Dear Pals-O-Mine,
As you may well have noticed, contact from me has been notably absent – pretty much since you left my immediate sight. Occasionally, when the planets align, the seventh seal is broken, and the time of the year is right, lets say, around Halloween or Mardi Gras, you’ll hear from me, or I from you. These times of year trigger strong, welcome memories that remind me of good times gone by, and henceforth remind me that there are some people that I’ve been sorely out of touch with… regardless of the fact that email is free, letters are obscenely cheap to mail, and long distance phone charges are pretty damned affordable these days.
I have come to the conclusion that the blame lay squarely on your shoulders. That’s right, it’s your own damned fault. If you hadn’t jumped ship, pulled up stakes and run like cowards I never would have lost contact with any of you, not even once (some of you local folks can shut the hell up right about now). Really, every single one of you knows that my memory fails faster than the Hindenburg did after the Blue-Flame society got on board, and I’m more easily distracted than a crow in an aluminum recycling plant. What? What were you escaping? The crime, grime, negativity, poverty, corruption and record murder rates in this fair city? Pshaw, those things can be overlooked easily. What were you seeking? Peace of mind? Cleaner air? That and fifty cents will buy you a newspaper (although it’s likely a dollar fifty where you are). No, it’s clearly your fault.
Where do we stand, now that I’ve uncovered your critical flaw? Well, we continue on as we always have. We live our lives, thinking fondly of the past, and looking forward to the days when our paths cross in the future… and they will cross, one way or another at LEAST once a year either by phone, email or visit. When they do cross, we’ll have a grand old time laughing at the lesser mortals around us, drinking, having a cigar and generally living it up for the brief time we do have. Once that time is up, we’ll swear up and down that we’ll keep in touch, exchange our information again because the old info is out of date, and part ways.
Our intentions are good, they really are. We never mean to go on living our lives, being so shallow as to deal only with those people in our immediate world, it just… sort of… happens. We’re human, and as a human in this day and age we have too many irons in the fire – too many things that we HAVE to pay attention to that we can’t always give enough attention to the people and things we WANT to. Unfortunately, that means that only those things that touch our immediate day-to-day lives get the lion’s share of it. It’s a sad fact, but true nonetheless.
Having said that, I want to let you know that the brief time we do get to spend together, either in the same room, state or even miles and miles away, is no less enjoyable. They become the fondest of memories. Because they are so infrequent, we treasure them all the more.
So, regardless of the lack of communications being exclusively your fault, let’s try an experiment. Let’s not swear to heaven and hell on earth that we’ll call each other every other day, or even every other week. Let’s try a realistic goal. Let’s try that free email thing I mentioned, and let’s try and do it, oh, let’s say once every two months or so as a start. If we opt for more, great – if not, great. Also, I’ve got this silly blog thing here, and I know for sure that most of you have something similar – we’re all professional ranters, so what better way to get a feel for what’s going on in each other’s lives than to read what’s on our collective minds. This ain’t a-gonna be too hard, seeing as we all spend about half (or more) of our waking hours on-line doing the digital equivalent of watching paint dry.
For now I’ll just raise my glass and toast to future contact. Cheers! I’ll see you guys in the funny-papers, and don’t take any wooden indians.
Stuff