Greetings, and good wishes

This is my theory about greetings and wishes that I've proven to myself repeatedly: anything that you contrive yourself no matter how awful is better than anything you can buy no matter how beautiful and creative or expensive because it comes directly from you without any intervening agency to put your thoughts and feelings into words or pictures or classy materials.

A birthday wish across Facebook is the worst of all possibilities. Any e-card available online, no matter how cute or well done, is second worst to that. Because both of those require no thought or no real feeling at all on the part of the sender, so they are void of anything personal,  an automated reminder and electronic response doesn't cut it. They're actually offensive, they prove the sender is not thinking at all. Not one bit.

I nearly missed my brothers birthday. No time to send anything hardcopy. This birthday greeting must be electronic. What a bummer.

c/p greeting and immediate response to it follows.

good luck, you guys.

United States, Vietnam, Polynesia, Australia, Malaysia, Moldova, Singapore, good luck making your cards.

That's for today.

cards

These guys I know like to play cards. I observed them for a while playing on a retro 50's laminated table. Bright yellow. Squarish irregular link design. Odd number of people at the table, the deck of cards dark green. Each hand dealt rapidly and expertly, creating a little pile in front of each player and darkening the whole area as individual leaves from bright yellow to dark green, then all at once without any signal at all, just the cessation of the deal, all hands swipe up their cards in one single deft movement, all players all at once like five choreographed windshield wipers, and bang, the table is yellow again.

I told them that.

They stopped playing and all turned to me at once and regarded me standing there regarding them, and one of them said,

"Chip, we have to drop acid to see the world like you do sometimes."

It looked like this, except worse, and it could have been five cards.