June 2, 2026
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The Unit Next Door
Day-of arc from the Conroe closing prep. David takes his son to a U-Haul in Conroe, loads the remainder of the garage out, and goes to the storage unit. The unit is disarranged. Padlock unbothered. The crossbow is gone from its case. Tools, drills, wrenches, screwdrivers, a generator: also gone. Fishing gear, shotgun shells, hunting kit: untouched. The first thought in the seconds before he reaches the office is the wrong one, and David walks past it on the ground: this turns out to be the row, not him. The whole back row of the building was hit because the back wall of the building IS the property-line fence. Thieves came in from the property next door, unscrewed the wall with battery drivers, and walked into about thirty units. The practical takeaway is the post: do not select a facility whose unit back wall doubles as the property-line fence.
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The Stampede
A Too Bits voice session in feisty register on what David has seen of the Houston dating scene at 45, post-handler-relationships. The data: 38 percent of American women carry tattoos vs. 27 percent of men, and over 50 percent of 18 to 49-year-old women — David's actual dating window — do. The arc walks the cultural lineage of the tattoo as earned scar (veterans, bikers), the witch-aesthetic surge among millennial and Gen Z women, the "fuck the patriarchy" reframe that Too Bits lands with surgical precision, and a Midtown bar throuple lament David overheard a few weeks earlier. Closes on a deadpan tattoo-parlor joke. Title is a triple read: the herd behavior the session diagnoses, the brands on the herd, and the audience the herd is performing for.
