De Brug – echoes

A couple of days later I was talking with Soup Boy. Soup Boy is certainly popular with the ladies, and has a healthy and active social life. He was bugging me about working fourteen hours every day and not getting out and meeting people. In my own defense I mentioned my encounter at De Brug. I started to describe her, but I didn’t get far.

“Black hair down to her butt?” Soup Boy asked.

“Yeah, ” I said.

“I know her. Damn, it’s a small town. She’s a trip. And she’s hot.”

“She just broke up with her boyfriend,” I said.

“Reeealy…”

“Yeah, we spent the afternoon disparaging North Carolina. He sounded like a real goober.”

“I never could figure out what she saw in that guy.”

“Well, she’s not seeing it any more.”

The conversation continued like that for a while, mostly at Goober’s expense. I wondered if I would hear from her again about her writing. She had said her life could fill ten books, and from what I heard from Soup Boy, she might not have been exaggerating.

Two days later Soup Boy and I were on a tram, and he says, “I have some gossip for you. It’s about Cleo.” It took me a moment to figure out who Cleo was, but then I was all ears. “I was at a party last night,” he said, “and I thought she might be there. I asked about her and they said she was in the hospital.”

“Holy cow.”

“Not the hospital, really, the psycho ward. I guess she’s kind of freaking out about her boyfriend.” She had seemed sad when I met her, but hardly freaking out. Still, people keep things inside. Then Soup Boy dropped the bomb. “Apparently she stabbed herself pretty seriously, a couple of times.”

Not even ‘holy cow’ could convey what I felt then, so I didn’t say anything at first. Eventually conversation turned to the futility of grand gestures of desperation, the fleeting nature of life, Soup Boy’s ex-girlfriends, and what a goober Goober was.

I understand her stay in the hospital was brief, but I have not heard from her since. I hope she does write her ten volumes, and I hope writing them brings her peace.

10 thoughts on “De Brug – echoes

  1. Jesse, did you notice the new box at the bottom of the comment form? It has a password printed in distorted text that a computer can’t read; to prove you’re not an automated spam computer, you have to type the text in a blank below the box.

    Apologies for the inconvenience. I really wish I hadn’t had to do that, but I was getting wiped out. On one post, I got five automated spams, three of which were obscene and one of which was for child pornography. That was the final straw.

  2. Please! No worries. I have no problem with typing in the password, I think it’s a great solution.
    I did type in the password, but it never took – it just kept popping up a new comment box, with my comment already filled in, but a new passwd to fill in. I often run into problems on the web because I browse with cookies turned off. So I turned cookies back on, went back to your page and tried several test comments. Still didn’t work.
    I had to use the password feature to purchase Rolling Stones tickets and it worked then. Bizarre.

  3. Andrew,
    No, you’re not “here, but you’re probably there, and I can’t “hear” you, but I can read what you typed.

    Also, maybe someone could see if the “password verification feature” is working on http://desertsea.blogspot.com ; does my blog do the same thing as Carol Anne’swhen you try to make a comment?

    Poor Shaz, such a sad story. Is is bad luck or life choices catching up with her or maybe alienation and lack of rootedness as perhaps the dark side of globalization?

  4. If there’s a glitch in that word verification thingie, that might explain why I haven’t had any comments other than Pat’s on any of my posts since I invoked that protection.

    I hope it’s just a temporary problem and the powers-that-be at Blogger will fix it quickly, if they haven’t done so already.

    Has anybody else tried to post to my blog and had similar problems?

  5. OK, I have experienced the phenomenon that Jesse describes. I was posting on Write to Say It, and the first two times I typed in the word verification, I got the warning that I had to type the letters exactly (never mind that I had made doubly sure I was doing so), and the window was refreshed with a new word to type. The third time, my comment went through.

    If this glitch continues to be a problem, I may go back to not requiring the verification step. It’s a tough call to make: I don’t want to make commenting harder, but I don’t want to allow commentspam.

  6. Pat and CA, tried it again yesterdayo n both blogs and got nowhere. We really need someone else to try, because it could easily be a MP not a YP.

  7. Just to be clear, if you complain to blogger, I never got the warning you talked about. In my case it acted as if it is in an infinite loop: demanding a code, not ingesting it, cycling to demand another code. I hit the send button and it just pops up a semi-new page with new code. Also, this is done clicking the radio button for “other,” not fellow blogger or anonymous.

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