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By Root 349 0

will stare at me unflinchingly while slipping his hand into my wife’s blouse and massaging her breasts. “Go away,” he will intone. He was weaned a long time ago. He just likes to feel her up. I am very worried for him, for I do not think he understands that eventually he will be unable to do this, that my wife will, in effect, dump him, disallow these fondles and caresses, much as she was eventually forced to do with Larry, our super, during a confusing time I’m not sure I fully understand. The potential ramifications are quite disturbing, and somehow I can’t shake the image of those poor Stanford students all those years ago. Most of them recovered, but a few did not attend top law schools.

It’s partly my fault, I know. I should never have had sex with my wife. But I worry for the future of science, and our planet. The time has come for us to put petty grievances aside and join together. We must pool our knowledge for a better understanding of the neurological, ecological, and biochemical effects of dumping in all its forms. We must also explore alternatives to human intimacy. Some of these alternatives will reveal themselves after the scientific method runs its course. Other alternatives, such as being afraid to commit and having a very large dog in your apartment, have been with us forever. All avenues must be explored.

We need a unified theory of dumping and we need it now. Otherwise, we will have learned nothing from the eons of heartbreak our species has endured, and we will remain disastrously unprepared for what promises to be a very complicated dating future, where in all likelihood one’s sexual success will depend entirely on the slant of one’s gills.

Contributors

Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert is the host and executive producer of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

Marcel Dzama

Winnipeg-born artist Marcel Dzama’s art has appeared in hundreds of international exhibitions. In 2006, the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, UK, presented an early career retrospective of his work entitled “Marcel Dzama: Tree With Roots.” A collection of his work, The Berlin Years, was published by McSweeney’s Books in 2003. He has designed CD covers for Beck and the Weakerthans and illustrated a children’s book in collaboration with They Might Be Giants. Dzama currently lives and works in New York.

Will Forte

Will Forte has been a cast member on Saturday Night Live since 2005. He voiced Abe Lincoln on the series Clone High and appeared in the film Beerfest. He also wrote and starred in the film The Brothers Solomon.

Bruce Jay Friedman

Bruce Jay Friedman was born in New York City in 1930 and started his career as an editor and magazine and short-story writer. Friedman has published eight novels and four short-story collections, as well as a half dozen plays. His screenwriting credits include Stir Crazy (1980), Doctor Detroit (1983), and Splash (1984), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman, published in 1997, contains fifty-seven of his stories, and Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos, a collection of Friedman’s best nonfiction, was published in 2000. Sexual Pensees, an erotic memoir, was published in 2006. His newest collection is entitled Three Balconies.

Matt Goodman

Matt Goodman graduated from high school in the spring of 2007. He is currently enrolled at Swarthmore College. Goodman was the editor in chief of Sonny Paine, a high school literary journal published by 826NYC, a nonprofit writing organization for children. Goodman is also an 826NYC volunteer. Check it out: www.826nyc.org.

Alex Gregory

Alex Gregory has been a New Yorker cartoonist since 1999. He lives in Los Angeles and has written for various television shows, including The Late Show with David Letterman, The Larry Sanders Show, and King of the Hill. He has a wife, two daughters, and is an accomplished pilot. The people who harp on the fact that he has never flown a plane or successfully operated a flight simulator are just jealous of his innate flying skills, so if you