I’m going to level with you: sometimes, in this newsletter, I will write a bunch of words about a rug. If that’s a bridge too far for you, I understand. But if you’re cool with it, read on…
Important Business First
- Annie‘s awesomeness continues, with Red being named in ALA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults! Seriously, folks, go read this book.
- The NYT did a feature on the rough life of “mid-career” playwrights (term defined loosely), including an annual income figure from Samuel D. Hunter that is both harrowing and, for many/most of us, wildly aspirational. The article overall is pretty clear-eyed and depressing, although it misses a chance to be even more of a bummer by pointing out that at least one of the career launchpads it mentions no longer exists (RIP Lark).
- Only letting myself politic one politic this week: here’s my current favorite encapsulation of just how stupid and pathetic our national moment is.
- No Groupthink D&D this week because the word count is already insane, but that just means there’s more time to pitch solutions to the whole Glindar the Righteous kerfluffle.
Now, to business…
Shocking Twist: Doing Things Is Possible, Actually
I’ve had an unplayed voicemail on my phone since November 23rd of last year. In the message, a pleasant but gently exasperated man named Rich asks me, once again, when I will be coming to pick up my rug. Rich has left a version of this message every month since May of 2024. I kept the November one marked unread, in the hopes that the little red alert bubble would inspire me to finally take action. For months, that plan failed.
The rug in question is a smallish, circular rainbow number, from Fiona’s room. We bought it to lay over the wall-to-wall gray carpet, which was there when we moved in and needs some brightening. The rainbow rug survived the first year and change of Fiona’s life, but in doing so it picked up some…questionable additions, of the sort only a newborn can provide. And so, a bit after Fiona’s first birthday, I dropped the rug off at a local store to be cleaned. I paid up-front. Two weeks later, they called me to say it was done. And then, somehow, nine months went by.
There is no rational reason for the delay. The rug store is less than a mile from our house. There is ample street parking around. I work from home four out of five days a week, and as an official Minivan Dad I have access to plenty of cargo space. Picking the rug up from the rug store is simpler than 95% of the tasks I accomplish regularly, including daily drop-off and pickup at Fiona’s daycare. The daycare is three miles away, to the rug store’s less-than-one. The rug also weighs less than Fiona, and it requires no specialty safety restraint to keep it alive in the car.
And yet, I did not pick up the rug. And the voicemails kept coming.
I think that, eventually, the length of the wait itself became the problem. Somewhere around month three, a possibly forgivable confluence of full schedules and bad short-term memory metastasized into unspeakable, Lovecraftian horror. The dimensions of regret were non-euclidean, their enormity madness-inducing, and the scale increased exponentially every time I checked my voicemail. At some point in there, I was lost to it. “Guy who needs to pick up a rug but doesn’t” took root somewhere deep down in my self-image. “Maybe the rug,” I began to tell myself, “has always been at the rug store. Maybe I will somehow cease to be if it leaves.”
And also, there was the shame. Or, the possibility of shame. Nice Guy Rich Rugman sounded gentle enough in his voicemails, but even a moment’s consideration made it clear that he hated me. How could he not? Wouldn’t you hate someone who had foisted a rug upon you, like some large, textile orphan in a basket, and then ghosted? You didn’t ask for that rug! You shouldn’t have to clothe and feed it for the rest of its life! You were just meant to sell and clean rugs, not raise them into full-grown adult carpets just because their rug parents were careless and neglectful!
The metaphor has gotten away from me, but the point remains: I didn’t want to get yelled at.
As the months wore on, the idea of just waltzing in and asking for my rug back became inconceivable. I spent whole chunks of idle time gaming out what the best excuses would be if I did go to the store. Maybe I could say that I’d lost my phone for a full year? Or had a family health crisis? Is there a way to carry yourself while entering a rug store that lets the clerk know you’re a high-ranking secret agent of some kind, and that this whole thing is part of some bigger, important mission? The more I thought about it, the more embarrassed I got by the whole situation, and the less I was able to picture ever actually having the rug back in my house. I resigned myself to cold feet on gray carpet, forever, and that was that.
But then, 2025. Our Current Unpleasantness began, and I started trying to balance all the impotent rage I was feeling by just…doing more things. All sorts of things! Going to protests, and information-gathering, and leaving social media, and supporting good causes and all that big stuff, yes, but also, just, like…trying new stir frys when I cook, and sending around more plays I write, and trying to keep my inbox pruned more. All of that stuff, big and small, has become a small foundation within the chaos. But it has also all been a lie. A lie laid bare every time that I look down at my voicemail, and remember I’ve abandoned my [rug]. I can’t be a Person Who Does Things if I’m also a rug-leaver. A shopkeep inconveniencer. A real Deadbeat Rug Daddy*, down in my bones. Something, I realized, had to give.
In a searing moment of clarity and revelation last Saturday I decided, you know what? Screw it. I’m just going to fix this. I’m going to walk into that store and I’ll ask for my rug, and I’m not going to lie and I’m not going to avoid the issue. I’m going to go resolve this absurd situation that I made for myself, and if Mister Richard Rugman tries to say even one thing about it to me, well, LET HIM TALK. He doesn’t OWN ME. He doesn’t OWN MY RUG. I DO, and I’m gonna GO THERE and I’m gonna GET IT BACK, and I’m going to do it on a day that’s LONG ENOUGH after his last voicemail that it’s CLEAR that I’m doing it OF MY OWN VOLITION.
And so on Tuesday afternoon, I fired up my Chrysler Pacifica, and I blasted some pump-up music, and I drove the .7 miles to the rug shop. One half of a “Pink Pony Club” later, I had parked, and was crossing the threshold of destiny. I was greeted by a man who was not Rich Rugman, Esq., but who asked me quite nicely how he could be of service. My time had come. I was ready to live my new truth, and make positive change in the world, shame be damned.
“I am SO SORRY,” I began, boldly. “This is so embarrassing. I have had a rug here for so long, like, almost a year? And I want to pick it up?”
He paused. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll just need your—”
“I CAN PAY STORAGE FEES if there are any,” I added, helpfully.
“…Your name?”
I gave it to him, and he went to the desk and checked a clipboard, and he found my name and uttered a quick, “Oh, yeah, okay,” to himself, which I have to admit I found validating. And then he took me to the back room, where the rugs sleep. One wall had a big stack of cardboard tubes, each one with a rug inside, and one of the tubes had an index card on it, which just said WALT, in black marker.
And then he took down my rug from the tube, and he handed it to me, and that was that. No storage fees were charged, although I offered to pay them, again. I also think I apologized, like, five more times? At least? And each time I did he just said, “That’s okay,” or, “it’s okay,” or, “Yup,” or some other purposefully unremarkable variant of, “Please let me end this interaction immediately.”
My task was complete. I had a rug in my car where there was no rug before. I spent the entire trip home looking for some kind of Significant Something that would mark the end of this weird, dark chapter, but none came. It was an errand, and it was over, and it had taken so little time that I had a chance to go grocery shopping, too, afterwards. I guess that’s just how it feels to accomplish most things, most of the time? You do them, and so they’re done, and then there’s more things to do, and so you do those, as well, and keep going. And if the things that you’re doing are good enough, you made the world better, one little bit at a time. (Or, alternately, you have a rug.)
I did allow myself one indulgence, there in the car. I pulled out my phone and deleted my November voicemail from Rich Rugman. The little red alert bubble disappeared. I was free. And it hit me in that instant that Fiona, being two years old, might not remember that there had even been a rug in her room, at any point.
And so the next day, while Fiona was at daycare, I rolled out the rug and I got it all ready, and that night when I took her upstairs for bathtime I got to watch as she walked into the room and shouted, “My rud! My rud!” and ran around in circles on it for a few minutes. And then I tried to run with her, and said, “No, dada, MY rud,” and put the entire weight of her little body against my legs to push me back on to the boring, gray, wall-to-wall carpet.
And that’s just how it goes when you Do Things sometimes. There are a scant few rewards in the world. And so I just stood there, looking down on this Thing That I’d Done, and I uttered the fourteen words every parent dreams of saying:
“Please don’t poop on this rug. I can never go back to that store.”
*Congratulations, middle schoolers of America. I found a name for your ska band.
Potential Conversation Starters
For next week, as adapted from this questionable online list:
- Who is your oldest friend? Where did you meet them?
- What is the most annoying habit someone can have?
- What’s the longest you’ve ever left a rug at a rug store? (Or generally just put off an errand of marginal importance?)
Walt McGough 