The Meet. Cute.

Aspiring adults were never to be trusted.

But it was true that bookends were something to be adhered to. But you put them all over the place and told me that attention must be paid. I never fancied you as good of a writer as Mr. Miller so I'll be quite honest with you when I say that it was very hard for me to take you seriously.

Serious scribes don't lay barbed wire down for the rest of us. In fact, if you were the wordsmith you claimed to be, wouldn't you ask us to raise the bar, to meet you up here in the clarions and the cherubic pedestals you put yourself on constantly? I can, almost without hesitation, tell you that we would ignore the request. But then at least we would credit you with credibility, as you always say. And for the record, the expression is, "Give credit where credit is due."

You have extraordinary deficiencies when it comes to memory. This has caused me great pain and instead, will now be my greatest crutch. It will be just like when we play singles and you say 'ad in' and 'ad out.' By the way, you always get them confused and I never say anything. At least, not until now, I didn't.

It was a serious moment when I realized you weren't serious about any of this--that you were, in fact, a poor man's Hemingway--and I didn't like Hemingway all that much. So what does that say about you? You were in great need of solitude but incapable of intimacy. And unfortunately for you, they were one in the same. They went in hand in hand in hand in hand until we all started talking about Wheaties and the time space continuums while all the while going mum about the art of pretending. It all tasted like cardboard and our fishbowls filled right up.

Which led us right back here.

To the very end---

of the starting line.