I just wanted to point at your dick

I forgot how to socialize. Again.

Substack has an AI tool that generates images you can use on your posts. I asked for “money pouring out of a Home Depot store,” and this is what I got. Not bad! Not GREAT. But not bad!

I am sure that most of you are now dying to ask me this: John, how was your first week back at your full time job at Home Depot after being off for six weeks because for two days there you were so close to dying you could smell the hot sulphur fumes wafting up from You Know Where what’s that latest on the money we gave you to help others in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Helene?

To which I say: HAR! Wouldn’t you like to know?!!!

I mean, of course you would. Sorry. I don’t know what came over me there.

Well, actually, I do. Turns out that six weeks is probably the exact amount of time it takes for me to forget how to properly interact with others.

Do you know that the whole reason I got a job at Home Depot was because one day, after having spent at least a year in isolation during Covid, I was out in our yard, pitchfork (!) in hand, turning our compost bin, when this lady strolling by on the street near the bin says to me, “You have such a nice garden.”

My response to this completely acceptable conversational pleasantry was to immediately throw my arms up, as if suddenly if not violently possessed by a desire to hug the whole sky, and, like a scene from the low-budget horror film, Farmer Brown Finally Snaps, I holler, “Shit just grows!”

The woman dropped her eyes right down to the street, and picked up her pace to get the heck out of there. And that’s when I thought to myself, “Oh my god. I have got to start socializing with the peeps again.”

Not a week later I was wearing an orange apron, walking right up to complete strangers, and kindly asking, “Can I pretend to help you?”

“I’m sorry?” they’d say.

“Me too. But it’s the best I can offer. Because I don’t know where anything is in this store.”

“You should probably work in doors and windows,” our store manager said to me about three minutes after she’d let me loose on the floor. “You seem like more of a specialty kind of person.”

By way of proving just how right she was, behold my collection of badges for being District Specialist of the Month:

I think I’ve gotten three or four more of these since this picture was taken. You get one if, for that month, you do more sales, leads, measures, and one other thing I can’t remember right now, than any other specialist—in my case, any other Millwork specialist—in your district. Honestly, the only reason I display these badges like this is so that when I am, for example, poring over someone’s house plans, trying to figure out all the doors and windows they’re going to need, they can, whenever they hear me, say, involuntarily whimpering, look at the badges, and think, “Okay, well, this guy must know what he’s doing.”

Two years after I became a Millwork Specialist I was back at my job, having spent the previous six weeks in the company of almost no one but my wife (and also many doctors and nurses, but I have trouble casually conversing with people who keep sticking me with needles).

I, my supervisor, and a couple of coworkers were talking around my desk .

I saw that one of my co-workers, Tom, has pinned near the bottom of his apron a little gizmo thing I’ve never seen before.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“What, this?” said Tom, using his finger to slightly lift the thing off his apron. The fact that there was literally nothing else I could have been asking him about somehow made my brain go, “Oh, this would be a good time to be funny.”

So I go, “That thing? No, no. I really just wanted to point at your dick.”

And that was the moment I learned that six weeks might be the amount of time for which I can be isolated from other people before I transmogrify into, like, Boo Radley with Tourettes.

Now I can’t remember what I started off this post writing about.

Oh! Duh: The money so many of you were kind enough to entrust me to use to help victims of hurricane Helene—particularly those whose troubles I’d become aware of once I returned to work.

Well, no shit. A fair number of my fellow Home Depot employees got creamed by the hurricane.

Here, for instance, is what’s left of the home of one 70-year-old coworker of mine:

Whoops—I gotta run. So lemme just say real quick: The response of Home Depot to the plight of not just its employees but all of Asheville after Helene has been one of the most astounding things I’ve ever been aware of. I can’t even tell you—or at least not at this moment, cuz now I’m rushing.

I talked to my store manager about the funds that so many of you have so generously made available to help people like the guy whose house is above. Bottom line: She is right now sorting through all the needs of all 100+ of our store’s employees. So far everyone has received, from either Home Depot or FEMA, whatever cash, food, water, and supplies they needed in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. Once she’s figured out what needs what people have moving forward, she’ll tell me. And whatever money I/we donate to alleviate those needs will be DOUBLED by Home Depot.

That’s what I wanted to tell you. If you gave me $100 to help the victims of Helene, then, thanks to Home Depot, I’m going to be able to buy $200 worth of help with that money.

If you’d like to Venmo me some money so I can use it to directly assist my fellow Home Depot employees and others my wife and I know whose lives were seriously upended by hurricane Helene, I’m @Norman-Shore-1 or john@johnshore.com. PayPal-wise, I’m, again, john@johnshore.com. THANK YOU. Till next time, John