The question of the night was “Why aren’t the Kansas City Chiefs called the Chieves?” Thiefs are thieves. Leafs are leaves. But oafs are not oaves and milfs are not milves. You have to ask why. I mean, no you do not have to ask why but it made for good conversation. I was not feeling well yesterday and could have canceled the weekly Degenerate Night. But having someone to talk to seemed more important than being groggy from oversleep, and by sunset I felt fine. Today I feel like butt again, such that I did not fully realize how butt-like I felt until a few hours in to this precious gift of a day. I was up at 10:00 but stayed lazy and slept ’til noon.

I got a new window fan, to replace one caked with damp muck. It is just a cake of dust and grime but it looks nasty. Funny, though, it is the exact same fan that L. had at her place, and hers was in the exact same condition as mine. Covered with gunk. A weird thing about it was that it was on the floor in the middle of her living room. Her place, as much as I remember of it, was a strange mix of spartan and messy. She did not have much stuff but what was there was thrown about. But the presence of an identical window fan was a coincidence that went without comment on my part.

I reactivated Facebook today for two reasons. There was someone I briefly knew in high school who was insanely smart, with the highest standardized test scores and GPAs and all that. But he wasn’t just book smart. He had an active mind. I remember him as being somewhat insane. For reasons I do not recall he abruptly quit school. I seem to remember it being legal to do that in Florida when you turned 16. Whatever the legalities I just remember my mother saying in reference to this guy “Someone that smart with nothing to do is a dangerous situation.” She may have been correct, though I don’t remember her elaborating on the comment. I remembered him as just sitting at home, basically doing nothing but going insane. This was his choice. He protested academic institutions and the education system by unplugging from them altogether. I went over to his house once with my friend Pete, who seemed to be good friends with the guy but he also thought he was losing his mind for having nothing to do. I wish I could remember that guy’s name. I remember it as being distinctive but I cannot remember it, and I am curious now to see how he turned out, or what he did with himself. So I re-upped FB to see if I could spot his name on Pete’s profile. I did not see any name that sounded right, though I did begrudgingly glance at the profiles of some people I’d be happy to never hear from or hear about ever again. That’s not meant as an unkind or mean sentiment. It’s just that life is long and most of the people I knew 30 years ago should, as far as I am concerned, be the people I knew 30 years ago.

I never found the guy, and his name might come back to me. I thought of him because in some ways I am him. I am a smart guy with nothing to do. Intelligence is way overrated, I think, but it does have a way of making one stew in their own juices a little more aggressively than others. I don’t flatter myself in saying I’m intelligent or even creative. In most contexts these qualities are kind of a pain in the ass.

The other reason I plugged back in to FB was that I was trying to remember an elegant phrase a friend used to describe a distant cousin who comes out of the woodwork to claim an inheritance. He used the term in reference to the lawsuit involving Vivian Maier and a distant relative brought in from France to sue for his questionable claim to her estate. Alas, I found the correspondence between myself and the person who made this comment. The term he used was “distaff meyer cousin”, which is almost certainly a typo. He is among the most eloquent and articulate people I know, though, and is not prone to egregious typos. So I assumed he was just being eloquent with what sounded like a French term. It was good for a laugh among myselves.

OK, at the ghetto coffee shop, where a most objectionable woman is trying to get me into conversation. Not going to happen…