A man ordered salmon, and I cut him a piece a tenth of a pound over what he asked for. He made me fix it, and he stood there while I did. So I fixed it. I was perfectly polite the entire time, and I made him feel like an idiot on purpose.
This one is about the second ledger. Fish you can weigh. Oysters you can count. The third thing I hand across that counter has no unit at all.
A third of this episode goes back over The Soup, Episode 11: How I Deal With Bullshit, Apparently, and the flowchart it is standing on. The arrows are a lie. It is a sidewalk poured over a path people already wore into the grass. The concrete did not decide anything. It showed up after the feet and took the credit.
That chart is what happens inside me when something lands on me. This episode goes the other way. Not what comes in. What goes out, across a counter, to whoever is standing there.
What is in it
- 0:00Cold open, and the music
- 1:05Who this is and what the show is
- 2:13Refresher: last Thursday's Soup, the flowchart
- 3:22BULLSHIT OCCURS, and nothing in between
- 4:01The arrows are a lie. A sidewalk over a worn path
- 4:55No exit on the page. Nobody forgot to draw one
- 5:28The salmon, and a tenth of a pound
- 6:31Perfectly polite, and using it as a weapon
- 7:47Oysters, and the two honest reasons for the free ones
- 9:18The second ledger
- 9:49Back to the chart: the branch I get paid on
- 10:26Fourteen percent of the problem, all of the verdict
- 11:23Blue-Collar Mystic, Volume Three: warmth is the baseline
- 12:22The admission, and who actually gets more of me
- 14:59Blue-Collar Mystic, Volume One: then go find another job
- 16:02Going dark, compression, and the part before the bloom
- 17:22What is owed, and where the obligation ends
- 18:04The handwritten card, from the field note Truth Is Soup
- 20:23Every branch runs back to the top
- 21:02The door, and the invitation