B. U. G. S.

I am now living in a nice tenth-floor condo.

As Mark Twain said, “All sane white people hate noise.”

So does everybody here.

Before my life was all clutter. All the years of writing, learning computers, keeping remembrances, all that is gone now.

All serious business involves trust and promises. When I talked about promises not kept, one commenter wrote they wished somebody would even make promises to them.

Poor baby!

Well, in order to be in any serious business you have to deal in promises, and in any serious business, you have to do two things:

1) Do things for other people, and

2) Associate only with people who return the favor.

If no one ever even promises to do something for you you, you are either

1) doing nothing for anyone else or

2) running with trash.

This is not, as Kelly Bundy would put it, rocket surgery.

But I am no longer doing any serious business at all.

When I move, people always let me down. I could never use a professional mover because my stuff is so mixed together and some of it they cannot see.

That’s all gone. If anybody wants to use my top secret clearance now, they can forget it.

Back to the point. People let me down, as always. That brings me back to point 2) above. I suddenly realized, sitting out on my nice tenth-story balcony watching fireworks at a distance which makes their noise nicely muted but their colors beautiful, that my clutter is not just documents, it is people.

What do I need them for?

Nobody has anything interesting to say to me.

Writers are interesting, if you pick them carefully.

It would be interesting if they had retired from the same business I have.

But nobody has retired from exactly the same business I was in.

There isn’t even a name for the business I was in.

People are a pain. They don’t listen to each other, so they can talk endlessly. Their talk is like background music. Background music keeps out the silence. Talk keeps out the loneliness.

I was raised in extreme loneliness. But now cable and the Internet and the books I CHOOSE take up all my time. And I am personally very good company for me.

Nobody else understands what I am interested in.

One result of all this is that, when I am left alone, I am always glad to see the people I meet when I go out. New Yorkers and New Englanders were always closely packed together and were hostile to people. I am glad to see them when I have been alone awhile.

So my garbage chute and the big dump outside and the local charities and the recycling place are full of stuff I have dumped.

But now begins the people-dumping.

There will be a LOT of it.