a stranger in the club

A stranger requested to be my friend today. While looking over her profile I wondered her motives. Whilst doing so I realized, suddenly, the hillarity of assuming the request and acceptance of certain digital messages could induce words like friend. The world just grew a bit more polarized. But sure sweetheart, you can be my friend. This leads me to an essential decision about the action my new friend and I should take:

Let's start a club, you and I. I don't remember your name, and I don't feel like opening a new browser to find you.

We will determine a criterion for the members of our club. I suggest that it be for those who are not themselves.

I want to give full oppurtunity to this maxim, because it has just now struck me as something that is both inspiring and completely ironic. Beyond this, it is useful. If I am not myself I can be anything I want. When I am anything I want, I can avoid being myself.

So let the club begin. The membership is not permanent. Simply because one would assume that if one could not be themselves, they certainly will be themselves at some point. So in case of this, members may come and go as they please.

Second Rule: No girls allowed.

Except for those that are not themselves.

Yes, Yes . . . Our club creation is almost complete.

One last rule: If you are, indeed, not yourself, do not attempt or strive or even try to remedy it. Be your "not-self" fully. Make every single ounce of your personhood fulfill your "not-self." Become it.

And when you're done, new friend, leave. But please leave your "not-self" here. Safely tucked away in a small cubby, in a small coat closet somewhere in the foree of our club. I'll watch over it. Sprinkle it with moth balls if you leave it for too long, occasionally shake the dust off of it.

It would be a shame to find some other "not-self" to be.

Disclaimer: I'm expecting myself to be a literary faunt, to spout words like they were free. But I forget, that faunts have a unique advantage that I do not. They recycle their payload and, for the most part, keep water running through them. They are only constrained by the amount of water that is evaporated. So faunts will continue to run, processing stream, after stream. Slowly the level of water will drop. Leaving a white mark on the side of the pool; a spectral image of the deposits that are invisible, tasteless and without mass while you drink, but able to be wiped away after the sun has dispatched water particles.

I'm not a fan of faunts.

My longevity is taxed by an ever increasing need. The world calls out in some sort of pseudo-crisis, begging for attention and care and cultivation; begging to be meticulously tended, as if a flower were to spring up after so many weeks. I call the crisis pseudo because I don't believe I carry much clout. Not to say I couldn't make this world better, rather that I believe both the world and I know that I wont.