Episode transcript: Stinky Dan was a “hacker” that Squatty knew. He was massive, like a figure drawn by someone who recently learned that the human shape is just a series of different circles, and he hulked behind his mutil-screened desktop. And, he did have a kind of chemical odor that Linda couldn’t quite place.

“Is that why he doesn’t live at the squat?” Linda asked Squatty.

Squatty smiled tightly, “Everyone is on their own path, and no judgement, but you also have to have your own boundaries, you know? But I think he can help you.”

It was the first time Linda had seen Squatty slightly uncomfortable. They had come to Dan’s with Joe, another member of the Squatty crew who seemed to be the actual connection here. Joe and Dan exchanged cryptic hellos that Linda tuned out as peacocking blather. She also thought she saw something change hands during their elaborate high five, but she also, also didn’t care.

Squatty and Linda sat on Dan’s fairly nice couch in his fairly dark living room while Dan and Joe hunched over the computer screen. Linda asked if there were any new Western Toilets but Squatty said he didn’t like to watch them when he couldn’t give them his full attention. Joe kept hurling questions over to Linda as they worked.

It didn’t take too long for results. Once Dan got down to digging, he found that all of the bleats urging Linda to rejoin “The conversation we’re all having” — they all came from a similar cluster of IP addresses. Which suggested that one person had taken control of the various accounts.

“If you look at, say, Sarah’s posting history,” he said of an old neighbor’s daughter’s account, “she stopped posting regularly about 2 years ago. This post here, ‘This place is getting stale. I’ll see you on the Green Mountain!!’”

“That’s that platform for all the weenuses,” Joe interjected.

“That was May 2030,” continued Dan, without acknowledging Joe. “And then she doesn’t post again until a few weeks ago. ‘Have you dabbed, yet?! Don’t miss Beany Beanz,’ with a ‘z.’”

“Beany Beanz is so based,” said Joe.

“Don’t click that link,” warned Dan. “Beany Beanz is malware dressed up as cryptocurrency.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Joe.

“I mean, that sounds bad, but what does this have to do with someone impersonating my dead aunt Rose?” asked Linda.

Dan summed up his findings: “It’s bots. Someone has taken control of these dead … sorry, abandoned accounts to hawk shit to idiots, and someone else hired out these accounts that have a connection to you to target you.”

Dan said that he could set up a blocklist of the IP addresses, so that Linda didn’t have to see them anymore. “Or you could join your friend Sarah on Green Mountain, where most people are now anyway.”

“But, like, can you get them?” Linda asked, feeling both bored and enraged by what was happening to her.

“What do you mean ‘get’ and who do you mean by ‘them’” Dan asked.

“Is it Button? I know it’s Button,” said Linda.

“This IP address is in Moldova,” said Dan, like that meant anything.

“So do your little clicky clacks and find out who it is in Moldova!” she said. They had spoofed her aunt’s account, or whatever, and Aunt Rose had been Linda’s favorite. Desecrating her memory should come with some consequences. “What if I really did think it was her ghost?”

Linda was on the verge of tears, which had made Joe retreat to the kitchen. Dan just shrugged his shoulders. “If you wanted to monetize this solution, we could talk next steps.”

Squatty put his hand gently on Linda’s shoulder. “Maybe let’s get some fresh air before we put any money down on … something we might regret.”

“You came to me, these are the tools I have, man,” said Dan.

Linda was shaken out of her rage by the quickly escalating tension and let Squatty bundle her out of Dan’s apartment. But she filed away “next steps,” just in case.

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Episode transcript:

After hanging out long enough, the kids started inviting Linda along for what they liked to call their “small acts of pointless rebellion.”

“Purposlessness is a great joy of life,” said a young woman with short, purple hair called Wendy, who seemed to be the ringleader for this faction of the crew.

“Is that a Western Toilet?” asked Linda.

Wendy rolled her eyes, “No. It’s a me.”

Squatty just laughed and said, “You know she’s cool, because she’s kind of mean.”

The acts were stuff like, one afternoon, they went around the neighborhood and taped little paper mustaches to the face scanning screens at all the apartment complexes. Mostly, if the security guards noticed them, they yelled them off. One even gave half-assed chase.

But more than one amused themself by examining their own mustachioed face in the screen.

“Is this what changing minds feels like?” Linda asked Wendy.

“God. Have you never taken an art history course,” Wendy responded. She snapped her fingers at an, well, underling, who rummaged through her backpack.

Wendy peered in over her shoulder. “Give her ‘Grapefruit,”’ said Wendy.

The underling hefted a large hardcover into Linda’s hands. Linda examined the spine. “By Yoko Ono. … I notice this ones not from the library.”

“No,” said Wendy. “I stole it. From Garden Book in Shanghai.”

“What if I steal it from you?” asked Linda.

“You should,” said Wendy. “And then give it to someone else who needs art in their life.”

Another evening, the gang snuck up to the roof of a nearby abandoned building to add to the graffiti that was already there. Some brought chalk, some brought spray paint. Linda brought a permanent marker.

She didn’t know what to draw, so she pulled up to a section of wall and just started making small squares. Wendy came over with a beer for Linda.

“Nice geometry,” she said.

“I can’t draw,” said Linda.

“Everyone can draw,” said Wendy.

“Everyone keeps saying that, but I don’t know if that’s true,” said Linda.

“Suit yourself,” said Wendy.

A small circle of drinkers coalesced in the middle of the roof. Adrian called Linda over to sit by him. There were no stars, but it was a peaceful night. Noise of the city drifted up from below, sounding a thousand miles away.

“Do you guys do stuff life this every night?” asked Linda.

“More recently,” said the underling who had given Linda the book. She was called Danny.

“I think we’ve been energized by the new blood,” added Adrian.

“Oh, who’s that?” asked Linda.

“It’s you!” said Adrian.

The small circle toasted Linda, “To new blood!” Linda felt warm and happy.

Recounting this to Brian later in bed, he remarked that she seemed happier lately.

“And, like, your sleep numbers are better, too. Wanna check the graphs?” He offered his watch to Linda.

“Nah. I feel like you’ve got a good handle on our bio-metric optimization,” Linda teased.

“Hey. When we’re sixty, but we feel thirty, you’re gonna thank me,” he said.

Linda hauled her laptop on to the bed.

“Babe, the blue light,” Brian said.

“I’m just checking my bleats real quick. I’ve got the polarizer on,” said Linda.

Brian tugged down his eye shade and slipped on his sleep-vibrations ring. “Good sleep makes good brains,” he said.

Linda didn’t answer. She refreshed the tab that would bring up new messages, barely even registering the slowness of the browser-based social experience. Among the posts of vacation photos and video news — both of which were too depressing to engage with for long — there was a new bleat urging Linda to “Come back! It’s the conversation we’re all having!”

She had been getting these lately, from old acquaintances. A college classmate she had fallen out of touch with. A friend of a friend she had met once at a party. An overzealous grocery store clerk who got Linda’s contact info before Brian had enlightened her on proper information hygiene. This one, though, was her aunt Rose.

Her aunt Rose had died 8 months ago.

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Episode transcript:

There was a man. There was a myth. There was a series of videos.

Western Toilet, by all accounts, was just some guy living in a place he wasn’t from, making videos about … current events? Politics? Technology? Kind of all of that and none of that, as far as Linda could see.

To Squatty, they were sacred texts to live by. They revealed things about the world that he had never seen before, and pointed out a path that was hiding in plain sight.

“Don’t be the man they are insisting you be. Be the person you are.”

This wasn’t something Western Toilet ever said. He didn’t have to. Squatty got his message loud and clear, and was dedicated to living it out in the world.

Squatty wasn’t some freak, though, obsessed with an internet man. He had a job, and hobbies, and friends. But to truly know the man, you had to watch the Toilet.

It was rumored that Western Toilet lived here in town. Squatty and the boys always kept half an eye out for him, primed with questions. Sometimes they’d take special expeditions to see if they could track the locations from his videos. And if there was good barbecue nearby, well, that was all in the course of a day’s work.

To Linda, the fervor was a part of youth she had left behind. She was a serious-minded 30-something, after all. Seeking answers from an online guru felt a little … misguided.

But then again, that was something that Western Toilet himself said. And, Linda had to admit that life was a little more exciting with something of a quest to pursue. Hanging out with Squatty and his boys, Linda had to wonder if maybe the thing she was missing in her life was just … friends.

She liked spending time with the boys, and working on the zine made her feel like a part of something. If anything, it gave her a chance to brush off her traditional paper cutting skills that she left behind in middle school.

“He talks about that, in ‘Work is for Jerks,’” explained Squatty. “Don’t be reduced to a paycheck. Do things that are useless to find your true purpose.”

Linda argued back that arts and aesthetic crafts weren’t useless, and they were off to the races: a spirited discussion about society’s values and what made life worth living.

She could have found similar advice in the self-help section at the library — a place Western Toilet argued they should all be frequenting more often. In fact, the gang arranged a trip to their local library where Linda got her first library card. Her family had reasoned that if they needed books, they’d just go to the bookstore.

And then, they never really needed books.

Episode transcript:

“If it’s a cult, it’s certainly a soft sell,” said Linda. She had dragged her old laptop out to Miriam’s coffee shop, intending to work on her personal essay.

But writing is a task which makes every other task seem more attractive.

She was currently explaining the Squatty Squat to Miriam. Since that day, Linda had messaged a few times with Squatty about ideas for the essay — “Do you think it’s possible I might be an artist? I designed a few logos for the pizza place.” His responses were always encouraging and enthusiastic, but there was never any sales pitch or pressure tactics. Just a bunch of guys making zines and kind of obsessed with some online videos.

That was another of the things she managed to accomplish instead of writing: Squatty had sent her a playlist: “Start here for enlightenment, wink emoji.”

And Linda was starting to get it. Old Gen X hipster with old Gen X anti-corporate ideas. “Stop letting them make you buy stuff,” was the gist. And Linda did.

She had been looking at new watches, because after a few weeks she was learning how hard it actually was. Without the bio-metric scan on her watch, she had no way to access any money besides going into an actual bank, for Christ’s sake. And as everyone knew, contemporary banks were not meant to handle people inside.

Withdrawing her own cash was a miserable experience that drove Linda straight to browsing minimalist watches that cost more that the pizza place netted in six months. There were cheaper, of course, but the minimalist ones had the feeling that re-buying a watch wasn’t a capitulation to a techno-structure that had been making her feel so oppressed. That’s right, she said it, oppressed.

So she ended up not buying a new watch and letting Brian buy everything for her.

As Linda was chatting with Miriam, one of the Squatty Boys came in. Adrian. It was a cloudy day, Linda noticed. Cloudy, damp and cold. The kind of weather that used to be appropriate for this time of year, that you didn’t see any more, now that everyone was choosing perfect conditions every time.

Adrian greeted Linda warmly. “I’ve been working on something for your piece,” he said.

He got a coffee and then he and Linda sat at a table. He pulled up some photos of his work in progress.

Adrian had a faux-vintage watch that mimicked the aesthetics of an old Casio wrist calculator. Linda noticed that people of his age were currently wild for the look of things from a time before she was even born. She also had to admit it was pretty cool looking. More fun than the bougie “timepieces” she had been considering.

But, no. She was committed to a no-watch lifestyle. Maybe that could be the hook for her essay.

Adrian’s artwork was much cooler than even his hip-kid watch. If Linda had had the vocabulary, she would have described it as a mixed media piece; vibrant paper cutouts depicting weather events on a background of decoupaged code.

“It’s the public API that Weather Aboveground uses,” Adrian explained.

It was really cool looking, and Linda said so. “It makes me wish my essay was better,” she said.

“You can starve to death waiting for perfection,” Adrian reassured her. “That’s a Dub-T special.”

Inspired, Linda sat down at her computer again to take another stab. The boys had already produced three issues of the zine in the time since she pitched her idea. Linda had even helped them distribute them around town, to mission-allied book stores and trendy boutiques. But Squatty always held space for Linda until just before going to press.

When she didn’t make it, they just filled it in with a fake recruitment ad for Viva Coco. “We don’t know what this is, but we’re pretty sure you should join.”

One of the guys even made his own buttons for everyone to wear. It was becoming an in-joke with a life of its own.

There came a time when a joke outlived its usefulness.

Today, Linda was going to finish the essay. Just put one word after another.

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Episode transcript:

Western Toilet was a guy with a YouTube channel. Linda watched the video over Squatty Potty’s shoulder.

“I take my name from his example, and I take my life from his teachings,” he said.

He said it with a smile, but it didn’t seem like he was joking.

Linda watched with interest — if anything could make this house full of boyish chaos come to a stand-still, it must be something. But a lot of it didn’t connect. She couldn’t tell if this Western Toilet was referencing obscure concepts that she didn’t understand or just making shit up. Linda was inclined to suspect the latter, but she felt that saying so might hurt Squatty’s feelings, and more than anything she didn’t want to do that. They guys, they all loved it.

After they each watched it on their own, they came back into the living room to discuss. Some of them had even made notes. This video’s theme was maybe “The value of liars in a healthy society” or “the freedom afforded by denying an objective truth.” There was some debate about this. At times, the analysis went frame-by-frame.

“Check out this guy’s expression in the background. He’s oblivious, and then … bam! He’s heard the news.”

It wasn’t all the Zapruder film, though. Some of the guys, while fully enthusiastic and present,

engaged in some side-chatter that was less than serious, and Linda could see a boy called Adrian sketching on a small pad. She shifted in her seat to get a better view. He was penciling out a scene of some snakes at a garden party. Each one had their tail twisted up in different geometric shapes. Adrian noticed Linda watching, and waved her over.

“These discussions can get pretty left-brained,” he said in a low voice. “I kind of prefer to let the feeling wash over me while I find my own meaning.”

Linda nodded in agreement. The vibe was the thing.

“There’s plenty of Western Toilet theories to go around,” he said. “But why don’t I show you some of the old zines? I think you might connect with that more.”

Adrian led Linda around to various piles and pulled out some issues to show her. He pointed out various collages and illustrations and other pieces that felt, for lack of a better word, very media-y.

“So are you all artists?” She asked.

Adrian shrugged. “Isn’t everyone?”

“Not me,” said Linda.

“Hey, don’t sell yourself short.”

Linda asked if the zine was their job, or what.

Adrian explained that while they all had what you’d call a “day job,” really, everyone’s job was living a good life.

“And what is a good life?” asked Linda.

“Well, that’s your ultimate job to decide,” said Adrian. “You know, according to Western Toilet.” He winked.

At the end of the — session? Or whatever it was — Linda wasn’t sure quite what this whole thing was — Squatty and the boys in this art-strewn apartment with their video guru. Adrian even said that they suspected Western Toilet lived here in town and sometimes they’d go look for him. “You should come next time.”

But she had to admit that she had had a nice afternoon. It was nice to be listened to and feel a part of something. Squatty was a little disappointed that Linda wasn’t quite as taken with Dub-T as he’d hoped. But he was confident she just needed a way in. “I’ll make you a playlist,” he said. “He’s the reason we’re all here, but I know it can take the right entryway to let him in.”

After such excitement, Squatty declared it no one’s night to cook, and the guys were all going to go out for Dan Dan noodles and beers. Many, many beers. Maybe some dancing later.

Would Linda like to join?

Linda demurred for now. She needed to go home and digest all of this resistance. Plus, she wanted to get started on her personal essay for the zine.

“That’s all for the best,” said Squatty. “We don’t want to push you into anything you’re not ready for. You need to come to your own conclusions on your own journey.”

“Is this a cult?” asked Linda.

The boys laughed. “We’re the opposite of a cult,” said Adrian, brightly. “We’re a brotherhood.”

He said it like that wasn’t worse, but Linda smiled. “Well … toilet on, brothers. I’m going home.”

“Toilet on … I like that,” said Squatty.

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Episode transcript:

Sometimes you didn’t get what you want or what you need, so the Rolling Stones could eat it, as far as Linda was concerned.

She had looked up Viva Coco, and it was a series of Trance Dance Parties that stopped 12 years ago at a club that had moved 3 times since than, and recently closed down. Linda wasn’t big into clubbing anyway.

After a pep talk from Brian — “A regular schedule keeps you honest, babe” — Linda decided that she was going to open the pizza place every day this week. And that she was going to stop participating is Weather Choose forever.

Brian said he’d help her unsubscribe from the app, but after following the help pages around in a circle for an hour, he declared it “dark patterns” and told Linda to email the help desk. “Or you could just … you know, do the choose.”

Linda sighed and said she would email, and then just hid the app on the last screen of her watch face so she wouldn’t have to see the growing red notification number.

Business was going well, though. Linda didn’t really have any regulars anymore, because even at her best, she had been opening pretty erratically. Other people are lothe to plan around “open when I feel like it.”

But her storefront was well-placed to catch a lot of walk-in traffic. Unfortunately, one of those walk-ins was Button.

“Listen. I’ll call the cops if you’re stalking me,” Linda said the first day he came in. She snapped an unflattering picture of him on her watch. “There’s a record!”

It’s not stalking, he told her. If she checked the terms and conditions of the Weather Aboveground app, she’d know that she was entitled to a Special Customer Liaison should she run into difficulty participating in the daily Weather Choose. “It’s free of charge!”

“My difficulty,” said Linda, “is that I just don’t want to. Please don’t say that you’re here to help me want to.”

She tried to remember some of the moves Miriam had showed her from a Women’s defense course that Miriam had taken a few years earlier. Linda was unnerved by the fact that everything about the idea of this encounter felt threatening, but Button himself turned every interaction into a helpful sales call. As outlined by the EULA, section 12-B, desire was, in fact, an area Button could offer to help in, but enthusiastic consent on Linda’s behalf would be required to proceed.

“I have a boyfriend,” said Linda, feeling incredibly lost.

And this was how it went: The world’s most boring stalemate. Button would come in, order a slice, and Linda would slightly burn it out of passive aggression. He’d then say, “It’s the conversation we’re all having,” but then not much else until close. If Linda asked him to leave, he’d leave. But he’d be back again the next day.

After a few days of mostly ignoring him, Linda finally asked, “Why is this so important to you? The weather used to just happen.”

Button snapped to attention. “I’m so glad you asked. It’s not just important to me. A lot of effort and man-hours and, let’s say it, money went into creating and implementing this technology, for all of us! Now it’s something that really brings us together. Weather Aboveground is so proud of its 100% participation rate, and we’re proud of the joy and ease that we bring into the lives of our members. It means we had a vision of the future, and it came true!”

This speech enraged Linda. She didn’t need this. She didn’t ask for this. The future was a story rich people sold, and to pretend differently was just … insulting.

“I can’t vote,” she said. “I lost my watch.”

She unfastened her watch, threw it to the ground, and stamped on it hard. That didn’t quite do it. At least she knew she had done some sound research into which models were the most durable, but that wasn’t helping make her point. So she scooped it off the floor and chucked it into the pizza oven.

“Stop coming to my store!” she yelled in Button’s face.