Conversations
These days most conversations happen between people who aren’t face to face. You’ll see people typing conversations while they drive. Go to a playground and you’ll see it filled with parents typing conversations into their phone while their kids are playing. Everyone is stretched pretty thin, I guess, so thin that’d it’d be easier to just eliminate conversations altogether, but since we’re social beings we need to keep up these connections with one another, and the only way to do it seems to be to converse while doing something else at the same time.
The image shown here shows a conversation with my wife in which I tried to express my frustration with a long delay in the bus that I sometimes take to work. When you’re in your own head, you can often come to the conclusion that things are fucked. Sometimes what you need is a little levity, a little sense of connection to someone else, a little talk about the hazards of being a late 1980s baseball card lying around the house of a toddler.
More recently, I had what I believe to be my first conversation with my son. Words have been said back and forth between us for some time, but this exchange seemed to have within it the give and take of ideas and concepts, of clarifications and exclamations, that constitute a conversation. It went as follows:
Jack: Puke
Me: Yes, puke.
Jack: Marny? [his word for Marty, one of our cats]
Me: Yes, Marty pukes.
Jack: Puke.
Me: Yes.
Jack: Waddy? [his word for our other cat, Wallly]
Me: Yes, Wally pukes.
Jack: Waddy. Puke.
Me: Yes, Wally goes hwleeeaahh.
Jack: [smiling] Puke! Waddy! Marny!
Me: Yes, yes, my son. Puke.
Cardboard Gods 
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