...Then You Sing Some More

I know none of this is real. Or, perhaps better phrased, it exists as a reality in a manner (ones and zeroes) I could not deconstruct into its present shape on your screen (or mine). It's all vapor and electrons with a heaping helping of whimsy but when I sit in front of the monitor (and there's a reason why they look like windows) and see a note from someone about whom I was just thinking, or just NOT thinking about, I marvel at the sequence of discoveries that had to happen when they did and how they did for all of that to become all of this.

We can use technology to track terrible and terrifying weather to provide otherwise helpless people with the advance notice that will save their lives. We can see and say greetings to friends and family half way and more (oh?) around the world from our desktop and develop relationships in cyberspace that rival any we have in terra firma. It's all the same and, yet, very different.

"We can't play this game anymore, but can we still be friends?" Despite, or is it because, the answer is contingent on conditions that are never defined, we often never know. This weekend, actually at the conclusion of it, I had a note from a FBF, Facebook Friend, whom I shall never in this life, meet, who attended a family celebration and met another (mutual) FBF whom I have met only once and will also probably never meet again. We three are a galaxy, without a sun or a moon, revolving around one another even as we are components of a larger movement comprised of many and more just like, and also unlike, us, to include you.

The only thing we three have in common is...wait for it, one another. And, here's the part that makes me smile, it's true for each of us and for all of us. Based on their posts, adventures, shared photos and comments, they live out loud and enjoy their lives at max vol. Maybe that's you? Or perhaps you are me in your galaxy faraway-the flavorless gelatin guy, not because I do not deserve a flavor but because I don't want to make trouble. But I'm only saying that while building a towering rage at being overlooked/underheard even as I assure others all is well. There's one in every crowd.

Look at yourself and those around you and see if you too aren't part of a tripod-possibly the most stable and flexible construct we have in our arsenal of social structures. The shades of gray and nuances across the color spectrum are a subset of the larger issue and not essential to the discussion. I'm one who contends neither white nor black are actually colors at all since the latter is the absence of light while the former is the absence of color. But like so many who so believe, I see my world only in those two.

It's the mingling with colorful people, some of whom I'm related to by blood and marriage, others via keyboards and mouse clicks, and still others by a variety of means and in a manner defying description, that helps me maintain and retain the fiction of human credentials. All the while I marvel at those who drink like it's water and dance like no one is watching.

-bill kenny