Spin

In this virtual place most of us are at best like ghosts, worst, walls that speak. (Certainly not shadows, which is a good thing.) For surely ghosts can hear one another, as it's a shame walls don't have ears. Yet, even all of this is a presupposition or a fade/pass from view.

I have a friend who held his own wake on Twitter.

How could this be? Wouldn't he be dead and therefore incapable? Fear of dying...  How about that instead? And the wake itself was appropriately, mercifully short. In other words, it didn't get the play he was hoping for, or so I assume, for we had stopped talking some time before that event.

The guy's dad died at age 44 of a heart attack. This friend kept that fact close to his own heart, and with each year he surpassed his father's last birthday, he made mention. I would say that he celebrated this occasion with a cheeseburger and fries were it not his standard fare. And when that day came when he fell to the ground unable to breathe because of the massive pressure in his chest, one wonders why the doctors in the ER wrote it off as asthma. Or, more to the point, why did he let them?

Six months later, still unable to walk a flight of stairs without resting, he returned to the doctors. It was on this visit he was told of his massive coronary way back when. And who did he blame? Not his father. Not himself.

Now, those of you who know me well, also know that I have no room to criticize. And this is most certainly part of the reason we no longer talk. So, when he said, "Let's just talk on Twitter so my wife can have the phone minutes," I did not protest. And now, sufficiently contrite for the time being, I can continue with the story.

The doctors put in a pace maker and stints to help the 40% of his heart he said was left. Still, very little help, and so he proclaimed to the Twittersphere, "I am dying." and proceeded to become a troll of principle (as all are), speaking the truth as his last words should be, while rewriting his past in heroic measure.

"I miss splitting firewood." A man who could not lift a 12-foot 2 x 6 without getting winded five years prior, his growing number of followers (thousands) none the wiser.

Then one day he went to the doctor only to find out that he had been cured, so he bought himself a milkshake to wash down the burger and fries, and moved his roadshow over to Google plus.

But I am being petty, for I have always cut fiction a lot of slack. It must be instead a guilty conscience from all of those years in advertising. That said, it is going to be difficult to convince you that while the above is not the case, you might find, on occasion, that I will refer to myself in some form of the third person. Blogger has those capabilities.

Denial, withdrawal, sparks fly between the words, so close yet how long can one hold another, hug, before there is a need to pull away. One knows it going in, or immediately within the embrace, and  I would imagine there are some that would ask, "Then why start?" and choose to live apart. Frailty goes unchallenged, the selfishness of sophistry. Curse all that surrounds you and become the sun.