Present

Kenny is one of the nicer rent a cops downstairs in the lobby, and obesity doesn't prevent him from actually doing his job. Like Tim, he is stick thin, and reported the car jacking that I was witness to, and if our backgrounds were just slightly more in sync, I would not mind dating him. Tenants get evicted for things like that here, and because I am naive, I got myself embroiled in something similar years back, with a piece of white trash who makes Frank look like the Bronx Casanova, and many of you may recall how my assessment of my ex-fiance has played out.

Kenny is near a hundred percent illiterate about digital technology and the new world of app-gadget fetish we live in today, but I blew some chatter out of my head about my tonsillitis episode. Nineteen is somewhat late in life for swollen tonsils, and Kenny says, with that inner city transplanted agrarian wisdom that leaves me impatient, "Focus on the present now, not the past."

All writers have is the past. The disabled woman on Sunday cut off, in her battle of wills, from her baby brother, is the same disabled woman Gretchen Laskas refused to respond to when I thought my ability to empathize with her agrarian mindset meant something.  Has talking about our past in Speakeasy actually hurt her in any concrete terms? Did I print her telephone number? Or hurt her earnings?  What I am driving at is when abandonment is merited, or not, and how it reflects reality. I have connected to thousands of people online over the years, but what makes a connection real, or my feelings of lost affinity germane? I miss Gretchen; if anything, I may have increased them if your curiosity is piqued. The best I can say about her novels, given the excerpts my fading memory recalls, is that she has the women's interest meme down, but weakly echoes Eudora Welty, and I have to be in the right frame of mind for Welty as it is.

Right now is as good as any to throw a tantrum about southern writers, but I believe I am well enough for coffee, even with my facial structure akin to over-heated cracked porcelain. It is perhaps accurate to suggest that if I stripped naked with a man as dark as Kenny, I'd have a panic attack; I will probably never be in a position to know.