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scare reasonable people
Sunday, July 9 2006
Early this morning I mixed up a batch of four ounces of epoxy and poured it into the repair I'd made in the football-sized hole in the header of a basement window. But I wasn't done with just that; I cut a 2 X 10 plank and sistered it against the repaired header. When I fix a problem, I never want to have think about whether it is fixed or not ever again.
I returned the computer I'd had overnight to the one client and then fixed the porch screen Sally had torn at the McMansion of the other client. Then I drove off into the noonday sun, finally having dug myself out of the hole I'd gotten into yesterday. On the way home I stopped for pizza in Woodstock, something I used to do every Wednesday back when I was working for WDST. Then, as a favor for the dogs, I stopped at Onteora Lake. Instead of jumping in the water as I'd hoped, they rewarded me by snuffling endlessly for chickenbones that campers had tossed into the bushes.
And old guy was hanging out there on the shore chatting up an attractive older woman. But when she donned her bathing cap and swam off into the lake, he wandered over to me (I was then knee-deep in some swampy shoreline vegetation) to discuss a subject he thought would interest me: dogs. He was one of those guys who wanders the world in a chronic state of loneliness while wearing the reason for this like a dunce cap: he's a terrible bore. Newsflash to the many boring people of the world: if you're not gorgeous to look at, the only way to be interesting is to either bear interesting information or you be funny. And to be funny, you have to be slightly shocking in the things you're willing to say, but not in a way that's going to scare reasonable people. (That "scare reasonable people" clause is one that I frequently ignore, to my repeated detriment. This accounts for the fact that all my friends either came to me through Gretchen or are less shockable than average. Shocking Gretchen's friends is not a sport I particularly enjoy, but I do it nonetheless.)
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