On his way out after today's special Peak Oilmen meeting, Fred Hutchins-Licket showed me a new iPod Nano.
I cringed as unpleasant three-part harmony went off in my mind's ear: air raid sirens, ooh-ooh-gah dive alerts and that bleeping noise that ready-mix trucks make when they're backing up. Couldn't have said why at that particular moment, but this one single adverb exploded into my head: "dangerously."
Am I being melodramatic? Possibly, possibly not. The Nano struck me as dangerously petite, dangerously sexy and dangerously powerful. I read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, you know. On account of that book I've learned to trust my hunches, at least more than before I read the book. That much dangerously in one place oughta be against the law. Or at least have a warning label printed on it. I just knew it.
"Be careful with that thing, Fred. It's got 'dangerously' printed all over it."
Fred gave me his trademark "I'd be scratching my sleek, silver-maned head if I didn't already have my hands full" look and went out the door.
After what happened a little later over at City Hall, I feel obliged to deliver this warning to husbands who have the notion to give an iPod Nano to their wives for a birthday present. Don't. Give her one of the other iPods instead.
Just after 8 pee em, Fred Hutchins-Licket slid between the cracks in the Today Cafe's front door like some kind of ectoplasmic misery. I was telling a booth full of adventurous just-passing-throughers that they oughta leave Anomaly Road at night to locals who are used to strange events, when Fred walked straight up to me, tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear, "How'd you know?"
How do you explain symbolic nuance or the dangers of spurious perceptions to somebody who is the heir to a concrete fortune? You don't.
On my way to not telling the third husband of the 40-something Mayor of Licketyville about symbolic nuance and spurious perceptions, I got the people at the booth one of those gaudy pictorial maps of Anomaly Road put out by the Chamber of Commerce, excused myself and took the crestfallen Fred to the Privacy Corner.
"You want to tell me what happened?" The usually silver-tongued Fred opened and closed his mouth a few times, but no sound came out. Just a bubble or two.
"Okay, let me take a wild guess. You presented that dangerously petite, dangerously sexy and dangerously powerful gadget to Mayor Madge at her City Hall birthday party this afternoon. You thought you were going to be a hero on account of her Steve Jobs crush that she's always publicly joking about. How am I doing so far?"
Fred continued to do his imitation of a silver-haired guppy.
"So I'm guessing that Madge opened the Nano package, blushed a little, gushed a little, gave you a perfectly political peck on the cheek and went back to doing Boss-at-the-Party. And after it was all over she refused to speak to you on account of your embarrassing her in public. And now she's at the Planning Committee meeting and you're here."
A sigh, a pair of rolled eyes. "That's pretty close to what happened. Who told you?"
"Nobody told me. Just guessed. A hunch. Gut feeling. Read a book called Blink."
Fred just frowned his concrete frown.
"Let me see if I can put it another way. Petite, sexy and powerful. I think I used those words to describe the iPod Nano gadget you showed me. Right?"
"Right."
"Two out of those three words are perfectly accurate descriptors of our wonderful Mayor." Fred may have concrete in his blood, but I figured that maybe appealing to his arithmetic sense might do it. Wrong.
I gave Fred one last hint. "Our Mayor who is always on a diet..."
Silence drained what color was left in Fred's face.
"Oh."
Fred couldn't bring himself to say anything more on the topic...and who could blame him?
In fact, the only thing Yours Truly could think of to say at that awkward moment was the following item from one of the wisest living men of Modern Times.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid." -- George Carlin
I wish I was smart enough to believe that George has that wrong, but I'm not.
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