ing over her lunch,
“I wrote you a sandwich.”
“Arkansas thunderstorms are
close to my own words,” she re-
sponded, surely meaning something
like “What a neat trick!” That, however,
was then. Today, I learn of a good friend’s
passing, and my current favorite person in
the universe will not even speak to me, de-
spite my trying in most every language (in
the same universe) to explain to him that
pretty much the only thing that he could
possibly do to actually halt progress (which,
as it turns out, is a difficult word to define,
in any language!) is to cut off all means of
communication. What a lazy way to go, this
death by incommunicado. Perhaps, then, the
San Francisco fog colludes with that of my own.
Feeling my way through it, this fog and that fog,
I happen upon the zing of a word that once meant
something. “To whom?” asks my favorite person in
the universe. Thus we arrive, the both of us, in color-
ful bow ties, at the Awk Ward, where for many years I
live, taking lots of pictures of myself just to while away
the time. Much later, when I finally escape, I find myself
at every MUNI stop swimming in a curiosity that is almost
always followed by an uncontrollable laughter. I’m not
laughing (of course) at all of the people from other more
distant terrains who stand in the subway or sit in a bus
with long wands which are called Stick Selfie. “You idiots,
you lost another month!” says the person sitting directly
under the ad for Stick Selfie. Or is it that the voices in-
side of my head dare instead to remain silent? Will they
always be this deceptive, this quiet, this deceptively
quiet, like an intricate stealthy drone driven from
five thousand miles away by an even smaller drone?
