Hunk o' Mania: A Tale of Romance, Fortitude, and Gangstalking
There comes a time in every young person’s life when they ask, “What if I took a growth marketing approach to dating?” Or, if you’re an empath like me, “What if I took a growth marketing approach to fixing my friends’ love lives?”
I broached this topic with my usual muse, and he agreed, “sure, whatever.” And so with this enthusiastic stamp of approval, dear reader, our journey began.
Friend #1 - aka Mr. Lost Romantically
I really put myself in the mind of my friend, using my powerful empathy skills, to craft a series of posters. Since he had recently shown up outside my parents’ house (uninvited) (explicitly told not to come) and pouted in the rain when I didn’t let him in, this made me think of sad, wet, lost dogs. (I say this with immeasurable affection.)
Also, to protect Friend #1’s anonymity, I will henceforth refer to him under the moniker “John.”
I also created a Date John application (see exhibit 2 in the appendix) and a Date John hotline for admirers to call in.
Life’s more fun when you rope your friends into your stupid bits. What is a jester without a court to entertain? NOTHING. And so I put a bunch of my and John’s friends into a groupchat called “The John Girlfriend Taskforce.” This committee was crucial for assessing the romantic inquires for John and deeming if they were worthy of a chance.
After adorning the city with flyers, strangers started sharing pictures of the posters on reddit/twitter, and that solicited even more interest for my dear friend John. A dozen suitors filled out the Date John application, and even more left voicemails. A reporter from SF Gate inquired about writing a story on John’s quest for love. For only ~20 posters on the street, most of which got torn down in less than 24 hours, not bad. From wanted by no one to desired by all - oh how lady fate is capricious.
Enter stage - The Reporter. At first, I dismissed her as merely the second reporter that had contacted us. So how did she earn the proper noun title of The Reporter? This is best explained via the following exhibit.
Exhibit 1: Ways The Reporter has attempted to contact John
Calling and leaving a voicemail on John’s dating hotline
Filing out the Date John application
Posting about him on Twitter (which she then pinned)
Finding & DMing John on Twitter
Sending a connection request on LinkedIn
Emailing the support email of his startup
@ing him on Twitter
What will she do next?
I respect and fear how she refuses to let a man (and his dating committee) ghost her. Is this a millennial thing? Gen-Z is fine with ghosting, celebrates it, even.
To parry, I wanted to send these nice wedding invitations to all of The Reporter’s coworkers (there’s only like 30 of them) but John said no :(
Instead, I mailed John a letter as The Reporter (it’s what she would’ve wanted). I expertly crafted it to be somewhat plausible in the introduction, to elicit suspicion midway through, and to artfully reveal itself as my handiwork by the ending.
Upon receiving, John and his roommate (also a good friend except for that he won’t let me make posters of him) freaked out. Ah, a good bit, I thought. Surely they realize it’s really me though. My good friends know me well. They will recall that I’m in my limerick phase. Yet to my surprise, my craft was altogether too skilled, and they fully believed it was the work of The Reporter. I thought - perhaps they were attempting to turn the tables by pretending to not know it was me. But no. Upon casually dropping into conversation “you know I wrote that letter, right?” John started tweaking and actually did not believe me for a while. This taught me an important lesson: my friends are much more gullible than I previously thought, and I can trick them with a lot less effort.
Oh, I also printed out a giant lost poster and put it outside the house of a friend who lives in a highly trafficked area (kudos to Athena of The John Girlfriend Taskforce for the idea and real estate).
I also made a French poster, for diversity. Hon hon!
Dear reader, you may be wondering, what do I get out of this? Well first, this is clearly much more in my interest than my friend’s, who is largely humoring me (thank you John), but also, I get to be the best man in his wedding if I find his wife. (I got this in writing so it’s legally binding.)
My Roommate Alex - aka Mr. Ready & Fertile
Although I greatly appreciated John’s willingness to be Patient 0, he kept cucking my creative freedom. I needed a new muse: my roommate Alex. Alex is the king of the IDGAF nation. He seriously does not care at all. This is excellent.
New muse in mind, I entered a fugue-like creative trance, and in my vision emerged three new posters.
Alex’s only reservation with the posters was being called “fertile.”
“Women love a fertile man, Alex.” I reassured him. Our friend Mackenzie agreed. Enlightened by my feminine knowledge, Alex conceded I was right. John would never let me call him fertile (perhaps, understandably, due to insecurity that he was not nearly as virile as Alex). My new muse was awesome.
Also, inspired by a sale from my favorite sticker company, I made stickers to advertise Alex. Sort of like a business card, but for love. We planned to hand them out to tall, blond, Amazonian-like women, which is Alex’s type, and if that didn’t solicit enough interest we would stick them in the bathroom stalls of dive bars.
The bestmanship terms and conditions applied to Alex as well.
Interlude: Alextravaganza
We interrupt your regularly scheduled content for a necessary tangent that is necessary.
Upon thinking about my roommate Alex for far longer than I’ve ever cumulatively thought of him, I realized I know SO MANY Alexes in the Bay Area and so Mackenzie and I decided to throw an Alextravaganza (Alex-themed party for as many Alexes as we could find). So we flyered for that as well. The flyers were highly suspect at best - hastily scribbled solicitations on plain white paper - but Alexes are not known for their strong survival instincts, and so we had a lot of interest. A ridiculous, surprising amount. Someone posted a photo of a poster and it went semi-viral on Reddit, but even more so, and more interestingly, we went viral within closed social networks. The Alexes I knew personally and the Alexes that attended the party mentioned they heard about this party from multiple people/groups.
The party was great - I provided “Alex” and “not Alex” nametags, wrote Alex trivia, and made the Alexes versus Alex derivatives (i.e. Alexis, Alexi) tug-of-war to determine the superior form of Alex (I’m sure you could guess the outcome - the potency of Alexness is correlated to fortitude.)
We dubbed the best Alex at the Alex party “Cool Alex.” Remember this, as it will be important later in this story.
Anyways, back to the principal Alex of this story….
Alex Got A Girlfriend Kinda
Alex got a girlfriend! Kinda. After meeting via flyer, they dated for a couple months. But that’s not very interesting to me personally, and this is my story, so I won’t bore myself with writing the details. No offense, Alex, if you’re reading this. If you wanted this to matter, you should’ve married her so I could best man.
Gangstalking The Reporter
Back to The Reporter - you haven’t forgotten about her, have you? As she surely had not forgotten about John. She continued to contact his known associates, although I was somewhat offended she couldn’t trace this plot back to me.
Mini interlude that doesn’t quite necessitate a subtitle - I was scouted to help some folks with graphics for Silicon Valley: The Musical.
At the musical performance, as I skimmed the crowd - I saw her. Her. At first, I knew not who she was, but something about her elicited a familiarity, one that comes only from the kindred pull of a long-lost kinsman, the nostalgic camaraderie of childhood friends, or someone whose LinkedIn picture you stared at for 30 minutes when penning a fake stupid letter in their name. With the sudden enlightenment Archimedes must’ve felt upon watching the water level in his bath rise, I realized it was The Reporter. Proper noun. Capitalization. A camera in one hand and notepad in the other, just how I imagined she would be.
I frantically yet subtly alerted the other members of The John Girlfriend Taskforce, who conveniently were all in attendance.
Another mini interlude that doesn’t quite necessitate a subtitle - I am working with some friends on a SF scavenger hunt. Committee members of The John Girlfriend Taskforce are also all involved in the scavenger hunt. To promote this scavenger hunt, I made a bunch of stupid posters, one of which is as follows:
A member of The John Girlfriend Taskforce happened to have this poster on hand at the musical, and so another member surreptitiously walked up to The Reporter and handed her the poster, saying “I think you dropped this.”
The Reporter saw this, laughed extensively, and scribbled “It’s all connected??” in her notebook. She looked around, but as is the eternal human condition, didn’t quite know what she was looking for.
She tweeted about this, and continued her pursuit of John. Emboldened by The Reporter’s demonstrated sense of humor, by a deep camaraderie felt by playing this game of cat-and-mouse for months now, with John a mere pawn in our tango, and in hopes that finding her the romance she craved would cease her badgering of John, I decided it was time to make Date The Reporter posters.
However, I couldn’t reveal my identity quite yet, and so Mackenzie and I went in disguise after dusk to plaster Date The Reporter posters all around The Reporter’s office building. I also really like the bit of going places in disguise (this is now my favorite bit).
Obviously, The Reporter loved her posters. Even got a couple dating inquiries from them! And since she had identified a member of The John Girlfriend Taskforce from the musical, she once again asked to speak to me.
I decided I’d edged The Reporter enough and agreed to talk to her.
She asked a lot of questions, and then asked most of them again and again, probably because she hated my answers.
E.g. The Reporter asked, “Why does John deserve a girlfriend?” And I said, “He’s a pretty cool guy.” When asked again a few minutes later, “He’s a good friend and I’ve known him for awhile.” When asked a third time, “You know, not a lot of people would be willing to let me put up posters.” Fourth, “Everyone deserves love.” And so forth. Babygirl, it’s not that deep. I think The Reporter should write about sociopolitical events and war maybe, because her tenacity and hard-hitting journalistic style seems ill-suited to my silly little schemes. Anyway.
John also gave The Reporter some fantastic to me but likely unsatisfying to her quotes - e.g:
Unfortunately our tricks and games turned The Reporter a bit schitzo and she started questioning whether John actually existed at all.
This is the downside of gangstalking that nobody talks about.
To partially deflect press coverage, John offered up Alex as sacrifice. Alex loved talking to The Reporter. Alex also invited The Reporter to our Survivor Party. A bad idea? Perhaps, but very funny. And it’s very important to weigh the magnitude of these two considerations.
Interlude: Survivor Party
Ever watched the show “Survivor?” Well this is loosely inspired by but nothing like it. The idea is every 20 minutes someone gets voted out of the party by tribal council. We had Cool Alex from the Alextravaganza act as the MC (told you this would matter later).
Alas, this is another story we don’t have time for right now. Back to the main plot.
Back to the main plot
In a poetic twist of fate, The Reporter and John arrived at the same time and walked into the Survivor party together - I wonder a bit of the cosmic implications of this…anyhow.
The party was very fun (so much so as an SF party can be). The Reporter finally got her story. John maintained his anonymity mostly. As did I. (My disguise worked perfectly.) (Except for the fact that The Reporter now knows where I live.) Both John and Alex found love (latter ended terribly, but that’s not really my problem) (Alex skill issue). (Former will probably also end semi-terribly, and that’s a little bit my problem.)
Dear reader, you probably wonder why I have gone through such great lengths for The Reporter, as unlike John and Alex, I had no bestmanship pact to spur me. As the saying goes, “As one person I cannot change the world, but I can change the world of one person.” And I rocked The Reporter’s world fr.
So what’s next? The journey with one (three?) muse(es?) coming to a poetic close, I must find my next…DMs are open.
Appendix:
Exhibit 2: John’s Dating Application
I expertly crafted the most important questions to gauge compatibility in a relationship, particularly in a relationship with John. Answers were multiple choice, and crafted to be MECE (mutually exhaustive, collectively exclusive), although a write-in option was provided in case someone wanted to be quirky and different.
Exhibit 3: Alex’s Dating Application
This entire blog is so underrated
Hello. I am well aware that I am over a year late to this but I need to tell you that reading this has brought me great joy and inspiration. Thank you for, well, doing all this bullshit.