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Weak VIII

20 February 2014

No. 6,489 (cartoon)

I don’t know what’s wrong.

You don’t know what’s right, either.

21 February 2014

Nothing But Grief

Andy is understandably upset after Andrea unilaterally ended their romantic relationship and moved in with another woman. I should have known better, but I decided to cheer him up.

“It could have been worse,” I suggested.

“You mean she could have emptied the liquor cabinet on the way out?” he asked.

“That would have been bad,” I agreed, “but you need to look at the positive side. If she left you for another guy, that’s rejection. But since she’s with another woman, there’s nothing you could have done short of surgery to compete.”

That cheered him up, but not for the reason I anticipated. He opined that having a penis was “nothing but grief,” and that surgery just might be the answer.

22 February 2014

A Snort from the Cookie Jar

Elaine asked me if I’d like a snort of whisky. I of course answered yes; any other reply would have been rude. She surprised me by pulling a bottle of good Scotch out of a huge cookie jar.

“Why do you keep the Bunnahabhain in there?” I asked.

“Because that’s the one place you wouldn’t look for it,” she replied.

“It’s a delight to be with a friend that knows me so well,” I agreed.

23 February 2014

Bad Review

Kurt complained about a new taqueria that offered stonking huge burritos for four dollars and ten different varieties of free salsa.

“How can you criticize such a place?” I asked. “It sounds great to me.”

“Maybe if you’re hungry,” he replied, “but I was looking for batteries.”

Oy.

24 February 2014

This Thing That Generates Anecdotes

It’s late at night and nothing unusual or noteworthy has happened today. That’s a problem since in 1995 I gave myself a quota of writing one purportedly interesting thing a day. Douglas Coupland, who is a much better writer than I will ever be, had a good perspective on the problem and its associated pitfall.

It [keeping a daily notebook] is hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life—instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

I guess I kept at it longer than he did because my life is more imagined than real. Or maybe I’m just dreaming that.

25 February 2014

Ambiguity Is My Friend

“If you set aside ambiguity it’s always to your own detriment.”

A BBC reporter claimed that François Mitterrand declared that’s what “a seventeenth century cardinal” said, but I could find no record of that anywhere on the Internet. I don’t care, though; life is so much richer when untethered by facts.

I’d wager that Mitterrand and the cardinal were talking about politics, but ambiguity has always swerved me well in the aesthetic realm as well.

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©2014 David Glenn Rinehart