Mookie's back on Ink vs Algorithm with another true story that's got no business being this fun to tell. This one's got a needle, a Southern-accented campus doctor barking orders, a soon-to-be Grammy winner squatting in the next apartment over, and a girlfriend who wanted him married before she wanted him gone: cocaine on the pizza counter, a robbery a month like clockwork, and one deeply, spectacularly unglamorous trip to student health services that Mookie still remembers in vivid, wincing detail decades later.

The story is Cheepnis in action, the philosophy Mookie laid out a few episodes back on Bald and Bloviating: Zappa, Nietzsche, and the idea that the most humiliating, unpolished, can't-believe-that-happened moments of a life make for the best art we can create/ No developmental editor cutting the adverbs here, no sanding off the embarrassing edges, just the real, ridiculous, occasionally gross truth, told the way it actually happened.

And then, without losing a beat of the comedy, Mookie goes somewhere he hasn't quite gone before on the show, peeling back what else was really happening in his life during this exact stretch of reckless, twenty-something chaos, expressed the way he thinks storytelling is supposed to work: not to fix anything, just to turn it into something worth telling.

The Short Story

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Mookie returns to Ink vs Algorithm for another solo reading, this one a true story from his nightclub-managing days in 1990s Chicago, and a companion piece to his published novella Greg's Gift. Before diving in, he opens with a real, honest check-in on where his head's at these days: five shows running in parallel, a self-described introverted extrovert New York City emigre now happily isolated in Southern California, and a hard-won sense that his writing has finally earned the confidence it took decades to find.

The story itself picks up a thread Mookie's been pulling all season: that the most chaotic, humiliating, out-of-control experiences of our lives are exactly the ones worth telling, not despite the mess, but because of it. The harrowing tale centers on a bartender Mookie liked a little too much to manage properly, the quiet ways enabling someone can start to feel like loyalty, and a single shift where every bad habit Mookie let slide finally came due at once. He tells it in the roman à clef tradition where real events, real people, compressed and shaped for maximum impact, and insists every beat of it happened, down to sending it years later to the real person it's about and getting back a giggling, unprompted confirmation.

Mookie closes with an honest look at his own process, why reading his own work aloud makes him a sharper writer every time, and where this story fits into a planned sequel to Greg's Gift he's already hungry to write.

The Short Story

The Novella

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Mookie steps away from interviews for a solo episode of Ink vs Algorithm, reading one of his own short stories straight from Substack. "The Jumper" is set in a Chicago high-rise insurance office in the early 1990s, where a temp worker watches his two office besties turn a woman's suicide into the day's juiciest gossip, trading grim, escalating details with the same giddy energy they'd use for celebrity news.

The story's real target goes beyond the tragedy itself, and implies the strange, almost comic speed with which people absorb someone else's death and keep right on living theirs. Within minutes of hearing the details, the office is already back to flirting, drink plans, and petty jealousy, genuine sympathy flickers for a sentence or two before getting steamrolled by the far more urgent business of the banal everyday.

Mookie's upfront afterward describes how the story is true, pulled directly from his own early thirties, temping and adrift in Chicago's John Hancock Building, refusing to grow up in any conventional sense. That admission opens into the real heart of the episode: his theory that the most excruciating, humiliating periods of a person's life are precisely the richest material a writer will ever get, and that financial recklessness, chronically broke, still creating anyway, isn't the wrench in the works, but the engine of it. He traces his own arc from cringing at his early, overwrought Medium posts to fully owning his voice now, volume and unevenness included.

The Short Story

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