Three in the morning. Couldn’t sleep. I got up and stood by the window and watched the street below. Nothing moving. Not a car, not a dog, not even the wind doing anything interesting with the trash. Just the orange glow of a streetlight on wet pavement.
I thought about how quiet it was. Not peaceful quiet. The other kind. The kind where everybody’s still awake but nobody’s saying anything.
The woman at the laundromat was folding a flag. Not a bedsheet — an actual American flag, creased and faded, the kind you see at yard sales in towns where the factories left twenty years ago. She folded it into a triangle like they taught her, tucked the last corner in, and set it on top of her basket next to a box of Tide.
I watched her for a while because I had nothing else to do. My clothes were in the dryer and the dryer was lying about having eight minutes left. I thought about how she handled that flag like it meant something, and then I thought about Jessica Foster.
I once worked a job where my only purpose was to stand next to a machine and make sure it didn’t jam. Eight hours. Fluorescent lights. The machine did the work. I watched. When the paper caught — maybe twice a shift — I’d reach in, pull out the crumpled mess, and hit the green button. The rest of the time I stood there thinking about lunch, about the woman who’d stopped returning my calls, about whether the parking lot had a fence low enough to climb if I decided to leave at half shift and never come back.
I’ve never been to Swadlincote. Couldn’t point to it on a map. But I know the diner. Not this particular one — the type. Chrome stools, checkered floor, menu on the wall in a font that still believes in the future. The kind of place where the owner knows your name and your order and doesn’t need an algorithm for either.
Cody Chetwynd and her husband Luke opened the 1950s American Diner in August 2023. Built something. The kind of thing people used to just call a living. Thirty-two thousand followers on Facebook, which for a diner in a town most of England couldn’t find on a map is not nothing. That’s word of mouth digitized. That’s regulars who can’t make it in on Tuesday but still hit the like button on the daily special. That’s how a small business breathes in 2026 — through the tubes.
A guy I used to drink with — Louie, worked at a printing press in East Hollywood — had a habit of calling me at two in the morning to talk about his wife leaving him. She’d left four years ago. He was still calling.
For about six months I’d listen. Pour a drink, let him go. He’d say the same things. She didn’t understand him. She took the dog. The dog was the only one who ever really listened.
The dentist I used to go to had a sign in his waiting room. Hand-lettered, taped to the wall above the magazines nobody reads. It said: “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”
I thought about that sign when I read about the Seminole Nation.
Some tech startup — unnamed, because these types always hide behind NDAs like roaches behind a refrigerator — walked onto sovereign Seminole land in Oklahoma with a proposition. They wanted to build a data center. One of those massive concrete boxes that eats electricity and pisses heat into the sky so that somewhere, someone can ask a chatbot what to have for dinner.
The woman at the next table was trying to figure out what to order. Not in the normal way — staring at the menu, weighing options, doing that silent calculus between what sounds good and what won’t make you hate yourself later. She was typing the question into her phone. Into ChatGPT, I’d bet. Asking a machine what she felt like eating.
Her date pretended not to notice.
Some researchers at Wharton — the business school, the one that produces the people who eventually ruin everything — ran experiments on almost thirteen hundred people. Gave them logic and reasoning questions. Offered them the chance to ask ChatGPT for help. More than half took the deal. And of those who did, eighty percent went with whatever the machine said. Didn’t check. Didn’t think about it. Didn’t hold the answer up to the light to see if it was real.
My landlord in the Sunset District had a space heater that would shock you if you touched the metal guard. Not every time — just often enough to keep you honest. The thing worked fine otherwise. Threw heat like a furnace. But if you brushed against it on the way to the bathroom at three in the morning, you’d get a jolt up your arm that made you forget you had to piss.
The laundromat on Fourth had one of those bulletin boards by the door. Business cards for dog walkers. A guy who fixes guitars. A flyer for a psychic named Crystal — fifty dollars for a past-life reading, which I thought was a bargain considering most people pay a lot more than that to avoid looking at who they used to be.
Someone had pinned a handwritten note in the corner. Block letters, blue ink: “LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO TALK TO. NOT ABOUT ANYTHING. JUST TALK.”
I used to write letters to people I’d never met.
Not emails — letters. Paper, pen, the whole stupid ritual. I’d be three drinks past good judgment and something I’d read would crack open a door in my head that I didn’t know was there. I’d write to the author. Tell them what their words did to me. Sometimes I’d get a reply. Usually I wouldn’t. The act was the point — the need to tell someone, anyone, that you existed, that you’d understood something, that the particular loneliness of their book had touched the particular loneliness of yours.