Me, too. I've got some great backpacks-in-stores stories. Also some great bicycling through the drive-up windows at fast food joints stories.

I doubt that any habitue of this thread hasn't read Sayaka Murata's immortal Convenience Store Woman, but while we're waiting for this saga to play out it wouldn't hurt to re-read it. (It's short.) I'm sure Ms. Murata would second all of SJ's suggestions for for improving clerk behavior.

Get out and straighten!

Me, too.

SJ, do you think there's any chance that the dress/cleanliness you mention actually had something to do with his asking for your backpack?

Clerk thinks, "There's a guy that looks like he might have something worthwhile in his backpack. I'll do the old 'you have to check your pack' routine to give me time to rummage through it while he's shopping."

I haven't read the book Mack mentions, but it's on the list now!

Thx for the update Mr. suited, good to hear you're doing ok, keep it up, always a pleasure to read your stories

I don't usually buy kindle. Books are to me what baseball cards are to others. I love collecting them, but I've simply run out of shelf space. Murata's book is downloading as we speak.

SJ, I'm jealous and hurt that I'm not your only fan, but welcome back bro.

Thanks, Da Nit! I doubt that I'm the best writer on the site, but knowing that someone likes my stuff makes it all worthwhile.

What's next? I will have to look for a job next week if I don't bink any online tournies by Sunday night. Time and money are running out.

Thanks for the kind words, TopGun in VA! No words of wisdom back yet from corporate. I'm not expecting much from a corporation with Terrible as their first name, and I would not be surprised if the complaint webform is outsourced to India or an AI, if it's monitored at all.

I have not read Murata's book, but I have lived the clerk life. I worked for a now defunct regional operation called Store 24, which was owned by Bob Gordon, father of Phish's lead singer Mike Gordon.

Bob had started the store in the late-60's in Boston as a 24-hour head shop. When I worked there as a teenager in the late-80's, Store 24 had around 50 locations scattered around southern New England, and they had devolved into standard convenience stores with slightly better than average selections of rolling papers.

When the movie Clerks came to our local movie theater, some of the boys put on their Store 24 caps and went out to see it together. Sadly, I had to work.

I don't think that he had theft in his heart. I wasn't dressed posh, just neatly. I may have exaggerated that little detail for the letter. I just think that he didn't like the look of me, and he wanted to flex the limited authoritarian muscles he'd been granted by his job at the store, probably on a whim, but I flexed back at him with Big Karen Energy, so it's to be hoped that he learned a lesson.

Also, this is actually the second time I've been asked about the backpack at a Terrible Herbst--so tar my letter with another untruth. The first incident happened last year at another location. In that case, I just turned around and walked out of the store without buying anything, and I've made a point never to go back to that location. I felt that I didn't get my point across there and then, though, thus the letter this time.

Thanks, Cocaethylene! You know, if you just posted savers in the LC/NC with your main account as your milestone post, everyone would like it. You don't necessarily need to post something to rival Goethe.

I'm as surprised as you that I have fans, plural. Nevertheless, let us post a tribute to Lee, Tenacious D's first fan.

Definitely me and Nepeeme jumping through the window and calling hospitals looking for you.

Listen sj, listen to me. Does anyone else here find that sentence funny besides me?
Obviously I'm not a professional writer, so maybe I don't have the tools to properly judge, but don't sell yourself short sj. Sure, there are other good writers here, professionals like bob_24. But comparing yourself to bob is like someone comparing Gaugain to Van Gogh.
Two different styles, but both very good.
You are a very good writer sj.

PS I think Da_Nit and I deserve a finders fee.

Edit: I'm enjoying Murata.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was supposed to be next. It's a perfectly good play, with an odd sort of love polygon going on between its four young protagonists, along with a ton of gaslighting and several nasty pranks--a fairy queen is ensorcelled into falling in love with a man whose head has been changed to a donkey's, so that's fun--and it boasts another play within a play, and thoughts on love and desire and the fickleness of it all, but after several weeks of fruitlessly looking for inspiration, I just can't find a peg on which to hang a review, so I'm going to skip it, knowing if I can't get be interested in doing the piece, it would be unfair to ask you to be interested in whatever lackluster thing I might turn out.

What's interested me lately are two subjects which a lot of us find to be profoundly uninteresting. A while back, I wrote in one of my posts that there are two subjects which a lot of us don't want to hear about from our friends, or our loved ones, or our acquaintances, and those two things are their dreams and their exercise routines.

I intend to write about both subjects here next, and to make an attempt to make them interesting by using a semantic trick that all of us poker players know...that is through levelling. I'm not going to write about dreams and exercise routines directly; I'm going to write about talking about them, i.e. I'm going one level up on them.

If that works, then I will follow up with one more essay on levelling and its effect on obsessive/compulsive thoughts and on addiction, which will be actually one additional semantic level up from thinking about talking about things, if I do it right.

Why You Shouldn't Tell Me About Your Dream

Someone we like or respect wants to tell us about a dream they've had, and we don't want to hear it. Why not?

Currently there is no agreed-upon empirical explanation for the nature of dreams, so this leaves me free to promote whatever hunch I may have which suits my fancy; and here it is: we don't want to hear about other people's dreams because on some level we understand that dreams are the garbage we separate from reality and toss away, and most of us don't want to deal with unanticipated trash from someone we like or respect.

If dreams are reality's rubbish, then what are its viable parts?

We can't know true reality because we can only experience our own self-generated virtual reality, and by that I mean the complete, cohesive, and multidimensional VR universe that our mind creates and maintains solely from interpreting raw electrical impulses and neurotransmitter transfers.

Whether or not a real material world exists is an argument that's been going on for several millennia--including recent hypotheses that we live in a computer generated simulation--but let's just assume for the sake of this argument that a standard material world exists. In that case, most of us are pretty good at building its match in real time in the form of a rational and sensible VR world, and our worlds seem to hold up fairly well to feedback and testing. This is the viable part of reality, as we perceive it.

We are likely good at world-building because we have billions of years of evolutionary management behind us, helping us to get it right enough of the time to survive and even thrive in this universe.

Unfortunately bad data and poorly rendered data exist within any sufficiently complex system, and we are extremely complex creatures. We don't notice the errors in our perceived reality very often, but these errors must occur somewhat frequently.

Why don't we notice more of these artifacts and glitches? Well, it would make evolutionary sense if our minds were set up to recognize and bypass errors in real time, in order to keep us from being distracted, which for many millions of years have led to us possibly falling off a cliff and/or being eaten.

With this in mind, if the data or its rendering doesn't help us to build a cohesive and helpful virtual reality in real time, then it is rejected...but no, rejected is likely the wrong term here. What if, instead, the bad data is stored away for later review during downtime? And why would we do that? Well, for all we know, there may be something important in there that was erroneously tagged as trash, and thus the necessity of a review.

And that's where dreams come in. My hunch is that when we dream, we're sifting through raw, unprocessed, largely erroneous or otherwise flawed data. This raw stuff has not been rendered into standard conscious thoughts and emotions because by its nature it's largely unrenderable. And that's why it's fragmented, fraught with continuity errors and often nonsensical.

Occasionally, certain dreams will give people ideas for books, or songs, or inventions, possibly based on data that was too ingenious or distracting for rendering in real time on the first go-round, but this particular boon seems to be rare. If you've ever kept a dream journal, you'll have found that most of these dream ideas are little better than gibberish. If there's a brilliant one in there, then you've run very well.

Once we review the dream data while asleep and confirm that it's useless, we forget about it. It's wiped--likely not completely destroyed, but it's pushed out of the path of recollection. In this way, our REM sleep cycle can be seen as a nightly defragmentation of our virtual reality database. Occasionally we will have recurring dreams, but that could easily be the result of a recurring glitch.

Sometimes we don't forget our dreams. Sometimes our memories of them make it past our morning cup of coffee. Is a dream that escapes the memory hole an important one? Eh....we might think so, because making sense of data and trying to render it into our reality is our job, it's what we do. In this case, the impulse to understand is strong enough that we decide to buck our defragmentation program and to keep something in memory that's almost assuredly not worth it.

But in almost every case, we can't make sense of it. It's already been tagged as nonsensical. So what do we do? The impulse might be to ask a friend or a loved one for help.

Your friend and/or loved one has already built a virtual profile of you based upon the image you have presented them in the form of relevant and viable data. When you tell them your dream, you are giving them garbage: bad data about you, poorly rendered data, rejected data. You are essentially not being yourself, and most people will find that to be annoying, or possibly disturbing, much like in a fairly common nightmare in which a familiar figure is acting like a complete stranger.

So I'm saying, don't bother.

Solid post.

Very good stuff Suited

As a side-note : I have done over 10k hours of meditation and am also averaging a month yearly (over the past 25 years) of intense silent retreats where we meditate 10h+ a day. Anyhow, at one point during this journey of mine, dreams started to come back. Dreams I had lonnnggg forgotten about. Like dreams of when I was perhaps 8 or 10 years old that, without the help of meditation, there is no chance in hell I would of even had a fragment of (conscious) memory of. But here's the thing : not only did they come back (when my eyes were closed in meditation) crystal clear as if I was again reliving them, but they were slow and deliberate : I was basically redreaming them anew And then they were simply gone, wiped away anew!!! Quite the interesting experience, I tell you

I agree mostly with your assessment of dreams; I also think they're some sort of garbage collection. However, I say don't discard the trash too lightly! We learned about past civilizations from their trash. Investigators go through the trash of their marks to learn what they're about. There is still value in trash!

Yes, and trash talk is always fun!

Suited – I binged the blog a couple of weeks ago (except all the Shakespeare stuff) and when I finally reached the end you were AWOL, great to see you back!
Love the dream theory, it’s very very much counter to my own dream theory, but thought provoking, and cool. A quality arm wave.


This is brilliant, because it jives with my own dream theory 😊 I’ve long had a steadfast belief that our memories don’t actually ‘forget’ anything, like anything at all, ever. So that bizarre, detailed memory dredging which you describe is like a big puzzle piece which just fits perfectly into the way I understand minds, love it.

BTW have you read Sandman, SJ? Very counter your theory to say the least, but an interesting fictional universe + it got some Shakespeare in it; even featuring the man himself!

Thanks uberkuber! It makes me happy to know that some of you enjoyed my attempt to take a **** on everyone's dreams.

Thanks Dubnjoy000! I could write several volumes on what I don't know about meditation, so I appreciate the insights very much.

As a kid I had a recurring Christmas Eve dream for maybe 5 or 6 consecutive December 24ths. I don't recall the details of the dream now, but I remember that by the 3rd or 4th year I was expecting the dream to hit--though I could not recall the dream's details then either until it actually kicked off.

Then on the 6th or 7th Christmas Eve, I finally recalled the details of the dream before I fell asleep, but the dream itself abandoned me that year and never returned, and now you're bored, though I'm fascinated by it, and that's the nature of talking about dreams.

Freud would agree with this. He and his school loved sifting through dreams. It may have helped that they were incredibly well paid for it, and that their patients could fill out a complete 45 minute session just talking about a dream or two, and that might have been their true value of dreams, in dollars and pounds and marks.

Thanks for reading, Rebus! It's a hell of a long thread. Back when it was around 300 posts I tried to go back and read it, and I couldn't get through it.

I agree that we don't completely forget much, if anything; I just think that the tags are removed and the pathways are rerouted to something more relevant.

I haven't read Sandman, but I've read a number of the Gaiman novels and liked them all: Good Omens, American Gods, Neverwhere and Stardust come to mind, off the top of my head.

I haven't read many comics, just Watchmen, a couple issues of Transmetropolitan and most of the early Walking Dead--I started the trade papers for that before it was on TV, believe it or not--and I gave up when it started becoming a slog, around the time the Whisperers showed up.

Back in the late-90's there was also a series called Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President that I enjoyed quite a bit. I'm not Asian-American but something about it spoke strongly to me. I wish I hadn't lost it in a move.

Why I Shouldn't Tell You About My Exercise Routine, Part I

I will note here that the 2+2 Health and Fitness subforum always shows a healthy amount of activity, and it sports (haha) a number of threads with view counts that far exceed what we have here in House of Blogs. We have been gifted as well with an excellent and well-regarded running journal right here in HOB.

With that said, a lot of us still don't want to hear about your exercise routine. Why is that?

My hunch on this is fairly simple, so I need not attempt to wrap my head around a large chunk of metaphysics, like in the dream essay. In this case it's an instance of reverse Schadenfreude: while we like to see our friends and loved ones succeed and do well in most things, that goodwill does not extend, at all, into endeavors at which we ourselves have tried and failed.

A lot of us have failed, after many attempts, to maintain an exercise routine over the long run. Those who have been successful are those who likely enjoy browsing and posting in HAF. Good for you.

I will post, instead, about my failures, and the type of thinking that I believe might have been the cause of them.

I'll start with the early chunk of dubious success that I had in high school, as I had my cigarette habit to thank for my gains. Nope, I didn't quit smoking then; quite the contrary, I smoked more as I exercised more.

Junior year I hung out for the most part with Bill, a stout and genial Irish Catholic boy who was a fellow smoker and a fellow football player. Our high school did not have tryouts for their football team. If you could make it through the hellish fortnight of two-a-day practices in August, you were guaranteed a spot on the team.

This, however, made for a very large bench. Bill and I were denizens of the pine for our junior year. There were four of us who thought of ourselves as third string defensive lineman, and the three times that season in which a game turned into a blowout and garbage time approached found us all sidling over to the coach so that he could see us and pick us out for our 2 or 3 minutes of actual game time. So if I want to be accurate, I was really more like 3.5th string.

Anyways, Bill and I liked to smoke cigarettes, but we couldn't do it during school hours. I had originally transferred over from a high school wherein the entirety of the smoking rules for kids had been as follows: (1) Make sure that you are somewhere outside when you light up, and (2) Do not let your smoking habit interfere with class time. That was it, no one ever batted an eye at little 14-year-old me puffing away in different locations outside the school several times a day.

At the new high school, the rules were more strict. They had one designated student smoking area outside, and kids needed to be either 18 years old, or 16 years old and having their parents' permission to smoke. I viewed this change as being a step or two away from pure Fascism.

Neither Bill nor I wanted our parents to know that we smoked. Bill was a good kid, and my form of rebellion against my parents was to try to see how much I could sneakily get away with without harming my status as a good kid.

By the end of the school day, Bill and I were usually dying to smoke a few cigs, so I came up with the idea of us telling our folks that we would be going to the gym. Bill didn't like to lie to his parents, so he countered with, "Why don't we actually go to the gym, and actually work out, and then smoke as much as we want afterwards?"

It was an inspired idea, and it led to the longest consecutive exercise routine streak of my life, lasting longer than a year. Bill and I did not work very hard at the gym, but--thanks to our nicotine addictions--we were as consistent as hell, and after about a year of working out, on the third game of the football season in my senior year, I found myself lining up as the starting first string defensive tackle, a position that I maintained with some success for the rest of that season.

I also finished that season up to around a half a pack of Marlboro reds a day. Bill, on the other hand, was up to a full pack a day, and he hadn't made it through the two-a-day practices that year, so when it comes to smoking and exercising, your mileage may vary.

I will get into my subsequent failures to maintain an exercise routine and the thinking that led to them in Part II.

Cliff notes: smoking is good for maintaining an exercise routine.

Actually, I find this rather intriguing.

Also, looking forward to Part II of the exercise routine story. I can't stand cigarette smoke but this is a good song:

Solid advice. Just bought a packet.

I’m just passing the gospel of SJ.

bink or job hunting?

It's no coincidence that it marked my longest run of keeping an exercise routine. But I'm glad that I quit the smokes. It's been 7 years.

Thanks Sheep! I'd forgotten that the song had a slow roll in it.

I've extended the deadline to bink until today. More on this later.

Charles Bronson is probably the smoking benchmark of exercise. This is like Mother****ing Charlie Bronson in his mid 50s, in pretty damn good shape and still smoking like a chimney. Apparently he started smoking when he was like 8 years old while working the coal mines. Obviously had some stamina issues though.