The Confabulator Cafe

Persistent Stalkers: A Love Story

Written by

ljenkins

in

Dear Idea:

If you are shiny and new and interest me in any way, I am yours.  I know I pretend to play hard to get.  I act like I’m choosy about what thoughts I let into my head, and that I have, for lack of a better term, some kind of “standards.”

Truth is: I’m kind of an idea slut.  And I’m down for almost anything.  So make your pitch, tell me why you’re worth my time, and we’ll see what happens.  If you pique my curiosity, I’m like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “a sure thing.”

But let’s be honest here for a moment.  Ideas like you come and go.  We can flirt and maybe mess around a little, but if you’re looking for more, I need to know you have staying power.  So here’s what you’ve got to do.

Show me that you love me.  Be my dedicated stalker.  Refuse to leave me alone.  Call me during dinner, surprise me at the grocery story, and watch me while I sleep.  Do all those things that would earn a living being a restraining order.

Please know that even as you pursue me, I will feign interests in other projects.  I will say I do not have time for you and may even attempt to pawn you off onto some of my friends, but rest assured.  You are making an impact.

Your persistence is magnetizing me.  Related thoughts and situations and snatches of dialogue will begin sticking in my brain like iron filings, and slowly over time they will acquire mass.  As I begin to group these things together, I will associate them with you: my sweet, special idea.

In addition to being dedicated to me and me alone, it helps if you’re at least a little bit fun.  I want to be able to tell my wife about you (don’t worry, she’s an open-minded kind of girl) and make her laugh when I riff on one theme or another.  I want her to feel like she can’t wait for me to write about you.  I want to think this could really be something special, and that I can’t wait to put pages in her hand.

If you can do all those things, my dear, beautiful, wonderful idea, then chances are good that we’ll end up together, trapped inside a small, dark room, chained to a chair for hours on end, slowly bleeding the soul out of one another, just like all of history’s great romances.

Hugs and Kisses,

ME

Comments

2 responses to “Persistent Stalkers: A Love Story”

  1. Judy Gehm Avatar
    Judy Gehm

    Your mind…fascinating as usual

    Reply
  2. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    Ok, pimp this idea:

    (first, sadly, I have to play professor and bring you up to speed on the science behind the idea – much like a Michael Crichton novel. Oxytocin is a hormone released by the posterior pituitary gland in the brain. It is a fascinating hormone. During delivery it causes the uterus to contract. It helps expel milk with nursing mothers. It is released by males and females during orgasm. It is also released when you first ‘fall in love’ with someone. It causes the ‘Disney love’ feeling where you daydream about the object of your desire. {forgive my lack of poetry here, but I am a scientist and not a writer my friend} Another thing you should know – and connect with the pituitary – is that doctors sometimes plant electrodes in the brain. {see The Terminal Man for a good literary treatment of this})

    Ok, so here’s your idea to pimp: imagine an ultra exclusive, incredibly expensive offshore couples retreat with a perfect track record. Your story could have different couples attending for different reasons. One may think it’s cheaper than a divorce splitting a billion dollar estate. One could truely be trying to rekindle lost love. One could have one partner not knowing the purpose of the trip. Whatever… The ‘secret’ of the islands success is that unauthorized brain surgery is perfomed on the guests. This level of surgery would not be hard to disguise (and even if it were we’d say it wasn’t for the purpose of the book). The surgery would consist of planting an electrode into the pituitary where it would cause an oxytocin release. The electrode would be attached to a transmitter that would fire any time it was in proximity to one matching the code it transmits. The matching code, naturally, would be set to the partners electrode. Any – and EVERY – time the two people were close to each other they would release oxytocin, and they would be ‘in love’. They would not fall out of love, and they would seek each others presence (like Pavlovian dogs). Where you want to take the story from there is up to you, but some of the most interesting fiction (and most lucrative) comes from real science being presented in a novel way (Jurassic Park, for example). Anyway, here you go….

    Reply

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