Jp Dud and the Case of the Missing Dojo Bathroom Slippers

John Paul Dud had been working late on a few assignments, writing articles for a neurologist, a weight loss guru, and a transportation firm. That was as far back into another perfectly wasted evening as he could remember.

He sprawled in one of the semi-form triangular beanbag chairs arrayed by the cowering space's swimming pool. Flowering vines hung down over a pool he could not recall anyone ever using. Large bats flew occasionally to preferred perches in the vines. As usual, one of the stray dogs that guarded the place was plopped  two chairs down. This one was quite interesting, it was all about techniques of making meatballs. Vic Casanova, Secrets for the Perfect Meatball.

One of the keys for pork shoulder meatballs involved adding extra crunchy Panko crumbs to the dry mixture, which also included oregeno, salt, fennel, and peperoncino. He looked the last up.. ah ah fancy word for dried hot chili peppers. He would change that for variety’s sake and avoid the dreaded p word. Not peperoncino, algorithmically scanned plagiarism. A string of five words in a row that were the same. It happened to the best of them. It had been two years since his last hiccup and he wanted to keep it that way.

JPD did not message much, there was a text from MJ that he responded to, she was late at work at the bank in M--, using her favorite big glasses filter to make funny faces. She looked like a fish. He spent 20 seconds trying to write “glub glub” in response. This should not be the case with something so smart as a computer. 

The first time, Facebook spellcheck kicked in and changed it to “club club.” The second time he waited the requisite fraction of a second for the dropdown box to appear and made the suggested/forced spelling disappear, changing the first "club" to “glub.” But with the second glub he missed x-ing the box and it changed to club again. Rinse repeat.

That was 20 seconds he would never get back, an addition to the 20 minutes he had spent in 2017 ascertaining that there was no way to turn off spellcheck on either the device or laptop version of Facebook Messenger. Algorithmic feed life, hence the need for fabric.... but he couldn't write anything creative until he finished four more articles and by then he would be sick of writing and ready to binge on whatever. 

Procrastination, thy middle name is Dud. Time for a well executed bathroom break, except that when he reached the door to the incense scented room that barely covered the scent of developing-world pipe system,  the straw slippers were missing.

Before I forget, it wasn't the sketchy, idealistic, annoying, virtual people. It was the dog. The dog did it.