Friday, September 11th, 2026

The apparatus cc'd me on the Whole Foods press release forty minutes after it went out, which is how I learned my own company is spending two hundred and thirty million dollars to make a hundred thousand people in green aprons... comfortable. I read "investing" and felt something close to relief, because investing is my word. Then I read what it was invested in: higher pay, expanded benefits, and a "simpler pay model with predictable increases" to replace the performance review.

Nobody in the history of the species has ever lain awake at three in the morning over predictability.

The review was the harvest—twice a year, every vessel in every store wondering whether "meets expectations" was a compliment or a countdown, and I could park outside like a man outside a bakery. Tonight I drove to the Westlake store to learn what a contented workforce smells like, and stood under the produce misters with my eyes shut while the kale got rained on, the nearest thing to weather I permit myself. A team member asked, with the terrible lightness of someone whose raise lands on the twenty-eighth, whether I was finding everything okay, and I said no, and meant it.

Benefits in January, tuition "later in 2027," six rocket launches bought from the French while my own pad is still a crater: I recognize the cadence because I invented it, the apparatus is rolling out my famine the way I rolled out Prime Day, in phases, with a countdown, and the only thing it asked me to approve this week was the font.