Headache

"There's just something about dialogue that really breaks up otherwise endless pages of prose, isn't there?"

"Yeah, I got stuck reading a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel once that barely had paragraph breaks, and my head hurt for weeks. I was praying for dialogue by the end."

"How's your head now?"

"Actually, it feels like a pine tree on fire, all straight lines ablaze with pain."

"You sound like Lorrie Moore."

"What?"

"Lorrie Moore. She does that in all her stories, makes everything into these long, complicated similes. 'Love without intimacy is an unsung tune', blah blah blah. It'll give you a headache if you don't have one already. After a while, you have no interest in her characters unless they all go through a course of Proszac. It's perfectly obvious none of them have ever had a good meatball sub."

"What on earth are you talking about? What's a good meatball sub gotta do with it?"

"Geez, you know those people, life is one big dreadful sadness. They've never had something wonderful break through their self-absorbed malaise. A meatball sub ought to be able to have an impact on you - heck, I don't know, you might not care for meatball subs. But you probably feel like about about some kind of food...chocolate chip cookies, maybe."

"Well, I am partial to a good piece of lemon meringue."

"Exactly. Lemon meringue...exactly. It dissolves into something magical."

"Hey, can we stop and get some lunch?"

"You are so suggestible! I bet if I started talking about bowling you'd wanta go."

"Well, no...it's just, like I said, I have a headache, and so maybe if I eat something...."

"Whatever..."