Dan's got a friend on the Seattle police force. It doesn't seem possible that a sentence that innocent can really mean what it does. It certainly makes the word "friend" difficult to get through, if you understand that it links "Dan's got a -- " to " -- on the Seattle police force" -- two phrases which don't seem to refer to the same world.

Dan's telling us about playing board games as a kid with his friend on the Seattle police force. I imagine a little kid who already looks like a policeman in some obvious way, as if I can spot them a mile off. It turns out that isn't necessary, because Dan's story is about this kid running into the room with around a dozen Junebugs, their wings already "clipped" (this verb, which implies a quasi-zoological care, is wrong), dumping them on the gameboard, and proceeding to kill them slowly and variously. I have to imagine most of the variety (whose greatness I doubt), and I don't. Instead I say "wow, so he's a cliche." I don't say "you're friends with a cliche" because that sounds accusatory, as if Dan should be something else, as if that's what this conversation is about.

Later we're walking to the park, without Dan. We walk past a kid who's saying to his friends "let's put alka seltzer in a birdbath and watch the birds explode." He doesn't look anything like a policeman. Before we're out of earshot, the park and the sunset stretching before us, we hear the kid say "I once saw a body bag float down this river." He is wrong.

I say to Dan, who isn't there, "these are cliches. This story is not a proof of some sort of human tendency to evil which manifests itself in the Seattle police force. That would be a convenient excuse for capitalism, which defends itself like forces of nature don't whenever its purported naturalness is shown up for the painstaking construction it is. That's what cliches are: excuses. All they do is get people off the hook. They don't make anything better."

"So write a different story," says Dan.

"Me?" I protest. "About who? Your friend is a cliche. Your friendship with him is another cliche. It's an excuse. It doesn't make anything any better."

"My friendship with him," Dan points out, "was never meant to make anything any better."

"Really?" I'm yelling now, over and over, trying to get out all the sarcasm, which I don't intend. I really mean the question "Really?"