(expletive deleted)

You know those days when something happens and you know the world will never be the same? Yeah, I don't either. Every once in a while I think I've experienced it, but usually it turns out that no one takes notice and the whole durned cosmic game just keeps rolling along.

Today, I received my first musician friend request on facebook. @#&! Hey, let's take a social networking site that we're already ruining with billions, literally billions, of useless applications that clutter up pages to the point where you can't even find people's walls because they never move things around even though it's incredibly simple to do. Let's figure out a way to give people everything they could possibly ever want, so long as we can make some money off of it. Lets give them so much of what they want that they don't even want it anymore.

Pretty soon you're going to be able to muck up your page with colors and graphics so no one can read it. Pretty soon you're going to be able to garble the hypertext on your page so badly that it automatically shuts down the user's web browser. Every time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with myspace II. I'm about ready to drop the entire internet like a sack of cold potatoes and move to West Texas. I'm getting too old for this.

Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms is, quite irritatingly, the slipperiest of all my Hemingway books. The Sun Also Rises is a fun romp through Spain that puts me in the heart of the upper crust of old. If it weren't for that book, I might not understand the concerns of my clients. Not quite a road book, but not far off. For Whom the Bell Tolls is immeasurably thick and unfinishable and probably has a gloriously devastating ending that I will never see. I also have a collection of short stories that features The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Short story collections never get read cover to cover, though. No sir, when it's good Hemingway I really need, it's always A Farewell to Arms.

Unfortunately, that book is never anywhere to be found on my shelf. I know I purchased and read it back in 2002. I'll never forget my great purging of 2006 right before my travels that lightened my burden by 50 some-odd books at a local bookstore and Salvo. This book was not included. It is impossible that it could have been. I think it surfaced somewhere for a few weeks a few years ago but has since receded into that hiding place it has discovered. I haven't gone out and bought a new sampling of that profound sadness because I'm always pretty sure I still own a copy.

Maybe it's time to buy a new one.

Sigh.