An e-mail I recently sent to someone whom I’m not sure considers me a friend gave me pause for thought (as well as a strong desire to invent a time machine so I could go back and grab my hand before I hit ’send,’ because daaaayum). Specifically, I started thinking about the different ways we communicate and how wildly different they are depending on the receiver. Communication as projectiles, if you will.

What I post here and on SodaCraze are generally sort of like… paper airplanes. They vary in shape and size but not substance, and they’re light and usually fun to look at (and fun to fold and throw) and it doesn’t matter who it hits, because of my lifetime mantra of ‘No harm, no foul.’

In my personal journal, it’s more like javelins: not too long and generally coming to a specific point.

In interviews, what I’m tossing are pretty much soap bubbles. Who doesn’t love bubbles? They look really nice in the air, they feel cool when they pop. But blow enough of them and you have to start hyperventilating to get enough air.

There’s a friend who usually gets what I’m going to have to call lightning strikes. We care intensely about each other, every time we talk one of us ends up saying “Well that’s why I love you, fuckaahhhhh,” but we are absolutely incapable of sending messages that don’t hurt each other, much the same way that lightning never improves anything it hits (except for Captain Marvel, obviously). Even his ‘fun’ stories and my ‘what I did this weekend’ stories send us into uncontrollable rages that make it impossible to communicate for days at a time. And this kid, I really do love him, and vice-versa, but we don’t have any bluntness when it comes to each other; it’s all edges.

There’s another friend who regularly gets darts – they look pretty harmless, and they’re fun, but there’s often a little bit of weight behind them. And the most important thing about darts is that you can’t just throw them at anything: there has to be a dartboard involved. So whenever I get a handful of darts, he gets them all, because he’s the only dartboard I know as well as the only recipient who would ever, ever get the joke.

My brother generally gets basketballs – I never throw him anything he can’t catch – whereas my closest friends get pingpong balls, which look easy to catch but are generally moving deceptively fast. (Also, they make a silly noise when they bounce off things, and they can get stuck in ceiling joists. But that has less to do with the metaphor.)

My mother only recently figured out how to “use the e-mails,” so what I send her are necessarily simple things, things that are strictly catchable, much like Koosh balls.

Another good friend usually gets a caber – they don’t come very often, but they’re looooong and kind of showy. (And once or twice he’s had to dodge them, screaming in fear.)

In school debates I found myself drawing on my massive ore deposits of random articles, useless trivia, overeducation, unlikely conjecture, and fallacious logic to produce thermonuclear devices which would be deployed at the very end of the discussion, but constituted an absolute end to it. Seriously, sometimes I’ve detonated these things and listened in misery as the talk pattered to a stop. “So… uh… well, I guess that’s that then.” “Sorry.”

Anyway, I’m going to go eat another Wagon Wheel, then iron a sports coat. How do you communicate with the people in your life?