best thing about ex-partners

is how you can expose your whiniest, most irritating, angst-ridden self, and they puncture it with mockery you'd never take from anyone else. Not to mention the strangely comforting surreal-idiot-babble you slip into with them. Babble that would have any other adult in your life looking at you strangely and backing slowly towards the door.

Such as:

"What do you do when you wake up scared?"

"I never wake up scared. You know why? My first thought when I wake up is Coffee. How can you be scared with coffee to look forward to?"

"OK, what do I do when I wake up scared? Other than coffee?"

"Scared like, the Martians are coming for you? Global warming's going to get you before you turn 40? What?"

"Scared like, what if my work never gets where I want it to, because I never get past item 5 on my To Do List? What if I wallow in mediocrity all my life because I'm not motivated enough? What if America's still giving $3bn a year to Israel when we're 80? What if the next global-warming hurricane wipes out Nairobi? What if the next 500 years is the Age of the Neocons and AIPAC, and everything we do is just an exercise in futility?"

"See, that's good. You're in the Van Gogh Suffering Artist phase of your career. Have you had urges to chop off fleshy appendages?"

"No."

"You need to ramp it up. Go to a Halloween shop and buy a box of fake ears. When you wake up scared, get out of bed, stick one on the side of your head, and lop it off with a butter knife."

Pause.

"Where exactly in your brain do you store these ideas?"

"Look, I offered you the simple solution. Coffee. People never trust the simple solution."

"Just once, I'd like to climb into your head and see how your synapses connect."

"My genius is unfathomable. Don't try to dissect it."

"This isn't the dumbest conversation we've ever had, but it's close."

"Clearly you've forgotten the one about the flatworms."

"Do not mention the flatworms. Or evolution. Or Lamarck, for that matter. And don't say...."

"Ontogeny...."

"NO! DON'T SAY IT!"

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

"God. You just had to say it, didn't you? Now I've gotta go stab something."

"You'd find me less brain-jangling if you drank more coffee."

"Huh?"

"Think about it."

"I don't want to think about it. Listen, I had a thought this morning."

"So did I. Coffee."

"No a real thought. Well, real in an existential kind of way. Do love poems stay true after the relationship ends? Like all the ones I wrote for you – are they still true, in some alternate dimension, even though we didn't last?”

“Is an ear still true after you lop it off the side of your head?”

“Fake ear or real ear?”

“If it’s a fake ear, it wasn’t true to start with. So you need to ask, were the poems like fake ears, or real ears? And were you Van Gogh when you wrote them, or some whiny scaredy-pants with no friends to go trick-and-treating at Halloween?”

"You are now officially making no sense whatsoever.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who began this conversation.”