Doomscroll Bro: Reading from #JFTRE5

Podcast Description:

In this episode of No Hair All Heart, Mookie Spitz reads from Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine, capturing the moment Penny Pitz—elite journalist, lifelong overachiever, and reluctant poster child for playing it safe—walks headlong into a situation she doesn't understand, but maybe needs.

Penny’s headed to a trash-laden penthouse in a Chicago high-rise to interview Jonnie Fazooliei: a broke, bombastic, self-styled inventor whose entire existence seems to mock ambition, discipline, and credibility. Everything Penny’s built her identity on. From the outside, Johnny’s a clown—a walking failure with bad ideas and worse execution. But the more she thinks about him, the more he messes with her calibration.

Why is she so drawn to this disaster of a man?

As the elevator climbs, so do Penny’s doubts—about the life she's curated, the success she’s achieved, and the prison of expectations she’s never had the nerve to defy. Jonnie, for all his mess, moves through life unfiltered. He’s reckless. Ridiculous. Raw. And maybe that’s what Penny secretly craves: the freedom to fail loudly, to live without the constant burden of doing the “right” thing.

What starts as a journalistic assignment becomes something more dangerous. Penny isn’t falling for Fazoolie—she’s falling for the idea of him, the escape hatch he represents. A chance to break something inside herself that’s long overdue for rupture. But risk has always been her blind spot. And standing on the threshold of this absurd, infuriating man’s world, she has to ask: is she here to expose him—or to see what it’s like to burn it all down with him?

The section is about the gravitational pull between chaos and control, and what happens when the person you judge most harshly begins to look like your only route to freedom.

The Novel

Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine

First Reading

Alice Unchained

Next Reading

Warm Up