Free A Walk in the Snark by Rachel Thompson

bigger issue of his general M.A.N. Disease (Male Avoidance Neuroses) ?
     
    Did I need to stage a Paper Towel Intervention? I don’t remember this chapter in the wife manual.
     
    No, no, he said. That’s not it at all. You women (so Mancode of him) just don’t get how we guys think. (Um, hello. It’s called marriage . But that’s a whole other article. Or book. I’m not sure yet.) Anyway...
     
    Enlighten me, darling, I replied. (But first, a martini please. Dirty, extra olives.) I have a feeling I have to gird my loins for this one.
     
    Okay, man o’ mine. Continue.
     
    Men are hunters. We’re men on the move. We’re here, we’re there. We’re dodging one bullet only to find that another is headed our way.
     
    I raise my hand. Um, bullets? We live in South Orange County, sweetheart. In a gated community. That hasn’t had a crime worse than someone TP’ing a tree in over thirty years.
     
    Don’t be so literal, honey. You get my meaning. Guys don’t have time to worry about throwing some silly paper towel away when we have to stop big-screen-TV-threatening water leaks or kill wife-eating spiders. We use the paper towel and move on, baby. It’s out of our consciousness. Eventually we’ll get back to throwing it away when the war is over. But by then you women have entered into Def-Con Hissy Fit #1 over the invading paper towel and have tossed it—just to whine at us about leaving it around.
     
    Besides, a man never throws away a perfectly good paper towel when he can use it again. Them thar’s supplies, and a soldier don’t waste supplies.
     
    At this point, he washes his hands and uses a paper towel. Given that the only war going on is our war of words (and his dearth of grammatical errors), I’m waiting in stealth mode to see what his battle strategy will be.
     
    And he leaves his paper towel absentmindedly on the counter and walks out.
     
    Not kidding.
     
    Sigh.
     
    I grab the towel and fold it in half neatly as I lean back in my chair and put my feet up, reflecting that it all works out in the end.
     
    I did need a coaster for my martini, after all.
     
    This war stuff is hard work.
     
    As I ponder my final olive, I hear a little noise and turn to see my guy peering at me around the corner, the smallest smile of victory on this face.
     
    Damn. Dude just played me.
     
    Sneaky bastard.
     
    ***
     
    *Poignancy Alert*
     
    THE DIFFICULT KIND
     
    Yes, this is another poignancy alert. You see after I wrote a few posts about D’s strange reappearance in my life and then sudden, unnatural departure, I thought I would be done. But grief and acceptance come in waves. So here is another piece that doesn’t contain my trademark snark. Hopefully you will find some value in the piece. If not, skip ahead, like I said, I’m not watching :-)
     
     
     
    Contact broken. Contact regained. Contact severed. Some people, or things, are meant to stay in your life. If it’s something transitory (like, eww—bugs) then, awesome —they’re gone as quickly as they come.
     
    But people—now that’s not quite the same thing.
     
    When you break up with someone, you expect him or her to be out of your life. And yet…you know this person is still around, like a shadow in your heart. You take these people out once in a while, hold their memories, and then put them away for safekeeping.
     
    But you never expect that anyone will take his own life.
     
    This particular Sheryl Crow song, “The Difficult Kind,” has always resonated deep within me and I knew from the moment I heard it back in the ’90s that, for me, it was about my relationship with my ex-love, D.
     
    What’s astounding is that we were able to speak of it before he killed himself in October ’09. He was a country boy, through and through, so he was unfamiliar with the song. I told him to listen to it and pay particular attention to the words.
     
    After he listened to the lyrics, he told me to go outside and look at the moon. “Whenever