It is always a pleasure to receive questions from my readers regardless of whether or not they have ordered one of my Sustainable + Sensible Religious Product Alternatives, but especially so if they have. And if they haven’t, they always have a chance to do so now especially since I am taking the time to respond to their email. A little quid pro Mary and Joe, as it were. Venmo/paypal: @RevDrDavidJ Thanks in advance.
Anyhooters, back to the reader email. To spare her the public embarrassment, shame, and/or scrutiny that may arise from seeking answers or advice from the Fish Fish Garden or any other pseudo-quasi-religious-ish organization or entity, I will refer to her as Suzy Tulips. And it seems Suzy Tulips was having a hard time with feelings of regret after a mishap at her local WallyWorld department store. Here’s what she wrote:
"Dearest Reverend Doctor David,
I swore at a WallyWorld store worker today.
They recently remodeled their store and I was unable to find the sunglasses. The only available worker was at least 40 feet away, texting on her phone, walking very slowly toward me and not looking up even once. So, as I intercepted her, I peeked at the phone. Sure enough, texting with emojis! What happened next is bad and something I had never done before. Perhaps the anonymity of my covid mask made me braver than I had been in the past. I said, 'Do you think you could stop texting on your goddamn fucking phone long enough to tell me where the sunglasses are??'
Now I feel bad. How can I make this right?
Sincerely yours,
Suzy Tulips"
Here was my response…
Dear Suzy Tulips,
Thank you for taking the time to reach out to the Fish Fish Garden with your tale of woe, frustration, lashing-out, and regret. I know you have many choices of pseudo-quasi-religious-ish organizations or entities in which to reach out and I am proud that you have chosen this one and hope you will continue to do so with future issues.
As for feeling bad and wondering how you can make the situation right, you can forget about this one and maybe even feel good about it. The way i see it, we live in a world of many distractions and the cell phone is one of the biggest, it’s right up there with kitties and titties. I see people crossing the street looking at their phones instead of traffic. While I used to want to yell at them to watch where they were going, soon I realized it was - in the grand scheme of things and for the survival of the species - a good thing if not a great example of social Darwinism.
You see, Suzy Tulips, due to your interaction (read: outburst), this employee who today was texting and paying no attention to her surroundings may have otherwise turned into tomorrow’s street crosser and texter who ends up getting taken out of the evolutionary gene pool altogether due to blunt force trauma from a MACK truck or even one of those electric vehicles that look like space pods and beep annoyingly when the are in reverse and are made from such cheap material that the car would be totaled when it hit her. You, Suzy Tulips, may have saved this girl’s life…and someone's space pod, too. Keep it up, but not too much.
Faithfully yours,
Reverend Doctor David
P.S. My venmo/paypal is @RevDrDavidJ for your convenience”
Is there a moral to this story?
Though it is more of a response to a reader than it is a story, there is a moral for sure. The world is full of distractions and it is easy to lose focus especially if you are working a job that you hate and there is literally anything else to do. Just remember to look up…and I don’t mean that in a metaphoric way, I mean it in a Suzy Tulips kind of way.