081313 #copperhead I had a conversation lately with my wife about him. Weirdly, it didn't go so well. I don't know how to explain it. I mean, on paper it looked good. She invited me to invite him to visit, to stay for a while; she was the picture of open and inviting enlightenment, but maybe that was just the problem. Maybe her sympathy—her *sympathy*—was so telling, so indicative of his becoming a disease, a sad nostalgia, a wraith of an imaginary Peter-Pan past. If I succumb to her sweet graciousness, I accept, I sign on the dotted line, I agree that he—that we, dammit, that we—never really existed.