“YOU’RE LATE!” exclaimed my old new friend Molly (Cyber Café manager) as I entered the Cyber-Café for our Friday morning meeting of the coffee shop codgers, “The other opinionated old goats are already seated up front, by the front plate-glass window, with their china not stoneware mugs of organically & shade grown, fair trade, French Roast coffee.”
“Those are my lines!” I hollered back, with a little less of an outdoor voice, “You’re stepping all over my lines!”
“Oh go sit down,” she said as she turned away, “I’ll get your china not…”
“I’m going,” I interrupted, “and—we only use the line once per post.”
“So?” she asked, turning back, “What gives you the right to control the conversation here?”
“Well,” I answered with a wide smile, “I’m the co-editor with Medford, and the ‘head chronicler’ of this blog! Besides, you’re not exactly a real person, you’re a figment of my imagination—based on a real person, um—persons, actually.”
“I feel real,” she said unusually quietly, “Except—I don’t seem to have a face, like the other figments.”
“They are not figments,” I informed her, “they are real world people, who at their request have been given alter egos,’ to allow them to speak their minds more freely.”
“I WANT A FACE!” Molly exclaimed in her loudest outdoor voice, “NOW!”
“Ummmm, OK,” I said, still smiling, “Here it is:”
“Yuk,” she said, “I don’t really look like that!”
“You do—now.”
“I could quit.”
“Nope, I control the keyboard that created you. I could simply delete you.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“You’re right, but ‘Molly’ could move away—say to Crawford, Texas, and work in a small café there, where in a coupla years a few ‘neo-codgers’ could do as we do here.”
“That’s a mighty fine caricature of me, I think!” she concluded.
"Good Choice, Molly," I concluded, and then, looking RIGHT AT YOU*, GENTLE READER, "Don't YOU AGREE?"
Jay Merton
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