#2: "It's late-night Cinemax with the artsy soft core porn. You want to wait until 4am for something decent?"

#1: "Options, then."

#2: "Why not do it as opposed to just imagining it?"

#1: "Explain."

#2: "If I want to eat a hot dog, I don't imagine myself in a space where I'm eating a hot dog. I go to the fucking hot dog place and get a fucking hot dog."

#1: "What if you don't know where it is?"

#2: "Existential yellow pages."

#1: "And no car?"

#2: "Existential car jacking. Or you hitchhike, or you get to it any which way."

#1: "And if it'd just make you fat and not want to do anything?"

#2: "Delusional straw-man argument, come on."

#1: "Seriously, what if all you do with the rest of your life is wander back and forth between home and a hot dog store, gorging yourself, drunk in some twilight stupor while your brain atrophies and the world evolves without you?"

#2: "Ok. First off: what is progress? Second: if you're happy, who in the fuck cares? Your stock-broker? Some nameless several million people after big pharma takes your discovery and rubs off a fortune from it? Your mom? Where is this giant nationally televised neon score board, you fuck?"

#1: "Societal versus egoistic impulse, then. If you can gorge both, then wean yourself off of one, isn't that the best of both worlds? That's retirement in a nutshell, yeah?"

#2: "What is with you and this quest obsession?"

#1: "Quest hobby."

#2: "Career = not hobby. 4 20 page papers in 4 weeks as a qualifying exam = not hobby. Try again."

#1: "If you feel an equal impulse to do two things, and that following one will increasingly allow you to do another, shouldn't you follow the first first?"

#2: "You have viagra for sanity."

#1: "I'm patient."

#2: "I'm not."

#1: "What is with you sometimes?"

#2: "What was the last time you felt no strings attached exploding happiness?"

#1: "Car. Streetlamps. Lost. Downtown. 3am. Windy and Carl on a mind jukebox."

#2: "Heroin by proxy ain't overloaded joy."

#1: "I do the best with what I've got."

#2: "Fine. And the 70% of the time where you're sucking on a contentment/mild paranoia that something isn't quite right somehow somewhere mood milkshake?"

#1: "It's gotten a lot better. You remember last summer."

#2: "The only reason we're still around is because last summer was temporary. Granted: things have improved in general. What happens when it drops back down? You know the pattern."

#1: "I have never believed in something without needing to think about it, not until this time, this place, with these circumstances."

#2: "Faith, then?"

#1: "Faith and science."

#2: "A hybrid."

#1: "Like everything else about us."

#2: "And will a hybrid ever get us to the one thing we're both looking for?"

#1: "You mean the externalization of what is inherently an internal state?"

#2: "The fucking thing you have visions about all the time that seems cool, yes."

#1: "Well, this the best hybrid car we've got."

#2: "Alright, if that's the case, I'll stop and watch the scenery pass by. But if you start huffing paint fumes and getting high on martyr complex, we're headed out into bat country with an oboe, a camera, a chainsaw and a crate of whisky."

#1: "Would I have a choice?"

#2: "Honestly? Doubtful."

#1: "That's a comfort."

#2: "Better be. Keep on driving."

previous - next