Belly Rubs

Do you remember the time Tom Cruise appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show (or maybe it was just called Oprah!) and he made a real heel of himself all jumping up and down on the couch? Today I was sitting on the deck in my backyard drinking coffee and I thought of this very thing and how there must have been an audience for that episode, which means that, out there in the world, there are, like, three hundred people who were all in Oprah's studio watching Tom Cruise jump up and down on a couch and yell crazy things. And the Tom Cruise event got so oddly popular, remember how so many TV channels showed clips of it?, that all those audience members were suddenly part of this monster of a thing they never expected. And I know that out of those audience members, there must still be at least twenty of them that tell people about how you would never believe it but I was there that day, and we all were so shocked to see him like that, he was such a nice-looking young man, you know? At dinner parties, with plates of potato salad and the tots running about grass-staining their knees, talking about being at the Tom Cruise episode of Oprah, like that was a big moment in their lives, maybe even a defining one, and I got so sad thinking about these people telling the story about seeing Tom Cruise jump up and down and say crazy things on Oprah's couch over and over again probably until their dying day, maybe even they tell the story so much that their neighbors have kind of an inside joke, like Hey Doris, Tim doesn't know about the time you went on Oprah, he he, neighbors all exchanging knowing glances as Doris launches into it again, the butt of a joke she doesn't get. What a sad story to tell over and over, I thought, drinking my coffee which was, by now, so infinitely lukewarm I could drink a lot of it really, really quickly, because how inconsequential of an event, this man on the couch. How extraordinarily, just, whatever. Then I took a step outside of myself to realize that I was a just some guy with nothing better to do on a Tuesday afternoon than imagine the sadness of a potentially fictional but likely actual human being forever swept up in a cultural moment that really didn't mean a single thing to anyone, and the whole quasi-post-intellectual-depression of it all made me feel so weirdly lousy and small that I went out into the yard where my seven-year-old beagle, Fiona, was rooting around smelling for rabbits and rolled her over so she was lying on her back and gave her so many belly rubs.