Dear guy from those YouTube ads and videos: Thank you for your offer of advice and/or help and/or products to help me reclaim my masculinity, and/or manhood. I had not come to the realization that my masculinity was something that needed to be reclaimed, but I would like your help reclaiming a set of wind chimes my wife really liked, which neither of us can find in the house even after we unpacked all the boxes from our last move. Sure, we could just buy another set, but I know it’s here somewhere.
If you have the bandwidth right now, I could also use your assistance in reclaiming some other stuff:
- Approximately 1,200 hours of sleep over the past seven years from occasional insomnia
- A $20 bill I absentmindedly left in a self-checkout at the King Soopers at 9th and Corona when I clicked the icon for cash back and then just forgot to grab the bills out of the slot one time in 2010
- Another $20 bill, same situation, different self-checkout, same supermarket, 2012
- A lens cap for a Canon 24-105 lens that fell in a bergschrund in Wyoming
- A couple socks (I can send photos of the corresponding socks if that helps)
- All the interest I’ve paid on student loans
- Some emails from the Hotmail account I had from 1999 through 2004
- My youth, or I guess not all of it, but, you know, maybe some of the things like a little bit of skin elasticity, and I don’t know, less joint and soft tissue pain after lots of exercise, and the larger feeling of wonder and curiosity that you have your whole life ahead of you and almost zero experience and the world seems bigger, and maybe less responsibility but without the lack of autonomy you have when you’re young, OK, that stuff, but also without some of the crappy apartments I lived in when I was younger, especially that basement one where the toilet backed up and there were all those spiders, and also keep the unreliable piece-of-shit cars I had from age 16 to about age 26, except maybe that Chevy S10 pickup that was also unreliable but would be handy to have around for, say, a couple Saturdays a month nowadays just to pick up big stuff, sorry, this is getting oddly specific, anyway, yeah, just some youth-y stuff, but not the bad/dumb parts, thanks
- Mr. T Cereal
- A couple remixes and live versions of songs I downloaded many years ago but somehow lost, which are no longer anywhere on the internet, as far as I can tell, even though we talk about how every song ever made is now available to stream, we all know that’s not 100% true
- I don’t know if this is technically “reclaiming,” but I ate at a restaurant in 2013 and I’m pretty sure I got food poisoning, and the next few days were pretty awful (I won’t go into detail), but if possible, I’d like to reclaim the moment in which we decided to go to that restaurant, and just say something like, “Hey, let’s grab a pizza at the place down the street” instead
- Three or four pairs of sunglasses that I somehow—well, you know, sunglasses
Sorry, I guess that ended up being kind of a long list. If it’s too much, maybe just the youth part, and one or two pairs of the sunglasses? Thanks in advance for your willingness to help me reclaim things and your ongoing concern for my well-being.
—Brendan
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