I Make a New Friend on Facebook!

Yesterday I received a friend request from someone with whom I am already friends, who’d made sandwich of his surname for his new identity. No longer just Bob Redacted, you see, but now Bob Redacted Bob. I of course immediately acceded, and within 12 hours he had kindly written to ascertain my state of mind (and, presumably, body), his exact words, without the requisiste comma, being “How are you John?” A zesty exchange ensured.

JOHN Thanks for asking, fam. Do you know Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Despair, the one whose most poignant (at least in my view) stanza goes:

Hark! I hear music on the zephyr’s wing,

Louder it floats along the unruffled sky;

Some fairy sure has touched the viewless string--

Now faint in distant air the murmurs die.

Awhile it stills the tide of agony.

Now--now it loftier swells--again stern woe

Arises with the awakening melody.

Again fierce torments, such as demons know,

In bitterer, feller tide, on this torn bosom flow.

That’s kind of how I feel today. I also ask that you listen to this song, which I wrote in 1997 when feeling much as I do today.

But why don’t we just cut to the chase. How much money do you want me to send you?

BOB What do you mean?

JOHN How tiresome, darling .How very tiresome. My guess is that you are Nigerian, and a fraudster.

Many minutes passed, and then several more, while I did the exercises responsible for my having the physique of a 73-year-old, and not one who, through no fault of his own, achieved Donald G. Trump’s age last week. Completing them, I saw that Bob Redacted Bob still hadn’t replied. But it isn’t as though I don’t have a lot of practice — given that I prefer the company of the pathologically shy, or at least taciturn — keeping a conversational ball in the air.

JOHN Last week in Turkiye, which is how the same people who capitalize black when it refers to a person of heightened melanin, now spell it, my wife and I encountered The Most Beautiful Man in the World while we conducted a little search in the environs of our hotel for a compact mirror. I mean, this guy made Alain Delon look like John Belushi in comparison. I’m hoping you’re old enough to know who both of those to whom I just referred were. Both are deceased now.

Still my new friend said nothing. Once more I kept the conversation alive.

JOHN That’s none other than Mick Jagger in the photo, with Alain and Mick’s girlfriend Maryanne Faithfull. Notice that Mick, who has never seemed to have a great sense of style — note his ghastly haircut in the unspeakable, should-have-been-career-ending “Dancing in the Street” video he made with David Bowie, whose music I’ve never admired, but who had style enough for a busload, is wearing socks of different colors, and that his shoes look dirty. I remember feeling as he must have when this photo was taken one afternoon in 1973 when I and First Girlfriend, with whom I was playing in a league far more exalted than that in which I belonged, went into a bank on Hollywood Blvd. together and found ourselves in line behind a guy who made me feel like John Belushi, though Saturday Night Live wouldn’t debut until two years later. I think it may have been the viciously-ridiculed-by-Frank-Zappa Punky Meadows of the band Angel.

In other news, I could never have loved Maryanne Faithfull, whose first name the British pronounce as though spelled Marian. She’s around 5-1, and I have always preferred tall women, and her legs aren’t shapely. But let’s get back to you. How can I help?

Once more I waited in vain for my new friend to type something — anything! But six hours and change later he still had not, and I had to conclude that he’d found others with whom he was a better fit, as Human Rexources dickheads enjoy saying