Another Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

a new essay by Mike Nagel from Issue Ten

Mar 21, 2025

Mike Nagel returns with the final piece from Issue Ten. Mike’s newest is centered around a trip to AWP in Kansas City last year, but it’s not all nerd convention stuff. There’s also junk mail for sale, first-class flying on points, and an expression of care every day to each child.

This essay—and all the work we published this week—appears in the print edition of Issue Ten. Mike’s beloved column “The Unintentionalist,” which ran for a year in Little Engines, appears unabridged in Archive. Both are out now.

Another Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

by Mike Nagel

While it’s a federal offense in this great nation of ours to open another person’s mail—punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine not exceeding $250,000—it is perfectly legal for a company to exist that does nothing but buy unclaimed packages from the U.S. Postal Service and sell them back to American consumers at a small markup.

For the low price of $109 plus shipping, you can get a 2' x 2' x 2' mystery box full of other people’s unwanted, unclaimed, or otherwise undeliverable crap. Recently, my sister-in-law Marsha started buying these packages online and inviting us over to open them. She films our reactions and then uploads them to TikTok.

“Tell me what you're feeling right now!” she yells as we open a set of gearshift knobs for a 1994 Jeep Wrangler. “Have some emotions!”

What’s surprising about these packages isn’t just what’s inside of them—almost always pure garbage—but that somebody wanted this junk.

Two hundred shower curtain rings. A mug that says Butt Slut on it. Anti-dandruff shampoo and vegan-friendly bacon bits delivered via overnight air mail.

These packages, I’ve noticed, raise a few questions.

Like: Who are people, really?

And: Are they okay?

[ ] [ ] [ ]

I’ve been thinking about other people a lot lately, partly because I’ve been opening their mail, but also because I recently watched the Mr. Rogers documentary on Netflix.

Like most people who watched the Mr. Rogers documentary on Netflix, I too have been inspired to start treating other people with the basic level of respect, dignity, and compassion they apparently deserve.

Who knew!

In the documentary, you learn how Fred Rogers re-invented children’s television using nothing but homemade puppets and a closet full of sweaters. The budget for his first episode was thirty dollars.

At one point in the documentary, Mr. Rogers goes before the United States Senate to ask for more money.

Here’s an excerpt from that speech:

“This is what I give,” Mr. Rogers says. “I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’”

Later, people would accuse Mr. Rogers of ruining an entire generation of perfectly good children by convincing all of them that they are amazing, one-of-a-kind people who make days special just by being themselves.

“No they aren’t,” people would say.

[ ] [ ] [ ]

Earlier this month, J and I took a trip to Kansas City, a town whose slogan, since 1915, has been “The Heart of America!”

We'd come for an annual nerd convention aka literary conference but also for the same reason we go anywhere: to see who’s there and find out if they’re okay. The convention, we learned our first day, was at the convention center.

“How conventional!” J said.

“How centered!” I said.

Around the corner from the convention center, in the heart of downtown Kansas City, which is already in the heart of America—here, then, in the heart of hearts—was a ten-story billboard encouraging people not to kill themselves.

“There Is Hope!” the billboard said.

I guess somebody in Kansas City thought people needed to hear that right now.

We’d flown first class and booked a fancy hotel room at the type of quirky hotel that thinks it’s funny to leave bright blue penguin statues all over the place. In the elevator, for example. By the ice machine.

Normally we would never fly first class or stay in a hotel so willy-nilly about where they leave their penguins, but in this case we’d made an exception.

We had, we told ourselves, earned it.

For the past two months, J and I had been living in the back room of her parents’ house to help take care of her dad after his massive, mind-fucking stroke. We’d been giving him showers, changing his underwear, and wiping his royal butt with lemon-scented baby wipes. Karmically speaking, we’d been earning major points, baby! Now we were ready to cash them in. I called up my gal Debra.

“I'd like to use some of my points,” I said.

“Your points?” she said.

“My points,” I said.

A few years earlier, the company I work for had awarded me eight thousand dollars’ worth of travel points for what I was told was a little something called A Job Well Done.

I’ve often wondered what my job at this company is, so it was nice to hear that I was doing it well. As much as I hate to admit it, I am exactly the type of mediocre asshole who naturally excels in corporate America, a place built on the idea that people are not special, are not one-of-a-kind, are notirreplaceable in any way.

A place built on a little something called scalability.

To remind us just how replaceable we all are, once a year my company requires every employee to submit a document explaining how the day-to-day operations of the company will continue uninterrupted should any of us drop dead. Every year, a few of us always do.

Business Continuity, it’s called. Standard operating procedure for a company this size. Lately, though, this exercise has gotten really easy for me.

“Let the AI do it,” I say.

For years, I’ve joked about robots taking my job, but now it seems like it’s finally going to happen. I’m almost relieved. Copywriters, I’ve read, will be the first causalities of the AI revolution.

“Yeah, but is it funny?” I ask people when they use the AI instead of me.

“Yeah,” they say. “It’s funny.”

No matter how well you think you’re prepared for it, it’s a bad feeling when you realize you might not be as special or irreplaceable as you thought you were.

I imagine it’s the same bad feeling Neanderthals felt five million years ago when human beings showed up out of nowhere.

“Yeah, but are they funny?” a Neanderthal might have asked his wife.

“Yeah,” she might have said. “They’re funny.”

I was talking about all of this with my friend Adam our first morning in downtown Kansas City, the heart of hearts. We'd met up for breakfast at a cafe on 7th Street called The Homesteader. They serve a dish there called “The Farmer’s Breakfast.” Two eggs, two strips of bacon, two sausages, and an entire baked potato for $11.99.

I’ve sometimes fantasized about being a farmer, even though nothing about it appeals to me. The only thing that appeals to me about being a farmer is the breakfast. I’ve sometimes fantasized, I guess I mean, about eating breakfast. This one was so packed with fat and cholesterol it could be seen, by certain medical professionals, as an act of self-harm.

“Bacon and sausage?” Adam said.

“And eggs,” I said. “And potatoes.”

“Wow,” he said. “Go Chiefs.”

“Go Chiefs,” I agreed.

The week we were in Kansas City happened to be the week of the fifty-eighth Super Bowl. I’d almost forgotten about the Super Bowl, and I’d completely forgotten that Kansas City’s beloved Chiefs were going to be playing in it. The whole town had gone Chiefs crazy.

Everywhere we looked, local nutjobs were wearing Chiefs jerseys and flying Chiefs flags and saying Chiefs-related catchphrases to each other. They’d incorporated “Go Chiefs” so thoroughly and seamlessly into their vernacular, we suspected they’d stopped realizing they were even saying it.

“Go Chiefs, can I get you guys anything?” our waitress asked when we sat down.

“Go Chiefs, can I get you guys anything else?” she asked twenty minutes later.

“Just the checks, please,” we said.

“Just the checks,” she said. “You got it. Go Chiefs.”

“Go Chiefs,” we said.

I've never been much of a sports guy, but one year I came close. This was back in 2011. That was the year the Dallas Mavericks went to the NBA Championships against the smug and vile Miami Heat. The Mavs were old by then. Nowitzki was in his thirties. Jason Kidd was, I’m pretty sure, in his early seventies. It seemed unavoidable that these old farts from Dallas—Neanderthals, let’s call them—would get their asses royally handed to them by the younger, sexier, state-of-the-art Miami Heat.

They might as well have been playing against robots.

So when the Mavs won the Championship in Game 6 (105 to 95) the victory felt, to all of us in Dallas at least, practically philosophical. It felt, to all of us over the age of twenty-five, like a moralvictory. It felt—I might as well say it—hopeful.

So even though I’m not into sports, have never been into sports, and will likely never be into sports, I wasn’t at all annoyed to be visiting Kansas City—a town that was experiencing that same hope—especially when it seemed like a lot of people here in the heart of America needed to be reminded that such a thing exists.

[ ] [ ] [ ]

“I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m a mentally ill person,” Adam was saying that first morning at The Homesteader. “I have a mental illness. I have influenza of the mind.”

A few weeks before coming to Kansas City, Adam had taken a leave of absence from his job in the music business in order to focus on what really mattered most to him right now, which was not blowing his brains out. Not blowing his brains out, he’d decided, was his number one priority.

I knew a little something about people wanting to blow their brains out, having recently seen a billboard about this very thing around the corner, but also having worked at a crisis hotline for a few years in my early twenties. I made $11 an hour talking some seriously fucked-up people out of doing anything stupid. It wasn’t really a crisis hotline, but like anyone who’s ever worked in a call center knows: every hotline is a crisis hotline if you know what to listen for. Someone calls up The Home Shopping Network at 2am to order the 10-Piece Stackmaster® Cookware Set, but what they’re really saying is: “HEEELLLPPP!!!”

At the call center, I wasn’t allowed to give people advice, but I was allowed to make them feel like amazing, one-of-a-kind people who made days special just by being themselves. I’d ask where they were from.

“Kerrville,” they’d say.

“Kerrville!” I’d say.

I know, of course, that most people aren’t really all that amazing or one-of-a-kind, and I know that most of us don’t make days special just by being ourselves, but I don’t think it hurts to pretend. Mr. Rogers even wrote a song about it. It went like this:

Pretending you’re a pilot or a princess!

Pretending you’re a doctor or a king!

By pretending you can be...

Most anything you want to think about!

By pretending, just pretending!

[ ] [ ] [ ]

As part of the annual nerd convention, I’d been invited to read an essay in the basement of an old hotel, at a bar called The Nighthawk.

J and I don’t drink anymore, but we met Adam there early and sat in the back of the bar. We drank ice water and listened to poets read poems off their iPhone screens. One of them was about the poet’s childhood trauma. One of them was about the poet’s workplace trauma. One of them was about the poet’s penis, which we learned had been traumatized.

The poems, I felt, raised a few questions.

Like: Who are poets?

And: Are they okay?

I didn’t know what any of the poems were talking about, because I never know what any poems are talking about, but I knew what all of them meant.

They meant: “HEEELLLPPP!!!”

When it was my turn, I got up there in front of the room full of drunk and traumatized poets and read an essay about my father-in-law’s massive, mind-fucking stroke. It was the same essay you’re reading right now. A version of it, anyway.

I told people how last Mother's Day my father-in-law had been magically transformed into an Idaho baked potato and now J and I took turns giving him showers, changing his underwear, and wiping his royal butt with lemon-scented baby wipes.

I told them how whenever he took a shit, we had to carry his massive, pipe-busting turds from the camping toilet in his bedroom to the guest bathroom across the hall.

I told them how every night, when I put him to bed, I gave him a hug and told him I’d see him in the morning. And every night he said, “You bet.”

I told them how I’d recently watched the Mr. Rogers documentary on Netflix and been inspired to start treating people with the basic level of respect, dignity, and compassion they apparently deserve.

“Who knew!” I said.

The trick, I explained, was to pretend like all these random idiots in our lives are secretly amazing, one-of-a-kind people who make days special just by being themselves. The trick is to pretend like we’re all irreplaceable, even if we know better.

“You kept using the word pretend up there,” one of the drunk and traumatized poets told me later outside the bar. “I think the word you’re looking for is believe.”

[ ] [ ] [ ]

A few days later we left Kansas City, the heart of America, in first-class seats bought with non-refundable travel points.

“Please place all laptops and tablets in their own separate bins,” the TSA agent at airport security reminded us. “Go Chiefs.”

“Go Chiefs,” we all agreed.

Our flight happened to be at the same time as the Super Bowl, and we were in the air over Oklahoma when the Chiefs scored their first field goal. I heard quiet whoops around me and felt the plane dip a little. I wondered if the pilots were watching the game, too. If the Chiefs scored a touchdown, I worried we might plummet a thousand feet. If the Chiefs won, we’d all be goners.

And then the Chiefs did win. 25 to 22 in overtime. By then, J and I were already back home at her parents’ house, a place we secretly—and sometimes lovingly—call The Thunderdome. J was asleep before the fourth quarter even started.

The flight from Kansas City to Dallas is only an hour and seventeen minutes long. A real waste of first-class tickets, that’s for sure, but we didn’t mind. After two months of living in the back room of The Thunderdome, wiping her dad’s royal butt with baby wipes, we were in the mood to be wasteful. We were in the mood to feel like millionaires. Even if it was only just for a weekend. And even if it was only just pretend. We had, we told ourselves, earned it.

“We’ve earned it,” we kept telling ourselves, and keep telling ourselves still.

Who knows. Maybe one day we’ll start believing it.