-
Love is Fallacy
by
Max Shulman
Cool was I and
logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute
and
astute
—
I was
all of these. My brain was as powerful as a
dynamo,
precise as a chemist?s scales,
as penetrating as a scalpel.
And
—
think
of
it!
—
I only eighteen.
It is not often that one so
young has such a giant intellect. Take,
for example, Petey Bellows, my roommate
at the university. Same age,
same
background, but dumb as an ox.
A nice enough fellow, you understand,
but nothing upstairs.
Emotional type.
Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist.
Fads,
I submit, are the very negation
of reason. To be swept up in every new
craze that comes along, to surrender
oneself to idiocy just because
everybody else is doing
it
—
this, to me, is the acme
of mindlessness.
Not, however, to
Petey.
One afternoon I
found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of
such distress on his face that I
immediately diagnosed appendicitis.
“Don?t move,” I said, “Don?t take a
laxative. I?ll get a doctor.”
“Raccoon,” he
mumb led thickly.
“Raccoon?” I said, pausing in my
flight.
“I want
a raccoon coat,” he wailed.