We were curled up on the La-Z-Boy and he was ignoring me—tapping away on his fucking iPad.
"Watcherdoin'?"
"Not much," he muttered and continued doing it AND ignoring me.
"I'm boooooooooooooored!"
"Go to sleep," he said.
"Look, despite what you've heard dogs do not sleep all the fucking time. We need to be entertained, or didn't you read that in your Googling."
"Oh God!" he sighed deeply. "If you must know I'm Facebooking. Right now I'm sending a note to my friend Yogi whose cat is very sick."
"Yogi? A CAT!!!"
"She's heard about you and I've heard about the cat and we share our stories on Facebook."
"A CAT?!?!"
"It's Yogi's cat!"
"And you've known this Yogi for a long time?"
"Yup. We spent an afternoon together once. I was higher than her and could protect her and so we went to all the dangerous places in Kalimdor and fished and I took her to flightpoints in Feralas and Desolace..." His voice petered out as it does with the sad, old and nostalgic. I didn't understand a word he said.
Then...
Then...
OH MY FUCKING STARS!!! World of Fucking Warcraft! "This is another one of your imaginary friends!—"
"—virtual friends—"
"—whatever. Do you ever live in the real world? Concern yourself with real things?"
"The fact that Yogi's cat is sick worries me."
"WHY?!?!?!"
"Because she's a real person and we like each other and she knows about Boo and you and, by the way—despite all she's heard—she likes you."
Hm....well, that was something even if she was a cat lover. "You've been tapping away an awful lot. Is it all about that cat?"
"No," he said and then he had a thin, grim smile—like a slasher-movie killer might get before jumping out of the closet to finish the deed. "I'm settling scores." Ooooooh! Now this sounded juicy. He didn't need prodding. "I was a freelancer at a daily. Always been happy as a freelancer and had no ambition to be anything more. But there was this one cow at the paper who just took a disliking to me. She had no logical reason except she was a tired, old, unionized-up-the-twat bitch who didn't like freelancers. She never once gave up making my life miserable. The weirdest this is that before she began this vendetta she was an okay journalist, but she put so much energy in her hatred toward me and a thousand more largely-imagined miseries that it showed in her writing. Her opinions—she was a columnist—become dull and badly-written. She became guilty of the worst sin of journalism—where you have to be a short-form artist: her work got flabby. She could spend ten paragraphs describing something before squashing in her opinion in the last two. But her vendetta had all the gusto her writing did not. When I got sick and then was laid off, I could almost hear her bitchy cackling."
"And Facebook...as in the point of this long-ass story?" I said.
He sighed with evident pleasure. "Her colleagues and friends are now all Friends of mine on Facebook. So now I can—utterly obliquely—rip her a new arsehole."
"How?"
"By praising her coworkers and saying things like, 'His writing has an elegance you don't see anywhere else in the paper.'"
"You live in an angry little world, don't you?"
"Not at all! It's pure sideshow amusement. I have lots and lots of good friends on Facebook and in World of Warcraft - "
"—like Yogi—"
"—like Yogi—"
"—and her fucking cat." He said nothing. "Just out of curiousity, what's this cat's name?"
"Taffy."
"Oh! For fuck's sake—why not a normal name! Why can't cats be normal?!?!?!"
"You assume you are normal..." he said.
"...and?"
"No animal on two, four or eight legs is like you."
There was a long silence and I said, "You've just insulted me with utter obliqueness, haven't you?"
"NEVER!" he protested.
Too much.
No comments:
Post a Comment