SAUL BELLOW OVERDRIVE

Me: I'm not really sure if there is a God, but I think atheism is boring and philosophically bankrupt. It is incompatible with any honestly compelling notion of ethics, which necessitates an appeal to a transcendent moral ideal (however fallible we finite human beings may be at interpreting and applying it). Even if I am not fully convinced in the existence of God, I behave as though He must exist, because of the way in which I make sense of the significance of my actions. Also, crucially: ROCK 'N' ROLL!

The majority of our clients don’t even borrow from us, they just pay for our ability to get them paid a lot faster than they could on their own, and to guaranty the retailers’ credit. (I.E., if the store doesn’t pay when they say they would, and we approved them, we will pay you.) We have muscle they don’t, and with the invoices we own in aggregate we are a MUCH bigger and more urgent line item on the stores’ balance sheets.

When a client terminates, we “charge back” the invoicing to them, which is to say we release our ownership and legal right to collect on those invoices and close them out on our books. It all goes back to the brand, it’s their problem to deal with again and they take the task of shaking their debtors down back in-house. We provide them with a letter to inform the stores that they should update their pay-to information and stop sending us funds due to our former client, but inevitably we receive an accidental payment or two from a boutique that hasn’t gotten the memo yet. Our policy is to return the funds with a reminder to accounts payable that they no longer belong to us, please pay the brand directly going forward.

I want to kiss The New Yorker for this piece. I have a “mild” case of misophonia that has veered more toward moderate ever since my bipolar diagnosis, enough that I own three different pairs of noise-canceling headphones and never leave the house without a fully charged set of cans. I also keep both foam and Loop earplugs on me at all times for different gradations of “the ambient noise here is upsetting enough to require dampening but I don’t need to blast rock ‘n’ roll, electronica, jazz, or brown noise to tame my fury.”

I feel fortunate in that most eating sounds for me are tolerable (I can enjoy restaurants and dinner with friends!), and noisy breathing is case-by-case. Usually, if I’m not trying to sleep, I can deal with it. Cold and flu season drive me batshit crazy because I hate all the sniffling and throat-clearing. Dogs barking make me want to kill the dog owner followed by myself.