Huckleberry Hax
The mollified corpses left in my fumbling wake are the unfortunate collateral damage of genius, if you like: I might have seriously upset perfectly decent people with my social ineptitude, but without those subsequent moments of utter selfabhorrence I might never have achieved the greatness of inventing this amazing phrase. Incidentally, I’m not not mentioning here examples of my own personal FCs here out of consideration for the privacy of the crosspostees insulted by them, nor out of any attempt to reduce damage to whatever impression you might currently hold of me: the reason I’m not mentioning them is I have very little actual recollection of their content and circumstances. I believe that the magnitude of my horror on these occasions activated some sort of emergency selfpreservation system which declared martial law on my brain and promptly ordered the neurons retaining the memory of the event to commit suicide. All I’m left with today is the recollection of suddenly realising the full magnitude of what my third finger and the Enter key had just done to me and the extreme desire in that moment for my life to end immediately. There is, of course, no recovery from a fatal crosspost. In the instant of their occurrence, one is usually completely aware that, following the optional grovelling apology, the crosspostee will never be spoken to again. Their name must be added reluctantly to the growing list of people we’re resigned to acknowledge would not only be likely to run us down if they happened to spot us walking alone on a country lane, but would actually be justified in doing so. Any attempt to recover even the smallest fraction of the previously held relationship will only result in the degradation and further humiliation of both poster and postee: any hugs, praise and compliments, any statements of selfflagellation, any intellectual attempts to undermine, counterargue or in any other way rescind the offending comment made – humorous or otherwise – will ring more hollow and more false than a politician’s pre-election promise; never, under any circumstances, should this be attempted. Accept the new reality and move on. 135