Friday evening I got the news that my downstairs neighbor in our three-story, seven-unit condo building, was killed in a motorcycle crash.

May 9.

Apropos of the talk this week about Twitter (can you believe these bastards are still in business after the barrage they've gotten here?)*:

Does anybody remember a fleeting term used by the first generation of Internet smart-alecks, around 1995? The "brick world," they called everything except the Internet.

Well, sometimes I surf the Internet looking for the brick world. And other times I surf the brick world looking for the Internet. And I'm here to tell you they're still two different places.

For instance, you can Twitter until you're light blue in the face and you won't find the sort of thing I found the other morning at a suburban restaurant while waiting for my motorcycle to be repaired:

A table of three fat old jagoffs eating breakfast in preparation for a day's work. One complained that he lost $100 in a poker game last night. Another flirted raunchily with the good-natured young waitress. All of them worked the crossword puzzle together, sharpening their minds for the job ahead: picking up a piano in Calumet City and moving it to Elmhurst.

The Internet for climate—the brick world for company!

* Commenting in response to my IABC poem from earlier this week, Boots reader Chuck B. wrote what I believe is the best sentence that has ever appeared on this blog: "Twitter makes me want to be a plumber."

My language-sensitive friend Suzanne Ecklund e-mailed me the other day, hoping e-loud that I would share her consternation at the reluctance of the "under-40 crowd" to say, "You're welcome."

Instead, it's "no problem."

I have feelings about this, but they're not as much outrage as perplexed sadness.

I think this discomfort with the traditional thank you/you're welcome transaction betrays confusion about who we are, what we deserve to get from one another and what we are responsible to give.

In the dark about all of that, and thus afraid to owe or to be owed, we try to turn every interaction into a neutral trade. Every transaction is a "win-win," every teacher learns just as much from the students, and every kindness wasn't a kindness at all. It was, instead, "no problem." (Or, as a sweet-voiced Australian hotelier once said in words poetic to these ears of mine, "Not a worry, mistah Murray.")

I'd like to declare myself above this syndrome, but hell, I haven't been 40 for long and just today I ran a piece of equipment across town for someone who needed it. When he thanked me I said, "Oh, no worries. It was actually a nice motorcycle ride over here."

That was true.

But it was also true that he had apologetically asked a favor and had thanked me for doing it, and it was my social duty to say, before "no worries" and the gracious motorcycle anecdote, "You're welcome."

Why are we afraid of such modest intimacy? And why are the younger of us more afraid than the older?