Ted Offers Encouragement in a Time of Need

Ted is a good friend.

I was feeling really blue earlier tonight.  Online technology—or perhaps my own technological inadequacies—had let me down once again.  I had spent hours and hours on a writing project for 317am.net, and after doing everything I thought I ought to do, the whole thing crashed (it was someone else’s website) and I was left staring at my empty hands.  A word the techies use sometimes is “unstable.”  Boy, was I feeling unstable when a weekend’s worth of work—and the satisfaction of having gotten the damn thing done—suddenly went kaput.  I was sitting at the kitchen table, helpless before the laptop, groaning pitifully.  And then Ted hopped up—first onto a chair, then onto the table—and stuck his face in mine.  Here’s what I found later on the monitor upstairs.

suffering over silliness?
cut it out bigster you’ve seen worse
you see worse all the time
and if you’ve learned anything
it’s that everything makes for a story
someday you’ll turn your lost piece
of writing into a new piece of writing
and i’ll bet you like the new one better
that’s how it goes you know?
we soulful types are designed to find
consolation in how things turn out
no matter how they turn out
and generally speaking
before the rubble
settles and the
smoke has
cleared
we
find a reason to laugh

do you remember zorba
the greek?  that contraption
for skidding logs down from the
hills and how it all collapsed in a heap?

there he was on the beach afterward
slapping his heels and teaching
the uptight young english
guy how to dance
i would teach you too
if i were just the littlest bit
more steady on my feet these
days meanwhile what you
ought to do is go watch
some cable and get
some sleep this
believe me is
sound ad-
vice