Dear Love Attorney,
The other day I was bitten by a fiddleback spider. The how is not important. all you need to know is that the bite is painless and one of its symptoms is that 7 hours in, one starts hallucinating. Anyway, unaware of the spider bite, I went out to a club with some friends and started dancing.
A little while later the hallucinations began. In my state I was dancing with who I thought was world-renowned screen actor Daniel Day-Lewis, someone I’ve always had a celeb crush on. Me and Daniel had a good time dancing, and when he kissed me on the dance floor, I declared how I’d like to take him on a date to the banana-store, unless the suspicious looking anteater in the corner takes me out first (this was part of my hallucinating).
Long story short, we exchanged numbers and fluids (I vomited on him, and he was so repulsed that he vomited on me). The next week I arrange to meet him at a restaurant for dinner. When I show up I see not Daniel Day Lewis, but just some balding telemarketer with a mustache who happens to be named Daniel.
I’m in the restaurant bathroom right now texting this to you, so could you please hurry up with advice about getting out of this situation without hurting Daniel’s feelings? He seems like a very fragile person, being ugly and in a dead-end job, etc. Please hurry.
From,
Lying in a Web in Saratoga
(Sent From My Blackberry)
Dear Web,
In my rowdy Viennese law-school days, I would frequent a certain ‘gentlemanly’ establishment on the weekends, and the weekdays as well. Thinking my glasses would hurt my chances, I would often make my visits without them. Under my foggy, sans-glasses vision, I more than once requested the ‘best-of-both-worlds’ gal—the opposite of what I wanted—and all because my eyes played tricks on me. I am of course talking about a conscious aesthetic choice I made, whereas you just happened to be poisoned right before going to a club. But my analogy holds—men under certain lights or substances can be dangerously ugly when you see them under more truthful lighting.
On a larger plain of thought, our two cases provoke a discussion about the oft-jolting disjunction between Be and Seem, and the representation of truth or beauty in the flippant mind. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but what if the beholder is nearsighted? What if the beholder sheds her rose-colored hallucinogenic glasses and beholds that what she had mistaken for beauty and the star of “There Will Be Blood” is nothing more than a mustachioed hack? What about the romances that can begin only after multiple martinis? But I digress.
What you must do in this dilemma is what I call, ‘Maintaining the Illusion’: pretend your date is just as enchanting and gorgeous as he was that night you met. In your case, pretend this duffy loser is, in fact, Daniel Day-Lewis. Ask him questions about Martin Scorcese’s directorial abilities, or his acting method, or Last of the Mohicans.
Daniel will either A.) get the point and realize you were smashed and trotter off without you having to say anything directly; or B.) He will pretend to be Daniel Day-Lewis, just as he did the night you met. Soon enough, your mutual decision to pretend that he is Daniel Day-Lewis will realize the fantasy.
Also, it might help if you track down that spider and have it bite you repeatedly, to maintain the hollucinations, and hopefully they will become permanent, eternal – and so will your love.
Love,
The Love Attorney
(Sent from my Workdesk of Dutch Mahogany)