The Duck in Normal entries

“Have you met me?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yes, of course I’ve met you, no, you’re not using that right, you don’t start off a conversation that way. If I say something like ‘Ease up on the Shrimp’ or ‘Buzz much Stoney Mcstonerson?’. That’s how stupid snarky banter works.”
“Says you.”
“Yeah, comebacks are another story. You can’t use them from off the rack.”
“Have you met me?”
“Heh, better, I guess. I suppose it’d be a good pick up line.”
“Well?”
“Well, picking up your boyfriend in his own house, binge watching Veronica Mars on the sofa is … setting the bar pretty low.”
“Oh. Where do you suggest I go?”
“The arm chair, maybe swing a leg over, show a little skin.
“Have you met me?”
“Heh. Discretion might be the better part of valor, but repetition is the better part of, the better part of, the better part of pick em ups.”

So, sue me. I got nothing. I’m not working my last nerve, just my most inflamed one. I have a tablet in the bathroom used, almost exclusively, to play Yahtzee With friends. It’s a Facebook game, one of those ones that tell you they’re going to hijack your contacts and shit. For the one person out there who doesn’t know what Yahtzee is; Facebook didn’t invent it. What would the odds be that the one person who never heard of Yahtzee was reading this shit, especially with the above intro? I don’t know, but I got a twenty says my guess’ll come closer than yours. Hey, I should get a kudos of some kind, boredom could lead to serial murder; I’m just putting the English language out of its misery. Around the turn of the millennia folks from camps all along the bell curve were saying Spanish would be the first language in America by 2015. Some with fear, some with excitement, enough that Fucking Donald Trump takes the white house on a ‘Build a Wall’ platform.

Wow. What’s the rule for paragraphs and multiple non-subject non-sequiturs? I’m sure there must be one. I just do it by rhythm, like it was a manual typewriter. Ding.

Oh, yeah. So, Facebook Yahtzee With Friends makes suggestions on who you should play next, typically someone who doesn’t have the app but does have Facebook. I got so tired of seeing my granddaughter come up as a suggestion that I started a game. Heh. If they don’t have the app it says, in my bathroom, that you started a game with anonymous. The next suggestion was and still is this woman I was engaged too back in the early nineties. She used to say shit like ‘Have you met me?’ She had a whole pocketful of pre-stamped banter, enough to amuse a catering gig of conventioneers for an evening. That sounds snarkier than I meant it. The truth is I seem attracted to that in a person. I don’t know why, I prefer necessities mom. Um, if that’s too cryptic, how about Zappa’s band?

One Halloween we were up at the zoo, the Portland zoo gets all dressed up for Halloween and Christmas and summer concerts, and we were swaggering through the haunted house. She gets this tug on her sweater, turns around with the viscous look and voice saying “Do I know you?” Her eyes were about three feet too high. It was a little girl, like a toddler, who had lost her mom in the haunted house. The kid burst into tears and crouched as small as she could get. Elise (that was, and still is, her name) was instantly sorry, knelt down, scooped the girl up, apologizing and in between cooing soothing words to the kid used her underground fight club voice on the crowd to find her mom.

You’d think that would make one pause the next time one wanted to trot out ‘Do I know you?’ It didn’t. That’s still her go to, I think, for ‘back the fuck off’. It’s not like I wouldn’t enjoy a game of Yahtzee with her, but if she accepted it wouldn’t be over until she was either up by a bunch or we had reached even. For some unknown reason I’m kind of attracted to that too.

Whether I edited (heh, good one) all that into subject specific paragraphs or made it all one, it still has everything to do with nothing. It’s good Friday and, according to the story, it’s the day they put Jesus in the tomb. ‘Forgive them father, they know not what they do’ isn’t a great piece of snark bait, but it’d be a different kind of tale if Jesus had said ‘Do I know you?’ Wall building folks would have reinforced the rock in front of that tomb, que nada.

So, one of today’s lesson is, friends don’t let friends type sober. Just type No. This is your brain on eggs. Why do you think they call it dope, fiend? Well, how did I get here?

You know what PB needs? Of course you do. It needs a reference section and a wet bar and its own Yahtzee. There are people I’ve been playing Yahtzee with for years, hundreds of games, based on, um, my constitution, that I haven’t exchanged a single word with. Hell, I didn’t even know there was a chat feature until a few months ago. Most people have a different Yahtzee name than their Facebook name, so it’s possible I’ve been playing with someone I’m related to and not even known. Sounds like a late nineties MTV show, right? Buddy seems to be a popular name. Weekly I’m in a game with at least three buddies, it’s gotten to where you need seven digits following buddy. I wouldn’t do it. I’d either spell buddy different or go with a synonym. I actually use my real name on Yahtzee. Of all my digital paranoia, being stalked by a Yahtzee ‘buddy’ is pretty fucking low on the list.

It’s my considered opinion that anybody for whom being stalked by a Yahtzee ‘buddy’ is in the top two digits of their paranoia list … I don’t know, but it’s not positive. I’ve never considered it before; the world shouldn’t be scarier, but it is. What the hell did Will smith used to say … something like ‘Don’t start nothing and there won’t be nothing’ That doesn’t sound right, I mean the quote. But, too, the sentiment. All sorts of things are happening that you didn’t start. Though by you I think he meant, or his character meant, y’all, which means me, unless I’m Will Smith. I might be Will Smith but you can call be Buddy75690023. Have you met me?