rob, hi, so sorry i missed your call. in la on business. you know how it gets.
good. great. yeah.  wow. rob gordon. seems like a 100 million years ago now.
fantastic but i'm a little busy right now. listen. do you want to come to dinner saturday? i'm having some friends over and i need a spare man. are you a spare man?
great. gotta go. see you then.
hey rob.
fuck! i knew it! you're going through one of those what-does-it- all-mean things.
there's been a rash of them, recently. i find it a little unnerving. in fact marco called a few months back, and he wanted to see me, and rehash the past as they say, and i wasn't really up for it. do all men go through this?
it's all kind of lost in the.  in the dense mists of time now.  it wasn't that i really liked marco more. in fact i thought you were more, shall we say, attractive than him. it was just that he knew he was good-looking and you didn't, and that made a difference somehow. you used to act as if i was weird for wanting to spend time with you, and that got kind of beat, if you know what i mean. your self-image started to rub off on me and i ended up thinking that i was strange. and i knew that you were kind and thoughtful.  you made me laugh, and i dug the way you got consumed by things you loved.  and marco seemed a bit more, i don't know, glamorous? more sure of himself? less hard work, because i felt like i was dragging you around, sort of. a little sunnier. sparkier. i don't know. you know what people are like at that age. they make very superficial judgements. do you think that's superficial? he was a clown, if it's any consolation.
oh god, no. i didn't want to hurt his feelings.