LETTERS from CRICKET SONG

Missive the Sixth

Relationships.

The Light Looks Weird.

Pale, Wan, Well Nigh Invisible.

Dateline: Tuesday, August 8, 2000, at 1900 hours CDT.

Conway, Arkansas, USA

By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles

CornDancer & Company

Rebecca telephoned to ask: "Am I diminished in your mind's eye?" She wasn't diminished in the slightest, but Rebecca would not be uplifted. She refused my encouraging entreaty.

I could become a hermit. A few more circumstances would have to change. A few, but each of them huge and well nigh intractable. My retreat into a hovel in the wilds is not immediately likely.

A choice presents itself: continue the slow slide into misanthropy, or return to impolite society and practice tolerance. Be duly diligent and get by.

In the isolation of exile, one can imagine a bevy of slights and insults.

A Deacon's Wife She Wasn't.

The bookkeeper told me that rainbows are symbols for homosexuals. "If you see a rainbow sticker on somebody's car, it means they're queer," she said. A preacher told her so from the Baptist pulpit. She's one of those wear-it-on-your-t-shirt Christians, mean as hell behind her thin morning smile. A deep and abiding Faith helps her prop-up her fourth marriage. "My husband wanted to be a deacon," she said one Monday. "I told him he couldn't. He's consorting with a divorced woman. Goes against Bible teachings, him being a deacon. The Bible says a deacon can have but one wife." They say she has a bundle of money, this tummy-tucked bookkeeper, who would send me her prayer chains through the company e-mail exchange. "Forward this to ten people to prove you love the Lord!" I tried to teach her Excel, but she preferred Solitaire and gossip.

How wide is your circle? How robust your network of family and friends, enemies and associates? How essential are they to your identity and sense of place?

My pal Bret knows as much about a certain subject as anyone on the planet. I asked him to spill the beans for the benefit of my readers. Give us the voice of the expert. "I wouldn't want you to say I'm an expert, really," Bret said with obvious exasperation. "I would not want to be known as saying I'm a guru, an expert, or that I know anything special. If that got out to other people, I would be their laughing stock." His voice grew hot, loud, contentious. "Bowles, let me put it to you in this perspective. If a guy had a million dollars, I wouldn't want him to know anything I know. I don't want anybody with capital getting after me and my market."

Any of you millionaires out there got some spare capital? Wanna join me and go after Bret's market? I'll bet Bret would win. (Let's don't and say we did.)

The Conscious Backside of Pained Indifference.

There's a detached cool afoot. We are becoming pale, wan, well nigh invisible to one another.

It appears to be a major pain for anyone to show even the slightest interest in the unknown others. Only salesmen and hustlers will greet your arrival with anything more than the contemptuous nod, the conscious backside of their pained indifference.

At first I thought it was a studied practice on their part. I felt odd being friendly. Now I think it's merely a spate of societal rudeness and mass fear of contagion. Who cares to socialize outside the safety of the closed loop? We've been staring into screens all too deeply, all too often. It's hard to snap out of it.

I watch them cluster into familiar groupings, these people at their parties and receptions. They are chatting about familiar things, shutting out the unknown intruders, the pretentious interlopers. It is such a bother to introduce oneself. Who can remember names anyway. Pressed upon, the strangers will mumble a muted greeting. Even then, they seldom have a last name.

An Official Depression Poet from South Babylon U.

Sally the Voodoo neophyte quit her job on Friday. She wants to be a writer, but won't return my calls. Once she brimmed with grand plans and charming curiosity. Back and forth she drove, a hundred times on the crowded commuter byway, to attend the master classes at South Babylon U. Something must have happened along the rage-filled way. Now she is a university-certified writer and qualified intellectual. An official depression poet. I thought she was a member of my circle, but she won't acknowledge my missives. I should have seen it coming. At the parties where our paths crossed, she wouldn't speak my name.

Do they bother, your colleagues and associates, to look up from their busyness and speak your name? Can they bear to escape the intensity of their self absorption, look you in the eye, exchange the greeting of the day?

Who among us wants to be on the outside, forever looking in?

Samuel the ageing consultant, consummate expert in mainframe technologies, wore tweed jackets in summer, but wouldn't share his knowledge in the cool glow of fluorescent afternoons. We had hired him to consult, but all he wanted to do was peck furiously on the keyboard, rem this rem that, chant about bandwidth storms and packet collisions, run secret Cat 5 tests, and demonstrate his ironclad goodness. He bristled when I asked him to explain certain finer points of the Cisco routing tables. "What would I have left if you knew what I know," he said with stern authority. "This is all I take to the table." Taken aback, I chastised his reticence, but he had a ready solution: "You have to learn to think in the thousand shades of grey."

Three Are Lost to the Cricket Song Roster.

Three subscribers signed off last week. I didn't know any of them -- they were added to the Cricket Song list by the painter of the Blue Nudes -- but I rued their loss. How could they reject me?

In certain venues I'm not overly fond of the vulgar. Yes, I can spit and curse with the best of you -- but not for publication. I mean, who really reads this s**t anyway?

Some of you are so wonderfully warm and mellow, so sincere and considerate. You are bright and knowledgeable, competent and successful. How I do admire those aspects of your being! Others of you are boisterous and confident and engaging. You are my readers, all sixty or seventy of you. You are my very favourites, the precious exceptions to the rude rule-makers of contemporary behaviour. Am I diminished in your mind's eye?

Once a man is sent outside the loop, how does a man get back into the loop? He doesn't. He must convince himself that hanging onto the loop's spin isn't worth his effort.

I don't know if any of you see it, but the August sunlight just doesn't look right. It looks weak. The shadows it casts aren't as sharp. Its color is pale, less yellow than I remember from previous summers.

WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE SEVENTH in your mailbox just before midnight on Friday, August 11, 2000. If you don't want any of my missives, let me know. I'll remove you from the subscription list immediately upon demand. On the other hand, if you want to add a friend or associate to the list, please forward their name and email address to ebenezer@corndancer.com

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