GarthBox

In Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, a rich grump named Horace Vandergelder hires Dolly Levi to find him a wife. Dolly, who wants the job of wife for herself, does not compete for it. Competing is for amateurs. Instead she invents Ernestina Simple: a heiress of great beauty, impeccable manners, and zero existence.

Ernestina’s job is not to be chosen. Ernestina’s job is to stand next to Dolly and lose.

Economists eventually caught up to this trick and named it the decoy effect. It’s why the menu carries a lobster nobody orders. The lobster isn’t food. The lobster is a spotlight operator, and it points its beam at the steak.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Nothing in your life gets chosen on its own merits. Not products, not job candidates, not you. Everything gets chosen against a lineup, and whoever builds the lineup wins before the judging starts. Dolly understood that the question is never “am I good?” The question is “what am I standing next to?” Or, as we more regularly say in our day-to-day… “Compared to what?”

Marketers who get this stop polishing the product and start composing the shelf. Good, better, best. The oversized option that makes the middle one feel wise. The premium tier that exists so the standard tier can look like a steal wearing a tuxedo.

And people who get this stop letting strangers cast their comparisons. Scroll long enough and you’ll find yourself standing in a lineup you never agreed to, somewhere between a guy with a boat and a woman whose kitchen has never known crumbs. That lineup was composed too. Just not by you, and not in your favor.

You can’t opt out of comparison. Nobody can; it’s how choosing works. But you can notice who arranged the shelf. You can ask what the lobster is selling. You can decline to be somebody else’s Ernestina.

…

Dolly gets her man, by the way. The fictional heiress retires undefeated, having lost exactly as planned.

Stay Positive & Shelves Are Ready For (Your?) Stocking

People keep asking me what my novel is “about,” and the honest answer is too long. So instead, here are six specific things that are in the book. If even one of these makes you tilt your head, you are probably the reader I wrote this for.

1. A chocolate milk bottle full of magical spice.

I will not explain how it got there. I will not explain what it does. I will say that it has more agency than most of the side characters, and that it is responsible for at least two of the book’s three major betrayals. The bottle is the closest thing this novel has to a meaningful love interest.

2. A Cambodian spy whose cover story is probably that she is a sommelier, maybe.

She is probably good at the sommelier part. Let’s assume that. She is excellent at the spy part. Mostly. She is unprepared for the part where she falls in love with the wrong restaurant owner, which is, in fairness, a difficult section to study for.

3. A restaurant that serves insects.

Crickets, mealworms, scorpion when it is in season. The chef refers to insect cookery as “menu honesty.” The diners refer to it as “the bug place.” Both are correct.

4. A business rivalry that escalates like a raccoon with venture funding.

Two seafood restaurant owners, one block apart, both convinced the other is the reason they have not yet become great. They are both correct, and both wrong, and both about to discover what either of those things actually costs.

5. A woman with freckles.

Who is described, in the book, as “either holy or extremely well-funded.” I will not say which. I will say that you will know by chapter seventeen, and you will not be ready.

6. The repeated question: how do you keep moving forward?

This is the only part of the book that is not a joke. It is the spine. It is the thing every other strange object is hanging off of. If the book works, you will laugh for a good 300 pages and then close the book and sit very quietly for a minute, because the question will have caught up with you.

---

If you have already read it, please consider leaving a short Amazon review. One sentence is plenty. Reviews are how weird books find their next strange reader.

A creative companion piece to Herough Herough, set in the same universe. Not part of the novel — but it would feel right at home on the shelf above the bar.

---

General Provisions

All employees shall be informed, in writing, that the restaurant serves insects. Employees who believe they were misled about this during the hiring process are entitled to one (1) free meal and one (1) opportunity to leave.

The phrase “the bug is the meal” must appear in the employee handbook, on the back of every uniform, and on a small placard above each kitchen station. It does not need to appear on the menu.

Section 1: Insect Storage

Insects shall be stored at temperatures appropriate to their species. Mealworms refrigerated. Crickets ambient. Scorpions, when in season, in a separate walk-in clearly labeled NOT THE WALK-IN YOU WANT.

No insect shall be stored adjacent to dairy. The reasons are aesthetic.

A locked drawer shall be maintained for any insect a regulatory inspector has specifically asked you to stop serving. The key shall be held by a person who is not currently on the premises.

Section 2: Handling

Employees shall wash hands before handling insects. Employees shall wash hands after handling insects. Employees shall wash hands during handling, if anyone is watching.

If an insect escapes during preparation, the employee shall calmly inform the chef, then attempt to recapture the insect using the designated insect recapture tongs. The tongs are in the drawer above the dishwasher. There is only one pair.

If a customer notices the escaped insect, the employee shall immediately offer that customer a complimentary pint of beer. If the customer notices a second escaped insect, the customer is to be informed that the restaurant has a small thematic infestation as part of its concept and is encouraged to leave a review.

Section 3: Service

Insects shall be served on plates of contrasting color. Black plates for crickets. White plates for mealworms. A plate that matches the insect violates the spirit of presentation and undermines customer trust.

Servers shall not, under any circumstances, refer to insects as “little snacks,” “crunchy friends,” or “the small ones.” Insects shall be referred to by their species name or, if the customer appears squeamish, by their dish name only.

If a customer asks “is this a bug?”, the correct response is, “yes, and it pairs beautifully with the Dopplebock.”

If a customer asks “is this a real bug?”, the correct response is, “would you like me to bring out the beer list?”

Section 4: Emergency Procedures

In the event of an inspection, the locked drawer (Section 1) shall not be opened.

In the event of a fire, prioritize the escape of customers, then employees, then the scorpion walk-in (Section 1).

In the event a competing seafood restaurant opens nearby, refer to the General Manager. Do not engage. Do not respond to flyers. Do not, under any circumstances, accept gifts of chocolate milk delivered by a person you do not recognize.

Section 5: Acknowledgment

By signing below, the employee acknowledges that they have read and understood these guidelines, that they are aware the restaurant serves insects, and that they understand the bug is the meal.

Employee signature: _______________

Date: _______________

Did you actually read this: _______________

---

The novel where the chocolate milk references make a lot more sense.

I wrote most of Herough Herough in the corner booth of my own beer bar, which is a sentence that sounds like a brag and is actually a confession.

Here is what nobody tells you about writing a novel while running another business: the bar will always ask for one more hour. Not because the bar is needy. Because the bar is alive. A new keg arrives. The card reader stops talking to the printer. Someone you have never met walks in and asks if you serve the kind of lager they had in Germany in 1994, and you do not, but you spend the next twenty minutes talking to them about the beer they think they remember. By the time you sit down with the manuscript, the manuscript has gone cold and the corner booth has filled up with people who want to talk about anything except sentences.

So here is what I learned, in the order I learned it, mostly the hard way.

1. The bar does not care if the book gets written.

This was the most useful insight I had in four years. The bar will keep running whether you write the book or not. The book will not exist if you do not write it. One of these things is generous and one is jealous. Make peace with the jealous one.

2. Pick a worse time to write.

I tried to write on Thursdays – our delivery day. Did not work. I tried to write at 10 pm after closing. Did not work. I tried writing on Mondays when we were closed. Did not work.

What worked was writing at 5:30 a.m. each day, getting it in before the bar – or anyone engaged with it beyond me – was influencing it.

3. Use the bar as a research lab.

The book is about competing seafood restaurant owners. I do not own a seafood restaurant. I do, however, own a place where people gather, complain, compete, gossip, and reveal themselves through what they order. Everything I needed to know about the rivalry in Herough Herough I learned by watching people argue over an IPA they pretended not to care about.

4. The bar is also the readership.

When the book was done, the first people who bought it were people who had watched me write it. Not because they cared about the book. Because they cared about the booth.

I would not recommend writing a novel inside a business you also run. But I would not recommend doing it any other way, either. The bar made the book stranger, slower, and more crowded with real human voices than it would have been if I had written it alone in a quiet room.

---

Stay Positive & Happy To Let You Into The Bar At 5 a.m. If You Need A Place To Write

I finished my novel because of a sentence that sounds like an insult: unshipped work helps no one.

For a long time the draft lived on my hard drive, where it was helping exactly zero people, including me. Finishing it felt dangerous. Not inconvenient. Dangerous, the way a ledge feels dangerous. My body treated “type the last chapter and edit like hell” like a threat to my survival, which is a strange way to treat a google doc.

Here is a building designed to do the same thing on purpose: a haunted house.

Every inch of it is engineered to convince your nervous system you are about to die, and every inch of it is engineered to guarantee you cannot be hurt. The chainsaw is foam. The monster is a nineteen-year-old named Devin who has a chemistry test on Thursday. The corners are padded and the exits are lit. It is the safest building in town precisely because it was built to feel like the most dangerous one.

Most of what freezes people at work is a haunted house.

The launch, the pitch, the price increase, the unfinished manuscript. The fear is real. The danger is theater.

Which is why the mindsets that sound the harshest are actually the safest ones you can carry. They aren’t tough talk. They’re the employee who breaks character and shows you the zipper on the costume.

“No one cares about your product.” Sounds brutal. It’s a cushion. Nobody is in the audience filming your rehearsal, so a less-than-amazing first version costs you almost nothing. The market’s indifference is the padding on the corners.

“The worst they can say is no.” The monster, unmasked, is a two-letter word. It has no teeth and it cannot follow you home.

“No one knows what they want until you show them.” You cannot fail the test, because there is no answer key. Customers write the answer while looking at the thing you showed them. A survey asks people to imagine. A demo lets them react. Only one of those tells the truth.

And the fourth one, the one that got my novel done: “unshipped work helps no one.” This is the only real hazard in the entire building, and it’s not in any of the scary rooms. It’s in the lobby. The unshipped thing carries a one hundred percent failure rate, and it fails silently, every day, with no feedback and no refund on the time.

That’s the marketing lesson hiding in the fog machine…Risk almost never lives where fear lives. Fear stands at the launch, waving its foam chainsaw. Risk sits quietly in the pipeline of things you never sent, never priced, never showed anyone. It wears a cardigan. It calls itself patience.

Your body can’t tell a cliff from a launch. It’s an old instrument doing its best. But you’re allowed to check the equipment. Squeeze the chainsaw. It gives a little. It always gives a little.

Stay Positive & Click “Herough” Nav Above If You’re Interested In The Novel

Read your draft a second time and you’ll catch something you missed. Let it sit overnight and you’ll catch something else. Read it out loud and your own mouth will trip over a sentence your eyes swore was fine. Hand it to a friend and they’ll find the thing all three of your passes walked right past.

Every one of these techniques works…. That’s the trap.

A metal detector on any beach on earth will beep. That doesn’t mean there’s treasure under the sand. It means you’re holding a metal detector.

The beep is not a verdict on the beach. It’s a property of the tool. Review techniques are the same. They will always find something, which means finding something tells you almost nothing about whether the work is ready.

I used to believe professionals polished more than amateurs. Watch a good one work and you learn it’s closer to the opposite. A furniture maker sands a tabletop to one grit and stops, not because higher grits stop mattering but because past a certain point the only person who could ever feel the difference is the one holding the sandpaper. The craft isn’t infinite polish. It’s knowing what the piece is for, and who’s going to run their hand across it. (What is it for? Who is it for? … Sounds like positioning doesn’t, it?)

Marketing lives and dies on this. The version you ship competes in the market. The version you keep improving competes only in your head, against an imagined ideal that never has to survive contact with a customer. Customers cannot buy the better version sitting in your drafts folder. They can only buy what made it out the door. And every additional pass on the thing that’s already good enough is quietly billed to the next thing, the one that doesn’t exist yet because you were busy sanding.

None of this is a case for sloppy. Sloppy is when the reader hits the flaw. The line worth learning to see is the one between a flaw your audience will actually feel and a flaw only the maker can find. One is worth another pass. The other is just the detector beeping.

I read this post twice. On the second pass I found things, because the second pass always finds things. I fixed two of them and left the rest where they were, and I could not tell you with any confidence which choice was the professional one. That’s the honest state of the art: not a formula, just a nose you develop for the moment when better stops meaning anything to anyone but you.

Stay Positive & I Only Read This One Twice

Coming around turn two I got my weight wrong. Not by a lot. A few inches of laziness, sitting where I’d been sitting instead of where the bike needed me. The front tire told me first. It went light, then vague, then the bars started that shimmy that every rider knows in the base of the spine before they know it in the brain.

Every cell in my body wanted to roll off the throttle. That’s the whole seduction of the instinct: it feels like the responsible thing. Slow down, back out, reassess. It arrives dressed as wisdom.

I gave it more gas instead. The bike stood up, the shimmy dissolved, and the whole event was over in less time than it takes to describe the fear.

The physics are almost rude in their simplicity. When you roll off the throttle, the bike’s weight pitches forward onto the tire that’s already in trouble. You’re taking the panicking employee and handing them more work. When you roll on, weight transfers to the rear, the front unloads, the geometry settles. The machine was engineered to be stable under drive. It’s the hesitation it can’t handle.

I keep thinking about that on the days when nothing I’m riding has wheels.

The instinct doesn’t only live in wrists.

When a launch wobbles, when the market goes vague under a business, the reflex is the same: roll off.

Pause the spend. Soften the positioning. Shrink the claim until nobody could disagree with it. And the roll-off almost never comes as a full stop, which might at least be a decision. It comes as half throttle. The rebrand that keeps the old logo on some of the trucks. The strategy the company adopts and also quietly keeps its exit from. The bold claim with three qualifiers bolted to it in legal review.

Half throttle is the worst place to be on a motorcycle. You’ve given up the stability of commitment without gaining the stability of stopping. All that’s left is the wobble, sustained indefinitely, at expense.

Watch what companies do to their people mid-shimmy and you’ll see the same weight transfer, in the wrong direction. Hiring freeze, training budget gone, everyone asked to hold on tighter with less. That’s loading the front tire. The team is the rear wheel. Drive comes from there or it doesn’t come at all.

I’d love to tell you I gave it gas at turn two because I understood the physics. I didn’t, not in that moment. I’d just been told, enough times, by riders further down the road than me, that the throttle is your friend right up until it’s your last mistake, and that the difference is mostly whether you believed it before you needed it.

That’s the uncomfortable part. The throttle only proves itself after you’ve already committed. There’s no version where you get the evidence first.

Stay Positive & Loosen Your Grip On The Bars