A 12-year-old newspaper boy of a bygone era nears the end of his route and walks into a small cafe in the dark cold and rain of early morning to snag a cup of coffee. A few soldiers and factory workers are hunched at the counter while a man sits in a corner with his nose hovering over a beer. As the boy heads for the door, the man calls out to him, “Hey Son!”
The boy approaches tentatively, then recoils in confusion as the man lays one hand on his shoulder and uses the other to place it under the boy’s chin, the better to get a full look at him.
The boy snarls, “Say! What’s the big idea?”
Whereupon the man responds, “I love you.”
Ah yes, the engineer, all acute observation and precision, gone all to mush in romantic love—probably human existence’s most inherently destabilizing, irrational experience, psychedelia X 10.
The scene sounds improbable in this age, in which the cafe proprietor and customers w...
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