I’m putting a call out to any confidence tricksters who subscribe to this newsletter, or to anyone reading this who knows a good flimflammer. I may have identified the most gullible man in the greater Kansas City area. I don’t know his name. I know one place that he goes to, though, and he’s easy to identify. A resourceful scoundrel could learn his name with ease. I was at the YMCA, some days ago. I went swimming, and then stepped into the adjoining sauna. The facility would close in fifteen minutes, and I wanted to feel hot. The sauna was filled with men. One was younger than I, the rest my age or older. Men of certain ages say incredibly stupid things, especially when no women are around, and so I knew all I had to do was sit tight and keep my ears peeled. I heard a man outside the sauna, telling yet another man a thing he liked about Donald Trump. He said that Trump had promised to reinstate anyone who was removed from military service for refusing to get a COVID vaccine. “That probably doesn’t affect many people, does it?” asked the second man.“Probably not,” said the first man. “But still.”The first man stepped into the sauna. He said hello to the younger guy, who asked what he had been driving.The guy who had just entered, the “first man” from before, said he had been driving his truck around town, which was frustrating.Frustrating how? asked his friend.“Well,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing: “Kids yell at me when they see me. A lot of people take pictures, like when I’m at a stop light. They just lift their phone cameras and point them at me, you know? And I’m sitting there like, at least stop and say something nice about the truck before you take the picture! You don’t have to talk to me. You can say the nice things to the truck!”It was something much like that. I was so confused. It was like when I read The Expendable Man, the 1963 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, at the start of which the protagonist (spoiler alert) has just driven away from a small town where a crowd of people shouted at him and drove him away, rattling him, making him afraid for his life. There is no immediate explanation for why they’ve done this, and it’s peculiar. The reason it’s bewildering is that Hughes delays indicating to the reader until page thirty or forty or so, that the protagonist is a Black man. People drove him out of town because they were racist white shitheads, but she doesn’t make that so obvious at first, and it makes the whole thing even stranger and more unsettling than it would be otherwise. The realization I came to, some seconds after this man in the sauna complained that people were yelling at his truck and taking pictures of it, was that he owns a Cybertruck. I had seen one around town, and laughed at it. Now here he was, right in front of me: the guy who was sitting behind that ridiculous Cybertruck steering wheel. He said he was looking to get a new car. He has a Model Three, which I guess must have been his other, smaller Tesla. The conversation broadened to other subjects, and included other men in the sauna. It’s something that happens when you get a bunch of men together. Everyone feels like they’re part of the conversation, and all of the men seem to want to participate. Everyone pitches in, to guarantee quality colloquy. I never say a word when this happens. I have never felt like I belong in these impromptu conversations with groups of strange men, and it’s happened a few times in my life that someone has confronted me about that. I’m not kidding. It’s not cool.Anyway, the Cybertruck man shared with another man something he had learned the day before: if you spend ten minutes in an ice bath, it burns 1,000 calories. The other guy shook his head. “There’s no way,” he said. “1,000 calories? No. Maybe, like, fifty.”Everyone agreed that it was nonsense to think ten cold minutes could burn 1,000 calories. You might burn some calories, sure. But there was no way they would add up to 1,000. The Cybertruck guy then said that he noticed the other day how his phone kept showing him things he hadn’t looked up online, but had been thinking about. It was like his phone was reading his mind, it was so weird. Another guy said that had been debunked a long time ago, that your phone only seems to read your mind because it’s reading your eye movements. It’s tracking what you’re looking at and showing you more of it. If you were thinking of something, it was probably because you saw an ad for that thing, and you’re only seeing another, similar ad.From there, the conversation went on in this same vein. This guy would say something that wasn’t right, and the other guys would correct him. Then I left. I was getting too hot.So, yes, if anyone who knows how to rip guys off wants to travel to Kansas City, I will help you to identify this man in exchange for a modest finder’s fee of 5 percent. That’s all. If you want me to help with the...
