Greg is fairly matchless, I found out today. The reasons for this, which I am expatiating on for the Journal of Bereavement Psychology, are numerous: upbringing, compromise with the inevitable, genes (belonging to many distinct, but collusive in matters of taste, branches of the Indo-European and Sinitic gene families).
Over lunch, it turns out, he admonished me on some habits I had been ignoring. I have a good many, and Greg is an avid spotter of behavioral anomalies. While I do not usually care to attune myself to the damage I do my environment, Greg's eye excepts its marks from havering to the degree that many of them, indeed thousands (Greg's eye is as large as our habitat), have thrummed headlong into subtler chords, without all-trouncing guilt.
I explained my methods and feelings. It was through my rather sharp education I could enter and exit a good many paths towards virtue and other extremes without ever being in danger of donning the ancestral tunic or shrugging off the precipitate blowtorch of our well-staffed sanctity.
But Greg was there.
There were also a fair dozen redheads caroming off the highway under which we were lunching in that type of day-of-the-dreadnought newfangled luncheon spot so plaguing of the creatures who would angle us sharper. One of the caroming cluster bent his young head over the lip of the highway and spoke of the Gauls, those infamous shunners, and spoke of our being like Gauls (Greg, it turned out, had noticed the thing a good month before), and it was razor-sharp on the palate, his notion, his sense of our place, and Greg looked off into space, which for you and me is like dying of bad contraception in the eighteenth month, so of course I was shocked, and spoke heavily to the redhead, who threw his reddish young body over the lip in a lithe young red stunt, holding on to the lip with his lithe young red hands, and facing me backwards, he turned his head to control my anxiety but only that he might with his odd reddish limbs envelop me backwards, this redhead now hanging in air, and this quieted Greg down some and he seemed to get an idea concerning my habits, which I had been ignoring until this quite lucky lunch.
"You know," he said as the redhead clung tighter and entered some special new parts in the fray, "I think you, like most of the people I've known, have been ignoring some vital facts about yourself, and spend much of your trouble (for trouble is work, undertaken most often in earnest) divesting yourself of the obvious, facts like 'gunning to Jakarta I could not help seeing the flames of Mylanta factories nudging the peers of Roland into halftones,' or like 'gluing my headdress to want is a difficult and unchampioned but so-vital work in the age of utterly gunless accoutrements.'"
There was more, but the upshot of the whole beast was a sullen, matte stand against undue violence. "Terrific," one says, "and then we will scream for a while.