December 1st

Some people believe I am depressed just because I don’t think anything good will ever happen and can’t recall anything good ever happening in the past, but they aren’t psychologists so their opinion is just as informed as mine and I don’t think I’m depressed. Depression is something that happens to others - like getting murdered. I am not depressed and I am not murdered. I don’t think I’ll ever be murdered. A depressed person would probably assume the worst and think they are going to be murdered. I think there is a non-zero chance that I will get hit by a car with the way people drive - with their cell phones out because they just have to text someone something right at that moment (no idea why that scenario didn’t come up nearly as frequently back before texting and cell phones existed) - and it’s possible that person will commit a hit and run. But I don’t think the person will intentionally try to hit me with their car and I’m not positive if I will die - I would need to research it because I really don’t know much about the impact of a car running into a human body. That would be murder, killing me with their car intentionally. And I don’t think that will happen to me because I am not depressed.

Still, people don’t like being around me much because I complain all the time. Some people comment on the weather or say some other inane bullshit to fill the silence. Saying some empty words seems worse to me that saying something I truly believe like people need to not walk side by side and take up the entire sidewalk especially if they’re slow. Sorry if you don’t want to be reminded that people do that because they are inconsiderate, but I genuinely believe that and I don’t think you can say the same about “looks like it might rain later.” And that’s how I found myself with so much free time to do whatever I pleased. That’s another thing I hate: people ask to spend time with you and then you suggest things to do and they don’t want to do any of those things and then their presence is just an inconvenience. It isn’t even that you can’t do the things you want to do, you can’t do anything because they don’t want to do any of the ideas you suggest and somebody has to come up with something.

So anyway, I was walking down Killingsworth, looking in store windows. Gentrification was changing the streets sometimes I would think I took a wrong turn because I didn’t recognize anything around me. It’s one thing for a store to shut down and another one to move in, but the fucking buildings get wiped away and there’s some shiny new one all of a sudden. It’s weird because it does kind of look “nice” in a clean way, but it also looks like “shit” in the way that a lot of rich people have no taste - they just want expensive things because they are told the value and the things, like the apartment buildings they move into, are actually hideous and weird looking. But this one building, it looked pretty gross and recently built, but the sign outside said the place was called “Handjob” and I had to see what was going on in it. That’s the new thing - a provocative name. You kick all the Black people out of a neighborhood and then you come in and open a business called “Tubgirl” or “The Reach-around Tavern” or something. But obviously it worked on me since I had to see what the handjob store was all about. I knew it wasn’t going to be like a brothel or something. It’s always done with a wink. It’s kind of weird because they try to be incredibly family-friendly. Like they don’t know what the name of their store means. They open some scented candle store and call it like “Two in the Pink and One in the Back Door” and then act like it’s just “zany” and not something that would have been censored on a hit single when it played on the radio back in the early 2000s. Anyway, I went into the Handjob store to see what they were selling and I guess I was hoping it was a Spencer’s Gifts type of thing where there is stuff to laugh at inside while the minimum wage employee glares at you because it’s obvious you aren’t going to buy anything. But the second I went through the door, it was obviously not a real store. It was empty. For a second my brain tried to rationalize it and I thought “well, I have never seen this store before maybe they’re still moving in” but then I realized that there’s no rule to open their store immediately. The store can take their time actually being set up before beginning business. So they wouldn’t just be open for business while they wait for the stock of whatever they sell to arrive. But it wasn’t just that there was nothing to buy in it, there was nothing. There wasn’t a register or anything. I started thinking about how I couldn’t even think of what a store normally has in it. I just take it for granted that I go into a store and it is normal. Sometimes there are clothing racks or shelfs, but different stores have different things and this place was a ghost town. There was a guy who I thought was an employee. But nothing else.

So I asked this guy what the heck the “Handjob” sold because I have been trying to curse a little bit less. I think people might put up with my negativity if I didn’t swear all the time. And the man who is built like a bouncer says “wishes.” He doesn’t even do the standard friendly customer-service type of “thank you for coming into our store” type of deal. I wonder if he would have done that “may I help you?” if I had spent a bit just looking around the nothingness. Obviously “can I help you?” is fake nice, it’s a way to tell you that they think you are going to steal from them so get something and get the fuck out. But I don’t think he would have even done that fake niceness. He just said the one word “wishes.” And before I can think to ask “why is a store that sells wishes called ‘Handjob’?” or even “what do you mean?” or possibly “if it is possible to actually sell someone a wish, is that even ethical?” it somehow slips out of my lips: “how much?”

That is how I came to give a big man in an empty store called “Handjob” $50. I really can’t explain how he convinced me to give him that much money for what sounded like a scam. But he was selling wishes so maybe he was a wizard. He didn’t look like a wizard, but it’s possible our depictions of wizards in the media are inaccurate though it is also possible wizards do not exist. He could have been a hypnotist although that wouldn’t explain why he was working retail - unless it was his store although if he was a decent hypnotist, he would have hypnotized some poor schmuck into working for him for free. But maybe he was an ethical hypnotist who didn’t want to have a slave so he just came in to his wish-selling store and worked retail knowing he was owner even if nobody else knew he was the owner so he was treated poorly as all retail workers are. Or maybe he told other people he was the owner, but didn’t tell me. If he did that, I am a little offended he kept it from me. But maybe he told people when they started mistreating him so the fact I don’t know if he is the owner is because I was so cordial. Anyway, without $50 and, theoretically, with a wish of some sort, I left the store.

With so many unanswered questions filling my head and too much shame to re-enter a store I just exited to ask them, I headed to cross the street and a car came out of absolutely nowhere and hit me. Hard. As I flew through the air, I could instantly tell that a bone in my leg was broken. I wasn’t sure what else was. And while I knew what a broken bone felt like, I didn’t know what - for instance - a punctured lung might feel like. I had no idea what sort of damage was done to my body by that car hitting me. And as my body headed back down to earth, I thought “man, I wish I had researched about what an automobile hitting a human body does instead of putting it off for another day like everything else in my life” and suddenly my brain was filled with so many statistics and footage of people being hit by cars and anecdotal stories people wrote on Reddit about being hit by a car or seeing someone get hit by a car that I was absolutely overwhelmed, I couldn’t even process all of this new information flooding my brain. It was knocking all the questions about the “Handjob” store out of my head because there simply was not enough room for all of this at once - at least not at the forefront. And as I was beginning to piece some of this research together, I died. It turns out that getting hit super hard by a car is really bad for a human body and it can kill a person.