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Turning things around, I asked him what his feelings were about our ending things. 'I'm incredibly angry,' he responded fondly. 'How dare you? You should at least have to come have coffee with me once a week.' I asked if he felt that way about most of his patients. 'Not really,' he responded.(Sigh. Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness--a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering yo the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that each passing year you fave the unavoidable certainly of a solitary feature in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver to yourself over the back of a kitchen chair-- then this confirmation that you have triumphed and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it is the one person you'd hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on "adorable" even though you'd been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one...well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.)
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