighbor piped up about my dogs and me scaring off the, erm, clientele. I had figured the many skulking men coming (and then promptly going) were friends, or plumbers giving estimates, or friends and plumbers buying fentanyl. I would never have known what was afoot (or abed) if she hadn’t seen fit to talk to me.

My life generally runs more to my liking when people don’t do that. Or, if they must do that, when they stick to talking about the weather—hell, when they stick to talking about the Broncos.

Instead, lately they choose, out of all the topics in the world, to talk at me about the Holocaust.

​SOCIAL TIP #1: The Holocaust is not a natural progression of conversation with your customers at the post office.

This happened when I was at a post office different than my home post office. I appreciate the people who work at my home post office. They sometimes let me use the MEDIA MAIL stamp on my packages. They talk to me about flowers and dragons made out of Legos. They have never once tried to persuade me that a historical atrocity was anything but.

They are sticklers for rules at my home PO—so I’m pretty certain that discussing historical atrocities in a contemporary context is not USPS policy.

The best part about going to the post office away from my home turf is that my stale material becomes fresh. Like when, in compliance with USPS policy, a USPS employee asks me if my package contains any hazardous or dangerous materials, despite my package containing only books.

“Not under normal operating conditions!” I like to say. At which point my home postal officers hand me the MEDIA MAIL stamp to keep me occupied.
I read the (very empty) room at this away-game post office and called an audible. Any dangerous or hazardous materials? “No more dangerous than a book!” I chirped.

So what came next was sort of my fault, but not really.

“Pretty dangerous, then!” said the woman—let’s call her “Dee” because she made sure I knew her name when she asked me to answer the survey about my experience. So far, so good. This was banter. “That’s why the N—zis burned them!”

I mean, she was NOT WRONG, but still my biblio-senses were tingling, and not in the cozy-bookstore-on-a-rainy-day way.

“You wanna know why they really burned books?” Dee said, clearly deciding mine was a face she should talk to.

I did not, in fact, want to know. But she had me by my package, which I had relinquished but not yet paid for.

“J—sh s—ual deviancy,” she said, only she did not censor or otherwise hush herself like I do for algorithmic purposes. And then she kept talking and I noped out on the inside but not on the outside because Dee got herself so riled up that she mis-stamped my package and had to work off the wrong label with what looked an awful lot like her personal nail file.

She started my transaction over, including a reprise of the hazardous materials question. I’ve never played my answer so straight in my entire book-shipping life.

And this was the second time that week that a stranger took one look at my face during an innocuous exchange and turned it into explaining why Everything I Know About History Is Wrong.

The first was at an Argentine tango dance in an entirely different ZIP code than Dee. One of the trademarks of tango culture is the peculiar way we ask each other to dance—not with words, but with staring. This tradition makes tango the ideal social activity for those who don’t want strangers talking at me.

Yet despite these codes of conduct, a woman I do not know sat with me and chatted on about an experience she’d had with a foreign dancer who related how staring lands differently in his culture. I believed it, I said—having lived in parts of Europe where grown adults can stare you down with impunity for an entire train ride from Barcelona to Berlin.

I did not see this as any sort of invitation down any holes, rabbit or otherwise. But she leaned in and said—loudly, to be heard by half the dance floor over the music—“I was doing my own research, and you want to know who really won World War II?”

SOCIAL TIP #2: DO NOT DO THIS, EVER.

So I am finished with people for a good long while. Becoming a shut-in is the only way to avoid strangers who Do Their Own Research and think, for whatever reason, that I want to hear about it.

If they really, really like reading into conclusions for themselves, then I suggest they start reading my face before opening theirs.

In case you need a reason to avoid "Barebnb"

By Zach Hively

As you may imagine, traveling with 160 pounds of dog is a logistical challenge in any configuration. Ten 16-pound dogs? One 120-pound beast and forty one-pound chihuahuas? Makes me think I have it easy, what with just two dogs sniffing either side of 80.

Even though I average a hand per leash, which I think is a positive, lodging establishments tend to have animal restrictions. They often limit us by quantity (“less than one”) or mass—as if purse pups are any quieter or less destructive than I am.

So, for our recent semi-long-term travel booking, the boys and I turned to Barebnb.

Barebnb, for the uninitiated, is the more honest and transparent copycat of a well-known home share platform. True to its name, it ensures the bare minimum: barely any assurances, barely any accountability. It also stands by the guarantee implied in those final three letters of the brand: you get a bed, for “b,” and for “n” you get not much else.

Not even, it turns out, what’s included in the listing. Perhaps I am a petty b, which accounts for that final “b” floating around at the end of the brand name—but our accommodations lacked both so-called “kitchen essentials” AND a first-aid kit. All of this is no big deal until breakfast goes sideways. The only silver lining, I suppose, was that no one could put any salt in the wound.

Still, this condo allowed dogs, plural, with emphasis on the “n”: not much restrictions and not much fees. In hindsight, these not-much’s may have been red flags. We needed a place to sleep besides the dog beds in the car, however, so we paid the nonrefundable booking fee through Barebnb and moved in.

​(Nonrefundable! That also begins with the letter n!)

All told, the condo complex provided a charming experience of community and culture. We got not much chance to be charmed, however. Our time was largely consumed by evading the many free-roaming dogs drawn in by the lack of fees and restrictions, particularly those under the guardianship of underqualified toddlers, and dodging the many underutilized dog-poop-disposal stations.

My trip afield, in fact, was dominated by making certain my dogs kept me comfortable. The actual purpose for our travel fell by the wayside. I don’t even recall the purpose for our travel, beyond doing our civil best to earn a positive guest review on Barebnb.

​We soon gave up on that too.

Late one weekend morning, in a rare moment free of neighbor dogs and their pint-sized handlers, my dogs and I sat on the front stoop of our ground-level unit. We sipped coffee and admired the parking lot. A car pulled into the numbered spot next to ours. This was business-as-usual. Cars frequented the numbered spot next to ours. They never came back. This, I was fine with. Most of them were terrible parkers.

This particular driver—let’s call him “John” because you’ll see why—sat there for some minutes. The dogs and I were aware of him, but none of us barked. Him sitting there was the most charming aspect of the condo complex we’d yet seen.

At some length, a woman from the unit adjacent to ours went and chatted with John through the car window. John drove off; the woman came back up the short walk to our building and complimented the cuteness of my dogs. I immediately suspected her to be of the highest discernment and character.

​“My friend is such a wuss,” she said. “He was like, ‘I’m not coming out of the car with this dude and his big dogs staring at me. Nuh uh.’”

We three fellas were appropriately flattered. She kvetched about our mutual Barebnb host and the extortion-level rates we paid. Something on my face or my dogs’ faces prompted her to lean in like a co-conspirator; whatever she saw on our faces, we were honestly just pleased that one single neighbor was not stooping on our stoop without picking it up. We weren’t asking for what came next.

“John wasn’t my friend,” she confided, her voice lowering, a subtle menace lacing through her long fingernails—which she tapped on my arm. “I’m an escort. You all are scaring off my customers.”

That’s how, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday, we were taken aback. The listing certainly had not indicated THIS as a neighborhood amenity! The threat, though quiet, was clear—we, intimidating though we may be, needed to stay out of her way—or else.

Or else? Or else risk the wrath of the next John, or the next—one with better threat assessment capabilities? Worse, what if the Barebnb host was in on this ring? Were we, the rare legitimate guests, the front for a much shadier business model?

Look, I don’t care that this woman makes her living as an on-site escort. If the industry were safe and regulated, I might have considered the gig in order to pay for our Barebnb stay. But I cared that we had just been confronted, on our own rented stoop, about interfering with illicit activity—in broad daylight—on the Christian god’s holy day, for whatever that was worth.

My priorities became: 1) get us the everloving heck out of there; 2) get refunded for our unused dates, because if ever circumstances were extenuating, these were.

Getting out, while stressful, was doable. We regrouped before one John or another got wind of our whereabouts.

The refund, though, proved impossible.

Our hosts cared as much about the unlicensed practice in their rented unit as they did about our kitchen’s lack of cooking oil. It looked increasingly like the foot traffic was buttering their bread. So I jumped on with Barebnb Support, thinking they’d like to, you know, support me.

Hours of phone calls, hysterics, and closed support tickets later, Support’s response came down to: “We talked to the host. They don’t want to refund you. And since both prostitution and lack of safety due to large quantities of illegal activity with bad parkers are not covered in our BareCoverage policy, you’re also getting boned.”

So—I may be out some moolah. The dogs have not ruled out more drastic measures; regardless, I finally got the joy of writing a scathing review, and then the joy of editing it down to Barebnb’s character limit. (The limit of their character is, admittedly, quite small.)

​I’m left to conclude that whatever the challenges of traveling with dogs, they cannot compare to the challenges of existing among human beings. Next time, we’ll pitch a pup tent. Far, far away. Five stars.

And burn your computer while you're at it.​

By Zach Hively

Young people just don’t read anymore. This must be truth, because I work in the book industry, and I hear it from plenty of older people who

​a) monopolize my time at bookselling tables to tell me that
​
b) they know exactly what young people do with their spare time.

They then proceed to walk away from me without buying any of the books I’m selling.

I cannot promise that these older people are the same older people who gape at younger people who admit they don’t own televisions and microwaves. But I can promise that they are the same old people who drove the young people off Facebook fifteen years ago.

Granted, there are solid cases to be made for the decline of reading. Take me, for instance.

Me getting published anywhere at all on a regular basis (such as this very Abiquiú News) suggests heavily that no one reads anymore, regardless of age. Unless it’s the birds and the gerbils whose cages get lined by my work, printed and shredded. Many more people, I am certain, light their woodstove fires with my work than actually read any single piece from start to middle.

But I am just one man. I can produce only so much writing—as much as half a man, or perhaps a quarter of one. There are dozens more people like me out there, so-called writers, each of us struggling to craft the perfect cup of tea. Some of them are actually succeeding in writing back-cover copy for other people’s books well enough to get them banned. Banned, I tell you! And by people you KNOW don’t read.
​
Now I can’t articulate exactly why it is okay to start a fire with the newspapers who print the junk I write, but abominable to start a fire with a book that also contains the junk I write. Nor can I explain why burning a book is worse than banning it, because it isn’t, other than in a matter of degrees. (Most bannings, for instance, take place at room temperature.)

All I know is that if I can’t stop people from condemning books to the ol’ burn-n-ban, dammit, I want them to condemn my work too. Because that is the SUREST way to get someone to read it. Or at least to buy it—can’t burn it if you don’t got it.

Frankly, I can’t figure out why I haven’t had more books banned, aside from the fact that I haven’t written very many. I like to say things that book-banners wouldn’t like very much. I am always game to “punch up,” as comedy experts say—to take a swing at The Man, the powers-that-be, particularly if I think they are unlikely to read it.

But I often refrain from punching anyone, old or young, up or down, because against all odds I have some remaining faith in humanity.

I was recently in attendance at a party for adults, in honor of a kid’s ninth birthday. I hung out with the kid, mostly because they have Legos, but also because I unwittingly made a day-long commitment when I asked what they’ve been reading.

I learned—in greater detail than the original text—about their current favorite book series, which I’m pretty certain involved a kid and most definitely dragons and the kid had bullies and also sisters (which were maybe the same people) and these other people also had dragons who weren’t allowed in the apartment complex which was a problem because CLEARLY you cannot keep your dragons OUTDOORS, especially on a day like THIS, and you don’t even understand how cool the main character’s clothing is, which she makes herself with the dragon’s keen fashion sense guiding her, but the other dragons don’t appreciate the chic bent to apartment D-3, so they bond together to wipe out both the main character and her dragon, and it’s possible the lines bled between the book series and the Lego village we were touring together while enduring the synopsis, but you get the gist and also I evaded adult conversations about the stock market so it was a real win-win.

​Oh, and also, on an entirely different day, I carpooled with a younger person who was very, very excited that he had just scored a box set of Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (which he explained was known as Remembrance of Things Past in an earlier English translation). He did not have Legos in the car with him, so that’s all I recall him telling me.

These: these younger people provide me with my greatest hopes for the future. I’m pretty certain we’re all going to die in an overheated, ever-erratic climate like that time I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the oven in my new rental house which also did not have air conditioning. But until that happens, kids and other younger people will keep reading, and bookstore sales will continue to climb so long as we have trees to make books and zealots to spike sales by banning them. I just hope some of the books are mine.

It's my desert-iversary.

By Zach Hively

This week marks the anniversary of my return to New Mexico, where I was born and where I grew as tall as I’d ever get—where I didn’t appreciate my surroundings until I left and came back and left again and came back again—where I needed to return to settle into myself.

It’s the same week when I moved into the house I’d been fixing up for a summer. I needed New Mexico again, but I didn’t want the city this time. I wanted mountains with nearly nothing between me and them but crows and smoke from someone’s brush burn. I wanted space to think and breathe and maybe sometimes disappear, for a while.

I found a space to write more poetry than I ever had.

​These poems are some of the ones that came out in this headspace and heartset. They are from a suite called “Five Times Coming Home."

Other People

They worry about me being here
as clear as snake tracks in the sand.

As if I will tire
of reading worn stones
and could ever translate
the strata of stories
in the walls sheered
by guerilla floods
and illuminated by
the roots of cedars,
patient monks.

As if I could ever smell
over the next ridge
to my satisfaction
and finish tallying the stars
on my walls
like the count of my days.

As if I need more
than myself
and the indifferent welcome
​of this, my companion land.

Untaming

feral mind, feral heart
rocks dirt trees

fire and sky, moon and sun
the flow and ebb

turning toward, drawing away
where is the wild man

the shapeshifter
with smoke and stories

has he forgotten himself here
no mistakes

more serious than joy
reacquainted with feet and hands

find the sky again
grow thick with quiet

continue choosing
turning toward

to feel it all all
ways of being

are not exclusive
lay them bare

​again
and always

Querencia

My way
is not the
only
way.

I must learn
from other ways
to test and hone
my ways,

to make way
for those other ways
any way
I can.

There is
no right way
to love
this place

or let it
love me back,
to test and hone
me and stun

me with
an evening flower
or a print
in the snow,

to make way
for others
as others
made way

for me.

In which I learn the ways of the world.

By Zach Hively

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Kaspar Hauser?Pull up a chair and I’ll tell you that Kaspar Hauser, the story goes, once wandered onto some Bavarian street as a teenager. This wasn’t in itself notable. Nor were the two letters he carried—one purportedly written by his birth mother in 1812, and the other purportedly written by the old man who had housed Hauser since infancy.

“Housed” is too fitting a term. Kaspar had existed lo these many years, so the second letter said, without once leaving the house. Lucky him? Not really. Kaspar never saw the sky. He ate only rye bread and drank only water. He had experienced only enough human contact to learn only the words needed to tell the outside world that he had never experienced human contact.

Kaspar Hauser fascinated the world, or at least some nineteenth-century Bavarians, with the murky riddle: What is a human being who never learned how to be human? But like, at all?

Now. Let us set aside all the extraneous details of Kaspar’s story. These include the suspicions that he was a habitual liar, that he made it all up, and that he—being a man of the male gender before his brain finished developing one way or another—accidentally killed himself while staging an assassination attempt to re-up his public attention. Not important.

What is important is that I, two hundred years later, can answer exactly what happens when a man has been isolated from human society since his youth:

He cannot properly load the dishwasher.

More to the point: I cannot load the dishwasher.

This is not me rehashing the old trope that one person in every relationship loads the dishwasher like a Zen monk on assignment, while the other person loads it like a chipmunk whose parents just got home a day early. The beloved and I both load the dishwasher with great care and obsessive tendencies, thank you very much.

But I? I do so with a complete and uncompromised lack of knowledge of how to do so properly.

I may disagree with this assessment. But my disagreement does not matter. I am, after all, the Kaspar Hauser of dishwasher-loaders. I have had only enough dishwasher exposure to understand that dishwashers exist—but nowhere near enough to function as half of a successful dishwashing power couple.

Just like Kaspar Hauser (if we believe him), I came by it honestly.

See, I grew up in two households with dishwashers. But I also grew up in two households that did not trust dishwashers. One of the chores I was accused of evading on a regular basis was to wash the dishes—by hand!—before loading them into the dishwasher. This process thus negated the need to ever clean food debris out of the dishwasher’s food debris filtration system.

I’m pretty certain the only functional purpose of our dishwasher was to get our money’s worth out of having a dishwasher in the first place.

This entire setup also meant that we could load that puppy to the brim with clean dishes, so as not to waste any more water or energy or money than we were already wasting. And this went on, and on, and on, dinner after dinner, week after week, until I reached legal voting age in the United States of America and legal drinking age everywhere else.

And then? As an alleged adult? I never had a chance to learn any differently. I stumbled into the world as if it were a Bavarian street. I took up residence in an ongoing string of dorms, apartments, back rooms, basements, garages, and full-on houses without dishwashers. And if they had dishwashers, I used them as storage compartments.

Other people relive their issues in relationship after relationship; I took mine out on kitchen after kitchen.

But I was also being, to the best of my male brain’s understanding, smart about it. I was hacking the system: I washed my dishes by hand, then stopped there.

How was I ever supposed to know that, sometime in the last few decades, we started trusting our dishwashers to wash dishes? How was I to know that, according to certain beloveds, we trust our dishwashers but only to wash the appropriate number of dishes? What even is the appropriate number of dishes?

​I can now tell you the appropriate number of dishes is “fewer than that.” We wash approximately four items at a time so that additional items “don’t break” because I “stuffed the dishwasher so full that the water cannot actually reach the dirty surfaces anyway.”

These are not complaints on my part. They are not part of that other trope of making fun of domestic disagreements. I call this trope “Everyone is an equal partner and everyone’s perspective is valid, especially hers.” And this trope is not fair. She is actually very right, a very great deal of the time. Sometimes, enchantedly so.

As proof, a recent text exchange between us went this way:

Me: I’m cracking. I think I threw out my pill bottle yesterday.

Beloved: Check the dog Rx pile?

Me [to myself]: That’s dumb.

Me [ten seconds later, also to myself]: … God dammit.

​So I trust her, and her worldly experiences, on how best to load a dishwasher. I’m invested in doing it right, because it matters to her far more than it should matter to any human being. Then again, what do I know about being human? Only this: that I bet I can fit in a fifth dish without her noticing.

Poetry for the dogs.

By Zach Hively

Here’s a little secret insight, a peek behind the curtain, a glimpse behind the veil:

I am, whatever else you may have heard, a human being.

And that means I come with a whole duffel bag of junk that all the other species on Earth, so far as we know, never have to deal with.

​Except dogs. Dogs have to deal with all our junk. Because they’re dogs, and it’s what they do.

Sometimes I, being human, get in my own way.
​
This is especially true when I am trying to be a writer. It’s less true when I’m trying to put frozen chicken tenders in the oven. Most humans should be able to handle that. (Although you’d be surprised.) But writing requires me to create something outside myself, using only what’s in myself, which exists only in the world outside myself.

When I get in my own way too much as a junky human being, the best way out is to love on my dogs. And when I get in my own way too much as a writer, the best way out is to write haiku.

​Good haiku is an exquisite artform. What I usually do is chicken-tender haiku. The sort where I say to myself, “Any ol’ writer can write seventeen measly syllables!” And then I make myself prove it.

I recently undertook a Big Adventure with my dogs.

We got out of our usual everything and put ourselves somewhere new, for a time.
There is exactly one extrovert in this pack, and he took right to it.

There are exactly two introverts in this pack, and one of them handles things with much more grace than I do.

​So when the writing got tough, and my insides felt junky, I started scribbling down some chicken-tender haiku … from the perspective of two dogs on a Big Adventure.

​Here is what came out.

​hey, hey, did you know
we get the same food here, but
water tastes different

before our desert
we knew paved alleys and grass
​hello, our old friends

seasoned country dog
my first suburbanite squirrel
talk about wild life

short-term neighbor's ask:
do you want to say hi? no?
​i'm just like my dad

strangers coo "handsome!"
we have thoughts: Amazon trucks
should follow my rules

favorite toy, new rug
can i still lay on your foot?
​home away from home

My first impression of becoming a man is that tents really have come a long way since my childhood. For instance, tents now have floors. They also promise right there on the packaging not to siphon rain directly into your shoes.

What tents are not now is any easier to assemble. Sure, the camping store offers high-end pop-up tents even quicker to unfurl than a condom on prom night. But this is the wilderness, dagnubbit—it is meant for rugged men experiencing nature through their slowly deflating air mattresses. It is not meant for making camping “easy.”

While giving tent setup an initial try, I found a lot of left-behind tent stakes among the pine needles. These stakes could be merely relics from simpler days, when campers torched their floorless tents rather than pack them out. But I know better. These stakes are all that remain of campers eaten by cougars.

Cougars present a very real threat in this campground.

The freshly laminated warning signs stapled to the vault toilet by the Department of Game & Fish describe how cougars want to bat me around like a mouse in a pinball machine.

If the government would only supply the cougars with giant cardboard boxes to play in, they’d stay occupied for basically ever. But federal funding is tight, even considering the influential work of the camping lobby. So I must stake my survival on these actual posted tips:

• Avoid jogging, hiking, or walking alone.
• Avoid jogging or hiking at dusk or at dawn.
• In fact, why don’t you just avoid moving at all, ever.
• If you do move, carry a sturdy walking stick.
• NEVER APPROACH A COUGAR!

Despite my best efforts to avoid cougars, it’s really quite difficult when camping alone to eat s’mores without moving. So in the event I attract a cougar anyway, the signs suggest to treat it the same way I would a grade-school bully, ideally before it crushes me into Fancy Feast. These tips are especially encouraging, because some of them are in all caps and others use title case:

• STOP! STAY CALM!
• Do Not Run! Face the cougar & stand tall.
• If cougar approaches, throw objects & speak loudly.

​
And, most helpfully of all:

• If cougar attacks—Fight Back!

Now, according to my imagination, a mountain lion is larger than the average housecat whose claws I cannot remove from my clothing without it shredding me like an expired check. Of course I won’t Fight Back. Are you kidding? If a cougar attacks me, I plan to flop into a boring heap and hope that, before I regain consciousness, the cougar moves on to other feline activities, such as attacking itself or sleeping.

You might think that only cowards faint instead of Fighting Back.

But that’s not true. Cowards would read these warning signs and promptly return to town under the guise of fetching all the camping essentials they just realized they forgot. I am no coward. I will test my mettle without such frivolities as can openers or a pillow or breakfast. I will make do with what I brought, or do without.

And I think I’ll be doing without, unless my phone magically discovers a signal out here so I can call the tent manufacturer or maybe my parents to walk me through putting this tent together before darkness blankets the forest which is already happening and there’s noises in the trees and no sign of the local ranger and it’s so dark I can’t even see what I’m writing anymore if you all discover this notebook after I die please tell everyone I loved them and I’m sorry about that unfortunate incident with the beans …………

I’m back and clearly not dead yet.

In the end, I bucked up to the challenge. I worked up quite a macho sweat threading the tent poles through the tent pole sleeves. I correctly oriented the rainfly in less than five tries. Not to brag, but I even triple-pinned the tent zippers shut with all the extra stakes lying around. I’m admiring the whole installation as I write by lanternlight inside it.

​I have a big stick; I’m not moving; and I challenge any hungry cougar to tear through this manly fortress and take its chances with me. No, really, please; I’m not sure how I’ll get out of here otherwise.

Your call is not very important to us.

By Zach Hively

I recently had one of those customer service experiences that leaves one wondering if, possibly, the key to cracking all the world’s unsolved murder mysteries is lurking in those calls that may be recorded for training purposes.

It all started because I decided to become a book publisher. I based this decision on the potential career earnings. Ha ha! I kid. I based this decision on the pleasure I derive from saying the words “book publisher.” Try it--book publisher. It’s a very pleasant phrase.

But no book publisher is an island. It doesn’t matter how introverted I am; I have to rely on Other People unless I want to write all the books, and design all the covers, and harvest the timber to be pulped into paper all by myself.

Actually, I do want to do all these things. But someone has to buy all the books to fund my book forest and my writing snacks. Which means customers. Which means … customer support.

Now I don’t want to use names, so that if any customer support agents should go missing, I won’t be immediately linked to them. But the issue at hand, the reason I wrote to customer support in the first place, was that I needed to sort out a book problem with my distributor.

A distributor, for those not in the industry, is a company that uses an ineffective, user-unfriendly, poorly designed, and ugly web interface to ruin all the metadata associated with a forthcoming book. And then—and then!—a distributor makes that ruined data impossible to fix because of reasons that do not apply. This corruption of data means the distributor cannot distribute this book to bookstores, which is a relief (for the distributor) because distributing books is outside their terms of service.

That’s more or less what I wrote to the distributor’s customer support team three weeks ago, only I used Fake American Sincerity voice because at that point I had not yet waited three weeks for a response. I even tried to fix the problem myself first! More than one time! And then I opted to let professionals handle it so I didn’t wreck the rest of my week on a Tuesday.

That was my first big mistake, assuming the professionals would handle anything professionally, or at all.

I got my response two days later. The customer support agent also utilized Fake American Sincerity voice. The agent assured me, with text copied straight from some manual or other, of all the ways they had not read any portion of my plea for help.

Because many of you are not book publishers and should not have to suffer through learning distributor lingo, I’ll translate the ensuing exchange into a more familiar context:

Me: I would like some apples, please, because this is a supermarket.

Customer Support Agent: According to this manual, we do not have broccoli.

Me: But I just need apples.

Customer Support Agent: You have allowed your carrots to expire. You may still eat them, but they will have a floppy mouthfeel.

Me: Apples?

Customer Support Agent: Potatoes are indeed delicious. I apologize for the dragonfruit’s inability to banana.

Me: Will you understand “apples” better:

• if I use bullet points?
  

and selectively bolded text?

​
Customer Support Agent: No, but we will elevate your frustration to our advanced grocer team.
​
I wish I were exaggerating. I am not.

Yet the distributor had me bent over a promotional book display. I cannot distribute myself; this is one of those times I’m stuck relying on Other People. Maybe even Other AI Chatbots.

So I figured I’d try being patient for the book distributor’s advanced grocers to get to my support ticket. And I was patient, alright. I was patient for TWO. ENTIRE. WORK. WEEKS

This put me nearly three weeks in, all told. At this juncture, I funneled anything else causing negative emotions in my life into a brand-new second support ticket. I asked the distributor (in transparently thin Fake American Sincerity voice) to give itself a suppository with an Encyclopædia Britannica.

The response I got to that ticket kindly informed me that emails are answered in the order received, except for mine, which would be bumped to the back of the queue each subsequent time I wrote in asking for updates.

Fortunately for the life and longevity of everyone involved, this response was a lie.

(I might lie too, if my job were to answer last week’s support tickets on a Sunday night.)

An advanced support team member informed me that the wrong and unfixable data could be fixed all along, just not by me. The team has also revoked all my data-editing privileges, including changing my own password.

​But this is okay! Because I have found a new career even more pleasing to say than “book publisher.” And I’m certain that grocers never have to deal with food distributors.

So screwed.

​By Zach Hively

Sometimes, we experience moments of wonder that modern science cannot explain.

Yeah, yeah, we now live in an age of magic because modern science has been defunded. But these moments are no less special for not being peer-reviewed. Truly spiritual glimpses beyond the veil of reason have no equal in this life, except maybe ice cream.

I experienced the inexplicable just this Sunday.

So there’s this door that just keeps coming loose. I’m not a big-time door person, by any means, so I don’t know how to explain it more technically than that. The door comes loose, and it always has, ever since the beginning of time or ever since the previous tenant, whichever came later.

Every now and again the door gets looser, and my beloved asks me to tighten it—not because I am a man and thus more competent, but because I am taller and thus more competent.

I find a screwdriver—seldom the same screwdriver, and seldom in the same drawer—and I righty-tighty whatever screws still remain. The door closes a little more easily, for a time. A little less like there’s a foot or some small child in the way.

A week later, or a day, the door loosens right back up. It’s like the old cross-stitch saying: When God closes a door, He has to lift up on the handle and put His shoulder into it.It’s the only way He can be sure to keep the cats out of the garage.

As I said, the door has been this way forever. Which makes what happened next all the more inexplicable.

The door came loose. Really loose this time. Loose enough to frustrate whatever Almighty is out there. I was not surprised, seeing as all the screws in all the hinges only I can reach still went righty but had ceased going tighty. My beloved asked me to fix it again.

​Only this time, unlike all the times before … I KNEW HOW TO FIX IT BUT FOR REAL.

“Do we have toothpicks?” I asked.

We did.

“Do we have wood glue?” I asked.

We did.

“Is it hanging out with one of the screwdrivers?” I asked.

It was.

“Do we have any idea where I learned this?” I asked.

We did not.

You cannot science me into understanding how, exactly, I knew the tried-and-plausibly-true method for fixing stripped screw holes with quite literally the smallest pieces of lumber available on the market today.

I—and I cannot stress this enough—am not handy.

I tend to fix things by ignoring them until they go away. I have removed doors and lived without them rather than repair them. This toothpick trick is not something I could possibly know.

If trauma can be inherited through DNA, can handiness be passed on, too? This toothpick-fix feels like something Papaw would have known. It’s entirely possible my parents knew this fix too—it would explain the box of toothpicks from my childhood that’s still around here somewhere—but that I was too busy re-reading Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books to pay attention to the home repair tips that, until Sunday, were not relevant to me.

Yet wherever I absorbed this knowledge, I mustered the undeserved confidence that only every man on the planet can muster. I coated those toothpicks in wood glue. I stuffed them into the screw holes. My beloved fed me salami and licorice and told me I was sexy. I got door hinge grease on one of my fingers. We took a nap that I got to count as “curing time.”

​Then came the moment of truth: Screwable, or screwed up?

I am thrilled to report, with no spin whatsoever, that my unearned knowledge worked on all but one remaining screw. Which I am obligated to point out is on the bottommost hinge, where my beloved can reach it. Her problem now.

The door closes with silky ease. If it ever comes loose again, it might be time to sell the house and move to Europe. Or to try it again with multicolored toothpicks.

Either way, neither God nor science can describe that high of repairing a door with no knowledge or ability whatsoever. It was the fourth-best feeling of my day.

The third-best was that nap.

The second-best was the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream my beloved bought me as thanks.

The first-best was sharing it with her.

​There’s no magical moment quite like an impromptu date. Just to be sure we didn’t ruin the moment, we left the house out the other door.