We had a house guest not long ago. When one has a house guest, one tidies up. One washes the guest towels, put fresh sheets on the bed, sweeps, mops, dusts, and otherwise behaves in ways foreign to one’s daily routine. And we did all the above. But, during the process, as I was putting fresh sheets on the guest bed, I flipped the fitted sheet a little too hard. I popped the beast to straighten it. But it caught the ceiling fan blade. The fan blade arm, the piece that attaches the blade to the body, broke in two pieces. Had the part been fabricated of decent material, I would not be writing this. But it was made of soft metal combined with the breath of a baby. This pairing was insufficient to withstand the snap of a bottom sheet. I erupted in anger at the broken pieces on the unmade bed. I cursed builders who use crappy products. I cursed the original owners who did not replace the fan with something decent. I cursed the subsequent owner, just because. And I cursed myself because flipping the sheets as I did was the act of an imbecile on drugs and sleep deprivation.
That notwithstanding, we completed our trip to Garvan Woodland Gardens. We drank beer, sampled tuna tartare and mahi-mahi tacos, and ate decadent ice cream. That does not explain why I go overboard on cleanliness with house guests. Right. It doesn’t.
And so why am I writing this, when I could have been smoking fish or instigating an insurrections that would cleanse this country and bring it into a new age of decency and possibility? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind. How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?
But I have another question that’s been on my mind for a while. A Facebook friend I’ve met only once in person, a guy in Florida, has bounced off and on from Facebook for a long while. In the latest iteration, he unfriended me and has not friended me again. I can deal with that; I’ve dismissed people who annoyed me. But I had no clue; no idea. And now I’m feeling rather down; what did I do, I wonder? Why would I be skimmed off into the trash? That’s one of the negatives of social media. The impersonal—that is, not personal—can be misconstrued as personal. A comment can become an attack. Appreciation can become a relationship or an affair.
