the world has turned and left me here

historiologically speaking

"I love black and white cookies." We've only just met, and we're already getting her life story.

"I was like dating this guy, and, like, I bought him this black and white cookie, right, you know, and we went to Central Park to eat it, and he didn't even share it with me. That's when...I knew. It didn't occur to him to share it with me. He just like ate the whole thang. There's no way I could, like, be with a person like that."

This sort of thing is hard for me to resist. "You know what he should have done?" I ask. "He should have broken the cookie in half. Then you each could have worn half around your necks, and when you would meet, you could put the jagged cookie pieces together. They would fit like so. Then you could even both nibble a little of the edges as you lean your heads together."

Not knowing me, she went through a beautiful moment of bewilderment while she tried to figure out if my sincerity was mock. But the best was yet to come. She gets into an argument with a friend of ours who works in the tenement museum. He's telling us how the East Village, a once predominantly German neighborhood, changed ethnicities after a shipwreck on the East River.

"Historiologically, I think you need to get your facts straight," she breaks in. She starts trying to reconcile the current (very different) ethnic makeup with his story. But I can't pay attention. I keep wondering if she really did say that word: "historiologically." Perhaps I misheard her.

He starts to respond, but she leaps into the breach again: "Well, historiologically speaking..." Yes. She definitely said it. Unbelievable. I'm filled with an amusement that knows no bounds. I've stopped listening...it's just me and the word, playing over and over again in my head...in the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was hilarious...

"Historiologically."

Ben once dated a girl with a lawyer sister with a similar tendency to overstep herself in her bids for intellectual cred. When Ben dumped the girl, the lawyer sister walked up to him and delivered a speech which began with the assertion that "my sister doesn't need you, as she has many suitors."

Ben described this moment to me later. He saw the word "suitors" jump out at him, flashing on and off in his mind like a neon sign. "Suitors." "Suitors." He couldn't remember anything else from her speech. Everything fell away, except for that one wonderful word. That wonderful word which tried so hard.