anaphoric *

Several years ago, I had just begun dating someone whom I met online, and I forwarded my friend S. the link to his profile. Of the pictures, the only one that was at all clear was one of him rock climbing. S's comment was that he looked good flat against a rock.

It slowly dawned on us, as we drank together, over the phone, almost 600 miles apart, that looking good flat against a rock is actually an excellent and very desirable quality in a mate. We pitied girls who didn't know what their swains looked like FAAR, and imagined a service whereby women would send us photographs of their men from behind, and we would use Photoshop to render them FAAR. And then there was someone in particular whom I wanted to see FAAR, and S. suggested that we break into this person's apartment and replace his mattress with a giant slab of granite, and then hide in his closet. When he returned, and got into bed, we would jump out from the closet, dressed as old-timey paparazzi with old-timey cameras, and take a bunch of pictures.

At that point on our lives, we had more than a few scenarios that involved dressing as old-timey paparazzi and jumping out from behind lampposts and popping out from behind bushes, etc.