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How about a warm cup of shut the Hell up?
The only things fictional about this post are the characters, the conversation, and the coffee cups. Everything else is cold, hard fact.“Hello? Is anyone there?”
Jack Callan stared numbly at the Venti Starbucks cup, which he cupped in both hands. Across the roundtop table for two sat his friend Egan O’Connor.
“Have ye lost yer mind? Are ye now discussing matters with ye coffee when ye have the finest company just beyond the cup? It’s me, boyo. Talk to me.”
Jack lifted his eyes, craning his powerful neck, and stared into the blackness of the ceiling. His square jaw imposed itself into the conversation.
He sighed, and when he did, that hulking chest, pecs prominent against the form-fitted cotton shirt, caused the upper buttons to pull against the buttonholes. With the rugged look of a logger and a bodybuilder’s physique, there was little about his appearance to suggest his passion was writing. He was near impossible to defeat in arm-wrestling but preferred the contests of wit.
Jack prized mental agility over physical prowess.
At last, he lowered his eyes, fixing his gaze on Egan, his friend, a man, like himself, of Irish descent, but unlike himself, an immigrant, the first of his family to, as Egan put it, “wash ashore in the Land of the Free Loader and the Home of the Disappearing Brave.”
Another sigh and Jack explained his mood, “You know they talk of online echo chambers. Everyone settles in with the company of those who echo their assertions and assumptions about life.”
“Don’t I though? Sure.”
“Well, I have taken my writing to Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, or X, which is a stupid name for a social media platform, and now Substack, all to the same effect.”
“Oh, you mean the only people reading your stuff are those who agree with you and echo your sentiments?”
“No,” Jack grumbled. “I mean it echoes because there is no one there. My voice reverberates in the emptiness. No one reads it. No one responds because no one is there. And isn’t that the ultimate kick in the nuts? There are billions of people on their phones, iPads, or computers from morning to night, and not one reads a thing I write. Not one.”
Egan feels the heaviness of his friend’s spirit draped on his shoulders and wants to carry the burden but doesn’t know how.
Instead, he grips his own Venti cup and curiously considers the iconic logo.
Jack nods.
Thus Jack’s echo chamber escaped the Internet and went – where else? – to Starbucks.