On Friday the gang and I  stopped into a nearby bar to hang on to the remaining hours of the night after a wonderful evening of bowling and beers.  We bumped into a couple of lady friends of Jaguar and Golden John, and we all grabbed seats at the long table in the back.  I had run into these same friends the weekend before at the same place, and we’d briefly exchanged salutations and introductions – “Hi, I’m Bones.”  “Joe?”  “Bones!”  “Bones?”  “Yeah, Bones.  It’s just a dumb name that everyone has called me since…”, until we gave up trying to scream over the loud music and all went on our merry ways.  And on this following Friday, I found myself sitting next to one of these girls, who turned to me and asked, “Bones, what’s your real name?”

Ahhh, this conversation again….

“Um, well, Bones is pretty much what everyone calls me, so I guess that’s my real name…”

“No, but what’s your real name?” she peered over at me with a look of distrust.

“Ohhhh…”  I replied with mock surprise.  “My Christian name?  It’s Ben, but no one really calls me that outside of…”

“You sure it’s not… Mark?” still eyeing me, suspiciously.

“Uh, yeah, pretty sure.  But let me check my license.  Um, yep, it’s Ben. See?”

She inspected the license until she was convinced that my name was, indeed, not Mark.

“Ok.  Fair enough,” she said.  “This past week I received this creepy, rude text message from some random guy named Mark.  And since you were the only person I met over that weekend, I assumed you were the only one who could have sent this.   And all week I was thinking that you were some weirdo asshole.”

I took a look at the text message that she had saved on her phone.  Yeah, it was dirty.  And it was creepy.  And it reeked of bitterness.   Of some lonely dude who had had expected to receive some attention from a strange young lady at the bar, and when it didn’t happen, he went home angry, drunk, and fired off a creepy text as some pathetic form of retaliation.

And she had thought that this low madman was me.  Awesome.

Now, considering that I’ve probably asked for maybe one phone number from a girl at a bar in all my years of single-hood…and there’s been many of those years… I most definitely hadn’t asked for any numbers that past weekend.  And even if I had, I hate texting, as I’m impossibly verbose and thus find the whole process frustrating and slow.  And still, all that aside, if I were going to send a text to some girl I don’t know, creepy and perverted would not be my tone of choice.  No, the message would probably read more like this:

Poop
Pee
You’re dumb
Barf
:-)

Because I’m a charmer.

So, no, of course I’m not Mark, and of course I didn’t send any perv text messages, but what’s so incredibly awesome about reality  is that it doesn’t matter that I didn’t!  For a full week this lady had thought I had!  As she read and re-read that nasty text, the guilty party that had come to her mind was silly ole’ Bones.   And so had she hated me.   And I’m fascinated by this neat concept.  Perception is reality, and for the past week she had perceived this Mark guy to be some goofy scrawny older fellow with a loud laugh and a receding hairline and a ubiquitous pint of ale in his hand.  Me. Whatever outcome Mark had intended, whatever form of attention he had desperately craved, it had failed, for whoever he was, he was no longer this man.  He had merged with another man.   In this girl’s reality, Mark had become someone else.  He had become me.  And poor unwitting Bones had become this man.   Mark, the original Mark, had never existed in this girl’s reality. Instead, his existence was entirely defined by mine.  With a simple drunken horny text message, the man had disappeared.  In this particular singular reality.  Replaced by another man.  Mark was gone.   For a week.  A single week where reality wavered and waned and a creep stole my face.

Oh, reality!  You’re a snake, slithering madly, while we poor souls cling to your scales in merciful incomprehension.

You know, I was thinking about snakes this morning and was wondering something.  Does a snake have a tail?  Or is the snake actually the tail?   When it all comes down to it, a snake is nothing more than a mouth with a tail.  Or a tail with a mouth. You know?  Think about it.  Normally a tail has a defined start and end.  And the start is usually directly above an ass.  But not a snake.  It is not above an ass.  No, in fact, the only ass associated with a snake is just a regular old snake ass attached to the end of the tail.  And at the opposite end there’s a mouth.  So really, a snake is just a tail with an ass and a mouth.  And man, that’s just stupid.

I’ve just decided that I hate snakes, and other things.

So, where was I?  Oh yeah, Mark.   The gang and I decided that it would be a good idea to teach Mark a lesson in manners by  prank calling the phone number that he had had left on the text message.  We called out the digits, we all dialed them into our phones, and we all hit send at the same time.  All of us were greeted by the Operator informing us that the number was disconnected.  Except for our buddy Sandman.  He actually connected with someone’s voicemail.  And he left a long and weird and rambling message.   Strange that he was the only one out of five who was able to connect, we thought.  We looked at what he had dialed.  He had misdialed the number.    And so, in a delightful irony, his attempt to leave a message for the creepy guy who had left a creepy message for a random girl had resulted in a new creepy message left for a new random girl by a new creepy guy!

And now, somewhere out there, there’s a girl who’s creating her own version of Mark.

And everything is connected, a snake eating itself.