Congratulations Iron Chef Viewer!

You’re a thirty-something without much ambition but with plenty of heart and one Jewish parent who lives with her sig-o in Brooklyn’s well-established Shithole district. You “write,” which means a magazine, three times a year, pays you two thousand dollars to leave them alone and pushes out one of your “what it was like to watch Transformer’s on opening night” bullshit pat pieces in the middle of their socialist rag so they can fill up space and you can stay on food stamps. You hate just about everyone you meet and, to top it all off, you don’t like bagels.

Yours is a joyless, tedious life. Well, most of the time.

But soon you’re going to discover something wonderful. Something magical. Something that will make you happier than even the best sex (which is still pretty ho-hum) that you have with your purposefully gender neutral partner.

Tonight you’ll be flipping through channels with your partner’s hand in your crotch, idly fondling you while you talk about the latest novel outline you’ve written. The two of you will smile and laugh and know, deep down, that you’re not really going to write a three hundred page book about a young woman who subverts the publishing business in dystopian future New York by hacking all of the city’s Kindle’s and making them output nothing but Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It would end with the young authoress dropping a manuscript on the desk of the last publisher in the world, a manuscript that would strongly resemble the book that the reader had just finished. You’ll use the word metatext like eight times describing the fucking thing.

But you’ll mercifully shut your fucking mouth when your partner flips on the Food Network and you both catch of sight of the thing that brought you both together in the first place. It will be a serendipitous moment and you’ll swear for that heartbeat of the world starts again for you in that instant, as you speak to your children (artificially inseminated or otherwise) about the day you started hoping again.

Turns out the Food Network decided to start airing Iron Chef again which is, to your credit, pretty much the best show ever. And as the two of you watch it, leaning ever closer, your hands will wander off each other’s genitals to your own knees. You’ll become self-sufficient people, whole people who can feel and think on their own again. Your partner will stand up and shuffle to the kitchen, where they’ll start cooking again for the first time in months, and you’ll sit in rapture, laptop across your still naked crotch, watching Iron Chef and smiling while you work on the greatest thing you’ve ever written: a novel about a unicorn with a serious cigarette addiction.

Congratulations Iron Chef Viewer!