A Cyber Interlude

Scarecrow: “Don’t you just hate laundry?”

I know he meant ‘doing’ the laundry but still I replied with absolute tolerance to his erring phrases much more to his exerted effort of feigned ‘mystery and immovable calm’ for the past incalculable seconds only for fear that at a certain flash of correcting him I would get the cold treatment for knowing too much. One moment his eagerness passes clearly as a promise of a ‘budding’ Greek love between people with mutual affection and the next he shuts you off like someone with a communicable disease. His knack for making people fall in love with him and shut them off the next possible moment is up to now a mystery, he is a self-imposed science as he is hard and obscure. Although I have a saint’s leniency to his unusual character of the ‘odd sort’ he struggles himself to be, I admit there is a threshold for putting up with this façade of misanthrope. But nonetheless I cherished his peculiarities as I would to his indifference and the ache it incurs. Don’t we all ache for being neglected? Although I was a bit annoyed of him playing it like someone in control of the entire conversation, like he is in control of my entire thought and being, I delight in the idea that he has to pretend all the time or the fact that he at least ‘tries to be’ every time he talks to me.

Fungus: “I left mine in the machine long enough for life-forms to establish its niche on them”

. . . was all my spontaneity could afford. I hate to wisecrack. When one is wisecracking I believe he isn’t really communicating, he is only playing it clever and playing it clever isn’t really as close to an honest-to-goodness talk. But who does that sort of talk through Internet Relay Chat? Talk was all I wanted especially from him whom I haven’t had the slightest forecast of weather for what felt like a thousand years, even if I knew he had to pretend. But I wisecracked anyway, it seemed a likely bait for someone with varying interest to talk. I hung on to this whole pretense with sanctity, almost a distracting eagerness of someone willing to resurrect the dead.

Fungus: Franz?

Fungus: Nice talking to myself.


But what followed the witticism, the well-feigned sound bite was silence, a silence palpable and real. It was cold as dead. He delights in doing his laundry while I on the other side facing a screen was left hanging, timing every blind blink of the cursor, worrying whether it was the Y2K bug’s delayed leash that took effect right at this fractured second or just me having too much chutzpah like a bad spell enough to scare a whole flock of Godknowswhat. He left me facing a machine long enough until life-forms establish its niche on me feeding on me. . . I will only have to scan, scroll up the electronic page and read in verbatim our previous chat and figure out what went wrong perhaps a misplaced punctuation or a grammatical error.

I will have to rewrite everything fit for consumption. He could have just said he wasn’t fit for conversation.

May 15, 2008