Todd Terwilliger

I’ve been stewing on this for the better part of the week: a girl I know de-friended (un-friended?) me on Facebook. That didn’t bother me at all. What bothered me was the total lack of decorum in the whole affair. Hallowed laws of etiquette had been infringed at my expense. That was a crime I could not abide.

First, let me rewind the tape. There is, in this world, the tiniest percentage of people over whom I have a disturbing power: I am given a mainline into their very psyche, direct access to their cerebral cortex. For whatever reason (I don’t pretend to know), the smallest things I say (or don’t say), do (or don’t do), take on a monstrous life in their tortured cerebellums.

These poor unfortunates, of which this girl was one, can’t figure me out. They try and they try and they try but, for some reason, I can’t be deciphered. They can’t tell if I’m joking (which is often) or if I’m serious. I’m not a difficult or complicated man but, to them, I am like some unsolvable glyph, unreadable and alien.

This power, like all power, corrupts. It is unavoidable. I could not help myself: using, abusing my ability, sending hotshot after hotshot down the barrel, knowing exactly what would happen. It made me giddy, light-headed, cackling like some junior-league Rasputin.

I don’t blame her for cutting the cord the only way she knew how. I understood it. It was proper. It was right.

I don’t know when she did it, I only noticed it this week. But when I did, I recognized it for what it was: an attempt to escape, to get out from under a power beyond her control. Knowing this, I felt like I should send her one last message, a cordial goodbye and good luck, to close the wound neatly, walk away on good terms, a clean cut.

I typed up a message and sent it out. I thought it was a very nice note. Not long after, I got a reply. It was one word: “thanks”. Period. No good luck to you too; cheers; no hard feelings; nothing, not even a smiling emoticon after the one word, just a glowering decimal. It wasn’t right. I didn’t deserve this curt dismissal.

Has the foundation of good manners eroded so far as to deny a man a proper goodbye? In times past, even enemy duelists would extend each other courtesies and pleasantries as a preface to their attempted homicides- a bow, a warm greeting, a how’s your mother, before the knives were un-sheathed, the guns drawn, and the blood shed. And yet, there I sat, looking at a single word burning the pixels of my LCD screen, raw and uncouth.

Did the internet do this? Dig underneath the supporting beams of etiquette like the sapper of some demented medieval army? Or is this decay an older thing? Only the last step of a continual feeble decline?

I don’t know. Maybe it all began when we stopped wearing hats. Without a hat to doff, a brim to tip in respect, our very recognition of respect began to erode. I don’t know. My father said that Kennedy did it. I don’t know that either. I do miss hats though.

Whatever the reason, we are come now to a place from which we can slink away from things without confrontation, without the necessity of face-to-face, without goodbyes, not even digital ones.

So “thanks” she says. “No thanks”, I say. Well, it’s what I would say if I chose to say anything at all, to dignify it with a response, which I did not. Indignance, at least, is still alive and well, even on the web.

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