Genuine Human Needs

I cracked a loud can of diet coke at a ripe 9 a.m. today. Cara is asleep on my floor so I was trying to be quiet. On a whim yesterday she decided to fly up for the weekend. It was a total surprise! We were just talking last night, as we got into the Unisom, about how house guests see up close and personal all the substances you abuse. POP! Cara didn't flinch.

The second I heard the can's loud POP!, I thought of an Abbey excerpt from Down the River and decided to whip out my old copy and find it...

We pause on a beach for lunch. The air quivers with heat, with albedo reflectivity from the radiant canyon walls. Must be close to a hundred degrees in the shade and the sand is much hotter than that. Gary unloads the cooler, the crowd goes for the drinking water and the Tang. The hardcases among us snap the tabs from cans of beer, kept cool like catfish in gunny sacks trailed in the river. Fssst! The others stare. Impossible to muffle that sudden release of CO2 under pressure, the conspicuous pop! Sounds like a grenade attack. Incoming! Nobody here flinches but everyone knows who is drinking the beer. And who's been hoarding it. Would be helpful if some clever lad invented a more discreet, a more genteel mode of opening beer cans. A soft, susurrant, suspiring sort of . . . s i g h . . . might serve nicely. A sound that could pass, let us say, for the relaxed, simple, artless fart of a duchess. Ingenuous. But our technology continues to lag behind genuine human needs.