Oliver, thanks for including the “Electric Sheep” track at the end of your story so I could go straight to the music before some shimmering siren led me astray. I find so much delight all over Medium that I flit from writer to writer, voraciously reading everything I can, like a child feverishly stuffing chocolates in his face before the adult comes along to stop the fun.

Each writer contributes her own flavor to the thing, and your flavor is brilliant, quite unforgettable once tasted, because the word combinations you build have never been seen in captivity. They stop the lazy reader in his tracks and send him back for another look, muttering, Did he just say, “I’m building a truer ensample of valorous mein”? And the answer is, Fuck yeah, he just said, “I’m building a truer ensample of valorous mein.” Because that’s precisely what you’re doing, and what nobody else is doing.

I knew Oliver Shiny was someone I wanted to know when I saw the mini-bio on your profile, the one we all have that gives us one sentence to describe ourselves. Yours says, “Not quite clever enough to origami my life story into this blurb.” That is what I’m talking about — that right there is unforgettable. Who knew origami was a verb? And who knew that as a verb, it could be made to do the work that, by all rights, should have required about 15 words to do. Only you. You’re the only one who ever made “origami” fucking buck up and lift the equivalent of a two-ton diesel over its head using one hand while the other was tapping REPEAT on “Electric Sheep” like you told it to do because, let’s face it, you made “origami” your bitch and there’s no question it does what the fuck you tell it to do. Sorry “origami,” but it’s obvious.

And, yes, it’s sad that you don’t get thousands of green hearts, because that is definitely what I look for when I’m shopping Medium for that writer who has the answer to every problem in my life and who, furthermore, has included every possible scenario I’ve encountered or ever will under a single click-bait title that, when he’s finished straightening out my fucked-up life, also leaves my breath minty-fresh. Oh, wait. I forgot. I don’t want life advice from someone who is so narcissistic that he thinks he’s got a) all the answers for b) me, a person he’s never met. Come to think of it, I don’t want life advice, period. So maybe the thing I should do here is to thank you, Oliver, for not purporting to tell me how I should live.

Thank you, Oliver, for being one of the cool cats of Medium, a real good egg.

P.S. As an experiment, I’ve decided never to change the tags that are auto-populated by Medium onto my stories. Though I’ve never written a story about entrepreneurship or start-ups, Medium thinks they’re my two favorite subjects. No, Medium, those would be your two favorite subjects, not mine.

I figure that’s as good a way to subvert the system as I’m likely to devise: I imagine the tech-bro-man clicking to open my story, delivered in the results of his keyword search for “entrepreneurship” and “start-up,” and smashing his laptop against the wall, shrieking, “That fucking Bohanan dude again?!” Yep, hello Mr. Tech-Bro, and thanks for clicking! Now don’t forget that little green hea … hey, what’s a matter, you angry or someth … Awwwww, screw it.