I’m cooking up stories for you. Little bite-sized stories for you to flap your gums over. Picture me, a brown-haired blue-eyed guy in Utah wearing jeans and a 3/4 sleeve baseball t-shirt. I’m sitting on my couch with my legs kicked up on the coffee table. A tiny Lasko Model 100 space heater is pointed at my feet. It’s currently ten minutes to midnight, snowing outside, and my phone reads 17 degrees Fahrenheit. My apartment is only marginally warmer. The thing is, every month around the first (when rent is due) my roommates and I get poorer than usual and make pacts to turn off the heater to save some scratch. We proudly declare that the cold doesn’t bother us; that we could save the cash instead. Only a wuss would complain about being cold.

But of course, once we get paid halfway into the month and we have a few more paperbacks in the wallet again, we begin to take turns slipping out of bed in the late night hours to discreetly click up the thermostat little by little. No one blames anyone for doing it, and the rumble sound the furnace makes when it fires up is always welcome in this cold weather. The pansy inside each of us just wants to be warm. It’s silly really, but if you want to know the financial situation of me and the roomies, all you have to do is come over and say hello. If there are icicles forming on the sink faucet, you’ll know we are hurting for dough.

I just remembered I forgot to check my mailbox today, but I’m not going outside. Hell no. The bills can wait a few more hours until morning. I don’t want to look at them anyway. No, I am going to sit right here. Clacking away on a cheap Toshiba laptop, with chewed pieces of baozi dumplings in my mouth and a bowl full of berries teetering on the cushion next to me. They will be my fuel. The bao will keep me warm and the berries will keep me awake.

So, wrap up in a blanket and gather round the space heater (or crack a cold one if you’re lucky to have sun where you live) because like I said, I’ve got stories for you. Some are to provoke thought and others are just for fun. What you read might even make you feel some scruples. I reckon that’s a good thing. We need them now and again.

What story will you get tonight? Well, that depends on how sweet or sour my berries are this evening.