Please Stop Building Community How’s your day going? You ever had some flake ask you that? Couple of problems with this. It’s a brazen test question and I have nothing nice to say. It always happens in the middle of some transaction- a transaction whose success depends on brevity. Think bank tellers, salesmen, delivery guys……These are the perps, but not always. My first experience was with that little bitch-boy at the gym. Nice guy, smiles so hard when patrons come in, he looks like Stevie Wonder. Anyway, Peter had to re-run my card because it wasn’t auto-drafting. We determined that my card had expired and we began the miserable process of adding a new charge-card that also had available credit. While standing patiently as he clicked on his computer, he suddenly stopped working and said, “How’s your day going?” Say what? That came out of nowhere. Well, not so great, Pete, I’m just now realizing I maxed out my credit card collection two months earlier than usual and might have to sell my hair. And I don’t mind telling you folks, without this hair, I have very little reason to visit a gym. The fish out of water is another source of this crime. Some septuagenarian out with her daughter in the big city might ask “how’s your day” because some UPS driver has done it to her a few times, and she figures that’s how we talk ‘round here. There’s no solution here but politeness. And that’s like opening the gate and letting the virus in. It is also unwelcome from a delivery person. While I sign his tablet, I don’t want to build community. Please leave my porch before the steps fail. Further, I don’t need my neighbors seeing me. I wish to remain an Ivory-Billed woodpecker, who may only be spotted on Sundays when I roll my trash bin to the curb. But if you do foolishly answer his question with any detail you’re compromising the social cocoon you aim to live in. Worse, you’ll probably say something insulting or stupid- and surely, you’ll be thinking about it the rest of the night. And if he says something conversational, whoa Jesus. Now I’m standing there smiling- certainly not on my to-do list. I would just like to know what you people are getting at? Who told you to do this? Listen up- you go back to your shack- I’ll go back to mine. No point in extending any of it. Larry Thack Hopes to Arm Wrestle Sec. Hegseth in the Diggers Antiques parking lot, if he’s Man Enough to Show