I rode my Masi home for lunch today, parked the bike in its assigned spot near the others in the bedroom, noticed my wife notice me notice the new, multi-shaped, cushiony-chair thingy, and feeling pressured to comment, I recalled her pattern of recent purchases: first the desk chair, and then the whole damn car just for the seat, and so I asked:
"Lumbar support?"
She nodded her head yes. I sat down to a bowl of ox-tail soup, and she placed the latest Bicycling magazine before me, back cover folded open. She knows I like to read back to front; she's a sweetie, she is. I slowly spooned the soup and perused the ads, then lapsed on the soup and settled into a review of chain lubes. She snatched the magazine out from under me, went to the other room and yelled back:
"Eat your fucking soup before it gets cold!"
When I finished with the ox-tail soup, I felt a sudden awakenening of my fullest expression of manliness, and I went to her.
"Hey," I said.
She returned my baritone bid with a deep flash of her enchanting eyes of white circling gold circling black. And then it happened; out of her blacks -- magical sparkling red stars appeared and danced toward my eyes. I closed my eyelids and surrendered some of my most powerful neurons to her red sparkles. Two by two, I paired off my knightly neurons to her dancing stars and rushed the new couplings off to private places in my brain to play, each with their own multi-shaped, cushiony-chair thingy. Afterward, in a lull, on the floor, by our own multi-shaped, cushiony-chair thingy, I noticed the tag sewn into it: "Liberator."
"Where'd you get this thing?"
"I ordered it from an ad outta the back of one of your cycling magazines," she said, with a hint of mild exasperation."
"Well then," I opined, "I must post a review on the CR list."
Joe Starck Madison, Wisconsin