Listen, I can’t speak for everyone else, but it didn’t make a difference to me. I want to get that out right away, and I repeat—it didn’t make a difference to me.

I know you think it did, so that’s why I’m saying it first. You walk along, and you see how many starfish there are scattered along the shore. Frankly, the situation looks impossible, and it is, for one person. I mean, after all, that’s kind of your universal conflict: What is the meaning of my life? What purpose do I serve? And finally, is there some kind of telos that can be shared between me and other people?

How successful a night? Well, the first guy wasn’t wearing a shirt. That’s what I said: no shirt. It wasn’t in the bar. It was in the function room. That’s the great thing about function rooms, they’ll let you in without a shirt. Pants? Pants’d be pushing it. There’d be problems if you showed up without pants. Speed dating demands pants. Hawaii shorts at the minimum.

Yeah. There’s a side entrance where the smokers stand. It’s cold and full of abandoned beer barrels. You don’t smoke. You don’t notice. His chest? I didn’t really look. It seemed intrusive to look. And, I guess, he wanted you to look. OK. I did look. It was hairless. And he flexed his muscles when he spoke. As if to punctuate what he was saying about going to the gym and masturbating.

You might be wondering what became of Mr. Ed, the talking horse from the television series which ran from 1958 to 1966. Few people outside the industry know that Mr. Ed was actually a zebra. The horse originally cast for the role proved uncooperative, and, with production costs mounting, the producers were afraid the show would be dropped from the network schedule. Their inspired solution was a nearby zoo that was willing to lend a zebra. Black and white television of that era rendered the zebra’s stripes invisible to viewers, and the set was reconstructed using forced perspective to make the smaller zebra version of Mr. Ed appear as large as a horse. The popular show became one of the first to be syndicated, with episodes still airing today.

The Waiting for Godot: Place two ice cubes in an empty tumbler. Watch them melt as nothing else happens. Wait until morning. Repeat.

The Wasteland: Pour everything you have into the largest glass you’ve got. Hand it all over to Ezra Pound and watch him change everything. Garnish with footnotes.

We can be modern day mannequins—

Malleable forms of constant perfection.
We are Stepford wives with a mouse’s click.
Pinterest allows us to be anything.
Pinterest allows us to be everything.
Renaissance women reorganizing:
homes transformed with wine corks and mason jars.
And don’t forget glitter. Always glitter.