My Truck Desk

> a great many time consuming pleasantries

> Oh the horror!

Indeed, that is precisely the case for some folks - with social anxiety. Or autism. Or a number of other mental states.

Maybe they're tired to their bones and barely have energy to even have one meal a day? Maybe they lost a loved one and never quite recovered since then?

It costs nothing to be polite and assume best intentions from the other side.

My secret guilty pleasure is having ChatGPT write Lovecraftian stories based on such comments. So far this is the only use I have found for AI. Normally I would not post AI output but I think it is on point in this case.

It began, as all cursed endeavors do, with the purest of intentions: I merely sought to write.

My study was dark but warm, lit only by the thin radiance of a candle whose flicker cast shifting runes upon the walls. The pen was ready, the page unspoiled—a void awaiting the invocation of dreadful truths. I had dreamt for nights of a vision unspeakable, a presence that lingered behind the very act of articulation itself. Its whisper came to me as I slept: Write me, it said, and in writing, know me.

I dipped the pen and began—

—and then there came a knock upon the door.

“Evening there!” cried a voice, buoyant and ordinary. “Fine weather tonight, isn’t it?”

The words struck me with an almost physical repulsion. Weather!—what pitiful triviality could dare interpose itself between man and revelation? Yet there stood my neighbor, that kindly, smiling fool, inquiring after my health, the state of my larder, and whether I had seen the curious cat that roamed the yard.

I muttered the necessary pleasantries, the ritual formulae of dismissal, and returned to my desk.

The ink had cooled; the shape of the thought—the horror’s shape—had dispersed. Still, I began again.

A thing older than stars—

—and then a rustle behind me, a cough, a cheerful “How’s the writing going?”

He was back. Or was it another? For though the voice was different, the tone—the bright, social tone—was the same.

“You look awfully serious in here,” said a woman I did not know. “You should take a break. Sometimes a good chat clears the mind.”

Her smile was wide, her eyes hollow as twin erasures. Before I could reply, she began recounting a trivial anecdote about a friend’s nephew’s dog, and I, like a man dragged to some drawing-room inferno, was compelled to nod and murmur assent.

It continued. Night after night, interruption upon interruption. A knock, a question, a remark about the lovely moonlight. The doorbell, the telephone, the tapping at the windowpane.

I began to suspect there was no end to them, that their numbers were infinite, that polite inquiry itself was a kind of infection spreading through the membranes of reality. Their sentences formed patterns—loops of empty sociability, endless circuits of conversational non-content. “Nice evening.” “Can’t complain.” “How have you been?” “Oh, you know.”

Always that last phrase. Oh, you know.

No! I did not know, could not know, and yet the phrase reverberated with uncanny finality, as though it carried within it some cosmic truth of negation. Each exchange drained the ink from my pen, the substance from my thought. The horror I had sought to describe was replaced by these... niceties.

And then I saw it—terrible revelation! The horror I had tried to summon was this very thing. The polite voices were not interruptions; they were the manifestation itself. The Eldritch Thing that I had imagined crouched behind the stars had, in truth, been whispering all along through the chatter of humanity—through the endless, smiling noise of the social.

For what greater terror is there than the eternity of small talk? What dread more absolute than endless connection, without communion?

Now, as I write these final lines, I hear them again— a gentle rap at the door.

“Hey there,” says a voice. “Hope I’m not disturbing you.”

And the words multiply, spilling over the page, crowding the margins, each letter a grin that will not fade.

“Just thought I’d check in.”

“Lovely evening, isn’t it?”

“How’s the writing going?”

“Oh—you know.”

The pen trembles. The candle gutters.

I understand now: there is no silence between sentences. Only the murmur, waiting.

It depends on the environment - many years ago I used to have temp job in the summer working on a large industrial plant that had a nice office building where the managers and admin staff were based. There were no signs saying "temp staff keep out" - and you did occasionally have to go in there but it was pretty clear to me that you couldn't go and hang out in there - particularly as the temps got all the muckiest, smelliest jobs in all weathers.