It’s Your Ribs

On balance I guess you’d say I’m a melancholy guy.

I was just thinking I’ve written too many downer political statements on this blog and it was about time I got back to frivolous stuff, the kind of stuff you write about when you are social networking, like American Idol and Lost, recipes, music and sex.

But then I discovered that I have lost my memory stick, and it always brings me down when I lose something, but in this case it’s worse because I can’t really remember what I had saved on my memory stick. It’s physically tiny, but it holds 16 gigabytes, which is a lot of damned data, and even though it wasn’t full, I think I must have lost a lot.

I just don’t know what.

Maybe I should just forget it. It didn’t cost that much (and I’ve got a drawer full of them in my desk anyway), and if I don’t know what was on it, maybe the information wasn’t that important. Of course, there might be a list of user names and passwords on it, enabling somebody to get into my various online accounts and do bad things. (Watch out for that here on revision99.) So now I’m bummed again, and I don’t feel like happy talk.

2009 really sucked, didn’t it? Consider the depression (economic, I mean), teabaggers, the endless frustration and tedium of the “health care” “debate,” the military escalation in Afghanistan, the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, the Supreme Court decision to turn corporate money loose on our political system — oh, wait, some of that was this year, wasn’t it? That just points up the fact that 2010 looks pretty much like 2009, which bums me even more.

So I have lost my memory stick. I wish I could lose my memory. too.

But on that earlier-promised lighter note, this cartoon cracks me up. It was sent to me by my dear friend Kate. I met Kate at a party when we were both in high school, and her sense of humor and mine clicked immediately. I am certain that if we had seen this cartoon that night we would have giggled together over it for the rest of the evening, and now all these years later she has clipped it out of a magazine and sent it to me. I’d like to give the cartoonist credit for this charming non sequitur, but obviously he (or she) should have signed it more boldly.