All I want to know now is…how long will it be before he returns to radio??? Anyone who really knows me knows how much I loved the Tony Kornheiser Show. Fingers crossed for a rapid return.

Mr. Tony, hurry back!!!

Then I got one. I still hate cats, only not my own. I wonder if this is the same feeling people with kids have. They hate all other kids but their own. Probably not. Kids have to interact with other kids on a pretty routine basis, so the parents probably become immune to the annoyances of other children. That is unless their kids are home-schooled. Then the parents probably do hate other kids and fear that they will infect their own children with senseless frivolity, videogame-onset obesity and single-digit IQs. But my cat has never had to interact with other cats unless it’s been through a window, and during those moments he pretty much goes bat-shit. So I guess, in a way, he is a home-schooled cat.

Anyway, the point I was going to make is that I think I was meant to get a cat, even though I hate them. Cats are aloof and standoffish and dole out their affection as if it were some invaluable delicacy like Chinese snow frogs or grape Kool-Aid. A cat’s not going to be all up in your grill, showing you love 24/7 like a dog. A cat will cross your path, nudge his head into your shin and keep walking. That’s it. That’s all the love you get. And if you try to eke out just a smidge more affection from a cat by stifling his gait and picking him up, he will quickly show his disdain for your unwelcome disturbance by scratching out your eyes or putting the supple skin of your chest into an agonizing death grip.

And that’s why I was meant to have a cat. I’m aloof, standoffish (by perception only, I like to think), and because I have hurt and been hurt by love so much in the past, I am stingy with my affection. It comes in dribs and drabs. If I can control to whom and how much love I dole out, it makes things a lot safer for me. Of course, I will probably die a miserable, lonely old man. But hey, we all have our burdens to bear.

In fact, the only difference between me and my cat Charles is that he has the ability to lick his own butt. I can maybe reach a thigh, but definitely can’t get any further than that. Lucky him, I guess — except for the fact that his breath smells like ass all the time.

Because I don’t have his email to offer personal thanks, I wanted to at least write a brief post, thanking Tony Garciella for his generous contribution to Evening Melancholy. The donation was not expected but is sincerely appreciated. Mr. Garciella’s donation puts a nice little dent in the cost to run the station and with the economy being as crappy as it is, I appreciate the sacrifice even more.

Thanks again, Mr. Garciella!

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury. Remember it? How could one forget it? I read it during my freshman year in college. English class. At my desk. Sitting quietly in the laziness of after noon, eyes slowly galloping from left to right. Fifteen, twenty minutes and the world had vanished. I’ve read novels that didn’t startle and shake me like this one short story. Nearly twenty years later and Bradbury’s suggestions of consequence still haunt me. Good or bad? I don’t know. I do know that I’m still stricken with anxiety at times when the memory of this tale rushes to my immediate recall.

A group of men travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs. The leader of this group warns the hunters not to make any missteps while trekking through the fragile denseness of history. One careless step off the path and the future could be irrevocably altered. Insects, rodents, entire races of people could be wiped away in an instant. Languages could be throttled. Future presidents could become vagabonds. And vagabonds could become powerful tyrants.

One of the men in the story does venture away from the designated path and in doing so, steps on a butterfly. When the men return to the present time, they quickly realize that that one man’s tiny misstep had completely changed the future as they knew it.

The responsibility of it all would be too much for me. To know that I could, with one errant step, drastically change the course of history? Thank you, but no. No time travel for me. I hope no man finds himself in the possession of gift as dubious as the power to travel through time. I can only imagine that the sway of evil has a much stronger pull than that of good, and entire nations would suffer if only one man were able to figure out how to scamper across centuries.

The moral of this story creeps up on me every now and then, more frequently as I get older. Yesterday, after sitting on my back porch to skim through a magazine and drink a beer, I reentered my house and walked into my bathroom. I had been eating sunflower seeds when I was outside, so when I happened to notice a little brown speck on the front of my tee shirt in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, I imagined it was only a shell from one of the seeds. However, when I glanced down at my shirt and got a better look, I realized that shell was actually a tiny snail, no bigger than the nail on a pinkie finger. Apparently, it had been on my shirt for a while because it had left a nice, long and slimy trail down my shirt front. It was mildly disgusting.

My immediate reaction was to walk over to the commode, lift the lid and quickly tug at the end of my shirt until the snail toppled off and fell into the toilet’s bowl. I hit the lever to flush, and it was then that the suggestion of consequence came trampling forward in my mind. It may seem silly, but I wondered how much I had altered the future with that one little gesture. It could be that a gesture just as small eventually lead to the fall of the Roman Empire. Or maybe something as tiny as a snail, in the grand and complex twining of time, lead to men goosestepping down the streets in shiny boots, inhumanely gunning down their fellow man.

Then again. Maybe a snail is just a snail.

I think of things like that. And then I think that if I guage every single action I make and the consequences that are borne of such actions, I will surely go insane. So, when I think of that tiny snail, slowly descending into the darkening swirl of the commode, I have to get a grip and tell myself that it’s not as bad as I imagine. “It’s not the end of the world,” I say to myself.

Problem is, sometimes, I’m not totally convinced.

I ran into an old high school classmate at The Publix yesterday. I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen her since our graduation. I hate running into people at the grocery store. At the mall, fine. At a restaurant, I’ll take it. But grocery stores are the worst. Mainly it’s because they have aisles. Aisles are like the shopping version of the movie Groundhog Day. All you do is run into the same person over and over and over again.

You first run into someone in aisle three, exchange pleasantries and say farewell. Aisle five, you pick up a can of turnips, maybe some yams and, Hey, there she is again. All you can do is smile or say something dumb or pedestrian like, “Haven’t we met? Ha ha ha.” or “We gotta stop meeting like this. Chuckle chuckle.” Wouldn’t it be great if we could just blurt out something that would completely mess the other person up for the rest of the day? Strolling down the aisle, only to run into her again. She smiles. You smile. She opens her mouth to say something and you say, “No, no. Iridescent tumbleweeds smote the cardigan muffin top.” Then you turn your face forward again, wearing the same, warm smile and gently push your cart away.

I’m not good with conversations in a grocery store aisle. How long should I stand here and talk without it getting weird? How do you cram twenty years into a grocery aisle conversation? What if I got so engrossed in the conversation that when it was over, I realized I really didn’t feel like shopping any more and just walked out, leaving my full cart right in the center of the aisle? What would she do if I kicked her real hard in the shin and ran away? Would she try to find me or continue shopping or find her whole shopping experience ruined and just leave? What if I jumped in her cart and demanded that she wheel me around the store so I could stretch out my arms like DiCaprio and scream, “I’m the king of the world!!” over and over again until the police came. What if we have a normal conversation for five minutes, then, just as we say goodbye, I take a few items out of her cart and put them into mine and walk away as if it wasn’t an incredibly deranged thing to do?

A lot of what ifs. None of that happened. It was mostly, “What have you been up to? Married? No? Kids? No? Job? Life? Absolutely not.” Then we wound it down and said our goodbyes. She said she would see me at the high school reunion, which incidentally, is only a year away. 20 years. How depressing is that? Then she went her way and I went mine and I spent the rest of my shopping time hoping I didn’t run into her again because our conversation was exhausted and I didn’t want to spout some cliched line if we did encounter each other again. Fortunately, we avoided the repeat meet. I did see her at the checkout. She smiled and I waved and that was that.

By the time I had unloaded my groceries into my car, she was just exiting the store. For a brief moment, I thought of yelling out her name so she could watch me shove my empty cart with all my strength towards her vehicle then run away, leaving my car and groceries there in the parking lot. I imagined she would watch incredulously as I ran and ran, becoming a tiny, clinically insane dot on the horizon. But I didn’t do any of that. I just got into my car and left.