What's that you're scribbling? Always scribbling, always thinking up plots and blueprints to make human beings extinct by talking them down to thoughtless one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. What are you writing, what is it? What's this one about? A struggling artist? A modern martyr from the Biiigggg Apple,, darling? The Type A father grappling and wrestling with his thoughts, his debates with the devil, and dates with women far more evil? How's this, how's this...Make him pay his child support, fall for a quirky 20-something with the interesting haircut, and run himself to the ends of the earth looking for meaaaaning in life all the while cutting himself lose from the rut, the griiiind, the mad mad world? The screw-up, in the end, darling, always gets the girl. Whaddya say?


Well, darling--I can call you darling?


Go on.


See, it's a love story. Where all the characters fuck like the wedding night and fight like it's their last hours and they'd like to save the world, you know, if time permits.


What are they saving the world from? From going on? From spinning? What's the harm in spinning sometimes? Haven't you ever knocked yourself dizzy and stupid? You're still here. You're still sitting here writing these books and looking into people, who...well, darling, sometimes what you see is all that matters.


Now now, if that, if what you say is the way in which, in which, well in which lovers should behave--floating face first on the surface, a comfortable stasis wrapped up into the hands of every person we deem fit--if that were true, why isn't this world drowning in the bodies of those lovers and children and riding off on the American Dream, screaming something inappropriate and deliciously indelicate like "Fuck the world!" Why not that, sir? Why are so many faces contorted into uncomfortable ropes of unhappiness? If everything were as simple as you say, where does sadness come from?


But all the best stories end unhappily. If I were to unravel the threads of the why's, what for's and how come's, I fear, well I fear the world would tumble down off its axis and crumble at your feet leaving nothing but the manuscripts of men in love and the ashes of every relationship failed by the quizzical princesses looking to save mankind with storybooks.