DASHER'S DREAMS.

Dasher Dreams.

1.

Once upon a time,

We stuffed dog shit into paper sacks and left them on people’s front porches, set fire to them, jammed the doorbell, and ran like mad to safe cover, snorting and choking with stifled laughter as they opened their doors to greet the flaming orange wretch. Strange how yesterday’s pranks are today’s acts of terrorism.

Back then, you had to be present to see the trick. Now, we don’t even bother to open the door. The stranger is never welcome in our homes. We greet him with indignation for interrupting our carefully measured, hard-won privacy. We hunker down behind digital peepholes, watchful, wary, like paranoid kids in tree forts, convinced the enemy is already at the gates.

But there it is on Jaimey F.’s stoop: a bloated Buffalo Wild Wings dinner-feast, bagged in crinkling white plastic taped shut with a cheerful bumble bee yellow sticker whose unbroken seal proves I haven’t sampled Jaimey F’s feast in transit. It's a precarious tower of delicacies, waiting for one Minnesota man to finish waiting for me to leave so he can poke his head out into the street in his boxers, scratch his balls, and reach for his slice of heaven.

I just need to snap this photograph of the package on the stoop and be away to win my little share of the gold in this game’s endlessly serpentine windings through town from vendors to mouths and back again, all carried through an army of hands driving their own cars into endless repairs so that—

The same picture. The same package. The same hands. Snapped and sent a thousand times, a thousand places, by hands attached to faces no one will ever see.

The ghost ritual repeats. The same snapshot. The same porch. A thousand hands, a thousand mouths. All of it, simultaneously, hungrily—

Now. We are a faceless army of hands driving smartphones and automobiles to fill your mouths and the porcelain thrones in your bathrooms later, all in the name of post-modern convenience in the aftermath of Covid. Always monitored by that blinking Ring doorbell… I never signed my likeness away for it to capture, nor gave my consent to being recorded. But I am. Every time. Somewhere, a faceless homeowner gets the alert: A stranger is at your door. An imposing stranger. What does he want from me? Once upon a time, visitors at our front doors were curiosities; now the presumption is that anyone knocking on our front door wants something from us.

What becomes of your recordings of me after I make my delivery to thee…? Do I end up in a Facebook or Nextdoor.com who’s-who of delivery men, or do you share my picture as a neighborhood creep? Do you analyze me? Study my movements? Archive my existence in a folder labeled "suspicious activity" while you chew on your boneless chicken wings and dip your seasoned fries?

When were identity and gossip interwoven with Chick-fil-A breakfast deliveries?

Things were different when the Chinese place and the Pizza place and Jimmy John’s all had their own delivery crews. We were willing to face the folks who brought us our food then. Now, thanks to the anonymity Covid imposed on us—for our security, of course—there’s an air of suspicion that inflects itself upon the delivery person these days, the courier. With good reason. I’ve been a DoorDash customer whose driver availed himself of about half of my vittles. Licked his fingers as he helped himself and got it all over the rest of what he didn't eat, I’m sure. Help yourself, really.  We’re all animals, anyway. Ghostly, ghostly post-Covid animals, aren’t we?

Sartre complained at the end of No Exit, “Hell is other people.” Kafka chased his tail trapped in an endless bureaucracy that seemed to delight itself in its impenetrability. During the internet’s advent, to which Elon Musk still seems to cling, we were promised a remedy to existentialism’s dangerously florid cancan with nihilism.

But here it is, with the Famous Dave’s delivery in my passenger seat beside me, headed to Rochester’s lower-class housing (called the Gates, appropriately), obeying the speed limit and traffic signs, listening to NPR sweat bullets about the death of democracy the Washington Post failed to alert us to, peppered by an AI that’s more tape, toothpicks, cotton balls, popsicle sticks, glitter, modepodge and attitude than NVIDIA microprocessor chips.

“Turn left.”

Of course I will. I know where I’m going.

Banks of battered gray apartment buildings slide ‘round me. The Gates of Rochester.

“Turn right, and then your delivery will be 800 feet on your right.”

And you know that isn’t right. She’s pinned the complex, not Building K, which is another half mile into the complex. Noobs wouldn’t know that. Now she’ll nag me until I finish the job on my terms.

DoorDash would have you surrender your autonomy to the machine—Siri knows better/trust Siri before you trust yourself—except: Siri is wrong about 45% of the time, which is why Elon Musk’s self-driving cars aren’t running deliveries for DoorDash.

Yet.

“Make a U-turn.”

2.

It’s dark, and the headlights of my 2013 Sonic do little to tamp it back. They only add to the interweaving glares my fellow transiters’ headlamps cast, as the ripples from the soft peach shadow of the passing sun to the West bleed into to the ocean of tender bruised purple reaching from horizon to horizon overhead, frosted with unwiped filaments of milky cirrus clouds blotting out the stars.

If I weren’t awash in incandescence’s blindness, I might see two, maybe five stars pinprick through the curtain, through the veil, punctuating the modernity of the moment with the holy white filaments of eternity. Something real, evidence of the eternal to connect to, unmolested by Mammon-in-the-moment, something that is never forgotten in its essence.

Unlike what commodity makes of you and me.

“Turn right.”

She barks rudely, doesn’t give a damn about the sustaining poetry of the moment.

She is also so wrong.

“Turn right.”

The neighborhood in question is a few hundred feet ahead. Were I to follow her instructions — I’ve danced this fandango with her before — she would deliver me to the backside of the house in question, her pin is in her neighbor’s backyard, on a street that doesn’t connect to hers.

Mathilde M., just off Valhalla Drive, as the slice of orange on the horizon finally fades into purple.

“Turn right,” she says suddenly as I almost slither past the approaching next right. As usual, she didn't give enough warning, even for a wrong turn.

You’d think she’d recalibrate, but something about the pin in this sector of the map leaves her breathless, irritated, vexed, and furious, even until I make the delivery magic happen for her despite her most vigorous assertions to the opposite.

All hell breaks loose when I don’t do it her way, even when her way is wrong.

They forgot I can think for myself. Or maybe it wasn’t in their areas of consideration when they erected the game, made its rules. In pursuit of that sweet, sweet delivery cash.

“Make a u-turn,” she chimes helpfully.

The moment passes and I turn right.

“Make a u-turn,” she spews more urgently, indignantly.

It’s nineteen-ninety-three and my father and stepmother are going at it about directions again in the Plymouth Voyager.

There’s no winning when both parties have to be right. The loser will carry her tarry stain of wrongness into the party, leading with it, looking for understanding and sympathy in her victimhood for not having been right in the moment when right seemed like the only thing worth being. She’ll forget when it’s clear that no one else finds the story funny or relevant. It’ll still sting, being wrong. She’ll still rue my father’s bullying with the directions.

Something different about this late-stage human commoditization bearing down on me now. Older than they both were then, yet still feeling like the teenager chasing the head of a mammoth wave, looking for the perfect curl into the ultimate ride out from sea gliding in to shore, to the peals of onlookers in awe of your—

“Make a u-turn at the intersection.”

She needs it. She needs to be right. So urgently, so badly. And she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But now, there’s something else in her voice. An edge. An insistence. Like she isn’t just calculating a new route, but correcting a disobedience.

The goose chase is wrong for the Dasher because it makes us look like idiots to the customer, but playing it victoriously is right for the Dasher because it affirms his humanity, his knowing, his experience. But the goose chase is what it’s all about when it comes to the gig economy. As the crow flies, that’s one thing. As the ghost haunts the parapets, that’s another. Me, I have real obstacles. Commoditized personhood is one of those.

“Proceed 300 feet to the traffic circle and make a u-turn.”

Something about the way she says it now—different. Less suggestion, more mandate. As though she’s measuring my willingness to comply.

That’s the clue to all of this, isn’t it? The strange mystery of the cult/culture of DoorDash. What it says about us, as people. I can put my finger on it, but I can’t say it.

Covid changed everything. Covid turned our humanity on its head, and something different crept out of us. What did we learn from Covid? Retreat into boredom, disconnection? Or find self-celebration exalting in home and hobbies—becoming influencers, becoming elevated selves, to ourselves, to anyone watching approvingly from the curtain of social media? The triumph of the isolated self persisted after masks, after vaccines, when the corner turned and we’d stopped dropping like stones and found ourselves free-ish in the world again. And what had we learned?

We’re safer when we push strangers away.

Aren’t we? I wonder as I pull into Mathilde M.’s upsloping driveway.

Ice crusts the sidewalk. I wore the wrong shoes. A shotgun scatter of dog shit and urine ruins an otherwise pristine patch of snow in front of her porch. I’m not to knock or ring the bell.

“You’ve arrived.”

That last line. Is it a statement, or a verdict? I dash up. Drop the package. Make it pretty pretty. Snap the picture.

Who were you? I suppose I shouldn’t care? I’m not supposed to care. You're one of a million, lady. But I want to know you’re all right. I want to know your story. I want to know your story, Mathilde, and I want to know you’re all right.

Who was I to you?

A pair of hands, nothing more.

But you to me, for just a moment, could've been a story. And that would've meant everything.

3.

There are no strangers on social media, just nobodies and some buddies, but what's socialization if you're not navigating a strangers' strangeness, whatever you can make of that?

Mirror mirror, on the wall...

“Turn Left, and merge onto the exit ramp for HWY-63 heading north.”

Never mind that the signage reads HWY-52, and there’s no mention of Highway 63 anywhere at the exit.

Mammon did something to our humanness when it drew the upside-down Fool during Covid, didn’t it? It blinded us—possibility erased something from us—something essential. It snuck in, under cover of dark, Ring doorbell eyes capturing its arrival in a dash of ghostly flash, and it took something from us we can no longer name. Something that should be scenting this moment. Something that fails us, our humanness, in its absence. And when it did, it moved us closer than ever to commodity. When did we stop being people, and when did we fail to realized we'd become livestock?

Of course, the devil would pull a fast one on us during the pandemic. Weren’t the MAGA-types paranoid about of similar things during those dark and twisted days?

“Take the Exit Ramp to Elton Hills Drive, and bare left on the ramp.”

The specialness of commodity was the glue that held us together—not you and me together, but knitting you and you together, ourselves in isolation—during the pandemic. There were magic formulae for safety during those dark years, the lost years, the biting years that came at catastrophic cost. Every Amazon package delivered us a magic wand, a powerful sword, a cup of plenty, seeds from the source, the source being Amazon.

“Turn left.”

The algorithm chose what we needed before we did. We clicked "Buy Now" like pressing our foreheads to the altar, yearning for absolution. The supply chain was God, and Jeff Bezos was its prophet—ruthless, all-seeing, his empire stretching across continents like a mechanized gospel. We were his congregation, paying tribute in one-click tithes, our salvation measured in next-day shipping.

Did Jeff Bezos save the world’s souls during Covid—or simply rewrite the scripture of necessity, turning survival into a transaction, faith into fulfillment notifications? Was he a commodity messiah, bringing redemption of self and soul to us all? Did he reinforce the cult of island selves that followed—intentionally, or accidentally? And how did Mark Zuckerberg fare as the architect of our new digital cathedrals, where the faithful curated their own worship, building avatars in their own images, turning communion into content and confession into data? Despite our cloistered worlds pushing the strangeness of other strangers back, back, back away, as a function of perceived taint or contagion? Somehow, forgetting that for some other group of strangers, we're a stranger, too.

“In 200 feet, the destination will be on your right.”

But nothing is ever right. Nothing is where it says it is.

I am a Dasher. I exist in transit. No destination is mine to reach. Only waypoints and goal posts, if I'm lucky.

I fight that slipping away, every day I drive, every piercing blue eye from every Ring doorbell that stares me down and dares me to disobey the customer’s instruction to avoid knocking or ringing, to leave their flaming bag of goodies on their stoop, snap the same picture every Dasher snaps on every same-seeming stoop on every house that defines Rochester, Minnesota, as the ideally lucrative market for DoorDash commodities and wares.

Sometimes, I hear a soft click when I set the food down. Not just the camera taking a picture—something more deliberate, more final. More like a judgment. A chalkboard tally mark against my name. A quiet, mechanical nod that I was here, that I was seen, that I had played my part in the machine's quiet dominion.

Sometimes, I hear that faint click at home, and forget where I remember hearing it from.

“You’ve arrived.”

Did you realize that when you became an Influencer, you sacrificed your humanness and became a commodity yourself? The products you shill… Do you even know what a snake oil salesman is?

“You’ve arrived.”

We’re all interchangeable; the only thing that separates the customer from the Dasher is that it’s about more than just their hands. It’s only about my hands, yes. What they pay for is about more than just theirs. It’s about their mouths, their lips, and teeth, and tongues, and, later, their assholes ejecting what remains into the porcelain bowl, depressing the lever, swallowing the last of their Famous Dave’s down the drain.

“Make a U-turn.”

As if I had a choice. As if turning back were even possible.

4.

Tips.

Tips about tips.

Tips tipping you about tipping.

All the tips you needed to know about tipping but didn’t want to know.

Its in surprise, the unexpected, that we best convey value to each other. It's when I show you your worth to me in the slightest poignant gesture that you know yourselves to be seen by me, known and held. Tips are how Dashers are humanized and feel loved, as as restaurant employees find their worth made manifest to them in tallies of the same.

Here’s a tip: When Dashing, expect the unexpected. Wink!

You'd think Dashing is defined by the "seek and ye shall find" elegy, but it's really more about rain, pouring, or lacks thereof. Having low expectations reduces your stress levels when the day doesn't pull through, and makes room to savor the big victories when you have a day of deliveries that really brings the house down. Don't think that you know the rules for predicting the big wins. Don't go all casino in your evaluations  of your circumstances. Sometimes it rains; others, it pours. And sometimes nobody tips and they order as little as they can afford. In that case, it isn't about feeding empty bellies so much as it is people with less getting a shot at feeling special, like the big shots in town who can and do afford anything. Including me.

Here’s another Tip: You’re better off thinking of your work as a joyride than you are having financial goals. Murphy’s Law swings both ways when Dashing. The days you need the cash are the days petulant brats are ordering Baja Blast Mountain Dews from Taco Bell in North Rochester — and having you deliver the single melting soft drink to Oronoco or Stewartville, no tip, just to be — whatever they need to be.

Mammon grins, even here, under the umbrella of Door Dash, when a servile teenager can steal from you and you’ll suffer more to refuse her fare — and she knows it. And Door Dash passes no judgment. We’re independent contractors, Dashers and the Double-D, not employees. We’re partners in the ghost-gig economy, but we don’t watch out for each other. We're in it for ourselves.

The Samsung dings twice: the north side Chipotle, on Marketplace Avenue, needs a Dasher!

Oh look: A single Baja Blast to Stewartville[1]. $2.38, thanks to inflation, is now $2.79. The gallon of gas I’ll burn on the round trip is $3.18. Almost thirty-cents profit, until you realize I made almost thirty-cents driving for a half hour. That’s my wage. $0.29 per half hour, $0.58 per hour. Just so that little snot can get off on being cruel to a stranger. With no support from my employer, who isn’t my employer but is my business partner. The other business I’ll lose on the half hour errand to give her bullying laugh is probably $15. And she can do this because I’m a ghost to her, I’m a ghost to Door Dash, I’m just —

A pair of hands.

I guess I can pass on it, but then I take the hit in my ratings. Take enough of those, Door Dash doesn’t pass you the business.

So I take the joyride, listen to NPR have the same fits I'm having about political circumstances, get out of town, and get down. Of course I see something NPR doesn't in our circumstance. I see Mammon rising, absent divine intervention to spare us its incursion.

Pro-tip: There are way more good days than bad days when you're Dashing.

Then there are the inexplicable days, wherein the items you deliver have high value, and there are days when customers are just feeling like sharing in their humanity and wealth and they tip like crazy, and you can make rent in a single weekend's dashes. Those are the days you live for, the days you count on, although you don’t know when those days will be, particularly.

For the Dasher, the Law of Averages sustains you in the strange video game the pastime makes of your lived hours. You can’t arrive at any rules or assumptions about certain days, certain times. The business is either there or it isn’t, and there are no variables you can survey with any surety that guarantees the good over the bad. Inclimate weather could be a boon as much as a bane. Holidays can go either way. Except New Years Eve and the Super Bowl. You’ll work your ass off those nights, you’ll deliver more pizzas and carefully constructed expensive food than you know how to deliver safely, but you’ll make bank.

And then there are moments, once and a lifetime, really, where you’re stunned by human kindness and generosity. You can't count on them. You never know when they're coming. It's just a human kindness-tip, really: they're out there, and once in a blue moon, a bolt from the blue, divine intervention, you deliver to someone and there's a connection that fills your soul and revitalizes you down to the bone.

I was delivering to a blond twentysomething gay couple in a cute little bungalow on the outskirts of town New Year’s Eve. I brought them Chinese, as I recall, and one other odd dish. And they invited me in. They wanted to know my story, which I was too shy to tell. And they were all smiles in their matching clothes with their well mannered giant poodle. They were clearly in healthcare. Their cheer was effusive. They'd had a good year. And I knew that they were sharing it with me.

And they offered me a plate of Christmas cookies — and $200 cash as a gift — as a token of appreciation for the work I did for them, to remind me that, at least to them, I was a human being.

And it was a shock. And I have to remember that moment, that moment of proof, when I need to be reminded that humanity isn't beyond salvation, which I too often presume. There is good in is. I have to remember that those two adorable boys knew the way, and they showed it to me. Something more Christian in its spirit than any Christian I've known recently to show in spirit.

That is what a blessing looks like, and that is, also, in fact, what a blessing is. I expressed gratitude — awkwardly — and drove home to pray.

I prayed for them.

I prayed for their happiness.

I prayed for their joy.

I prayed for their family and, if they should want children, I prayed they’d have a world they would want to raise children in.

And I prayed that all of that would last them the duration of their lives together.

And the cookies were just right. Exactly what you’d expect for homegrown holiday cookie masterpieces. Maybe, next time, I’ll bring cookies, too.

We can’t all tip everyone like that, but if we tipped on person like that — each of us, as we were able to — say, once a quarter — well, that wouldn’t be tipping, would it? It’d be tithing. And if we all took a stab at tithing each other, who knows what we might build? Who knows what might return to us?

[1] I love how Siri sneers “Stewart” in Stewartville.

5.

And then there’s this pin in the middle of nowhere.

Not that highway 63 inbound on the north side of town isn’t a somewhere — just that it’s a going-somewhere, not an inhabitable somewhere that my giant bag of McFlurries and and McChicken Sandwiches for Iman S. can be delivered, let alone consumed.

I stand on the edge of the road, car beside me, sparse Sunday morning traffic peeling past at noxiously high speeds, tearing the tarmac, my breathing in bitter frozen clouds.

Dammit, Siri, you’ve boned it again.

“Make a u-turn.”

I know the answer, of course. They’re on a side road parallel to the highway, up the hill behind me, on my right, accessible by way of the exit behind me. But it’s a Sunday and there seems to me to be a moment of holiness under the Christian billboards that requires me to just pull off on the side, exit the Sonic, and steep myself in the morning air, resplendent in the gauzy sunlight cutting through the winter vapors, and take that god damned picture of nowhere before I deliver it to Door Dash and let them chew over their mistake…

The Somali community center behind the tangled bramble and trees that Siri says shouldn’t be there on a road that Siri denies exists at all. Feels kinda racist to me, to erase a community center like that, but… Maybe it’s just an honest mistake? I raise the phone to photograph the McDonald’s sack, sad on the road behind the Sonic.

Here, Door Dash. Here’s your freeway food.

I know them, the Somali community center. I let them know what I was doing, just to make the point, that Door Dash should include them in its map, as well. They're not outside of city limits. They're still in the delivery zone. There's no excuse their pin is in the freeway. They appreciated my petulant protest on their behalf.

I stand with the Sonic's door open for a moment and let the enormity of my tiny situation pass over me. Once upon a time, I was in Finance. Once upon a time, I marked the world with a gesture of consequence. And, somehow, as a function of parental neglect, I was left to wash up on the shores of this strange city, with it's world-class healthcare and restaraunts... It's always left me wanting. Wanting to leave. Wanting to get away, before it swallows me whole and I can never return.

I lock myself into the Sonic and watch as my breath fogs the windshield for a moment. I don't know where I'm going, but I know that the next move leads me into eternity.

And then I make that loop up the overpass, turn left over the viaduct, and then left again onto the northbound freeway.

And I take the first exit. And I find that first left that Siri says shouldn’t be there. And they get their McDonald’s. Because I’m a human being. Who regards them as human beings. And because it's in that connection, if you do it right, like the $200 and Christmas cookies gay couple, that you make forever happen.

We all have consequence.

But we don’t find it if we don’t take less traveled roads. We don’t find it if we don’t find each other, unmasked by commodity, in togetherness over a meal. If we can still tolerate each other.

“Make a u-turn.”

But what if we’ve already gone too far?

“Make a u-turn.”

What if we can’t find our way back to each other?

“Make a u-turn.”

What if I take that last u-turn and no one’s waiting at home?

But even then, I reach into my paper bag for communion, and:

“You’ve arrived.”