Life is Good

I'm nearly recovered from the flu -- or something like it. I'm not a brave sick person. When I'm running a fever I want my mommy, Campbell's Chicken Soup and a cocoon of blankets on the couch where I can watch One Life to Live. I become ten years old again, and that's what I did when I was sick and stayed home from school.

My CEO at work seems to be on medication, so things are calm. The CFO is going to be fired on Monday, and my direct boss -- the COO -- is in danger of losing his job -- again. On the plus side, I was moved into an actual office with a window and a door. I got grief from some people who thought there were others who should have it, but I always answered with, "The HR Manager should have a door." So all has calmed down. Now I have to find stuff to put on the walls. I work in the sports industry, and I've told them that I'm not putting any memorabilia up. I'll resist the urge to put up opera posters. I'm going shopping.

And I've been working on a new short story. I'm afraid that when I write, I don't have a very good attention span at the early stages. I almost need distractions until the piece clicks. Once that happens, I can spend hours on it. The new piece hasn't clicked yet. But I think it's going to be good. Anyway, one of the distractions I use is to log into a chat room on AOL.

There was a time when chat rooms were used to meet and converse with interesting people from around the globe. Now, for the most part they're used by prostitutes and the people who love them. I'm not one of those people. However, every now and then someone sends a message and for ten or fifteen minutes we send messages back and forth. Then, inevitably, they will ask me to send a picture and I decline. That invariably ends the conversation. I'm not interested in meeting anyone on line -- and certainly not interested in a sex romp. If you're reading this from a link on my AOL profile, take note...I'm not looking for sex!

But these conversations can be entertaining. They usually begin with someone reading my profile and sending me a line complimenting me on it. I say thanks, and it goes from there. Now, I don't list my age on my profile, and so most of the conversations are short because most of the men in chat rooms aren't interested in anyone who has completed puberty. I'm endlessly entertained by men who are too old to date themselves and who have such refined tastes that a thirty-five-inch waist offends their aesthetic sensibilities. That is, excluding their own gellatinous midsection, which is described as "beefy."

What always kills the conversation is when they ask for a picture and I decline. Exactly how stupid do you have to be to send your picture to a total stranger who is trolling the Internet for a random, anonymous sex hook-up? Well, however stupid that is -- I'm not. And some of them will offer to send pictures of themselves first, or just do it without asking, hoping I'll be shamed into reciprocating. Almost without exception the picture is a nude with the head cut off, positioned in what must be imagined as some sort of provocative pose.

Now, I have no pretensions to class or breeding. Yet, I'm quite sure owning a nude picture of oneself that is used to advertise for anonymous sex is not considered a demonstration of either class or breeding. And some of them appear to be professionally taken! So either the sender is so vain that he's hired a professional photographer to photo his manhood in all its glory, or he's so arrogant to believe that the recipient doesn't think he's stolen the picture from some porno site. Yes, the cream of the crop can be found on the Internet. For the record, I do not have any of those pictures either.

But on a rare occasion I will meet someone who is able to carry on a conversation. I do enjoy those, however brief they may be. I've discussed politics to shopping, and they're fun little disposable conversations that provide the perfect distraction from my serious writing. Just like my blog!