I am lonely as a hamburger, drunk as a cocktail napkin. Sunk as the mother trying to out-hot her teenage daughter on this carpeted dance floor in matching spandex tube tops. The bartender dons a bowtie, spills over and over, the details of his sordid divorce, pours that Same Old Same Old into anyone spongy enough to sop it right up. Repetition is like religion: comforting, revisionist. In the back of the hotel bible, someone has scrawled in the marginalia: beauty is useless! symmetry is for suckers :( If you listen to the same song consecutively, Dr. M. Ruefle’s diagnosis is unequivocal: you’re clinically depressed. The internet, as second opinion, blames french fries for fucking up your synaptic transmission. Here’s a thrilling potato fact: the Incas carried them peeled inside their pockets to cure their Peruvian toothaches, which is actually no less ancient than the way I sequester you, my favorite disease, inside a symmetrical, revisionist heart. Let’s just start over. Right here, Honeybun, chambered in this lobby bar in Massachusetts. You can be a stranger. I’ll saddle up beside you. Watch me dip my head back with practiced laughter, mouth unhinged like a desperate clam. Let’s be emoticons. Adore one another’s clichés & clavicles. Do you come here often? What’s your sign? Haven’t I seen you everywhere except Idaho? We can be young, nip each other’s numnums, dance slow-but-real-slutty in the blue of the juke box light. I can pretend it’s not humiliating to have grown this untalented at being alive. I can even try not to love you as consecutively, next time. If only you weren’t so useless tonight.