People

Fortunately for nobody, I am socially inept. This creates much humour when I meet people, because I have absolutely no clue what to say beyond "hello" and "my name is...". Having no idea what to say, I usually just wing it, and spew forth a garble of words which make a nice little collage, which spells out "Mental". Decent people seem to be able to get around this, but it's not a brilliant first impression. If I was to rate it on the scale of first impressions, I'd put it below soiling oneself and above BO.

It gets better: smalltalk. Unless it's funny, I don't do smalltalk, it's horribly dull and I'm uncomfortable asking such menial questions. It's a shame it's needed really, there's no in between gap from familiarity to friend, or there is, but involves being stuck in the Andes in a crashed plane. Without events happening it's hard to make conversation with somebody you hardly know.

Even better than that is the obliviousness of whether or not somebody wants you around, I take everything as a hint to shuffle away to a dark corner, which is probably right, but I don't know. I hate imposing myself upon people, because I do garble, in some random direction, sometimes about nothing, or at least the hope is I say nothing.

I'm rubbish meeting people, take today for example; a respectable woman whom I had just given the finger to for shouting abuse from her car caught up with me and I forgot to say hello. Damn. She wouldn't even hit me, I called her bluff, just stood there. In fairness I had just been running, it's hard to be sardonic when blood is diverted elsewhere. This is handy in other areas of course, but not when somebody is trying to make you look foolish. Didn't help I was fighting the urge to laugh in her face at the pettiness of it all, I did not fight that urge too well. Ah well. Who cares? Ooh, but I did think of the line "You just want me to sit there and take it? Well usually I do just sit there and take it when there's a woman involved, but we're in public." Unfortunately, I devised this (debatably) witty anecdote an hour later.

Another day tomorrow: Sunday. Expect ninjas on rollerskates and explosions. Or nothing, it's sunday after all. On sunday all the old people are praying and polishing their Kalishnakovs, so the town shuts down. If the gym isn't open I'm getting my excercise by climbing in through a roof hatch.

JW