Needs more explosions or something

In which our Hero encounters a place he frequents in a counter-romantic sort of way and startles at how the flavour of the place chances

With my impending but indeterminate exit from my client coming after 1 year + 2 years + (gasp) 10 years of being there in my various times and roles, I feel like I have an obligation to say something to some of the people I’ve worked with. To that end, after a meeting this morning, I made a point of stopping by the Papyrus store, a place that sells some fairly attractive note cards constructed in ways that almost justify their tremendous costs. I mean, I don’t actually want to talk to most of them, a more quiet exit could be achieved in writing.

As I studied my options, however, I realized that generally I go to the Papyrus cards to get something nice to enclose my letters to Nocturne. Going from that romantic context to the business thank you note and realized… this place is so insanely effeminate. Where is the quality fancy card shop for manly men mainly managing manly deeds? I want cards with… I don’t know, maybe tax forms on them or something. It doesn’t matter what, just.. not butterflies and women in dresses and cute birds wearing hats.

I’m not sure what creative and artistic but professional would look like. (For that matter, I tried to imagine what might satisfy “creative and artistic but masculine” and all I could come up was engine parts because I’d be sharing the boobs with the lesbians). I’m beginning to think that Hallmark might have served me better after all, with plain and unadorned cards that say nothing but “Thank you” on the front, and have lots of blank white space for me to imagine continuing with “…. you gelatinous shitweasel” or something.

I’ve settled on something with starscapes on it. If I can’t do a manly flavour of corporate, I can at least make my exit a gentle goodnight with a starry sky, right? It does give me more incentive for my plan to make some cards of my own doodles. If I can just find the time to make some card-face sized doodles. But that’d be manly, yeah?

(Wasn’t till I got home that I realized that it I was trying to do this whole thing in a “manly” way, I had probably left the road at the choice to write thank you cards.)