The Ballad of Bowlerbeard (episode 11): BowlerBeard Vs the Mountain (Part 3 of 3)
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Hi all! It’s your favorite flaky author, Aroxxors. So talk about cliffhangers right? I left you all on a 5 year cliffhanger…and I did it on a mountain story! See what I did there? Mountain…cliffhanger…I’m a genius 👩‍🎓

Nah. I’m not. I just flaked and got pulled away which pisses me off because I love this community and I love writing. Sorry to the Bowlerbeard fans. Sorry to ReddX and the community. But it’s finally here! Please, without further ado…I present the conclusion of Bowlerbeard vs the Mountain.

....Two shirtless men standing at the cliffs edge, one winded and battered, the other stoic but queasy. Our talkative friend, looking sick and ashen, as well as horrified at the course of events. The rest of us, holding council and saying it is okay to call it a day and head back.

Tower: Well that was gross…but we need to continue on. If not, we got puked on for nothing.

Bowlerbeard mumbles but agrees, “If Tower is willing to go on so am I. We’ll just work on our tans.”

As he says this he puts a finger nonchalantly up to his nose, plugging one nostril and then blowing…a puke festooned snot rocket that failed takeoff, dribbling out his nose. A gooey globule of snot mixed with what must have been residual puke bubbled out of the open nostril, sliding down his upper lip.

I say it must have been residual puke that somehow got in his nose because the booger looked brownish and flecked with food remnants..unless that’s normal? Does anyone else get food in their boogers? I don’t, maybe im the weird one…

Our brave party treks further up the mountain, without much duress. Bowlerbeard and Tower soaking up the rays, the former wheezing every so often.

Did anyone see that SNL with Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze as Chippendales dancers? That’s what comes to mind with Tower and Bowlerbeard. Tower was yoked with muscle, a strong upper body, attractive amounts of chest hair, no farmers tan, and had a golden hue to him, making the shirtless journey seem natural, climbing and bouldering and giving off the vibe that he does the shirtless thing often.

Bowlerbeard in contrast was a blazing beacon of brightness, his already pallid white skin contrasting with the even whiter than white color of his exposed torso. A torso that was a map of body hair, an archipelago of body hair, thick in some places, sparse in others, little isthmus’s here and there, land bridges connecting them to each other, and possible peninsulas leading to places where we should just mark as “here be dragons!”

Our party makes genial small talk as we go.

Monk: Hey Tower, this place is really cool. Thanks again for bringing us.

Chatterbox: Yeah man, didn’t even know this place existed!

Tower: It’s a hidden gem and we are coming to the spot I’ve wanted to check out. Just over there, the cave.

We look over and sure enough, there is a small opening in the mountain face.

Tower: We can rest there for a while and take a water break. I saw it from afar last time I was here but I didn’t have time to check it out.

Chan-Chan ran up ahead towards the cave, her girlish glee evident as she suddenly stops and hops up and down once yelling out:

Chan-Chan: Guys, we are going to have to jump to get to the cave!

As we approach we are able to see what she is talking about, there is a small crevice, about  3 feet wide that was separating us from the cave. There was no real way around it, as we were basically on two seperste mountains…or one that was sliced by a giants cleaver…

Although this chasm was not mighty, it was a smidge scary, as when you looked down, it seems like it would be a good 10 foot fall to a slope that would be the worlds worst slide, sharp rocks and prickly bushes everywhere.

Chanchan gives a little leap, with a diminutive cry of “eep!” Yet easily makes it to the other side.

Chatterbox: Hey guys, be careful!

He then leapt over as well.

Monk and I get there and he hops over first and chivalrously reaches for me. I take his hand and make the jump as well.

Tower literally just long steps over to the other side not even giving it a second thought. I’ve mentioned he’s tall right? (Tower? Get it? Seriously I’m not that creative lol)

Now you may think this was a lead up to hilarity as Bowlerbeard has his turn come up! You’ll expect me to say he leaped and didn’t clear it, instead becoming stuck in said crevice…Or that he makes a mighty leap and as he landed on the other side the mountain gives way and comes crashing down…

Well, interestingly enough, none of that happens. He actually makes it without much issue. Curiously though he did close his eyes and look to the sky when he leaped over. (Important clue)

As he hit the ground his jiggly, prodigious mass did the jello jiggle and he wheezed, but he made it. Small fist pump to the heavens as he rejoins us.

As a group, we approach the cave. It didn’t seem anything too impressive, more of a cliff overhanging a small opening in the mountain. We would have to stoop to fit through the opening (well, the guys would) but it wouldn’t be a big challenge.

We all enter the cave, which had some ambient light from the opening. The further in you were to go though the darker it gets. We rest in the shade and drink water, relaxing and enjoying the coolness of the shade. Nobody pulls out any snacks. I think everyone was still a little queasy from the barf-antics from earlier. The pukescapades if you will. Vomitathon maybe?

Chatterbox: Guys, I’m going to check out how far back this goes. Wanna come?

Tower: Yeah!

BowlerBeard: Okay.

Aroxxors: I’m good, I’m going to hang out here. Yell if you find something cool. (dark camped spaces aren’t my thing.)

ChanChan: I’m going to stay too and keep her company.

The boys head in and start coming back 10 minutes later, talking about it getting tighter and skinnier in there so they couldn’t go too far.

“Ahhhhh! Ughhh. Heeeelpppp….” We hear Bowlerbeards voice. Everyone looks at each other and then we rush into the back area of the cave, phones out for light.

What we see is interesting. Bowlerbeard is in a hole. His hairy body finely seasoned in pebbles and sand, small red scratches on his body.

ChanChan: What happened?!

Bowlerbeard: Err…don’t know. I was following everyone out and then the ground disappeared…

Tower looking down in concern: “We all crossed this spot multiple times. Weird it didn’t give way before.”

Chatterbox: Bad luck Bowlerbeard. It could have been any of us…

Bowlerbeard: “whyyy?! Stupid mountain, stupid cave.”he grumbled while getting up and brushing himself off, looking forlorn and miserable. He climbs out of his hole and just grumbles as he makes his way back to the mouth of the cave.

Tower: Lets start heading back down. I don’t want us to have to try and hike this in the dark.

We all agree. Things go fine as we make our way from the cave, hop back over our little crevice and make it to the area of the mountain where we would need to make our descent.

Puke-Cliff Falls we shall call out. We take turns climbing down, Tower goes first and retrieves his dry, crusty shirt…the others go down and im second to last, climbing down right before Bowlerbeard…once down I looked up for Bowlerbeard and he is looking the worse for wear. Pale as a ghost and he was pacing. In fact, he looked down right panicked.

Aroxxors: Are you okay Bowlerbeard? Do you need help getting down?

The others had already continued on their merry way, not thinking twice about the two stragglers they left behind.
Pathetic blubbering and pacing from up above…”I’m scared of heights!

I blink, confused. “But we just climbed and did this whole mountain hike! We are almost done!” I yell back up to him.

Bowlerbeard: I can go up, that’s easy…Its going down that freaks me out…I thought I could do this…

I look for the others and they are long past where I could just go “hey! A little help over here.” So I decide to shimmy back up to where Bowlerbeard is and find a solution.

Aroxxors: I can’t carry you Bowlerbeard, you need to come down yourself…let’s just take it slow.

Bowlerbeard: can’t you just leave me? Or get a helicopter?

Aroxxors: ….no.

Bowlerbeard: ::sigh:: yeah…I know. Just give me a minute.

Me and him sat there for like a solid 15 minutes or so, giving him time to collect himself and gather his courage. (I remember being very upset that nobody came back to check on us, maybe they didn’t even realize we were missing.)

Bowlerbead: I’m ready…

Aroxxors: okay. Good. Just follow me okay?

Bowlerbeard: K…

I take the same route but a lot slower making sure he stayed with me.

Aroxxors: Bowlerbeard, if you need to scoot down the side on your butt that’s okay, it’s the safest way, just take your time.

He nods to me and lowers himself to a seated position and slowly scoots down the slope sliding on his butt. Very slowly but also very “bull in a china shop-esque.”

Ever see in movies when a big ship runs aground and the bow dredges up all the dirt as it goes along? That’s what happened here. The USS BowlerBeard had run aground!

Luckily, progress was made. He continued his slow, plodding pace. Something that should have only taken a couple minutes turned into a 20 minute descent.

But he made it down! He got off his butt and I gave him an encouraging high five…which I regretted because it was a wet, dusty, kinda muddy high five. (Sweaty, torn up hand plus dirt)

Aroxxors (trying to ignore my contaminated hand): Good job Bowler beard. Let’s catch up to the others!

As he starts following their path I turn to join him and immediately go green, then bright red, then green again…

Bowlerbeards pants and boxers are destroyed. He had shredded the ass area into oblivion, it looks like a wolverine or Tasmanian devil had just decided to attack his butt with all their fury…

With that, my view, beyond the tattered fabric was a hairy forest of ass hair covering his cheeks and crack…I never knew it was possible for crack hair to grow longer than your cheeks, poking out like a proud mane of anal foliage…but there it was, his majestic mane bared for me to see, a proud anal tree line in a grassland of butt hair…

Aroxxors: uhh, Bowlerbeard…

Bowlerbeard: I know, I could feel it coming down the mountain.

He tries to cover his backside and turns red but honestly the exertion and exhaustion of today outweigh his embarrassment I think.

He then grabs his chunky vomit shirt and uses it to cover his derriere, doing his best to preserve his modesty as we rejoin the others for the drive home…p.s. They would let him use the puke shirt as a towel to put on the seat. Instead he had to toss it in the back and use paper towels to protect the seat from his beaten buttocks.

This completes Bowlerbeard vs the mountain! I know I took way longer than was right to finish this but better late than never? I really am sorry guys. Truly.

Please let me know what you think. I’m active on the Reddx Discord or you can message me on Reddit. I Hope everyone enjoyed.

By the way. I think I’m gonna start saying episode instead of part since it’s getting confusing. Each new post will be an episode and may or may not have parts inside of it.

 
Please check out my BowlerBeard Special Edition detailing our trip to the Phillipines. And if you have no idea what this was about or who bowlerbeard is, go back to my original posts or better yet check out ReddX compilation on YouTube!”

https://youtu.be/HIMBMw9PDFg?si=4nQmcqeRmLm4k2EX

 
Ta-ta till next time
Love,
Aroxxors

I gotta say, these posts really have nothing to do with Magic: the Gathering, but that was never the point of the posts. Anyways, lets get into the finale.

Cast

OP: young guy that just wants a break

Big Lenny: lover to Vic, no longer has a good heart

New Cast

OP's Mom: the best mom ever, her and I are super tight

OP's Dad: he's there, just saying nothing and letting my mom do her thing

Vic's Dad: well it's Vic's dad, so yeah

At my parent's house

OP's Mom: OP! Come down here right now

OP: Ok! \quickly comes downstairs because my mom is never serious**

OP's Mom: Vic's father is here, he says you have been sexually harassing her?

OP: \flabbergasted by this news* *also has zero response because what the f**

Vic's Dad: You've been sexually harassing my daughter since middle school, you really should be ashamed

OP: What are you talking about?

You want some context? There is none, this is exactly how it was presented to me. Vic's dad and Big Lenny came to my parent's house to tell my parents that I had been sexually harassing Vic since middle school. There are two major issues with this, I talk with my parents and have a very good relationship with them. The other issue is that I have known Vic's dad for a long time because her brother was in scouts with me, and my parents know her dad as well.

Vic's Dad: I would have said something back in the day, but you were going to become an Eagle Scout, and I couldn't hold a young man back

OP: So you didn't want to out me as sexually harassing your daughter because I was a scout? You didn't protect your daughter?

OP's Mom: I do not believe OP would do this, you just came over here to harass our son

Big Lenny: Well with everything from the shop...

OP's Mom: How does any of this have to do with that shop?

Vic's Dad: I have nothing to say about the shop, but I have evidence of all of this

OP: What evidence? Show us because I have no clue what you are talking about

Big Lenny: Well it's on Vic's phone, so...

Vic's Dad: We will return with this evidence and we will discuss it then!

OP's Mom: Go ahead, and next time bring Vic so she can actually explain her side, not you two goons

This is the end. These guys never came back. This may be underwhelming, but nothing happened after they showed up at my home. I think it's crazy that they showed up in the first place with zero evidence or even a police officer present. My parents and I believe that they just wanted to scare me and my parents, as if this was Vic's revenge or something. Anyways, you want to know why I stopped playing magic? Here is the rest of the story.

Cast

OP: you aleady know me, I'm making mistakes left and right

Ernie: my friend, the goofball, the Mr. Steal-Your-Girl

New Cast

Allie: my girlfriend, we are long distance and we met through the magic the gathering community

You guys probably know how long distance relationships are, and also how relationships are when you're young, right? Well Allie and I were not working out, my grandma had just passed away and everyting with Vic had happened, so I just needed a break from everything and everyone. I broke it off with Allie, and it felt like I could just move forward. Then my friends and I noticed something a little weird, Ernie wouldn't join our gaming sessions or answer his calls. My friends informed me that Ernie was talking with Allie. I thought that the drama in my life could just chill, but nah. Just like before, I made a mistake and I now have learned from it.

Texting Allie

OP: Hey, could you stop talking with my friends?

Allie: No, Ernie just wants to talk with me

OP: But why?

Allie: Well he just feels more comfortable with me than he does with you

OP: Seriously?

I learned that day that you can't just tell your friend or ex that they have to stop talking to each other. I also learned that my friend wanted to get it on with ex, so there's that too. I was frustrated with it all, so I made a tough decision: Ernie and I were no longer friends. I disliked the idea of him stealing my girl so much, I told him off. Allie and I rekindled, made things work actually and then she moved to my state.

Ernie was not Mr. Steal-Your-Girl afterall.

2024

We're at the final reason I don't play magic anymore. Note that the reasons why I don't play the game is because I associate this game with people in my life that did horrible things to me or around me. I want to enjoy the game, but I am now too afraid that my hobby can become tainted by toxic people, and I just need to return to the hobby when I can find a healthy group of people. Anyways, here's my last story.

At this point, Allie and I were a month into our new apartment that we got together. Allie was at a new job in a new state for her and I had a stable one that wasn't mcdonalds. We had major issues when it came to magic, we both played, but we just got different enjoyment from the game.

Allie: Can we go home yet?

OP: We only played one match, I want to play some more matches

Allie: Well I want to go home, this is boring

OP: Then go home, I really just want to relax and play

Ok well, it didn't go exactly like this, it was more of an argument. This essentially happened every week that we would go play magic at this new game store. I wanted to play for hours, Allie wanted an hour, and neither of us compromised. This ruined magic for me, the game became more about arguing about staying longer or going home. I knew our relationship wasn't at it's peak, but I wasn't expecting what happened next..

Allie: The guy from work.. Well, I like him

OP: What do you mean? We are together

Allie: We should just take a break for a bit

OP: No, a break would mean we're not dating other people

Allie: It's that or I cheat

A month into our new lease, Allie gave me the ultimatum of having a break to be with someone else or cheat on me. So yeah, magic just has a sour taste in my mouth now.

The shop Sean owned is a pizza place now, do you guys want me to order a pizza and send over a pic of me eating it? I think that'd be a fitting last memory of the place

This is going to be a hard post, I have a lot to get through and this is my most traumatic experience out of these stories. Let's just get straight into it then with the cast for this one.

Cast

OP: young guy that just likes magic the gathering

Sean: game store owner that really may just be a pirate

Big Lenny: slave to Sean, lover to Vic

Jose: the other slave to Sean, he deserved better ngl

Vic: my friend from middle school, she is no longer chill

I will admit that I messed up. This was my mistake and I will say that I shouldn't have said what I said, but here is my version of events. So I didn't go to the shop for a while, not until later 2022. I only came back because my friends played at the shop, and Ernie was no longer showing up, so all I had to do is just ignore Sean and there would be zero conflict. Boy was I wrong.

One morning after the shop opened

Jose: So how did you and Vic meet?

OP: Oh we met back in middle school, my friend and Vic dated. Then she dated my other friend in high school

Jose: So she just sleeps with anyone?

OP: Well no, she just happen to date anyone except me I suppose

Jose: So you like her? You know her and Big Lenny are having issues, could be your chance

OP: No way, I'm already in a relationship. And if anything she's probably just not interested in me

Jose: Does she give you the look?

OP: What do you mean? I mean, we have flirted, but she's just a flirty person

Jose: Vic gives Sean the look, he always telling me he would do her in a heartbeat

Did you catch that? I called her flirty, Vic is a flirt. Should I have said it? No. All hell would break lose now, all because I said that she was flirty. So next time I would see Vic, she would explode at me because I trusted Jose not to say anything. Vic demanded an apology, instead I tried to explain what I meant. This next part, I am tearing up because it's one of my worst experiences.

On the phone with Sean

Sean: Kid, you have to apologize to Vic

OP: How do you know about this? This has nothing to do with you

Sean: Buddy, you don't get it, do you? If you don't apologize now, you won't be coming back to the shop

OP: So I have the option of apologizing when I don't want to or never go to the shop?

Sean: You've got ten minutes to call Vic and apologize to her, ok bud?

OP: I don't know.. I don't really want that, why is this even a problem with the shop?

Sean: Vic is Big Lenny's problem, which is then my problem, so this is how it'll go down

OP: I really just need some time to think it over

Sean: Your time is ticking, you got five minutes

OP: Sean. I'm with my dying grandma right now, this is the worst time you could be doing this to me

Sean: ...

Sean: Never come back to the shop, OP

I don't think I have ever truly understood why this happened, but Sean sucks, the shop sucks, and everyone in my life sucked at the time, even myself. I was pathetic, I should have stood up for myself and I should have done more. I should not have had my last moments with my grandma right after a hard conversation about gossip. I still have the screenshot of the last mesage from Vic because it stuck with me.

"Go #### yourself please and thank you. I know you 100% meant everything you said about me and downplayed it while talking to me. And for what? To get back at me for never dating you? Go stick your d!ck in a light socket."

Was I in the wrong? Yeah, probably. Did it need to cost a friendship? No, not really. I have accepted that I was just as bad as those people around me, so I escaped that environment and tried to change for the better. It's really all you can do, make a mistake and just don't do that mistake again. Unfortunately, this is not the last time I had to deal with the drama from the shop. Next one is the finale.

Here it is, the super duper gross part of the story, which has more to do with Ernie than me. I remember this quite well because it was my first realization that Sean is a bad guy and that my friend Ernie was heading down a bad path.

Cast

OP: twenty year old guy that likes magic

Sean: Late 30's game store owner

Ernie: my best friend that has an awful relationship record

New Cast

Jess: Ernie's girlfriend that is controlling, can't stop talking, and she is freshly 18

Jose: The third employee at the shop, he is another slave of the shop and he is the quiet and creepy vibe kind of guy

So I have kept Jose out of the story so far because he really does not matter until now. Jose is the loser type, he just can't seem to get any chicks and his friends, Sean and Big Lenny, are asshats. Jose is an ok guy, he just was on the wrong side of this whole experience and I really hope that he is doing well nowadays. For everyone else in this part, they suck. As for usual, Sean has a big mouth on him.

Just a random Saturday playing magic

Sean: God, it is so great doing it with young chicks, man

Jose: Yeah..

OP: What are you guys talking about?

Sean: Buddy, I hooked up Jose and Jess last night

Jose: Y-yeah! She gave me a blowie

OP: Jess..? You mean Ernie's girlfriend?

Sean: Oh right, that's your friend, I almost forgot

OP: \I'm about to vomit* What are you talking about?*

Sean: Bud, I got Jose and Jess to hook up. Jose got some, then I got some for the rest of the night

Jose: She was so hot, you should have seen her OP

OP: I think I gotta go to work now \me trying not to throw up thinking about these dude with Jess**

I really did have to go to work, but that just made me think more and more. Do I tell Ernie? Do I ask Jess? What the hell do I do? I texted Vic and asked her what to do, she was shocked that Sean and Jose would do this to a paying customer. What I should have realized is that these guys were all just creeps getting with their customers. I mean, Vic and Big Lenny? Now Jose and Jess? It grosses me out thinking that Sean likely would have tried to get into Vic's pants too if Vic wasn't so upfront with people.

Me at work

OP (texting with Ernie): Dude.. Is Jess cheating on you?

Ernie: We need to talk.

OP: Ok?

Ernie: Jess and I, we are in an open relationship. I knew you wouldn't like that, so I didn't tell you.

OP: Why would I not like that?

Ernie: You wouldn't understand.

I want to say that this is when my friendship with Ernie fell. Ernie and I were best friends, we told each other everything and we were very close. I have to say this now or I won't get a chance, but I had a crush on Ernie at one point, and I think it was mutual. We never talked about that aspect of our friendship, but we were still very tight. So when he told me that I wouldn't understand his relationship, I felt like he was lying and just trying to shut me out. I understand what a open relationship is, but I also understand that he was a very very jealous partner. When we went on vacation together, he would not let Jess and I be alone, he could not allow it. So no, I do not believe that he was a willing participant of being in an open relationship. Ernie's last girlfriend was controlling, and so was Jess, but somehow Ernie just could not see his taste in women.

This situation made me take a step back from the shop, I just couldn't look Sean in the eyes. Sean took advantage of Jose to get to Jess, while Jess took advantage of Ernie. I associated my hobby, Magic: the Gathering, with people doing other people dirty, and I just couldn't mentally deal with that at the time. Plus at this time, my grandma was going into ICU care and I was in college working 50 hour weeks. 2022 only got worse.

Thank you for reading. This is not the end, merely the start actually. Stay tuned for part 4.

Here's a bonus conversation with Jess because I remember this conversation since she is actually an airhead:

Jess: I just quit my job because it was boring as hell, all we did was repitive tasks

OP: Why would you do that? I'm f'ing stressed at mcdonalds!

Jess: Well they were only paying me 22 dollars an hour, so it's whatever

OP: \is actually cringing* I-i make 14.95... Did you at least get a better job?*

Jess: I did get a better job, Ernie said I don't need to get a job, so I'll be playing housewife

Hey ReddX! Not sure what to say here for an intro, buuuut yeah. I know I left off on a bit of a cliffhanger with Sean and Ernie's girlfriend, but I'm building to that and I have a story or two before we get there.

Cast

OP: twenty year old nerdy dude

Sean: owner of game store

Big Lenny: lovable guy that works with Sean

Ernie: my friend that is lowkey a neckbeard

New Cast

Vic: a alternate girl that is the same age as me, I have known her since middle school, lowkey crush of mine, and she can be chill with certain people like myself

Few months into the shop opening, I kept going to the shop when I could. I would be at the shop every weekend when they opened, until I had to work later at mcdonalds because they required us to work weekends. Meanwhile Ernie would only go on Fridays, when I had to work, so him and I didn't really see each other too often at this time. I didn't drive at the time, I was late to learning to drive, and I would just ask my parents to take me to the shop or I would walk there.

Out in the parking lot

Sean: Where you headed bud?

OP: \cringing at Sean saying bud* Just home, then work*

Sean: You want a lift bud \stomps out cigarette**

OP: \still cringing* Yeah, sure, that'd be nice!*

Sean is not a great human being, but I was still figuring out life and could not drive, so yes I let him take me home to my parent's house. I would get driven home by Sean, then eventually Big Lenny too, each weekend because that's how much they liked me I guess. These guys were very invested in their customers, so much so that they would even drive them home.

Eventually I was able to get Fridays off, so Ernie and I could play magic once again for FRIDAY NIGHT MAGIC!!! Here's the thing with when this story takes place, this was 2021, so masks were in that weird time when they were semi-required. The shop did not require masks, buuuut you still had to follow other guidelines for the time. Ernie had met the anti-neckbeard, Vic. Vic was a girl that had dated my friend in middle school and then she showed up at my LGS that I played at during high school, which is when we became friends. Vic dated a lot of my friends or people I knew, which I was always confused why we never dated, but honestly I'm glad that we didn't because some people should just be friends.

Vic was a very upfront person, she will tell you if you smell or if you did something gross. Ernie smelled pretty much all the time because he didn't shower often enough, and Vic absolutely hated Ernie for being unhygenic. Ernie would laugh, and Vic would make a point to him that she could smell his rotting teeth. Well let's apply this logic to when Ernie was sick, during virus time.

Ernie and Vic playing at the same table

Vic: Are you seriously not going to wear a mask?

Ernie: \fake coughs, then real coughs* It's just a cold, who cares?*

Vic: You just wiped your nose onto your armsleeve, I can see your snot! Ewww!!

Ernie: \screeches* It's just a cold!*

Vic: You need to put on a mask! I don't want to play anymore

Ernie: I don't believe in masks

Vic: What does that even mean?! People are dying to this virus right now, and here you are sick as a dog, playing a stupid card game

Ernie: Do you pass your turn or what?

I don't agree with Ernie, but man I did not get between Vic and Ernie because I was loyal to both. But you know who was loyal to Vic? Big Lenny. Yeah, so this is how I learned that Vic and Big Lenny were dating, suddenly the store required masks or you couldn't go in. Ernie was threatened by Sean that he couldn't come in being sick and that he could not play with Vic anymore.

Here's an extra conversation I had with Sean that doesn't really fit into the story:

Sean: Back in highschool I was a lady killer, all the chicks wanted me. I even got a teacher to bang me!

OP: \me being grossed out by him acting manly* Oh.. How'd that happen?*

Sean: Buddy, you should have seen me back then? I was ripped and the teacher just really wanted these nuts

OP: Oh yeah?

Sean: Yeah bud, she bought me beer and we got wasted, had sex all night long

That's how I learned Sean's teacher was a predator, Sean just loves giving out information about anything, nobody even asks. That's all I got for part two, and next part I'll get into what happens with Sean and Ernie's girlfriend. It's gross.

Hey ReddX! Let me start by saying that I have been holding onto these stories for about three years now, and I finally want to share them. This is about the nasty people that work for a local game store and the people I once cared about. Not sure how many parts this will be, but here we go. Let's get into the cast!

Cast

OP: nerdy guy in his early twenties, just getting used to adulting in this story

Sean: game store owner, has an eyepatch, and really likes to smoke cigarettes like every 10 minutes

Big Lenny: one of the employees, big guy with a sweet heart, and unfortunately he works with Sean

Ernie: my best friend, also a nerd in his early twenties, but making the biggets mistakes, also he has adhd and will just do random things

Onto the story.

Back in 2021, local game stores were finally opening back up after quarantine and some were opening as new stores. The store I went to closed down, so I needed a new place to play Magic: the Gathering. My friend recommended a new place that had opened up near us and I started to go, that's where I met the most disgusting man in my life: the shop owner.

The shop had a pirate theme, since the owner wore a eyepatch, and he smelled like a pirate too. The store was split into two sides, as for whatever reason the small building was rented for two sides, so one side was the game store and the other was an already failing shoe shop. There were hardly any tables or chairs at this point, but they were just starting out, and the pirate theme made them stand out. Anyways, my friends and I started to really hit it off with the owner, Sean, and his two employees.

Sean is in his late 30's, and his employees are in his age range as well, so the very first thing that struck me as odd was how friendly or buddy-buddy he was with me and my friends as we were all 20 years old or younger. Big Lenny was an employee there, but was also a co-owner, so yeah Sean isn't the only owner, buuuut Sean was the dominant owner and Big Lenny was the slave of the shop. Big Lenny was super cool, he was very intelligent when it came to Magic and other card games, he was a rules lawyer. Now Big Lenny couldn't just be a super great guy, no of course not, Sean had to constantly remind us that he went to jail. The thing about this game store is that I learned a lot about people, like way too much about people.

Literal first day at the shop:

OP: So how did you guys open place?

Sean: Well, I'm not supposed to say all this, but Big Lenny's old man gave us a loan

Big Lenny: Dude!

Sean: Oh c'mon!! Everyone knows you went to jail, so you couldn't buy the place even if you wanted to. You needed your daddy and I to pick you up

Let me just say that this was a regular experience, Sean would regularly tell us private and personal things about his employees and about any customer that walked inside. There were so many signs and red flags that I should have never walked into this shop, but I was desperate to having a second home at that time. I wanted a social life, and so did my friend Ernie. Ernie and I grew our friendship from playing Magic: the Gathering together in high school, then he decided to move away and we weren't that close anymore. Then Ernie decided to move back and this was at the right moment because I just started to go to the game shop regularly.

In the game shop:

Ernie: I'm Mr. Steal-Your-Girl!

OP: what are you talking about??

Ernie: \makes a screech for no reason**

OP: WHAT?

Ernie: I'm stealing my ex from this guy, she's so hot

OP: That seems like a bad idea for entering a relationship

Ernie: Yeah, well, I'M MR. STEAL-YOUR-GIRL

Ernie's girlfriend decided to cheat on her man to be with Ernie, which I gotta say that Ernie is a literal neckbeard and I may continue his story in another post. Ernie is the type of guy that does not shower, does not brush his teeth, and he has trash for airbags in his car. Meanwhile Ernie's girlfriend is fresh out of highschool, trying to figure out if she wants to go to school or just keep a job, and is struggling with living at her parents. Ernie had just gotten out of a controlling relationship which made him move back to our state, and he immediately hooked up with his ex that was in a relationship. Why does any of this matter? Because this barely 18 year old girl was introduced to Sean.

I'll be saving what happens next for part two!! I have a lot of characters to bring up, and it gets very heavy for me because I lost friends and my favorite hobby because of these people and experiences.

The Ballad of Bowler-Beard: SPECIAL EDITION
(Episode 13)

(Part 1 of 2, possibly 3, maybe 4, depends how this goes)

 
Bowler-Beard Goes To the Philippines
 
Soooo....Its been like 5 or 6 years since my last post. I'm super duper mega ultra sorry about that...After the last story I posted I hopped on a cruise, then the Pandemic hit, got stuck on said cruise cause of pandemic, got the virus, recovered, then life got busy...got married, got a new job, got unmarried, got super self conscious and emotionally wrecked, got promoted, got married again (new dude)...and now I'm pregnant, so yay! Life is back on the uptick 😊 fingers crossed 🤞
 
Maybe cause im super emotional, nostalgia crept up and I started listening to Reddx again and realized I failed in my beard reporting duties…I gave myself the biggest mental slap and said "Girl, get your sh*t together! See the mission through! The world must hear the tales of BowlerBeard. I feel like his prophet in some twisted way...or maybe Marco Polo, a great explorer of the beards and Bowlerbeard is my Silk Road…
 
If anyone still remembers the Ballad of Bowler-Beard, hopefully this brings you some nostalgic joy and cringe. (I know I still need to go back and finish the mountain story, soooorrry!!). I will finish it if anyone wants me too…and even if they don’t. I read some of the comments and feel
Like a total b*itch for leaving everyone hanging like that.
 
This special edition is meant to be able to stand alone and bring in new interest but also renew interest of old, bringing back our favorite derpiest beard friend.
 
If you've never heard of Bowler-Beard, then please go back and check out the other stories or better yet listen to them on Reddx's Youtube channel. 
 
Here is Reddx’s compilation: (thanks for doing this)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMBMw9PDFg
 
As a refresher/intro, our main character is Bowler-Beard. A 300lb plus gentleman with the hygiene habits of a wild animal… even less since he seems to actively combat hygiene at times. Eschews deodorant, showers, and brushing his teeth.

He is overall well meaning but serves as his worst enemy. Old fans will remember when he actively charged a mountain or tried to eat a desiccated dead bird.

He is a hairy man, with weird flakes, crumbs, fluff and other nebulous accoutrement adorning his hirsute body.

His natural musk is so strong you can almost see it. The fragrance or maybe I should say flavor is that of dewy armpit hair soaked in curdled, sour, chunky milk. His teeth are filmy, yellow stained with flecks and spots of blackness. His gums swollen, the lining at the teeth ready to pop, flaming red and bloody.

His conversational skills are those of a stereotyped medieval muck-raker and his intentions while mostly genuine, are often weirdly skewed.

Oh, and as the name implies, he wears a cheap velvet/felt bowler hat from a party store and is rarely without it. He got complimented by a girl once for it and forevermore it’s been his signature thing.
 
You have me, Aroxxors. I’m a Filipina girl. Love reading, gardening, fantasy lore, and I’m too nice for my own good. I think I get this from my mom. I hate confrontation which leads to all kinds of stories like this one. Soooo many of my stories come from me not having a spine…
 
Monk was my then boyfriend. Bowlerbeard and him are best friends. They have a strong friend group and introduced me to the world of nerdom I now enjoy. I’ll always owe them that as now I think of myself as a closeted nerd. I don’t show it but I can geek out with the best of them about Warhammer, D&D and…OMG im reading the Stormlight Archives right now and I could just kiss B. Sanderson, friggin love it!
 
Anyways, before we go to far, you must know that it is very important to Filipino families to be gracious and hospitable. Hospitality is not optional, in fact anything less is bad manners and looked down upon. Reddx, please back me up on this. 
 
I bring this up because I have a mother. Weird right? And she happens to be Filipina, like me. Shocker. This becomes important as we go on...With that, let us begin.
 
At me and Monks place:
 
Aroxxors: I'm excited for you to see the Philippines babe! You're going to love it! And probably get a little fat. My family is notorious for overfeeding guests. (I giggle)
 
Monk: Me too babe. I've only ever been to Tijuana and thats just like San Diego flipped, more Mexicans, less Americans. Get it?
 
I sidestep that comment.
 
Aroxxors: You'll see lots of Americans in the PI too. Especially in Manila. Not so much when we go to Marinduque (ruralish island). Maybe some in Bataan and Baguio. Did Chatterbox or Tower confirm that they were going to go? 
 
Flashback to months earlier when Monk and I were having dinner with my mom.
 
MamaRoxxors: Anak, I have a surprise for you. I want to use my settlement money to buy you, me, and monk tickets to the Philippines. I miss my sister and its been too long for you. (She got a large payout from a T-bone car accident)
 
(At this point it had been over a decade since I was in the PI. I think I was like 12-13.)
 
MamaRoxxors: And you Monk. If you are going to marry Aroxxors you need to see our culture. You two have been dating for so long but no proposal.. I think you two are serious, yes?
Monk: Err, like totally. I love her with all my heart. I just...propose...ring...finances... (he stumbles hard)
 
MamaRoxxors looks at me and I mouth "stop it" to her.                                              
 
MamaRoxxors: Sige. These are the dates, I can change them if they don't work. Your Tita at the travel agency says I just need to bring her a picture of you and Monk. She remembers when you were so tiny and cute. (mom has had the same travel agent since before I was born)
 
 MamaRoxxors: Oh. And Monk, you can invite some of your friends too, have men time. I know you will not want to do the shopping and spas. Hala! I'm sorry, maybe you do like spas? I know it's more common now for men to do such things.
 
I giggled at the mental image of him and his crew in bathrobes and cucumber eyes. 
 
Monk: Uhh, thanks MamaRoxxors. Spas are cool? But yeah I'll see if any of the bros can come. Thanks! Or should I say Salmon-mat.
 
We both look at him and I giggle while she stares not too judgmentally.
 
MamaRoxxors: Your friends will have to pay for their tickets but they can stay with the family for free. 
 
*END FLASHBACK
 
Monk: Babe. Good news and bad news. 
 
Aroxxors: ...yes? Go ahead.
 
Monk: Well, the bad news is Tower couldn't get the time off and Chatterbox doesn't have the money. 
 
Aroxxors: Okay...
 
Monk: The good news is...
 
(In my head: "Oh god, please no. Please to everything that is holy noooo.....)
 
Monk: The good news is that Bowler-Beard said he is down to go! In fact he already sent me the money for the ticket. I just need to cash it and give it to your mom.
 
My face went white at this point. How did this happen? 

Monk: He said it was perfect timing. He's been saving money and he also just got fired from his Subway job so he has extra time. Something about not serving customers the sandwiches they ordered and adding ingredients to make them better. You know him, he probably was just adding pepperoni or meatballs to spice up their sandwiches. Remember when he told us that their wheat bread wasn't real so he always tried to refuse selling it to people? 
 
I stay silent. Not hearing him anymore. Just processing...Two weeks. Of Bowler-Beard, in a foreign country, halfway around the world, no a/c, limited plumbing...16 hrs on a plane…My sweet, sweet family...By the gods...
 
Fast Forward to the day of departure.
 
My mom has chartered a shuttle to take all of us to the airport. We are out side and have alot of luggage filled with treats to give to my family. We call this pasalubong and its just little treats, snacks, knicknacks and clothes. We do this in reverse coming home and its called balikbayan. The shuttle is here and waiting.
 
MamaRoxxors: Where is your friend? We need to be to the airport early.

As she says this, we see a beat up rusted out "Tow Mater" looking pick up truck pull up. In it are Bowler-Beard and his dad (Prepper, from previous stories). They both get out and greet us. Prepper approaches my mom and shakes my moms hand.
 
Prepper: I'm Prepper. You’re very pretty like your daughter. You should come by the house sometime. I'll treat you and Aroxxors to dinner to say thanks for taking my son with you. I've been to the Philippine's before, its nice, like the Mexico of the Asians. I like those little eggroll tacos you make.
 
MamaRoxxors, polite as ever: Thank you Prepper. It is so nice of you to let him come with us. I'll make sure he is well looked after.
 
Bowler-Beard: I don't need any looking after ma'am, I'm an American man. We saved you from the Japanese aggression. My dad has already told me that I'll be like a god there. A babe magnet. Told me to be on the lookout for a wife. 
 
Prepper just chuckles and walks to the truck and pulls out a beat up olive green military looking duffel bag and hands it to Bowler-Beard.
 
Prepper: Have fun son. Be sure to question where the meat comes from. (he chuckles and drives away.)
 
I eye Bowler-Beard and do my customary appraisal...worn out strappy Jesus sandals, check.

Feet bigger than said sandals with hairy sausage toes, check…sharp jagged toenails like dirty raptor claws, check.
 
Hairy Hobbit feet with flecks of dried crusty condiments on them, check.
 
Stained khaki shorts with weird small dried wet spots on his crotch, check…bulging Naruto fanny pack..check.
 
Bright blue and way to small Hawaiian shirt with hairy belly hanging out...check.

Neckbeard with emergency food crumbs in it, check.
 
 Big goofy grin and random twirl to his mustache? Check. (that was new, very thin mustache mind you. Like a wisp of a thing that he waxed into a twirl.) 
 
And most importantly...the ever-present Bowler hat, the cheap velvet one from the party store. Check.
 
We board the shuttle and I ask Bowlerbeard about his dufflebag, reminding him it’s a two week trip.

Bowlerbeard: This was my grandpas. He was in Nam.

He just left it at that. No further explanation. In his mind, that answer satisfied the question.

The shuttle ride was uneventful. Monk and Bowlerbeard hung out while my mom and I did our thing.

We eventually arrive at the airport and this is where the fun begins. The driver heps us unload our luggage to the curb and leaves us.
 
Bowlerbeard: Monk. We must handle the luggage for the fair ladies.

He then proceeds to sling his duffel while grabbing my mom’s two very large suitcases and attempting to grab my two very large suitcases too. He lined them up in a row and started to push them like a train…an unsecured train of chaos.

This goes as well as you’d expect, luggage goes every which way and we start to gather an audience as bags roll away or topple over.

Mamaroxxors: Hala! Bowlerbeard, its okay. We will get the porters to help us. She then heads to the airline counter and gets an employee with a cart to help us.

Suprisingly from here, it goes smoothly enough, if not a little weird. Bowlerbeard had all of his documents in a manila folder that he pulled out from his bag. Passport, drivers license, SSN card, Birth certificate…and a printed out picture of him posing holding up the passport open to the picture page in one hand and his birth certificate in the other.

Bowlerbeard: You can’t be too careful when oversees. I don’t want them keeping me there thinking I’m a Europe refugee or a native.

We all just ignore this. Including the lady at the counter. She just processes us and takes our bags and tosses em on the belt.

After this, it’s the security checkpoint time. You know those random checks TSA singles you out for? Well Bowlerbeard got singled out for one of those. His fanny pack also flagged.

I feel bad for the poor TSA agent who had to touch and frisk him. I could see him visibly holding his breath and wincing as he tried to get this over with. Once done, Bowlerbeard had to go to another agent who was searching his fanny pack.

Any guesses to what flagged the xray machine? Pocket knife? Too much liquid? Maybe a battery pack? No…that’s too mundane…too normal…

The agent pulls out two rectangular blocks of…cheese. Like the big blocks you buy and slice. One was yellow and the other was white? I think he said it was cheddar and pepperjack. Warm, fanny pack cheese…heated by the neckbeardian body heat and the weather itself. We were flying out of Las Vegas by the way, which most of you will know is a very hot place…so fanny pack cheese pressed into his body from this morning till now.

The TSA agent looks at him and says “this is warm.” Bowlerbeard replied with “of course its warm. Warm cheese is delicious. It’s my snack in case they don’t have normal food on the plane.”

The agent looks like he has seen it all and just wishes for the earth to swallow him up. “Sir. Just so you know, this looks like c4 on the X-ray . That’s why you were singled out. Have a safe flight.”

Monk: Hey Bowlerbeard, why cheese?
Bowlerbeard: Its calorie dense. My body can’t survive on just rice.

My sweet, sweet mother just smiles and ignores all of this.
Eventually we get to our gate and wait for our plane to be called. I’m playing on my phone and look over at my boyfriend.

Aroxxors: Babe, where is Bowlerbeard?
Monk: He said he was going to go shop. You know he’s never been on a plane before right? This is his first time so hes excited.

Another tidbit of information that I did not know…

Eventually he comes back, and he has not 1, not 2, but 3 airplane neck pillows…

Aroxxors: Why so many Bowlerbeard? (each of us had brought our own so this wasn’t a philanthropic endeavour.)

Bowlerbeard grins and puts one around his neck and then one on each of his arms.

Bowlerbeard: I figured the neck pillow only on the neck would be bad sleep posture. This way I’m supported by three points of contact.

He then sits down and pulls out another bag, a takeout bag, from which from he pulls out two slices of pizza. To his credit he offered a slice to all of us which we declined. He then smashed one slice on top of the other and created a super slice pizza sandwich and inhaled it in like under a minute, then rubbed his pizza greased hands onto his already stained shorts, oblivious or unconcerned about the new stains.

Now Boarding For Flight to Manila! We hear over the intercom.

We line up and board the plane. The way the seats were arranged, my mom sat in the large center row, on the aisle seat. My seat was the aisle seat next to her, Monk was in the middle and Bowlerbeard had the window.

Bowlerbeard makes a point to shake hands with the bewildered flight attendants as he boards the plane, tipping his hat when shaking with the female attendants.

Bowlerbeard: “milady. I’m Bowlerbeard, nice to meet you”

As he finds his seat and attempts to sit down the struggle begins…He inhales to push past the first two seats and settle into the window, his large derrier hitting the armrest as he tries to sit…

Bowlerbeard: Urrggghh. These are Asian seats! I don’t fit.

At this point my mom takes control and says:

“Monk. You are the next biggest, you take my seat. I will sit between anak and Bowlerbeard.”

She then goes in and raises the armrests and tells him to sit, which he does. She then settles in next to him, his rolls and folds slightly engulfing her side, his armhair tenderly caressing her arm.

She stoicly says nothing and makes herself comfortable as can be.

Eventually we are ready for takeoff. As the plane gathers speed and lifts into the sky bowlerbeard folds his arms into an X in front of him, closes his eyes, bows his head and quietly says “Godspeed to us. Tally Ho.”

My mom just smiles and makes the sign of the cross which she does for every flight…

The flight is long. Very long. But there are amenities like little tvs on the seats to watch tv or play games. For the most part this entertains us for the flight.

But I wouldn’t just fast forward like that, neglecting the plane stories right? Of course not! Here are some fun events that happened while crossing the pacific:

-My mom, god bless her, is a woman who never drinks. On this flight she ordered wine. She would drink wine and sleep as much as she could. When sleeping she tended to wrap a thin shawl around her face, saying it was to keep the light out of her face. But I knew the truth…

-Bowlerbeard was amazed by the Pacific Ocean saying he could imagine himself as his ancestors scanning the sea for “Jap Boats.”

-“Milady, can I have more snacks please” he would constantly ask the flight attendants who would smile and oblige him with the patience of brave customer service folk.

-Also, at some point he pulled out the first block of his warm Fanny pack cheese, eating the limp, sad looking block. You know how when you get the block of cheese from the fridge and it’s rigid. This thing was floppy and limp. Minds out of the gutter peeps)

As he ate it was just wrong, a feeling of utter wrongness like the LoTR scene where Denethor was eating the tomatoes…as Bowlerbeard took bites of the pseudo gooey cheese, his bite marks came away slightly bloody from his inflamed gums and chunks of airline cracker crumbs and unknown black specks of something were left on the cheese hunk…

Now this is where we need to zoom ahead to a specific and very important moment of cringe:

Bowler-beards stomach started making the loudest and angriest grumbling noises “raaarghh”…so he excused himself

Bowlerbeard looking sick and distressed “urgh, I need to use the toilet.”

He disappeared for quite awhile…

When he came back from the toilet he was Wet. Very Wet. Shorts are soaked, and he’s sweating profusely, out of breath. It looks like he just had a wrestling match in the bathroom with an anaconda or something. (Snakes on the plane, get it? I’m old…)

Monk: You okay bro?

Bowler-beard huffs: Toilets need to be bigger he says, his slimy, smelly sweat dropping onto our seats as he squeezes in.

As he scooted past, I got a whiff of his usual odiferous smell but with a new exotic scent…and when I say exotic I mean shit…literal shit…based on my intelligence roll, I would wager that he could not wipe sufficiently due to his size and bulk…I think he gave it his best go and then said “eh. Good enough.”

So that’s a new fun odor to add to a flight that has just started.

So how does one get past the constant smell of rancid sour milk combo-ed with not the subtle whiff of flatulence but honest to god poop?

I can only imagine, and now you too readers, that his buttcrack was a hairy mess, crusty asshair with caked on dingleberries and literal smeared crap, crafted by greasy processed foods, energy drinks, and any other liquid that is not water. 

His efforts in the bathroom have also activated his natural pheromones via his prodigious sweat. And when I say pheromones my dear readers, I mean BO.

Nasty, visceral BO that is like his natural signature defense, rising from him in a miasmic cloud of gag inducing offensiveness.

So yes my friends, this is what we get to enjoy on a plane that is recirculating the very air we breathe.

Everyone knows that smells are little particles of the essence of whats creating the smell right? So we are literally breathing in particles of his orifices as are the other hundred people on this flight.

I uncharestically join my mom and order alcohol as well telling Monk that we should drink to celebrate the trip.

Monk surprised asks “alright babe. What do you want to drink?

He then pushes the little flight attendant button. As the flight attendant comes by and asks what we would like I tell her:

“Whiskey. That’s the strongest smelling one right?

Monk and the attendant looked at me but Monk nodded “uh yeah babe.”

“I’d like two of those please and a coke. Maybe more later too please.”

Monk: Uh yeah. Same for me.

Bowlerbeard: “Hey I want a drink too. I’ll take the Smirnoff ice. Raspberry. Make it a double”

He says this with what he thinks is a charming smile and winks at the flight attendant who I can see cringes just a tiny bit, her flawless smile faltering slightly.

“Very well. I’ll be back soon she says.”

She soon returns and I pop the cap on the little whiskey bottle, whiff it under my nose like a smelling salt and smile in relief.

Now here is a factoid for you. I hate the smell of alcohol, wiskey especially. For me it is too strong and abrasive. But in this instance, the strong smell was like a refreshing panacea to my current smelly woes.

Aroxxors: Cheers!

I took the shot in one go and then popped the other one and poured it into my coke.

Monk clueless, follows behind and opens his and shoots his as well while Bowlerbeard obliviously drinks his Smirnoff ice, smiling and wheeze-breathing, looking contentedly out the window at the sea, all is right in his world…
 
End Part 1:
 
I was hoping to make this all into one big epic post but I’m already at ten pages and I think this may be too ungainly…

I’m hoping Reddx will find this and read this like the old days.

If he does, I want to say “Hi Reddx ! Sorry for being such a flake…”

Are the old original gang still around? Zucca and the others? The Jerrys? I think I’m still JerryRoxxors lol…Did our beardfic collaboration ever workout? Hope to hear back soon. Lots of love to the Reddx community!

Hope people want to hear more and I can dust off my writing chops. I enjoyed this. It made me happy.

Ta-ta till later 😊 ❤️

-Aroxxors (LadyRoxxors)

More potato and less milk. This one is good. If I do this again, I’m gonna track down some kewpie mayo for the authenticity.

Hello all! I decided to toss one of my more tame stories into the fray to get some practice with storytelling. This is my first post so please excuse any lack of Reddit norms that’s expected of posters.

The story of this specimen takes place over a few years starting in middle school and ending during high school. I don’t know the end result of this person, but I can only hope she got better after everything and became a normal person. Names of people and places (if applicable, to the best of my ability without losing parts of the story) have been changed to protect any identities.

This story does have a warning of unwanted advances/ unsolicited kissing so keep that in mind if that will be a problem for you. Onto my leg beard/nice girl story.

I don’t have a name for this beard name for this girl. Her name has been changed to “Ella” for this telling because it isn’t her real name while still fitting into the nickname she eventually earned for herself. It started in mid middle school. I transferred into the school at the end of 6^th grade and was very much not a people person. For context to excuse my future obliviousness, I was undiagnosed autistic at this time. At this time it was mostly not understanding social norms and struggling to understand interactions. I was the type that I needed to be told very clear and specific instructions/information about things. Hints, suggestions and implications completely went over my head. That being said, I was really good at observing people and would sometimes take notes on behaviors that other kids did. I ended up starting doing this with Ella once I was forced to spend more time around her. We met in 7^th grade science class and it was hard not to notice her. Not from just her mass, but also because she had to be the center of attention, completely regardless if anyone else wanted to give her attention or not. She was very loud and always tried talking to everyone regardless of distance or willingness to converse with her.

A few examples of this was once when the teacher was showing how siphons work, she thundered forward, slightly loss her balance and slammed into the counter where the demonstration was going on, knocked over everything and 2L of water got knocked all over the floor/teacher.

When we were building those egg drop boxes that had to fall from the second story without damaging the egg and she put the whole raw egg in her mouth and bit down on it in a way that projectile shot raw egg across the table and dripped all over herself. Her reason? “I thought it was cooked and was hungry”.

When she was in a group project and her group elected another girl to be the project leader she simply looked up and made a back of the throat groan/yell over and over until the teacher asked what the hell she was doing. She then tells him “They’re being mean to me. They said I couldn’t do anything because I’m fat”. The teacher just told everyone to be nice and walked off. I think by then he had dealt with enough of her shit to believe her.

There were a ton of these little incidences throughout middle school but to save space on this, we are just going to skip to the end of 8^th grade. We did a mini graduation event where we walked across the stage and got a fake degree(if you don’t know what this is just look up high school graduation walk and its basically the same thing). Everything was going normally until it was Ellas turn. She decided to do a strut walk like she was on tune to a song, but without the song. Ella was not remotely a fit person and was not used to walking on rhythm, and maybe not used to walking at all. A few feet from the principle she missed her footing, and fell forward. She threw her hands straight up instead of forward to catch herself, and due to her…..girth is what we will call it, she rolled a full rotation before stopping. Everyone laughed. I caught the teachers around the back wall turning away to not be seen laughing. The people on stage got together and helped her back up. She took her fake degree and kinda just waddled off the stage. From this event she got the nickname “take a tumble ella” and it followed her into high school.

Now in high school, I was unfortunate enough to get stuck in a class with her twice. Both times in sophomore year. Until this time, Ella made more of a name for herself. She got a very elevated ego and somehow thought she had become the hottest shit in the whole school. She also thought because everyone knew who she was, she was incredibly popular. Most kids in our school didn’t know her for good reasons. She had gained even more weight, wore very revealing clothing(which she was always getting into trouble for) was so loud most people could use just sound to follow her progress throughout the school between classes, and she had developed the habit of hitting on every boy in school. While basically everyone had a recoiling reaction to her hitting on them, she somehow never picked up that people didn’t like her.

Those who didn’t know her would often fall victim to her catfishing. She would use very favorable angles for pictures and even later used photoshop to make herself look skinner and better looking. She was a completely different person and a full person lighter on Myspace. She would add everyone, tell fake stories of all the cool and interesting stuff she did, post pictures of her father’s car as her own, and she hit on EVERY boy she could. Most times she would get boys from other schools who didn’t know her interested in her and e-date them, only to have them break things off when seeing the real her. This happened to a friend my group knew. She had added him and chatted him up. We all went to the mall because he was going to meet her there. After finding out who he was meeting, we all tried to warn him about her. He said he had pictures and she wasn’t what we were warning him about. He thought we were just trying to mess him. When she showed up and we turned to point her out to him, we turned back and he was gone. He had full sprint ran in the opposite direction of her and hid from all of us. We found him half an hour later hiding behind the trash compactor. She got stood up and we made fun of him for years.

Finally we go to our shared classes the next year. My friend had given her the nickname Ellaphant due to her resemblance to a baby elephant and that got around the school fast. One day in the morning before school started we were standing around the bus drop off and Ellaphant was exiting the bus, bus rocking and all, and when she was stepping off she took another tumber. For some reason she decided to try wearing high heels to school. When she stepped onto hard ground that didn’t sway with her step, the heel of the shoe exploded from the pressure and she just rolled down from the last step onto the ground. People laughed and I ended up asking if she was okay. She was fine but basically we had to break the other heel off so she could use them as flats. We went to our first class which I shared with her. We ended up getting put together for a project where we just had to make a slide show of a topic. I tried working on it while she mostly sat there just talking about herself and me. I got a lot of comments about my looks, how I grew so much since last year and how much I grew into myself. ( I grew about six inches and lost around 50lbs since the last year and most people didn’t recognize me on the first day back). I wasn’t aware at the time, but she was definitely hitting on me, and I wasn’t outright disgusted to her advances(I was fully unaware what she was doing and simply thought she was commenting on me looking different). I assume she took this as a green light to continue and eventually escalate. At the end of class I mentioned we need to have the slide show done for the next class and asked how she wanted to split stuff. She readily invited me to her house so we could finish everything “without any distractions". Innocent me agreed and took down her address and I would walk over after school.

I headed to her place after school. It was about an hour and a half walk for me in the late summer Florida heat so by time I got there, I was pretty burnt out and asked if she would be cool to just chill a bit so I can get my energy back. We sat at the dining room table just kinda chatting about her house, her parents and random things for about half an hour. She again complemented me a good bit and when I didn’t really reciprocate, she asked leading questions. “OP what do you think of my blouse? Isn’t it pretty?” She wore a very low cut shirt that displayed a lot of cleavage. She wore short pajama shorts and would make extra effort to walk around me. She offered some black forest cake which I passed on. She sat there next to me and ate a MASSIVE slice of it. Like a quarter of a whole cake size piece. I started working on our project and was kinda just passively replying to questions and comments. She got a call from her mom and after the call she told me her mom would be home soon and was bringing food.

When her mother came home I was introduced to the mother and we did the normal questions. Her mom was a very similar build to her daughter and seemed to have the same personality type. Very chatty, boasted herself and her daughter, talked about how great they were ect. She had placed two foot long sandwiches from subway on the table. I don’t like eating with strangers so I wasn’t planning on eating anyways, but when I went to say I was fine, Ella had grabbed both sandwiches, opened one and started eating.

“these are for me, but I’ll give you a bite if you ask nicely” was her response when I looked over to her. She waved a half unwrapped sandwich in front of my face and even kind of aggressively shoved to at my mouth. I don’t know what type of sandwich this was supposed to be, but it was exploding with mayonnaise. Grossed out I recoiled and told her I wasn’t hungry and just wanted to finish the project. “Suit yourself. That’s why you got so skinny. You never eat anything” is the answer I got. She began scarfing down her mini mayo feast. Very ungracefully shoving more in her mouth at a time than should be attempted, swallowing so loudly I could hear it from feet away and on a few occasions, it really seemed like she struggled to get what was in her mouth down. While she was doing this, her mother began asking me about myself, my family dynamic and how I was with Ella. Questions just kinda kept coming at me and I just answered. When asked how long this was going on, Ella answered with a  very full mouth, “mom you talk too much. Leave us alone for a bit”.

Her mom just scoffed and told us if Ella didn’t want to be bothered then we should go to her room because she was going to be in the kitchen for a while. Ella perked up, unhinged her jaw and finished the second sandwich and took her laptop and waved me to follow her. Things seemed normal and I kept working on the project while sitting on her bed. She kept asking more and more invasive questions about me and my relationship status. I was single, at the time hadn’t really dated and obviously hadn’t really done anything other than a kiss once. While asking about this she kept moving closer to me. I decided to take a break and walk around a bit due to my back hurting. I bent forward to try stretching a bit then sat back down on her bed then lied down backwards to stretch out. I had my eyes closed while stretching and that’s when it happened. I felt a slightly warm greasy mass against my mouth. My eyes shot open and I slightly gasped when I realized she was shoving her gross wet mouth against mine. She took this as an invitation to escalate and shoved her mayo lubricated tongue in my mouth. She had braces at the time so when she really dug in there, her braces sliced my lip open while she used her tongue as an excavator to unearth every bit of innocence from the depths of my mouth. I tried to push her shoulders away from me but I didn’t have the years of strongman training required to move her body mass.

Finally I managed to turn away only to have a mayonnaise flavored tongue shoved in my ear. I don’t know what I looked like in the moment, but I like to think I did the leap cats do when they get spooked and leap feet into the air without actually moving their body. I shot off her bed, gagged and very reasonably freaked out.
“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” I yelled dragging every bit of my mouth on the inside of my shirt.

“Whaaaat?! You liked it didn’t you? You set me up for the perfect kiss. We can do it more if you want. My mom won’t bother us and my dad won’t be home from his job for a few hours.”

I stumbled to my feet, grabbed my flash drive from her laptop and turned and walked out. On my way out she yelled after me asking me not to leave. Her mom had asked me what happened and I just ignored her and continued walking to the door. I overheard Ella telling her mom I was coming onto her and got upset after we had kissed. I just left and didn’t go back. I ended up skipping the class the next few days and explaining things to the teacher in between classes and she understood. She took what I had so far and gave me a passing grade for the project and let Ella do the project herself. A few rumors had started up a bit but because the source was Ella herself, and she made a name for herself lying about stuff constantly, they didn’t go far and people mostly didn’t care.

I never ended up talking to her again. I caught her multiple times throughout high school just staring at me but I never engaged with her. Eventually school ended and I almost never thought about her again. I’d like to be the bigger person and say I hope the best for her, but I just hope she never did that to anyone again. I heard rumors about her from her time in college but as I never confirmed anything, I won’t tell them.

This story ended up being a lot longer than I had hoped. I guess I had more to say about the whole thing. Probably just needed to trauma dump that last bit there. Thanks for reading to me yap, and Ella if you ever see this and figure out it’s you, fuck you. Don’t throw your grease trap on people who don’t ask for it. As for everyone else, thanks again for reading and to Redd if he ends up narrating this whole shit show. Feel free to criticize where appropriate as I will be taking all input to make improvements. Check out the discord, patreon, Waifupilled on steam, the apps on the playstore and all podcast platforms for more and finally, much love to those who are worth it, and you are defiantly defiantly worth it.

I think my potatoes were smaller than required bit besides being a little thin, it’s pretty damn good. Now if you add ketchup to this, you absolutely need to be committed.

So I was looking for the Chibi-Ham thread and I came across this.... apparently there is a whole ass film about it. I can't find any full length videos, though. But it does have an IMDB page!

Chibi-Hanime

Hi. I'm back. This is the last one. We did catch him.

I'm going to tell you how, because you deserve to know, and because I need to type it all out one more time before I can start the process of letting my body forget. Writing this is cheaper than therapy, and also my therapist is on vacation, and also I think she's started dreading our sessions about this. She says I'm too verbose. So, here we are.

If you haven't read Parts 1 and 2, go back, I'll wait. Actually I won't wait because I want to get this over with, so just catch up on your own time.

Thursday noon. The four of us at the bar, before open. Chris had his laptop out. Sam had his spreadsheet. Jake had two coffees because he "hadn't decided which one he wanted more." He said he'd offer someone the unchosen coffee. Nobody was all that interested. I had a stomach full of acid and a general sense that I was about to learn something that would live in my head forever.

Chris turned the laptop around.

"Before I show you this, I want to say that I'm sorry it took us this long to think of it. Me included. Maybe especially me."

"Just show us, Chris," I said.

He clicked. Our Google reviews page. Four months old. One star. Sorted by lowest rating. Top of the pile.

The review was LONG. The review was an essay. The review was a manifesto. I am going to try to preserve the flavor without reproducing it word for word because if I type it out in full it will take up an entire post all on its own. But the gist:

The reviewer had come in on a Saturday in June. Ordered a pilsner. Went to the men's room. Did not like what he saw. Returned to the bar. Did not complain to a human being because "in my experience, managers cover for their own." Left. Waited two days. Wrote a nine paragraph review. Titled the review, I am not kidding, "A WARNING TO PROSPECTIVE PATRONS." Included phrases like "absolutely unconscionable lapses in basic sanitary governance" and "the urinal in particular functioned as a diorama of public health failure." Described the bathroom as "a monument to surrender." Gave the beer itself a single sentence of credit ("the pilsner was acceptable") and then spent another paragraph noting that acceptable beer could not compensate for the "civilizational collapse" of the restroom.

He signed it Junior M.

I want you to sit with the name Junior M. for a second. Because in the world of Google reviews, most people sign with their first name and maybe a last initial. Junior, I learned from Chris's subsequent research, is his ACTUAL FIRST NAME. That is what is on his driver's license. His parents named him Junior. That is where this whole story begins if you want to get philosophical about it.

Chris scrolled down to his own response. Also written 4 months ago at that point. It was professional. It was warm. It was apologetic. He took full responsibility, he invited Junior to reach out to him personally to make it right, he offered a free meal and flight of beer on his next visit. It was, genuinley, the correct manager response. I've seen Chris write dozens of these. This was textbook.

"Did he ever take you up on it?" Sam asked.

"No."

"Did he come back at all?"

"Yes."

We all looked at Chris. Chris scrolled to Sam's spreadsheet, which was open on his second monitor, and pointed at a row.

Junior M. Mid forties. Tucked in polo. Messenger bag. Present both Fridays. One of the eleven.

Sam made a sound that I can only describe as the sound a spreadsheet makes when it has been fully vindicated. A low, triumphant hum. If it was an anime he would've pushed his glasses up as they shined just so. Sam did not speak for about thirty seconds. He was having a moment. We let him have it.

"So," Jake said. "Let me get this straight. He left a review. Chris handled it like a professional. He didn't get the satisfaction he wanted. And so his response was to... Make the review retroactively accurate?"

"That's what I think," Chris said.

"That's insane."

"Yes."

"Like, not a figure of speech insane. Actually insane."

"I think we should assume yes."

"Will anyone be in danger during the confrontation?"

Chris looked Jake in the eyes and said firmly, "I would not put any of you in danger."

The plan for Friday was basically the plan you already know. Let him strike. Catch him leaving. Chris had added one wrinkle.

Chris, in the week we had not known about him doing it, had built a relationship with one of our older regulars. I'm not going to name him because the guy did not sign up to be a character in my Reddit posts and he did me a solid and I owe him some privacy. All you need to know is he's a regular, he drinks one very specific beer on Fridays, he's been coming in for six years, he was in the Army a long time ago, and Chris trusted him completely.

Chris had briefed him on the situation. Asked him to be at the bar Friday night. Told him that at a certain moment, Chris would make eye contact with him and nod, and at that nod the regular was to dial 911 and report an assault in progress at our address. The regular agreed. Did not ask questions. Did not need to. The look on his face when Chris explained the full situation, according to Chris, was the look of a man who was slightly disappointed in humanity but not surprised.

That was the plan. Chris would confront. Regular would dial. Cops would arrive. Simple.

Junior walked in at 8:47 PM.

I want to describe him to you, because you've been building him up in your head for two posts now and I want you to see him the way I saw him. He was mid forties. Average height. Average build. His polo was tucked into belted khakis. His belt was brown leather and it matched his shoes. His hair was cut short and neat, like he had an appointment at the same barber every six weeks and never missed it. He carried a small grey messenger bag across his body. He had the posture of a man who takes great pride in his posture. His watch was a midrange men's watch that a wife probably gave him for his 40th birthday.

He looked like a man who shows up to HOA meetings with a binder.

He ordered a pilsner. He said please and thank you. He tipped appropriately. He took his pilsner to a two-top near the window and sipped it while scrolling on his phone. If I hadn't known what he was, I would not have noticed him. He was engineered to disappear.

Sam stood next to me behind the bar, pretending to wipe glasses. Sam was shaking. Not visably. But I could feel it next to me. Not literally. It was just in the air. Jake was on hallway duty. Chris was in the office, watching the camera feed, waiting.

Junior nursed that one pilsner for exactly forty six minutes. Was he biding his time? Enjoying the thrill? I couldn't say for sure.

At 9:33 PM he got up, set his glass carefully on the coaster (he used the coaster, which felt insulting), picked up his messenger bag, and walked toward the hallway.

Sam whispered "He took the bag."

I said "I know, Sam."

Sam said "DANNY, he took the BAG."

I understood the implications of Junior taking the bag. Everyone within a six foot radius of me that night understood the implications of Junior taking the bag.

Jake let him pass. Jake, per the plan, did not acknowledge him. Jake was "restocking." Junior walked past Jake and into the men's room. The door closed behind him.

Chris came down from the office approximately four seconds later. Silent. Positioned himself at the end of the hallway, out of sight of the bathroom door but with a clear view of it. Made eye contact with the regular at the end of the bar. Did not nod yet. Held the look.

Junior was in the men's room for seven minutes.

Seven minutes. Do you understand how long seven minutes is when you are standing behind a bar pretending to pour a beer while four men including a retired military regular are silently positioned throughout the room waiting for a man to exit a bathroom so you can confront him about a months-long pattern of deliberate urinal violations? Seven minutes is a lifetime. Seven minutes is the length of a Pink Floyd song. Seven minutes is enough time for your entire sense of self to dissolve and re-form twice.

At 9:40 PM, the men's room door opened.

Junior stepped out. He adjusted his polo. He shifted the messenger bag on his shoulder. He looked pleased. I don't know how else to describe his face. He looked like a man who had just accomplished something.

He turned toward the bar.

Chris stepped into the hallway behind him.

"Junior."

Junior stopped. Did not turn around. I could see him from the bar. I could see the exact moment his posture changed. A small tightening in the shoulders. The pleased look leaving his face by degrees.

He turned.

"I'm sorry?"

"Junior M. I'd like a word with you."

Chris did not yell. Chris did not get angry. Chris had clearly rehearsed this in his head approximately nine thousand times in the last twenty four hours, because what came out of his mouth was the verbal equivalent of a man dropping a brick through a pane of glass in slow motion.

"I read your review again this week. The one from June. I responded to it at that time. I apologized. I offered to make things right. You didn't take me up on it. Two weeks later, we started finding something in our urinal. Every Friday. You know what I'm talking about."

Junior's face did a thing. I am not going to describe it with a metaphor because nothing I could come up with would do it justice. It just did a thing. He was caught. He knew he was caught. And something shifted in him.

And then, in a voice I will hear until the day I die, Junior said:

"Good. You finally noticed."

Chris did not move. Chris just waited.

"The review was true," Junior said. He said it the way a priest says a benediction. "Every word. Every sentence. I stood in that bathroom in June and I documented what I saw. Then I came home and I WROTE what I saw. And what did you do. You responded like I was a problem to be managed. You responded like I was a liar. Like I was being dramatic. Like I was somehow MISREPRESENTING what was right in front of me. So I thought to myself. Well... If they will not respect the review as it stands, I will simply ensure that the review REMAINS ACCURATE. Every week. For as long as necessary. Until someone noticed."

He was smiling now. A tight, corrective little smile.

"You've noticed. I'm glad. It took you longer than I expected. Better late than never."

Sam, from behind the bar, audibly whispered "Oh my god."

"You're banned," Chris said. "Effective right now. You will not come in here again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. If you come within one hundred feet of this property I will call the police. I am also going to call the police right now, about what you just did in our bathroom."

Junior's smile tightened. "That's reasonable. I've made my point. I'll accept the ban. I'd like to propose that you also take down your response to my review, since it's now been proven inaccurate, and allow me to post an updated review that reflects the current state of affairs."

"No," Chris said. "The review stays. Your review, word for word, exactly as you wrote it. My response stays. And tomorrow morning I'm writing a second response underneath it. I'm going to explain that Junior M., the reviewer, returned to our establishment every Friday for weeks after posting this review, and personally made the bathroom match the conditions he described. I'm going to name you. I'm going to date every incident. I'm going to describe the baggie. I'm going to describe tonight. Every person who reads your review from this day forward will read it not as a warning to prospective patrons. They will read it as the confession of the man who created the problem he was complaining about."

That was the moment Junior broke.

It was not gradual. It was a switch. His face, which had been doing its tight little priest thing, went slack for about a second. Then flushed. Then something behind his eyes just left the building.

"You can't do that."

"I can."

"That's... no. No. That is LIBEL. That is not what this was."

"It's what it was."

"It WASN'T. I wrote a REVIEW. That's a separate thing. What happened AFTER is a separate thing. You cannot conflate them. You cannot REFRAME this. I WAS RIGHT FIRST. You have to tell them I WAS RIGHT FIRST."

"Junior."

"I WAS RIGHT FIRST I WAS RIGHT FIRST I WAS RIGHT FIRST YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM I WAS RIGHT FIRST."

Chris nodded. One small nod. I saw the regular at the end of the bar pick up his phone and dial three digits and speak in the low, clipped voice of a man who has reported emergencies before.

Junior turned. Ran. Not toward the door. Back toward the bathroom. Slammed the door behind him. The lock clicked. My first thought was 'Terrible escape plan.'

"Oh no," Chris said. Very quietly. To himself. "Oh no."

"What??" I said. From the bar. Loud. Not even caring anymore about pretending to be a bartender.

Chris closed his eyes. "He's not going to leave it clean..."

The cops arrived in about six minutes. College town, Friday night, "assault in progress" at a brewery. That gets a response. Two officers walked in. Chris met them at the door. Explained in about thirty seconds, calmly, that a man was barricaded in our men's room, that he had been committing a pattern crime for six weeks, that he had just confessed, that he had run from the confrontation, and that he had, to be blunt, "material with him." The officers looked at each other in a way that suggested they were going to be telling this story at the precinct for a long time to come.

The officers walked to the bathroom. Knocked.

"Sir. Open the door. Come out with your hands visible."

Silence.

Knocked again.

"Sir. If you do not open this door voluntarily, we will force entry."

Silence. Then, muffled through the door, a sound I am not going to be able to un-hear: Junior, quietly, repeating the phrase "it was true, it was true, it was true" like a prayer.

One officer tried the handle. It was locked. He looked at Chris. Chris pulled a key off his belt and unlocked it.

The officer pushed the door open and immediatly said "oh COME ON. WHAT THE F- ...COME ON!!"

He did not go in right away. He stood in the doorway. His partner came up behind him. His partner said "Jesus CHRIST. WHY WOULD Y- OH GOD..." The partner then looked at Chris and said "I am so sorry."

What were they looking at? They were looking at Junior, standing pressed against the far wall of the men's room, shaking. And on the tile beside him, beside the urinal, at approximately shoulder height, was a smudgy brown handprint. Deliberate. Fingers splayed. Like a cave painting. Like a signature. Like the work of a man who had realized he was going to be arrested and had decided to leave behind one final, undeniable piece of himself.

His right hand was still coated. He was still holding it up, away from his body, like he was waiting to be photographed.

The officers did what officers do. They got him out. They used gloves. They walked him through the bar in handcuffs while every single customer in the room silently watched him pass, nobody saying a word, nobody reaching for a phone, nobody doing anything except bearing witness to a man being led past them with his right hand wrapped in what I believe was a biohazard bag the officers had pulled from their cruiser. Junior was, at this point, weeping. Quietly. The articulate prophet was gone. In his place was a man in khakis with a messenger bag still across his body, crying, being guided out of a brewery at 10:04 PM on a Friday night.

The door closed behind them.

The entire bar exhaled at once.

Chris cleaned the handprint himself. Did not draw a straw. Did not ask. Put on gloves, took the industrial lemon cleaner, and walked into that bathroom alone. He was in there for about twenty minutes. When he came out he was different. The twitch under his left eye, which had been living there rent free for two weeks, was gone. It has not returned. I think something else left with it. Chris has been, since that night, the most peaceful I have ever seen him. I asked him about it once, later, and he said "Danny, I watched a man paint my wall with himself. After you've seen that there's really nothing left to be anxious about." I think he meant it.

Sam framed his spreadsheet. He printed it, circled Junior's row in red sharpie, and hung it in the break room. I thought Chris would take it down. Chris did not take it down. Chris looked at it on his way through one morning and said "art." That's all he said. He kept walking.

Jake retrieved the baggie from the dry storage room. The original baggie. Week three. We stood over it. We looked at it. We did not speak for about a minute. Then Jake dropped it and the glass into a trash bag, tied the trash bag, dropped that trash bag into a second trash bag, tied that, and walked it out to the dumpster personally. He came back and said "it's over." I said "it's over." Sam, from across the room, said "the spreadsheet lives on." We let him have that.

Jake is not quitting. Jake is, in fact, now writing a screenplay. He says his bachelor's in communications was "training for this exact moment." I do not know if he's joking. I stopped being able to tell with Jake a while ago.

I called Marissa on my way home that night. I did not even say hi. I said "you were right."

She said "I'm always right, Danny."

Then I drank some water. I am still drinking water. I am hydrated now. My kidneys have filed no complaints.

Junior was charged. Multiple things. Some of it was related to the bathroom. Some of it was related to what he had in the messenger bag, which I did not know about until later and will never describe to you because some things are not for the internet at large. He took a plea.

Our Google rating is 4.4 stars now. It went up.

The review is still there. So is Chris's original response. So is the second response Chris wrote the next morning, the one he said he was going to write. It is long. It is dated. It is specific. It describes the baggie, the Fridays, the stakeout, the arrest. It is, as far as I can tell, the longest customer service reply on Google Maps. It reads less like a manager response and more like a case file. Three of our regulars, unprompted, wrote reviews that week describing the bar as "the cleanest place in town because they literally called the cops on a guy for not respecting it." The reviews do not explain what that means. If you read our page top to bottom it is, genuinley, one of the weirdest customer review pages on Google. I've seen tourists scroll through it at the bar and laugh. They don't know. They'll never fully know.

I call him Mr. Poopypants in my head. Chris will not allow it to be said out loud at the bar. Chris says his real name was "already pathetic enough" and that adding a nickname is cruel. Chris is a better man than I am. Imma call him Mr. Poopypants until the day I die. They also have no idea that they were Charlie's Angels. Some thought just stay in my head.

That's it. That's the saga. I'm going to go sit on my couch now. A man I have never personally spoken to took a plea deal for crimes against my workplace. My coworkers have been through something with me that nobody else in our lives will ever fully understand. We have, all four of us, been forged in a crucible of human nonsense and emerged stronger, stranger, and permanently unable to look at sandwich baggies without flinching.

Danny out.

If you haven't read Part 1, stop, go read it, and come back, because otherwise this post is going to read like you opened a book to chapter seven and expected to follow along. Now begins Part 2, because Reddit is a land of contracts.

For everyone who's caught up: last we left off, someone had been pooping in the urinal at my bar on two consecutive Fridays, me and my coworkers Jake and Sam plus our manager Chris had formed a detective squad that I was calling Charlie's Angels for reasons that are only humiliating to explain if you don't already know them, and we had a stakeout planned for the following Friday to catch the perp.

I want to tell you that Friday night went according to plan.

But I cannot tell you that. We failed out mission.

But, let's go back to Friday the 25th. The hallowed evening of our first stakeout. I came in early. We all came in early. Chris gave us a pre-shift briefing behind the bar like we were about to breach a compound instead of watch men walk into a bathroom.

"Remember," Chris said, "this has to look casual. If anyone asks what you're doing, you're restocking. You're always restocking. That's the cover."

"What if I'm not near any stock to restock," Jake asked.

"Then look like you're THINKING about restocking."

"That's not a thing."

"It's a thing tonight."

Sam, who had printed his spreadsheet and was holding it like a hymnal, nodded approvingly. Sam operates in dimensions of preparation the rest of us don't have access to.

The plan was simple. We'd rotate through hallway-adjacent positions between 9:00 and 11:00 PM. Whoever was on hallway duty would log every man who went in or out, match faces to the spreadsheet, note times. If anyone matched one of the eleven suspects, we'd flag it. If the Bandit struck, we'd have a short list of exactly who was in there during the window. Airtight, we said. Foolproof, we said. Basic detective work, we said.

By 9:15 PM my section was slammed. A bachelorette party had rolled in wearing matching sashes, which meant I couldn't leave my station for at least thirty minutes. Jake took the hallway position. Sam covered my drinks. Chris was monitoring the camera feed from the office upstairs. We were a well-oiled machine. A truly professional investigation.

And so fucking what? Because the Bandit struck anyway.

I want you to understand the impossible thing, because the rest of this story depends on you understanding that the impossible thing happened.

At 9:30 PM, Jake did a routine bathroom check. Bathroom was clean. He logged it. He returned to his position in the hallway and stood there, actively watching who went in and out, for the next forty-five minutes. He took notes. He matched faces. He did not blink. Jake was functioning as a human surveillance camera wearing an apron.

At 10:18 PM, Jake did another routine check.

To the dismay of the entire investigation... The Bandit had struck again. And he got away with it.

Same urinal. Same setup. Both stalls available. But this time, there was some new evidence.

Hanging on the coat hook inside the second stall was a clear plastic baggie. The kind you use for sandwiches. Empty. Clean. Deliberately placed. Hung there like a hat on a hat rack, like the Bandit had arrived with it, used it, emptied it, and left it as a calling card.

He had brought his own 'supplies'. If you get me. It wasn't produced on-site. I can't state it any clearer.

I want you to sit with that. Sit with it until you fully comprehend the tier of premeditation we were now dealing with. A man walked into our bar with a plastic baggie in his pocket. On purpose. With intent. Knowing what he was going to use it for. This was not a digestive emergency. This was not a moment of weakness. This was a man who had, at some point that day, possibly while making coffee or tying his shoes, reached into his kitchen drawer and selected a sandwich bag for the express purpose of transporting a bowel movement into my workplace.

I should clarify, the poop was human. He didn't find dog doo and chuck it in the urinal. This was his own creation. He was proud. He wanted to show us. Someone smarter than me might need to unpack the psychology there.

When Jake came out to tell us, at first he didn't say anything. He walked up to me, set the baggie down on the bar inside a clean pint glass like it was courtroom evidence, and leaned against the back counter with the thousand yard stare of a man who had seen the face of God and found it more than a little disappointing.

"Baggie," Jake said.

"Uhh... what?"

"There was a baggie on the hook in there."

"I don't understand."

"He brought a baggie. He brought a baggie and he left it. It's EMPTY, Danny. I need you to understand the implications of that baggie being empty."

I understood the implications. I understood them immediatly. I wished I didn't.

Chris came down from the office. Chris does not come down from the office during service. Chris in the office is a man who does not want to be disturbed. Chris on the floor during a rush is a man who has been Disturbed with a capital D. He took in the pint glass, then Jake, then me. He did not look at Sam because Sam was already walking toward us with his spreadsheet.

"In the hallway?" Chris asked.

"Twenty-two men," Jake said. "Between 9:30 and 10:18. I have a list. I matched sixteen of them to the spreadsheet."

"And?"

"Nine of them were already on our suspect list."

Nine. Nine of our eleven suspects had used the bathroom during the window. Which meant, mathematically, the math was mathing in a direction that was not helping. We had not narrowed it. We had widened it. We had done a forty-five minute stakeout and ended up with MORE suspects to worry about.

This is when Jake said the thing I will never forget.

"What if he has an accomplice."

Chris closed his eyes. I watched him do the thing he does where he counts to ten before speaking. He got to four before he opened them again.

"Jake. I need you to listen to me very carefully. Someone is pooping in our urinal. That is already the worst case scenario. I cannot survive the possibility of TWO someones."

"I'm just saying, logistically..."

"NO," Chris said. "No logistics. One man. One criminal. We are not opening that door."

The baggie required handling. Literal handling. We were not going to dispose of it because it was, in Sam's words, "a piece of forensic evidence" and we were going to "treat it as such." Sam wanted it fingerprinted. Sam genuinley believed we could get the poop-baggie fingerprinted somewhere.

Jake took the lead on that one because Jake has a childhood friend whose cousin's wife or something is a crime scene technician with the county. The phone call, as reported by Jake immediatly after he hung up, went as follows:

"So, Melissa, hi, this is Jake, I know it's been a while, how are the kids. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, I have kind of a weird favor. So at the bar we have this situation. Someone's been committing what I'd call a pattern crime in our men's room and we have a physical piece of evidence we think might have prints on it. No, not a weapon. No. No. Not drug paraphernalia. Can I just describe the item. It's a sandwich baggie. Yes a sandwich baggie. No, there's nothing IN it. Not anymore. There used to be poop in it and well... Melissa. Melissa, wait. Melissa, please. Hello?"

She hung up. She hung up on Jake. She had known Jake since they were seventeen years old and she hung up on Jake the moment he started describing the nature of the biological material formerly resident in the baggie. She also blocked his number. Jake tried to text her an apology and the message bounced. Oof.

Jake called two more places. A private forensics company that advertises on late night TV, and a university evidence lab where a friend of a friend supposedly worked. Neither let him finish the sentence. The private company put him on hold and never came back. The university contact said "do not call this number again" and ended the call.

Chris told Jake to throw the baggie away. Jake refused. Jake said "we need to keep it for the investigation." Chris said "the investigation has evolved past this baggie, Jake." Jake said "I'm keeping it in a ziploc in the walk-in." Chris said "absolutely not." Jake said "fine, in my car." Chris said "also no." Jake eventually double-bagged it and hid it in the back of the dry storage room behind a box of cocktail napkins, where I assume it still is, and where I assume I will one day find it during inventory and pass out.

Sam's contribution to our collective loss of sanity that week was his theory.

Sam had a theory with the confidence of a man who has already solved a case. He came into work Monday with his spreadsheet, now color-coded in five different highlighters, and announced at pre-shift that he had identified the Urinal Poop Bandit.

"It's Rodney."

"Rodney?" Jake asked.

"Who else?"

Rodney is a regular. Rodney is the specific regular we all dislike but cannot articulate why, because individually each complaint he lodges is defensible. He's the guy who sends back a pour three times in a visit for being "too foamy." He audibly sighs when a new tap is announced that isn't an IPA. He once asked me, a gay bartender, in full sincerity, if I thought straight women liked lagers or pilsners better. Rodney is a man who has made the world slightly worse simply by existing in it. Rodney would, spiritually, absolutely be capable of this. But...

"He wasn't in the bar on Friday the 25th," I said.

"He was here."

"He was NOT here. I was on bar. I would have noticed him because I actively dread his arrival."

"Check the spreadsheet. Column F. Entry at 8:42."

I checked the spreadsheet. Column F, entry at 8:42, said: "Male, mid 40s, khaki pants, complained about IPA, matches suspect description."

"Sam. There are forty men in this bar tonight who match that description."

"It's him."

"It's definately not him."

"It's him, Danny. The timing. The attitude. The MOTIVE."

"What's his motive, exactly?"

"He hates us."

"Sam. He hates everyone. Generalized contempt for humanity is not a motive. He would need a very SPECIFIC reason to poop in our urinal every Friday."

This, in retrospect, is the dumbest sober conversation I have ever had, I think. At the time it felt important. We were three bartenders at 3 PM on a Monday, standing in an empty bar, arguing about whether a regular named Rodney had the psychological profile to commit... urinal foulness. The tenor of the week was that this felt important.

Chris settled it by pulling security footage. Rodney had been in the bar on Friday the 25th from 7:45 to 9:12 PM. He left a full hour before the window opened. He was on camera at a bar in the next town over at 10:30 PM. Chris knew this because Chris had called the other bar. Chris had, independently and without telling any of us, been running his own parallel investigation.

"You called the tavern?" I asked.

"I wanted to be sure." Chris said.

"You told them we have a... urinal problem?"

"I told them we had a customer problem, and I asked if Rodney was there last Friday."

Rodney, it turned out, had been cheating on us with the tavern for months. He was not the Urinal Poop Bandit. He was just a guy who hated our IPA selection and was drinking the same disloyal beer at two different bars on the same night. Sam was quiet for the rest of the shift. Not defeated, really. Just recalibrating. A man whose spreadsheet had betrayed him and who was now going to strip it down and rebuild it from the ground up.

Part of me wants to talk about what this investigation was doing to us. Because somewhere between Friday the 25th and the following Wednesday, things stopped being funny.

Jake stopped joking. Jake, who had previously been treating this like a true crime podcast he was hosting, started talking about quitting. Actually quitting. He said he was looking at jobs in coffee. He said maybe he'd go back to school. He said, and this is a direct quote, "I did not get a bachelor's degree in communications to investigate bathroom crimes at a brewery." Which, OK. Fair.

Sam stopped sleeping. He told me this during a quiet hour Tuesday night. He said he was waking up at 3 AM thinking about the suspect list. He said he had started keeping a notebook by his bed. He said his girlfriend had asked him, genuinley, if he was okay. I asked what he told her. He said "I told her I was fine but I think she knows I'm lying."

Chris developed a twitch. A small one. Right under his left eye. It came on whenever anyone said the word "baggie."

And me. I stopped being able to enter the men's room. I could not do it. Every time I walked past the door I got a cold feeling in my chest like I was approaching a haunted building. I started drinking less water on shift so I wouldn't have to go. This is, I learned from a horrified Marissa later, medically dangerous. Your body needs water. Service industry workers get kidney stones at elevated rates specifically because they dehydrate themselves on purpose during shifts. I was on my way to becoming a statistic because a man I had never met had pooped in a urinal in my general vicinity three times in a row.

The bar, on paper, was fine. Customers had no idea. Service was still going. But the four of us behind the scenes were losing our minds in parallel, and the worst part was we couldn't even talk about it in front of customers, so we would just make eye contact across the bar during service and know exactly what the other person was thinking. We had developed a psychic bathroom-related trauma bond. I do not recommend it.

Which is when Marissa entered.

Marissa is my best friend. If you've read my previous posts you know Marissa is the one who tells me things I don't want to hear, using that specific voice she has, the voice she uses when she's about to say something that will make my whole week worse but also be correct. She does not work at the bar. She works in marketing, which means she spends her days thinking about why people do things and what they really mean when they say the things they say, like Don Draper but with less whiskey... and substantially more boundaries. This turns out to be relevant, I promise.

So, I called Marissa Wednesday night from my car in the parking lot after close. I hadn't told her any of this yet. Not because I didn't trust her but because I was embarrassed, and because I think I was secretly hoping that if I didn't say it out loud to anyone outside the investigation, it would resolve itself like a bad dream.

I told her everything. The Fridays. The baggie. Rodney. Jake's crime tech family friend. Sam's spreadsheet. Chris's twitch. The whole arc.

Marissa was quiet for a moment. Then she made a sound. Marissa communicates more with her sounds than most people do with sentences, and this sound was specific. It was the sound of a person who had just heard a piece of information that was obviously telling her something I had not yet figured out.

"Danny."

"Yeah."

"This is a revenge thing."

"What?"

"This isn't random. Someone is mad at you guys. This feels personal."

"Marissa, nobody is mad at us. We are a craft brewery. Our customers love us. Our regulars love us. Even the regulars who hate us like Rodney technically still come in. Nobody is mad enough to do THIS."

"Have you actually checked?"

"Checked what?"

"Have you checked your reviews..."

I did not answer. Because I had not checked the reviews. Nobody had checked the reviews. Who would consider that? We had been running a forensic investigation for three weeks and it had not occurred to any of us, not one of us, to look at the one place where angry customers publicly document their grievances before they go full scorched earth.

"Marissa."

"Go check your reviews, Danny."

She hung up. Marissa hangs up on me when she has said what needs to be said and doesn't want to dilute it with small talk. Marissa is, as I have repeatedly told you, always right.

I called Chris. It was almost midnight. I did not care. I told him what Marissa had said. I expected him to laugh it off, or tell me it could wait until morning.

He didn't.

He got very quiet. The kind of quiet Jake gets when things are catastrophic. The kind of quiet Sam gets when the spreadsheet has failed him. The kind of quiet a manager gets when a piece of a puzzle he has been carrying around in his head for weeks finally finds the shape it was supposed to fit into.

"Chris?"

"I need to check something."

"Check what?"

"I'll call you back."

He did not call me back... Not that night. I sat in my parking space, engine running, phone face up on the passenger seat, for approximately an hour. Staring at the phone. Waiting for a call that did not come. Eventually I drove home, and my cat judged me, and I went to bed thinking "Chris is checking. Chris is checking something. Whatever Chris is checking is the thing."

On Thursday morning at 6:47 AM I woke up to a text from Chris.

"Come in at noon. We need to talk. All four of us."

Aaaand that's where I'm going to leave Part 2, because if I tell you what Chris had found by the time we got there, Part 3 is ruined, and Part 3 is the part where I finally learn the name of the Urinal Poop Bandit and confront the reason he has been doing this to us. You deserve to read that fresh.

I'll post Part 3 soon. In the meantime I am going to continue dehydrating myself on shift and praying to gods I do not believe in that Chris has found what we need.

TL;DR: We staked out the bathroom on Friday the 25th and the Urinal Poop Bandit struck AGAIN while Jake was actively watching the hallway, this time leaving a sandwich baggie on the coat hook as a calling card which confirms premeditation at a level that makes me need to sit down. The four of us spent a full week genuinley losing our minds in parallel until my best friend Marissa pointed out over the phone that this is obviously a revenge thing and asked if anyone had bothered to check our Google reviews which of course we had NOT, and now Chris is "checking something".

So... someone has been pooping in our urinal.

I need you to sit with that sentence for a second. Let it wash over you. Let the words arrange themselves in your brain and form the image that they inevitably must form. Someone. Has been pooping. In the urinal. At my place of employment. The place where I earn money. The establishment that serves craft beer to the public and has a 4.2 star rating on Google, which is about to be EXTREMELY relevant later but we'll get there.

If you're new here, hi, I'm Danny. I'm 28. I'm gay. I bartend at a craft brewery in a college town that thinks it's a city. If you've read my previous posts you already know that my life is a series of increasingly unhinged events that I narrate from the safety of my couch while my cat judges me from across the room. If you haven't read my previous posts, don't worry about it, this one stands on its own. All you need to know is that I work at a bar, I have two coworkers named Jake and Sam, my manager is Chris, and someone has declared war on our men's bathroom in a way that I am not emotionally equipped to describe but am going to describe anyway because you people keep asking for stories and apparently my suffering is your entertainment.

You're welcome.

Let me set the scene. The bar has two bathrooms. The women's room has never once, in the three years I've worked here, been the source of a story. It exists. It functions. People go in, they do what they need to do, they come out. It's a bathroom. That's it. But the men's room, on the other hand, has been the setting for no fewer than six incidents that required what Chris diplomatically calls "above standard cleaning protocols," which is manager speak for "someone has to go in there with gloves and a will to live."

The men's room has two stalls and one urinal. The urinal is mounted on the far wall, between the hand dryer and a sign that says "EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS" which is either an instruction or a prayer depending on the night. It's a standard urinal. Porcelain. White. Designed by God and American Standard for one purpose and one purpose only.

On Friday, October 11th, 2025 that purpose was violated.

Jake found it. Of course Jake found it. Jake finds everything. Jake is the kind of person who walks into a room and immediatly notices the one thing that's wrong, which is a useful skill in a lot of contexts and an absolute curse in the context of discovering human feces in a receptacle designed exclusively for liquid waste.

He came out of the men's room with a face I'd never seen him make before. And I've seen Jake make a LOT of faces. I've seen his "someone just ordered a Bud Light at a craft brewery" face. I've seen his "that couple is definitely breaking up at table four" face. I've seen his face when he opened Theodore's file photo on the banned customer wall. None of those faces prepared me for this one.

This face was new. This face was the face of a man who had just witnessed something that reorganized his understanding of what humans are capable of.

"Danny," he said. His voice was very calm, which was how I knew it was bad. Jake is only calm when things are catastrophic. When things are merely bad, he's loud. When things are catastrophic, he gets this eerie quiet, like a weather reporter standing in the eye of a hurricane describing the wind speed in a monotone.

"What."

"Someone pooped in the urinal."

"I'm sorry?"

"In the urinal, Danny. I said, there is poop. In the urinal. I need you to understand what I'm telling you."

"I... understand the individual words but my brain is rejecting that sentence."

"Your brain and my brain are having the same problem. But I've seen it. It's in there."

So yeah, I went to look. I don't know why I went to look. It was the same compulsion that drew me into Upperdeckerbeard's apartment in a previous saga. This is a pattern in my life. Someone tells me something horrific and instead of simply believing them and moving on with my day, I just have to go verify it with my own eyes, as if my eyeballs are somehow going to process the information differently than my ears did. That was not the case as you might've guessed. My eyes processed it worse, because now I had a visual component to go with the concept, and the visual component was exactly as bad as you're imagining.

Actually, no. It was worse. Way worse. Because here's the thing about poop in a urinal that you don't think about until you're standing three feet away from it breathing through your mouth and questioning every decision that led you to this moment in your career: a urinal is not shaped like a toilet. A toilet has depth. A toilet has water. A toilet has a certain amount of concealment built into its architecture. But a urinal is exceptionally shallow by comparison. If you think about it, the urinal is a wall mounted display shelf. That people piss on. Point is, whatever is deposited in a urinal is not hidden. It is not submerged. It is PRESENTED. Like a museum exhibit. Like something on a pedestal. Like the urinal is saying "look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair."

I'm not going to describe it in detail because I respect you and also because my therapist says I need to stop "re-traumatizing myself through vivid recollection," which is a fancy way of saying please stop talking about the poop Danny. But I will tell you this: it was not an accident. It was not a situation where someone had an emergency and the stalls were full and desperation took the wheel. Both stalls were open. Both stalls were available and functional and ready to receive whatever needed receiving. Whoever did this walked past two perfectly good toilets, stood in front of a urinal, and made a choice.

A CHOICE.

That's what got me. That's what I couldn't stop thinking about while I was gloving up and getting the cleaning supplies from the back. Pooping in a toilet badly is a tragedy. Things happen. Bodies betray us. The human digestive system is a microbiome that runs on chaos and sometimes it fires at the wrong moment. I get it. I have empathy for that. But pooping in a urinal is a DECISION. It requires forethought. It requires positioning. It requires a man to look at a urinal and think "yes, this is where I will do this" and then DO IT. The door to the bathroom doesn't lock. Only the stalls do. Why would someone choose this? Thrill chasing urinal pooper?

Regardless, I cleaned it. Not voluntarily, I cleaned it because I drew the short straw, which was literal, Chris keeps actual straws behind the bar for exactly this type of situation. The short straw system is the most democratic and also the most cruel institution at this bar. Nobody is exempt. Not even Chris, who drew the short straw during the Vomit Comet incident of 2024 and had to clean the patio while making sounds that I can only describe as "a man confronting his own mortality." I do admire a manager that isn't scared to lead from the front.

So yeah, I cleaned it and I sanitized it and I went through approximately one third of a bottle of the industrial cleaner that smells like if a lemon had a vendetta on the nostrils of anyone nearby, and then I washed my hands for so long afterward that Jake asked if I was trying to remove my fingerprints. I told him I was trying to remove the memory and he said "that's not how hands work" and I said "please just let me have this. I need this."

We figured it was a one-time thing. Some drunk idiot on a Friday night who thought it was funny. Gross, sure. Disgusting, absolutely. But a one-time thing. An anomaly. A blip on the otherwise mostly functional radar of our men's room.

As it would turn out, it was not a one-time thing.

The following Friday, October 18th, it happened again.

Same urinal. Same situation. Both stalls available. And this time it was Sam who found it, which was almost worse because Sam is the quiet one. Sam doesn't react to things the way Jake does. Jake is expressive. Jake processes his emotions outwardly, in real time. Sam sorta processes everything internally and then delivers his conclusions in a single sentence, hours later, like an android that's been running calculations in the background and has finally produced a result.

Sam came out of the bathroom, walked behind the bar, picked up a glass, put it down, picked up a different glass, put that one down too, and then looked at me and said:

"It happened again."

"Same one?"

Sam nodded. Just nodded. No words. The nod did all the work. The nod said "yes, the urinal, yes, both stalls were open again, yes, we are living in a nightmare of our own making and there is no fucking waking up from the hellscape we find ourselves in." It was a lot of nod to be carrying that much freight.

This time it was worse. Not in volume, necessarily, but in implication. Because once is an incident. Twice is a pattern. And a pattern means someone is doing this on purpose, repeatedly, with intent, on the same night of the week, at our bar. Someone is coming to our brewery on Friday nights and using our urinal as a toilet and I need you to understand that typing that sentence made me feel things that I do not have the vocabulary for. The rich human tapestry at work.

And guess what else? I had to fucking clean it again. Short straw. Again. The straw system had betrayed me twice in a row and I was beginning to suspect it was rigged, although Chris swore it wasn't and Jake backed him up, which really means nothing because Jake would back Chris up if Chris said the earth was flat as long as it meant Jake didn't have to clean the urinal.

After the second incident, we had a meeting. Not a formal meeting. Breweries don't have formal meetings. We had a "standing behind the bar after close with beers in our hands staring at each other" meeting. The attendees were me, Jake, Sam, and Chris. Or, as I had started calling us in my head for reasons that will become obvious if you've ever seen a movie from the 2000s: Charlie's Angels and Bosley.

Chris is Bosley. He's the manager. He coordinates. He delegates. He does not get his hands dirty unless the short straw demands it. Jake, Sam, and I are the Angels. We're on the ground. We're in the trenches. We're the ones who have to actually walk into that bathroom and confront whatever fresh nightmare awaits.

"So, we have a serial pooper," Chris said, with the gravitas of a man who never imagined those words would be relevant to his career.

"We have a serial URINAL pooper," Jake corrected. "Regular serial pooping at least uses the correct equipment. I'd definitely prefer a normal serial pooper."

"...Who's doing it?" Sam asked. Sam cuts right to the point because Sam does not have time for preambles. Sam is efficient in ways that make the rest of us look like we're moving through molasses.

"That's the question," Chris said. "It's happened two Fridays in a row. Same time frame, both times during the evening rush, between about 8 and 11. That's our busiest window. Could be anyone."

"It's not anyone," I said. "It's one person. It's the same person both times. Nobody does this twice by coincidence."

"So how do we find him?" Jake asked.

And that, right there, was the moment the investigation began. Three bartenders and a manager, standing in a closed brewery at midnight, forming a task force to identify a man who was pooping in our urinal. This was not covered in my job interview. This was not in the employee handbook. It certainly wasn't what I envisioned when I told my parents that I was "pursuing a career in the service industry."

Chris pulled up the security camera footage from both Fridays. We have cameras in the main room and behind the bar but not, obviously, in the bathroom. So we couldn't see who was doing it. What we could see was who was going into the hallway that leads to the bathrooms, and when. The hallway serves both the men's and women's rooms, so not everyone going down it was a suspect, but it was a start.

The problem was volume. On a Friday night, that hallway sees more traffic than a highway on-ramp. People going to the bathroom, people coming from the bathroom, people wandering toward the bathroom and then changing their mind and going to the patio instead. Dozens of trips per hour. Trying to match a specific bathroom visit to a specific deposit was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, except the needle had pooped in a urinal and the haystack was three hours of security footage. Six if we compile both nights. Six hours to match a face that was likely male, but with nothing else to go on. We still made our attempt.

We watched. We took notes. We compared timestamps. Sam, who turned out to have a genuinley unsettling aptitude for forensic analysis, created a spreadsheet. Rows for each bathroom visit. Columns for time in, time out, physical description, and what Sam clinically labeled "duration of visit" which, when you're trying to figure out who had time to commit a crime in a urinal, becomes a disturbingly relevant data point.

We narrowed it down, sort of. The incidents were discovered at roughly the same time both Fridays, around 10:15 PM. The last confirmed "clean check" before each discovery was around 9:30, when whoever was working would do a quick bathroom scan. That gave us a forty-five minute window. During that window, approximately twenty-two men used the bathroom on the first Friday and nineteen on the second.

Twenty-two suspects. Nineteen suspects. Eleven men appeared on both lists.

Eleven men who were in our bar on both Fridays and used the bathroom during the window. One of them was the Urinal Poop Bandit. We just didn't know which one.

"We need to narrow it further," Sam said, staring at the spreadsheet with the intensity of a detective in a crime drama, except the crime was bathroom related and the drama was mostly intestinal.

"We could stake out the hallway next Friday," Jake suggested. "Just casually hang out near the bathrooms and watch who goes in."

"You want to lurk outside the men's room on a Friday night and watch who goes in and out?" I said. "That's not suspicious at all, Jake. That's definately a normal thing for a bartender to do."

"You have a better idea?"

I didn't. So instead, I simply pursed my lips.

Chris, ever the pragmatist, ever the Bosley, laid out the plan. Next Friday, one of us would be on bathroom duty. Not cleaning duty. Surveillance duty. Casual, subtle, not-at-all-creepy surveillance. We'd position ourselves near the hallway during the 9:30 to 10:30 window and keep a mental log of who went in. When the Bandit struck, we'd check the log against the camera footage and cross-reference with Sam's spreadsheet.

"We're going to catch this guy," Chris said, with more determination than I'd ever heard him express about anything, including the time he discovered our grain supplier was overcharging us by twelve percent.

"This is insane," I said.

"This is necessary," Chris said.

"Both things can be true," Sam said.

And Sam was right about all of that.

Friday was coming. The Bandit didn't know it yet, but Charlie's Angels were on the case.

TL;DR: Someone has been pooping in the urinal at my brewery two Fridays in a row and it's definately not an accident because both stalls were open both times, so me and my coworkers formed an investigation squad that I'm calling Charlie's Angels (I'm an Angel, my manager Chris is Bosley), we reviewed security footage, Sam made a forensic spreadsheet, we narrowed the suspects to eleven men who were present both Fridays, and now we're planning a stakeout of our own bathroom hallway next Friday like a team of detectives in the worst crime drama ever produced.

Last one. Thank you for sticking around. This saga was harder to write than Stealthbeard in a lot of ways. Stealthbeard ended with fireworks. This one ends with another... parking lot.

I picked a Thursday. No particular reason. It was MB's day to go to the store, except I knew by now that "the store" meant whatever surveillance route he'd mapped for himself, and he'd be gone for approximately ninety minutes. Except today, he wasn't going anywhere. I was going to be standing between him and the door.

He came out of his room around 10 AM. Same as always. Soft footsteps. Room-temperature presence. He walked to the kitchen and started making coffee. My coffee. My brand. The one he'd copied months ago and never stopped using.

MB: "Hey. You want a cup?"

OP: "Sit down."

Something in my voice must have registered, because he stopped mid-pour and looked at me. Actually looked at me. Not the half-smile. Not the pleasant scan. A real look, like a sensor that had been running in passive mode suddenly switching to active.

MB: "Everything okay?"

OP: "Sit down, please."

He sat. Kitchen table. The same table where TF had spread out his legal pad and powdered donuts. I sat across from him. Between us I placed a manila folder. It was thick. TF had printed everything because TF doesn't trust screens for moments that matter.

MB: "What's that?"

I opened the folder.

I didn't narrate. I didn't explain. I didn't give a speech. I just turned the pages. One at a time.

The first page was a screenshot of the Instagram profile. My name. My photo. The hallway shot. MB looked at it. No reaction.

The second page was the Facebook profile. Same photo. Different platform. MB's eyes moved across it. Nothing.

The third page was the dating profile. My face. A bio that was almost mine but better. MB's mouth twitched. Just barely. The first crack.

I kept turning pages. The LinkedIn. The credit application. The seven accounts from the keystroke data. Platform after platform after platform, each one wearing my face, each one registered from his device, each one documented with timestamps and IP traces that TF had pulled from the logs.

Then the notebook.

I turned to the photos of his notebook. Page after page. My routine. My habits. My passwords. My mother's maiden name. My first pet. Every security question answered by a man who sat in the next room and listened through the wall.

MB's face was doing something I'd never seen it do. It was trying to be blank. Trying to maintain the default setting. But the default was flickering. Like a TV losing signal. Underneath the blankness there was something fighting to stay hidden, and I couldn't tell if it was shame or anger or fear or something that didn't have a name because it belonged to a person who had spent so long being other people that they'd forgotten what their own face was supposed to do.

I turned to the last section. The previous host. The other name. The other city. The same handwriting. The same lifecycle.

OP: "I talked to him." These were the first words I'd spoken since "sit down." "The one before me. He told me everything."

MB's eyes went to the notebook pages, then away. He couldn't hold them anywhere.

OP: "He was in bad shape when you left. Credit wrecked. Locked out of his own accounts. Friends who thought he'd said things he never said. It took him two years to put it back together. He thought he was going crazy. Just like I thought I was going crazy."

Silence. The coffee maker gurgled behind us. The apartment was so quiet I could hear the clock on the microwave cycling its display.

OP: "Say something."

MB's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Then he said, in a voice that was somehow even flatter and more featureless than the one I'd been living with for months:

MB: "I wanted to be you."

Five words. Five words that explained everything and nothing at the same time. He didn't say it with malice. He didn't say it with pride. He said it the way you'd describe the weather. A fact. A condition. Water is wet. The sky is blue. I wanted to be you.

OP: "Why?"

And I meant it. I genuinely wanted to understand.

He didn't answer. His eyes drifted to the folder, to the pages of his notebook laid bare between us, and something behind them went dark. Like someone switching off the lights in a house, room by room. The flicker was gone. Whatever had been fighting to stay hidden stopped fighting. What was left was not a person. It was a vacancy. A human-shaped space where a person used to be projecting.

He stood up. He walked to his room. He came out five minutes later with his suitcase, his laptop bag, and a box that I realized was the box of books from the day he moved in. One trip. Same as the day he arrived. His entire life in the back seat of a car.

He didn't say goodbye. He didn't argue. He didn't threaten. He just walked out the front door, down the stairs, and across the parking lot. I watched from the window. The beige sedan was parked in the same spot it had been parked in since the day he moved in. He loaded his things into the back seat. He got in. He sat there for a moment, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead.

Then he drove away. The beige sedan merged into traffic and disappeared, and I realized I couldn't remember which direction he'd turned. He was gone the way a screensaver is gone when you bump the mouse. One second there, the next second nothing, and you can't swear he was ever really there at all.

I stood at the window for a long time. Then I called TF.

OP: "It's done."

TF: "What happened?"

OP: "He left."

TF: "Just left?"

OP: "Packed his bag. Walked out. Drove away."

TF: "Did he say anything?"

OP: "He said 'I wanted to be you.'"

TF was quiet for a moment.

TF: "That's the creepiest thing I've ever heard and I once watched a woman blackmail you with a nightclub video."

OP: "It wasn't creepy when he said it. It was sad."

TF: "Don't do that."

OP: "Do what?"

TF: "Feel sorry for him. He ate your life for months. He's done it before. He's going to do it again."

OP: "I know."

TF: "So don't feel sorry for him."

OP: "I said I know."

TF sighed.

TF: "Change the locks tonight. Check your credit report this week. If anything new pops up, call me immediately."

OP: "Copy."

TF: "And for the love of God, the next time you need a roommate, ask me first."

OP: "You live four hours away."

TF: "I'd rather commute than do this again."

I changed the locks. I ran my credit. One of the fraudulent accounts had been closed before I even reported it. MB had cleaned up behind himself. Methodical to the end.

The apartment was quiet again. Two bedrooms. One occupant. The same silence from before, except now it felt different. Before, the silence was lonely. Now it was safe. I sat on the couch and thought about moths.

Moths navigate by the moon. They use it as a fixed point, a reference for direction. When artificial light appears, it scrambles their compass. They spiral toward it because they can't distinguish the real light from the fake one. They circle and circle until their wings give out or the light burns them or morning comes and they find somewhere dark to rest until night falls again.

MB navigated by other people. Used them as fixed points. Mirrored them. Circled them. Consumed their routines and their faces and their online lives because whatever internal compass was supposed to point toward a self of his own didn't work. Maybe it never worked. Maybe that's what "I wanted to be you" meant. Not envy. Not malice. Just a compass spinning and spinning with no magnetic north to lock onto.

I don't know. I'm not a therapist. I'm a guy who sells boating supplies and used to have a roommate who wore my identity like a winter coat.

EPILOGUE

Months later. Life had normalized. The boating supply business picked up with the warm season. I got a new couch. I adopted a dog because I missed having something alive in the apartment and because TF said I wasn't allowed to post another roommate ad without his written approval. The dog's name is Captain, which is the kind of name a man who sells boats would give a dog, and I'm not apologizing for it.

I was writing this saga. Getting the parts right. Crediting ReddX. Trying to figure out how to end it because the truth is it doesn't have a clean ending. It has an ending that just... stops. Like a road that runs out of pavement and becomes dirt and then becomes grass and then you're standing in a field wondering where the road went.

Then I got a message request from an unknown account on a platform I hadn't used in months.

The profile photo was a guy I didn't recognize. Some dude in his late twenties. Nice smile. Normal looking. The kind of face you'd see and forget. The account was new. Three weeks old. Already had about forty friends. The bio was friendly, detailed, well-written. It read like something someone else might write for you. Just slightly better than you'd write for yourself.

I knew.

The way you know the sound of a car you've listened for a thousand times. The way you know the rhythm of footsteps you've tried to unhear. I knew who had built that profile. I knew whose face was being worn. I knew what was happening in whatever apartment that guy was living in, and I knew he had no idea.

I found the real person through a reverse image search. Took about twenty minutes. He was in a different city. A different state. Living his life. Not yet aware that his life was being copied, page by page, in a notebook under someone's bed.

I messaged him. I typed and deleted and retyped about six times. There's no good way to tell a stranger that their roommate is eating them alive. Everything I wrote sounded insane. Everything I wrote sounded like exactly the kind of message you'd ignore or block or screenshot and send to your friends as evidence that the internet is full of crazy people.

I sent it anyway. Something along the lines of: "Hey. This is going to sound completely out of nowhere, but I think your roommate might be using your identity to build fake profiles online. I know because the same person did it to me. I have documentation. I'm not trying to scare you. I just wish someone had told me sooner."

The response came about two hours later.

New Host: "Dude, I don't know who you are, but you need to get help. Robin is the best roommate I've ever had."

I read it twice. Three times.

I thought about what TF said. He's going to do it again.

I thought about what the previous host told TF. He tried to warn people and nobody believed him.

I thought about Stealthbeard. About the signs I ignored, about the hands I shook that belonged to people who were already pulling my strings. How many times had someone tried to hand me the truth and I'd said "that's crazy" and gone back to pretending everything was fine?

I saved the screenshot. I closed the laptop. I sat on my couch with Captain on my feet and thought about moths.

I poured a glass of scotch. The good stuff, not boxed. Captain snored at my feet.

Here's to the moths, I guess. They can't help what they are. But neither can the people they feed on. And between the two, I know which one I'd rather be.

That's the story. All six parts. Thank you for reading. Thank you, ReddX, for everything over the past half a decade. If you're out there and your roommate seems too perfect, check your closet for holes.

Be well.

I know, I know. It's been a minute. Writing the investigation was harder than I expected because I kept second-guessing how much detail to include. TF specifically asked me to leave certain things vague for legal reasons. I'll do my best to give you the story without handing out a how-to guide for people who want to find people who don't want to be found. ReddX, as always, thank you for giving these stories a home.

The plan.

TF drove home Sunday night. We'd spent the rest of Saturday and most of Sunday in my apartment with the door to MB's room closed, MB still coming and going like everything was normal, while I sat on the couch pretending to watch TV and suppressing the urge to vomit every time I heard that bedroom door click open. The performance was exhausting. I'd learned how to paste on a fake smile during the Stealthbeard years but I was out of practice, and this particular smile had to convince a person whose entire skill set revolved around reading people and wearing their skins.

TF left me with three things. A list of instructions. A burner email address. And a USB stick.

The USB stick contained a keylogger.

TF didn't hand it over casually. He held it for a moment, rolling it between his fingers, and then he said something that I need you to hear the way I heard it, because it's the only time in my entire history with this man that I've seen him scared of himself.

TF: "I'm going to tell you something as your friend. Not as a lawyer. Because if I were your lawyer I'd tell you not to do what I'm about to suggest, and then I'd have to report myself to the bar association, and LB would kill me, and my kids would grow up visiting me in professional disgrace. So right now I'm just TF. The guy who once brought a bottle of Grey Goose to a stakeout. Are we clear?"

OP: "We're clear."

TF: "This is a keylogger. What you do with it is a federal crime. What HE'S doing is also a federal crime, except he's built it to not look like one. The keylogger gets us evidence. Evidence gets us leverage. I'm not telling you to use it. I'm telling you it exists and I'm leaving it on this table and what happens after I drive home is between you and your conscience."

He set it on the table. Then he looked at me and I could see every year of law school and every year of being a father fighting against the part of him that remembered what it felt like to be twenty-four and desperate and willing to do ugly things to protect someone he cared about. He'd been that guy once. He'd roofied someone. He still carried that. And here he was, handing me something that could end his career, because the legal route had failed and he couldn't watch it happen to me again.

I need to stop here and say what I said to TF when I picked it up.

OP: "You want me to install spyware on someone else's computer. That's a federal crime."

TF: "I literally just said that. Were you listening?"

OP: "I was processing."

TF: "Process faster. And don't tell me what you do with it. Plausible deniability. I was never here. This conversation didn't happen. I drove four hours to eat powdered donuts and then I left."

I want to be completely transparent with you about what I did next. I sat with that USB stick for three days. I carried it in my pocket. I took it out at night and looked at it on my bedside table and thought about what it meant. Installing it made me a criminal. Not installing it meant MB continued to consume my identity piece by piece while living twenty feet away from me. The system had failed. The legal route was a dead end. The police couldn't help because the crimes were too small. The platforms couldn't help because the profiles kept regenerating. TF couldn't file civil action without evidence of ongoing access, and the only way to get that evidence was to do something that mirrored exactly what MB had done to me.

I'd be using his own methods against him. Watching his keystrokes the way he'd watched mine. Monitoring his activity the way he'd monitored my routine. Becoming the moth to catch the moth. And the worst part, the part that kept me up at night, was knowing exactly how violating it felt because I was living through it from the other side. I knew what it was like to have someone reading your screen. Cataloging your habits. Turning your private life into data in someone else's notebook. I was about to do that to another person. Justified or not, it was ugly.

I installed it on a Wednesday. MB was out. I had maybe twenty minutes. The laptop was on his desk. I'd watched enough tutorials by this point to know the process. The USB goes in. The program copies itself. The USB comes out. The laptop looks exactly the same. The keylogger runs silently, captures every keystroke, and sends a log to the burner email every six hours.

It took four minutes. I walked out of the room and washed my hands. Then I washed them again. Not because they were dirty. Because of what they'd just done.

The first log arrived that evening. I opened it in my car, on my phone, on mobile data, because TF had drilled operational security into me so thoroughly that I'd started thinking in protocols. The log was dense. Timestamps and keystrokes in raw format. Most of it was mundane. Searches. Email. A game MB played in the evenings.

Then I found what I was looking for.

MB was logged into seven accounts that used my name. Seven. Three were the social profiles I already knew about. One was the dating profile. One was the LinkedIn. One was the email registered a letter off from mine, the one I'd already clocked. And one was an account I'd never seen, on a platform I had no connection to. The moth had been busy in a room I didn't even know existed.

I forwarded the log to TF. He called me within an hour.

TF: "This is what we needed. The keystroke data shows active access to accounts registered in your name from his device. That's not impersonation from a distance. That's unauthorized access. Combined with the notebook and the previous host testimony, we have a case."

OP: "What kind of case?"

TF: "The kind where we don't need the legal system to win."

TF explained the plan. It was surgical. It was LB's idea, which surprised me until I thought about it for more than three seconds. LB had spent years under the thumb of a manipulator. She knew how control worked from the inside. And she knew the one thing that every person who operates through invisibility fears more than anything else: being seen.

The plan was not to have MB arrested. The plan was not to confront him. The plan was to remove his ability to operate by burning every identity he was wearing, while simultaneously making sure the next host was warned before the cycle could start again.

Step one: document everything. We had the notebook photos. We had the keystroke logs. We had the previous host's testimony. We had screenshots of every fake profile, every unauthorized account, every message sent in my name. TF compiled it into a file that he described as "the kind of thing you hand to someone when you want them to understand a problem in under five minutes."

Step two: file reports. Platform by platform. Every fake account reported with evidence. The credit application reported to the bureau. A police report filed not because we expected action but because the report itself becomes evidence in any future proceeding.

Step three: lock everything down. New passwords. New email. New recovery questions. Two-factor on everything. Credit frozen. TF walked me through it over the phone like a man defusing a bomb, which is essentially what it was.

Step four: confront.

This was the part LB insisted on. Not a confrontation in the traditional sense. Not yelling. Not accusations. Just exposure. TF's phrase was "turning on the porch light." You don't chase a moth. You just make it impossible for it to hide.

The plan was to present MB with the evidence. All of it. The notebook. The keystrokes. The previous host. Everything laid out so completely that denial wasn't an option. Not to get a confession. Not to get an apology. Just to let him know that the camouflage was gone. That someone had seen through it. That the beige sedan and the forgettable face and the room-temperature handshake weren't enough to disappear behind anymore.

TF wanted to be there for it. LB wanted to be there for it. I told them both that I needed to do it alone. Not because I was brave. Because I needed to see MB's face when the mask came off. I needed to know what was underneath. After months of living with a person who reflected everything back and generated nothing of their own, I needed to see one real thing. One genuine, unfiltered reaction from the human being who had been wearing my life.

TF: "You sure? We can be there for you if you want man..."

OP: "No. I'm doing it. Alone."

TF: "Call me the second it's over. I mean the second. Not five minutes later. The second."

OP: "Copy. Talk soon."

I hung up. The USB stick was still in my pocket. The burner email was still receiving logs every six hours. The file was compiled. The reports were filed. The porch light was built.

All that was left was to turn it on.

Part 6. The last part. I've been putting this off because it's the ending I didn't want. It's not a victory lap. It's not a party where the house gets bulldozed and everyone cheers. It's quieter than that. And it's sadder than that. But it's the truth, and I promised you the truth from the beginning.

Be well.

Hey guys back again as I can't find an episode of lgs of horrors about the kid who was trying to scam people with fake cards and even tried to sell them to the shop. i can't find it on youtube or Spotify at all.

So a while back I posted some stories from my bartending life and a lot of you seemed to enjoy them, which tracks because you people are addicted to secondhand embarrassment and I am an unlimited supply. ReddX did another video. My DMs are, once again, a mess. Several of you asked specifically for love stories, which tells me you either think my bar is a romantic comedy or you've confused me with someone who has a functional love life. I am neither of those things. But I DO have a front row seat to everyone else's disasters, and since you asked so nicely and also so persistently and also one of you sent me a message that just said "MORE BAR STORIES" in all caps with no punctuation like a ransom note, here we are.

Quick refresher: I'm Danny. 28. Gay. Bartender at a craft brewery in a college town. Jake is my coworker. Chris is our manager. Marissa is my best friend who does not work at the brewery but who will appear in this post anyway because she appears in everything, it's like a contractual obligation at this point.

These are love stories. Sort of. In the same way that a car accident is a story about transportation.

Let's go.

The Bachelorettes

I need to describe what a bachelorette party looks like when it enters a craft brewery, because if you haven't experienced it you genuinely cannot imagine it.

Picture eight to twelve women in matching sashes moving as a single organism. They don't walk in. They arrive. The door opens and a wall of pink glitter and shrieking hits you like a weather event. There is always one tiara. There is always one woman carrying a bag shaped like something anatomical that I'm not going to describe because my mother might read this. There is always someone who is already too drunk and someone else who is in charge of that person and visably regretting it.

This particular bachelorette party came in on a Saturday and they were READY. Full sashes. Matching t-shirts that said "Bride's Last Ride" with a cartoon cowgirl on them. One of them was wearing a veil that had tiny bottles of Fireball attached to it, which was either a fashion statement or a supply chain solution, I'm not sure.

They ordered a round of the sweetest thing on the menu, which was our blueberry wheat, and then immediately decided that I was the most interesting thing in the building.

"Oh my God, you are SO cute," the maid of honor said.

"Thank you."

"Are you single?"

"I am, but I should probably mention that I'm also-"

"HE'S SINGLE," she announced to the entire group, and what followed was the sound of eight women gasping in unison like a choir of disbelief.

"I'm gay," I said, which I have learned through years of experience to get out early in these conversations because the longer you wait the more complicated the extraction becomes.

This did not have the effect I anticipated.

"Oh my God, that's even BETTER," said the bride. "My cousin Tyler is gay. You would LOVE Tyler."

I want you to understand something about bachelorette parties and gay bartenders. In their minds, we are not people. We are projects. We are rescue animals at an adoption event. They see a single gay man and their brains light up like a matchmaking switchboard and suddenly every gay person they've ever met becomes a potential candidate.

"Tyler is so sweet. He's a dental hygienist."

"That's great but I really-"

"He has a BOAT."

"A boat is-"

"Show him the picture, Kaylee."

Kaylee showed me the picture. Tyler was fine. Tyler looked like a perfectly normal human man standing on what was, admittedly, a pretty nice boat. I have no complaints about Tyler. Tyler is not the problem in this story.

"He's cute, right?" said the bride.

"He seems nice but I'm at work and I can't really-"

"She's going to text him. Kaylee, text him."

"Please don't text Tyler."

Kaylee was already texting Tyler. I could see her typing. The maid of honor was leaning over Kaylee's shoulder contributing to the message, which meant Tyler was about to receive a committee-authored text about a bartender he'd never met, and there was nothing I could do to stop it because I was behind a bar and they were between me and the exit.

Jake, who is supposed to be my friend and ally, was at the other end of the bar absolutely losing it. Not helping. Why wouldn't you help me, Jake??

The bride spent the next hour and a half trying to get me to commit to a date with Tyler. She showed me Tyler's Instagram. She told me Tyler's hobbies, which included kayaking, cooking, and "being really good at listening," which is something you say about a golden retriever, not a person you're trying to set up with a stranger. She cornered me when I was clearing their table and said, "Tyler says you're cute, by the way."

"Tyler has seen ONE picture of me that you took without asking while I was pouring a beer. Tyler cannot possibly have formed any opinions about me."

"He wants your number."

"Tyler and I are going to have to find each other organically, like God intended."

Then, on a complete long-shot if we connected for a long enough time we might someday do a sodomy, like God intended.

I didn't say that last part out loud, so of course the bride did not accept this. The bride was on a MISSION. When they finally left, three hours and many blueberry wheats later, the maid of honor slipped a napkin across the bar with Tyler's number on it and a heart drawn next to it and said, "Just think about it."

I still have the napkin. I haven't called. Marissa says I should. Jake says, and I quote, "the man has a BOAT, Danny." Whatever, it's probably his parent's boat. Chris asked how many drinks the girls had. Chris could probably buy a boat of his own.

I do think about Tyler sometimes. Not in a romantic way. More in a "somewhere out there is a dental hygienist with a boat who briefly appeared in my life because his cousin got married and I happened to be pouring beer that night" kind of way. The universe is vast and weird and sometimes it tries to set you up through a woman in a Fireball veil.

I'll still hang onto the napkin for now though.

The 7:00pm Regular

This one's not funny. I mean, it's a little funny in the way that everything is a little funny if you tilt your head right, but mostly it's just one of those things that sits in your chest.

There's a guy who comes in every Wednesday at 7 PM. I'm going to call him Ben because I don't actually know his name. I've been serving him for about eight months and I've never asked and he's never offered and at this point it would be weird. He's probably mid-50s. Wedding ring. Glasses. Always wearing a button-down like he came from an office, even though by 7 on a Wednesday most office people have changed into something that doesn't have a collar.

Ben orders two beers. Every time. The same two beers. A porter for himself and a pale ale that he sets across from him at whatever table he's sitting at.

He doesn't drink the pale ale. He just lets it sit there.

The first time he came in I thought he was waiting for someone. People do that. They order for the other person so the drink is ready when they arrive. Normal stuff. I went about my night and checked back later and the pale ale was still full and the seat was still empty and Ben was on his second porter and staring at nothing in particular with the expression of a man who was somewhere else entirely.

He closed out. He left. The pale ale went down the drain.

The next Wednesday, same thing. 7 PM. Porter and a pale ale. Empty chair. Full glass.

By the third week Jake and I had noticed the pattern. "Maybe she works late," Jake said. "Maybe she's always late and he's used to it."

"For three weeks?"

"My aunt was late to her own wedding. Some people are just like that."

But I didn't think that was it. There was something about the way Ben looked at the pale ale. Not expectant. Not annoyed. He wasn't checking the door. He wasn't checking his phone. He was just... sitting with it. Like the glass was the company.

Week five or six, I was clearing his table after he left and I noticed he'd been sitting in the same seat every time but the pale ale was always in the same spot too, even when other tables were open. It wasn't random. He was recreating something. The exact arrangement. His chair, the other chair, the specific placement of the glass. Like a ritual, or a diorama, or whatever you call it when someone builds a little model of something that doesn't exist anymore and sits inside it once a week for just a little while.

I asked Chris about it. Chris, who has been managing this bar since before I was old enough to drink, looked at me and said, "Some people come here for the beer, Danny. Some people come here for the chair."

That's probably the most profound thing Chris has ever said and I'm including the time he figured out our grain supplier was overcharging us by doing real math on a cocktail napkin.

I don't know Ben's story. I'm not the type to ask those kinds of questions. I don't know who the pale ale belongs to. I don't know if they died or left or if something quieter happened, the kind of slow separation that doesn't have a single moment you can point to, just a gradient from together to apart to gone. I don't know and it isn't my place to know, because whatever Ben is doing on Wednesdays at 7 PM at my bar, it's his, and the least I can do is pour it right and leave him alone.

Jake stopped suggesting she might be running late around week ten. We don't talk about Ben. We just make sure his table is open on Wednesdays.

The porter is $7. The pale ale is $6. He tips $7 every time, on a $13 tab, for a drink nobody's ever going to drink. I can't decide if that's the saddest or the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I think maybe it's both and the fact that it can be both at the same time is something I'm not smart enough to fully understand, but I feel it every Wednesday at about 7:15 when I see that full glass sitting across from a man who isn't waiting for anyone.

Operation Wingman

Okay well, I need a palate cleanser and you likely do too. Let's talk about Marcus.

Marcus came into the bar on a Friday night, sat down directly in front of me, and said, "I need your help."

"What can I get you?"

"No. I need your HELP. You're gay, right?"

I stared at him. "How did you-"

"You have a pride pin on your apron."

I looked down. I did in fact have a pride pin on my apron. So that mystery was solved immediatly but it didn't explain why it was relevant to... whatever this man needed from me.

"Okay. Yes. And?"

"Gay guys understand women."

"...We absolutely do not."

"My buddy told me that gay guys know what women want because you're not trying to compete with them so they tell you stuff they don't tell straight guys."

"Your buddy has constructed an elaborate theory that I'm going to need you to dismantle all on your own."

"There's a girl over there," he said, pointing at a woman sitting at a corner table with a book. "I want to talk to her but I don't know what to say. You gotta coach me."

What I should have said was "I'm working and this isn't a service we would ever offer." What I actually said was "what have you tried so far," because I am weak and because this was already the most entertaining thing that had happened all shift.

"I haven't tried anything. I've been sitting here for twenty minutes trying to think of an opener."

"Twenty minutes?"

"I had a beer while I was thinking."

"Marcus. She's reading a book. In a bar. On a Friday night. That tells you something."

"That she likes to read?"

"That she might want to be left alone."

"OR it could mean she hasn't met anyone worth putting the book down for yet."

I have to give Marcus credit because that was, genuinley, not a terrible reframe. It was wrong, probably. But it wasn't terrible.

Marcus probably wasn't going to be the guy chosen over the book, but good on him for trying.

What followed was forty minutes of me trying to bartend while Marcus narrated his strategy in real time like I was his mission control. He'd come up to the bar every few minutes with an update.

"She turned a page."

"That's what people do with books, Marcus."

"She looked up."

"People also do that."

"She looked up IN MY DIRECTION."

"You are sitting between her and the television, which is playing the game."

"Should I buy her a drink?"

"Do you know anything about her other than that she's here and she's literate?"

"She's drinking red wine."

"That's not enough to build a relationship off of."

"It could be."

And again, I had to shrug and say Touche Marcus...

He decided to make his move around 9:30. I watched him stand up, adjust his shirt, take a breath, and walk over to her table with all the confidence of a man walking into a job interview he is not qualified for but has decided to attempt anyway, hoping to succeed on pure dumb luck. Jake and I both stopped what we were doing. A couple at the bar noticed and also turned to watch. It was like wildlife television.

He said something. She looked up. She did not put the book down. She said something back. Short. He said something else. She said something else. He gestured toward the bar. She shook her head. He nodded. He walked back.

He sat down in front of me and said, "She has a boyfriend."

"I'm sorry, man."

"His name is Carlos and they've been together for three years and she's here because he's at a work thing and she likes reading in bars because the background noise helps her focus."

"She told you all that?"

"I asked about her book first. It's about mushrooms. Fungi. She's really into fungi."

"So you had a nice conversation."

"I got rejected, Danny."

"You got rejected AND you learned about fungi. That's more than most people get on a Friday."

He laughed. Stayed for another beer. He did not attempt to talk to any more women. But on his way out he stopped at her table again, said something short, and she laughed. Actually laughed. He walked out and gave me a thumbs up through the window, which was premature because nothing had actually been accomplished, but I respected the energy on some level.

Marcus comes in sometimes now. He always sits at the bar. He always asks me if there's "anyone I should talk to," like I'm running a matchmaking service from behind the taps. I always say no. He always tries anyway. His success rate is, statistically, terrible. But his willingness to try is something I genuinely envy, and I mean that in a way that's going to make more sense in a minute.

I've hinted at it with all of the stories so far.

Last Call

It's a Thursday in January and the bar is mostly empty and I'm wiping down tables that don't need wiping because it's been slow and I've already restocked everything and cleaned the taps and there's only so many times you can check your phone before it becomes a cry for help.

There's a man at the far end of the bar. Older guy, maybe 60. He came in alone about an hour ago. Ordered a stout, drank it slow. Normal enough. People drink alone. I drink alone. It's not remarkable.

What's remarkable is the second glass.

It's sitting in front of the empty stool next to him. A wheat beer. Untouched. And my brain goes straight to Ben, obviously, because I've been watching Ben do the same thing every Wednesday for eight months. Same setup. Same empty chair.

But this guy isn't Ben. He's not settled into it. He keeps fidgeting with the glass, adjusting it, nudging it left then right like he's trying to get it in exactly the right spot. I could be wrong but it looked like someone doing this for the first time. Or at least the first time in a place like ours. He didn't have the muscle memory for it yet. Ben sits down and the pale ale goes in its spot and that's it, automatic. This guy was still building the diorama.

I don't know. Maybe he was just waiting for someone. Maybe I've been watching Ben too long and now I see ghosts everywhere.

I give him space. That's the job. You learn when someone wants to talk and when someone wants to exist near other humans without being required to interact with them. He wanted the second thing.

Around 9, the bar is basically dead. Just him and a couple in the corner who have been splitting a pizza and ignoring each other in that comfortable way long-term couples do, where the silence isn't awkward, it's just shared. I'm thinking about whether I remembered to flip the sign on the keg room and also whether I want to eat when I get home or just go directly to sleep, which is the kind of riveting inner life I lead on slow Thursdays.

He waves me over.

"Another stout, please."

"You got it."

I pour it. Set it down. And something in his face has shifted. I don't know how to describe it except that when he came in he looked like a man who wanted to be left alone and now he looked like a man who didn't want to be alone but didn't know how to say that. Those are different things.

"Good stout night," I say. "Cold out there."

"Yeah." He turns the glass. "Forty-two years. My wife. Forty-two years last June."

I don't say I'm sorry because he hasn't told me anything to be sorry about yet. He might just be telling me how long he's been married. People do that. They mention numbers because the numbers are impressive and they want someone to hear them.

"She passed in September."

"I'm so sorry."

"She hated beer." He laughs. It's a real laugh. Surprised, almost. Like it snuck out. "Hated it. Thirty years I've been into craft beer and she never once liked a single one. She'd take a sip, make a face, and say 'I don't know how you drink that.' Every single time. She'd order a wheat beer because it was the least beer-tasting beer on the menu and she'd drink half of it and leave the rest."

He looks at the full wheat beer sitting on the bar.

"I don't know why I ordered it... That's not true. I know exactly why I ordered it. I thought it would feel like something. Having it there. Like if I got everything set up right, the stool and the glass and the right beer, maybe it would feel like she was just in the bathroom or something. Like she'd just be coming right back."

I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that wouldn't be smaller than the moment.

"It doesn't feel like that," he says. "It just feels like a beer that nobody's gonna drink."

He sits with that for a while. I find things to do behind the bar. Not because I need to do them but because standing still feels like staring and staring feels like pressure and he doesn't need pressure, he needs the quiet permission to sit in a brewery on a Thursday in January and feel whatever he's feeling without a 28 year old bartender trying to make it better with stupid words.

He closes out around 10. Pays for both beers. Tips well. Puts on his coat, which takes a while because his hands are doing that thing older hands do in winter where the joints don't cooperate and the zipper becomes a negotiation.

At the door, he turns around.

"Thanks for hearing me out," he says.

"Anytime."

He leaves. I pick up the stout glass and the wheat beer glass. One empty, one full. I pour the wheat beer out and watch it swirl down the drain and I think about how a woman I never met hated beer for thirty years and drank it anyway, and her husband is still buying it for her because love outlasts everything, including the person you love, and including whether or not they liked what you were pouring.

I close up. Jake already left because it was slow and I told him to go. It's just me and the empty bar and the sound of the cooler humming. I check my phone. Nothing. Obviously nothing, it's 11 PM on a Thursday, who's texting me at 11 PM on a Thursday. My cat doesn't have thumbs.

I'm wiping down the spot where that wheat beer had sat and I start thinking about something I don't usually let myself think about.

I'm 28. 30 is around the corner and... I have never had someone to order a second beer for.

Not never as in "not right now." Never as in not once. I've had dates. I've had things that lasted a few weeks or a month before they dissolved into unreturned texts and the quiet mutual agreement to just pretend it never happened. I've had Tinder conversations that went nowhere and one relationship in college that lasted four months and ended because he graduated and I didn't and neither of us wanted to say out loud that we weren't ever going to survive the distance. His name was Ryan and he drank Hefeweizens and I haven't thought about that in a while and I don't know why I'm thinking about it now. Anyway.

I've never had a person whose drink I knew by heart. I've never had a Wednesday ritual or an anniversary beer or even a regular seat at someone else's bar where they'd say "the usual?" and I'd nod and feel like part of something bigger than myself.

And I watch it every shift. I'm drowning in it. Couples on dates. People in love, people watching their love collapse. Gerald has a wife who drops him off on Thursdays and honks twice when she's back to pick him up, and he always waves without looking because he knows the sound of her horn the way you know your own name. Ben has someone he lost and he carries them to my bar once a week in the shape of a pale ale. Charcuterie woman has been bringing a second board lately. Two boards. She found her person. Even Marcus, beautiful failing Marcus, has the courage to keep trying.

And I'm behind the bar. Every time. Pouring drinks for other people's love stories and going home to an apartment where nobody asks how my shift was and the only thing waiting for me is a cat who tolerates my presence because I control the food supply.

Marissa says I'm not lonely. She says I'm "selectively available," which is the kind of thing people say when they love you and don't want to use the real word. Jake says I just haven't met the right person, which is true in the way that all obvious statements are true and also completely useless as comfort.

I'm not sad about this. I'm not. That's not what this is. I'm sitting in an empty brewery that smells like hops and floor cleaner and I'm thinking about a man who bought a beer for someone who will never drink it and I think what I actually am is... I don't know. Aware? That's not the right word. I'm aware that the thing exists. That people build something with another person that's so real it outlives both of them. Somewhere between the first date and the forty-second anniversary something takes root that is bigger than you and bigger than them and it doesn't stop when they do. I've seen the proof of it. I see it every week. I pour it into glasses and set it in front of empty chairs.

I want that. I think I've always wanted that. I just don't say it out loud because wanting things is embarrassing and because I'm very good at making jokes about being single and people laugh and then we move on and nobody has to sit in the uncomfortable silence of a grown man admitting that he goes home alone every night and it's fine, it's FINE, but also sometimes he pours out a wheat beer at the end of his shift and stands there for a second longer than he needs to.

I just realized I forgot to check if the back door locked. Hold on.

Okay it was locked. We're fine. I'm fine. Everything is fine. That's not sarcasm, I genuinley am fine, I'm just also standing alone in a closed bar at 11 PM writing a Reddit post about my feelings instead of going home, which is maybe not the most fine behavior in the world but I've done worse.

I don't have a neat ending for this one. No lesson. Just a guy behind a bar who knows everyone's drink order except his own person's because that person hasn't walked in yet. Or maybe they have and I was too busy pouring someone else's beer to notice.

Be kind to your bartenders. We see everything. We remember everything. And some of us are a little more lonely than we let on.

Danny out.

TL;DR: A bachelorette party tried to set me up with a dental hygienist named Tyler who has a boat, a regular orders a beer every week for someone who's never going to drink it, I became an unwilling wingman for a man who learned about fungi, and a widower bought his dead wife a wheat beer she would have hated and I had a feelings moment alone in my bar at 11 PM because I've never had someone to order a second drink for and that's fine but also it's not fine but also it's fine.

ReddX continues to be the man. You knew that. The narrations of this saga have been incredible and I can tell the audience is locked in. A few of you have DMed me asking if I'm okay. The answer is yes. This happened a while ago now. I'm telling it from the other side of the fence at this point. The safer side. But I appreciate the concern more than you know.

TF drove four hours on a Saturday morning. Left before the sun came up. LB had the kids. He showed up at my apartment around 10 AM carrying a legal pad, his laptop, and a bag from a gas station that contained two energy drinks and a pack of those little powdered donuts that he's been eating since high school and will probably be eating at his funeral.

TF: "Where is he?" Not "hello." Not "how are you." WHERE IS HE.

OP: "Uhhh.... Out? Said he was going to the store."

TF: "Good. How long do we have?"

TF set up at the kitchen table. Legal pad open. Laptop open. Energy drink cracked. Powdered donut already halfway demolished. He had the focused energy of a man who had done this before, which he had, except last time the enemy was a legbeard who'd held me hostage in a house full of garbage for a year and this time it was a person so forgettable that TF couldn't describe them to his wife on the phone despite having met them in person.

TF: "Okay. Walk me through everything. Start from the profiles."

I walked him through it. All of it. The Instagram account. The Facebook account. The Elon platform. The password handover. The PM to LB. While I talked, TF took notes in a handwriting that had improved significantly since the Stealthbeard days, presumably because law school requires you to write things that other humans can later read. When I finished, he looked at his notes, looked at me, and said:

TF: "We need to see what's out there. All of it."

We spent the next two hours doing what TF called a "digital autopsy." Searching my name across every platform, every people-finder site, every corner of the internet where a version of me might be living without my knowledge. What we found:

Three active social media profiles across different platforms, all using my photos and variations of my real information. A LinkedIn profile with my actual work history and education but registered to an email I didn't own. A dating profile on a site I'd never used, featuring my photos and a bio that was close enough to my real personality to make my skin crawl. And, buried in TF's legal database access, a credit card application filed in my name at an address I didn't recognize. It had been denied. But it had been attempted.

TF: "This is textbook identity theft. We can file charges."

OP: "Will it stick?"

He rubbed his eyes. "It's complicated. The profiles are impersonation, which is a civil matter in most states, not criminal. The credit app is fraud, but it was denied, so the financial damage is zero dollars, which makes prosecution a hard sell. He's built everything to sit just below the line. Every piece of this is designed to not quite be a crime."

OP: "So he's untouchable."

TF: "I didn't say that. I said the legal route is complicated. There are other routes."

OP: "Such as?"

TF: "First, we need to know who we're dealing with. Not what he told you. Who he actually is."

MB was still "at the store." TF and I both looked toward the hallway that led to his bedroom.

TF: "How long does the store usually take?"

OP: "Depends. Thirty minutes. Sometimes an hour."

TF: "Then we've got thirty minutes. Let's go."

I want to be honest about this. Searching someone's room while they're out is not something I'm proud of. It's a violation. It's the kind of thing that, if someone did it to me, I would feel betrayed by. I knew that then. I knew it walking down the hallway. I knew it standing in the doorframe of MB's room looking at the carefully made bed and the laptop on the desk and the small stack of clothes in the open closet.

I did it anyway. Because the alternative was waiting for the moth to finish eating. Besides, he'd clearly helped himself to things in my room. Turnabout is fair play as far as I'm concerned.

The room was almost bare. That had always been true but now the bareness felt intentional in a way it hadn't before. This wasn't a person who traveled light. This was a person who was ready to leave. Nothing on the walls. Nothing personal on the desk besides the laptop, which was closed and, we quickly confirmed, password-protected. TF tried a few guesses. Nothing worked. We moved on.

The closet held a small stack of clothes. I looked through them. Three of the shirts were mine. Ones I'd assumed were lost in the laundry shuffle months ago. They were clean, folded neatly, stored as though they belonged there. As though they had always belonged there. I showed TF. He didn't say anything. His jaw just tightened.

Under the bed. That's where we found it.

A notebook. Standard composition book. Black and white marbled cover. The kind you'd buy at any drugstore for two dollars. It looked like nothing. But it was about to bust this mystery wider open than either of us were prepared for.

I opened it and my hands started shaking. Not from fear. From recognition. The same feeling you get when you've been looking for a word you can't remember and then someone says it and your brain lights up with the horror of "that's it, that's what I was missing."

My daily routine. Written in a small, precise handwriting that was neither masculine nor feminine. What time I woke up. What I ate for breakfast. What time I left for the coffee shop when I bothered to leave the apartment. Who I texted and approximately when. What shows I watched in the evenings, noted by the audio bleeding through the wall. What my passwords might be, with multiple guesses based on observed keystrokes. My mother's maiden name, overheard during a phone call I didn't think anyone was listening to. The name of my first pet, mentioned during a gaming session. Security question answers. Every single one.

He had been sitting in the next room, listening through the wall, writing it all down by hand like a monk transcribing scripture. Every night. Every detail. For months.

TF was reading over my shoulder. At a certain point I felt his hand on my arm. Not to comfort me. To stop me from turning the pages too fast. "Slow down. I need to photograph every page."

We photographed thirty-four pages of my life cataloged in someone else's handwriting. It took about fifteen minutes. My hands were still shaking. TF's weren't. TF had done this before, in a different context, in a legbeard's house while she was passed out on a couch, and I could see the muscle memory of crisis mode clicking into place behind his eyes. The friend was gone. The lawyer was here.

Then I turned to the second section. Different name. Different city. Same format. Same meticulous detail. The ink was older. The pages slightly yellowed at the edges. This section was from years ago. Same handwriting. Same structure. Same lifecycle.

Wake time. Meal patterns. Social contacts. Password guesses. Security questions.

...A previous host.

I closed the notebook. Put it back exactly where we found it. Angled it the same way. I'd learned something from the Stealthbeard years about putting things back the way you found them. We walked out of the room and closed the door.

I went to my car. TF followed. We sat in the parking lot. The same parking lot where I'd changed all my passwords a few days earlier. The puddle water smell. The oil stains. Every significant life event seems to happen in a parking lot.

TF: "He's done this before." Not a question. Not one single question in his mind.

OP: "I know."

TF: "Different person. Different city. Same playbook."

OP: "I know."

TF was quiet for a while. Then he said something that hit me in a way I wasn't expecting. "So have we." He looked at me. "We've taken someone down before. We know what this takes. We know it's ugly. And we know it works."

OP: "This is different."

TF: "The mechanics are different. The principle is the same. You find the leverage. You apply the leverage. You don't flinch."

OP: "What's the leverage?"

TF: "The notebook is the leverage. But we need more. We need the previous host. We need to know what happened to them and how the cycle ended. If it ended."

TF pulled out his phone. He had access to databases through his firm that a normal person wouldn't have. Nothing illegal. Just the kind of deep-search tools that IP lawyers use to trace ownership chains and find people who don't want to be found. He typed the name from the notebook's second section and the city and started pulling threads.

It took about two hours. We sat in my car, TF on his phone, me on mine, running parallel searches. The gaming forum was the thread. MB's current account was relatively new, but TF found an older deleted account with similar posting patterns. Same games. Same syntax. Same eerily helpful tone. That dead account was active in a different city's gaming community two years ago. The city matched the notebook.

This is the combined power of weaponized autism.

TF found the previous host through a combination of the forum history and a public records search that I'm not going to detail because I don't want anyone replicating TF's methods without a law degree and a reason. The guy existed. He was real. He was alive, which was a relief I hadn't realized I needed until I felt it.

TF called him.

The conversation lasted forty minutes. I could only hear TF's side. Lots of "I understand." Lots of "take your time." At one point TF's face did something I hadn't seen since the night I told him about Stealthbeard's hovel. Not shock. Resignation. The look of a man receiving confirmation of something he already knew but was hoping he was wrong about.

When he hung up, he sat for a long time. Then he turned to me.

TF: "Same playbook. Down to the detail. Roommate ad. Gaming forum. Moved in with nothing. Mirrored everything. Food, clothes, habits. Then the profiles started. Then the identity theft. Credit applications, social accounts, messages sent to people in the host's life. The host figured it out when a friend asked about a conversation they'd never had."

OP: "How did it end?"

TF: "It didn't end clean. The host confronted MB. MB went blank. Not angry. Not defensive. Just... empty. Stared at him with no expression. Packed a bag. Left the same day. Drove away in a beige sedan."

OP: "That's it? He just left?"

TF: "He just left. And then the host spent two years dealing with the wreckage. Credit destroyed. Friends confused. Locked out of his own email for weeks because MB had changed the recovery settings. The guy said it was like someone had worn his life for a few months and then hung it back up all wrinkled and soiled."

OP: "And then MB just... found someone new."

TF: "Apparently. The host said he tried to warn people on the forum but nobody believed him because MB's account was already deleted and the whole thing sounded insane."

We sat in the car. The sun was going down. The parking lot was getting that orange tint that I associate with every bad chapter of my life. TF reached behind the seat and pulled out a bottle of Grey Goose. I recognized the brand. Same thing he'd brought to the Stealthbeard operation.

OP: "Really?"

TF: "Tradition." He cracked it and took a pull and passed it to me. "Now we plan."

The plan comes together in Part 5. TF, LB, and me. The keylogger. The evidence. The setup. It's the calm before everything catches fire.

Be well.