A gorgeous, muscular walks in. You know the drill. You look only for a second and then attempt go to back to what you were doing, which is never as interesting as what he has  presented.

It’s worse when you are jogging and this happens in the park because jogging is the least fun thing for me and so when you see him, jogging past or on the sidelines, stretching and doing these odd exercises, you find a way, so easily, of stopping. And just standing there,wishing for a thick tree trunk or a bush so that you can savor the specimen. Too many aspects, hill and dale of muscle, the pits, the p-spots, the jawline, the sweat.

And there’s nothing wrong with the appreciation of beauty. God, if it were only that. But it’s so much more. It’s a chip on your shoulder that suddenly presents its full weight.It’s you and your reminders of where you lack on your person and how much you’ve lacked there and how It Will Never Be beause of the way you look.

So the appreciation bubbles up, the bubble bursts and you are left with the awful truths.  And by that time, he’s gone, he’s stopped stretching, started running. Or you just move on, because you have to, because staring at him is never good.

And it lingers all day, like a bad hangover (are there ever any good ones?)

.. as opposed to someone you betrayed. Inanimate toiletries get used up, properly, if you follow the labels. With humans–well humans–already there is something inanimate-sounding about that, isn it? I mean, best friends, aunts, uncle, cousins, lovers, ingredients as common as nitrates and pectin and artificial flavors.

You are saccharin. One of the oldest tried and true ingredients. You promised things or at least made people think you did–and you didn’t keep those problems. Inanimate objects were thrown at you, for your lies and betrayal.

The last things someone threw at you, right after some hot rollers from a woman’s hair, was a small bottle of aloe vera gel. I kind gel. Soothing. Not make-believe.Truthful bottle of aloe vera. You open the bottle sniff, you squeeze it just a bit, the dollop forms upended you squeeze more and more until its viscocity and opposing gravity and other forces topple its perfect sphere. It flattens out, disappoints. Unless you rub it on you.

That’s it: that’s the rub.

There’s to0 much written, in the beginning, before the story begins. Preface and introduction and Foreworad–What’s up with all this warm up? The farting around?
Well, I’m going to fart up a storm.By getting annoyed because Eggers puts all this stuff in and James Frey leaves it out and Franzen doesn’t.

And Anne Tyler (I have to put her full name because there are so many Anne’s.) doesn’t. (So many Daves and James’ and Jonathan’s too no can just go by “Tyler”.

Tyler who? people ask.

Tyler I love her, I say.