What concerns me is not the way things are,
but rather the way people think things are.

Epictetus

I

Tuco was scratching his head over the news article
about "social networking" - it didn't mention dancing once.
Or drinking, bars, or coffee shops late at night or early morning.

So what was this social networking where you just email and text
each other? Befriending at a distance. Not even talking at all.
Struck him strange.

But the strange part was thinking himself introverted
and not wanting that invisibility cloak the internet offered.

So he wrote a letter to Arlu. And asked her what she made of all this.

If you do not know how to ask the right question,
you discover nothing.

by W. Edwards Deming

II

Arlu read the letter and smiled.
She didn't get it either - why Tuco would be perplexed
when half their conversations were by letter. What's the diff?

But there was a difference in flow
how the words shaped themselves and built pictures and sounds
that filled the room with Tuco's voice - not heard so much as
smelled, heating the air slightly and the fragrance of his cologne
comes to mind. Pictures and sounds
where were they
on a screen of unstructured words and shorthand scribing?

Tuco always tried to ask the right question.
The one that moved the conversation deeper
rather than skettering across the landscape.

That, more than anything, held her heart.
A landscape of pictures and sounds always was at hand
filling their world with discovery.