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it, and to our best knowledge she never met anyone who merited such favor. Of course, this made her tail unbearably desirable to my newly running daughter. She wanted to touch it, pull it, sing to it, and use it as dental floss. At least twenty-five times a day, twenty of which were while I was trying to make dinner, Alice would make a running lunge for Polly’s tail. Polly, sensing disaster, would tuck her tail where only she could find it and race for her bed. My daughter, the thrill of the hunt exciting her blood, would shriek and chase her prey while I called after her, “Alice, don’t touch Polly’s tail. Leave her tail alone.”
    What my Alice would hear was “Alice…(inaudible sound)…touch Polly’s tail…(inaudible) (inaudible)…TAIL…(inaudible).”
    Everything else on the dog, being available to Alice, was dreary. That tail, by sheer virtue of its being forbidden, was better than ten My Little Ponies, an afternoon at the park, and themed footwear all wrapped up with a big purple bow made of candy. That’s how my brain works too. The mere suggestion of “don’t,” especially when it precedes any sort of social prohibition such as “Don’t say something stupid,” “Don’t say something weird,” or “Don’t say something stupid or weird,” and my brain takes on the gravitational characteristics of Jupiter. This is a state whereby a random thought, especially a random thought with ample fuel for embarrassment, gets sucked in from the black abyss of space and shoots right out of my mouth. In the natural laws that shape my world, this force is especially strong when strangers are present. Upon meeting someone for the first time, I might notice something about them that is completely out of the range of polite conversation and, of course, this becomes all I can think to talk about.
    Quinn meets new person. This woman has a luxurious moustache.
    NEW PERSON : Hello, Quinn. It’s nice to meet you.
    QUINN’S BRAIN : MOUSTACHE!
    QUINN’S MOUTH : So nice to meet you. Have you been to the Frida Kahlo show?
    NEW PERSON : Uh, no. Why?
    QUINN : I…thought maybe I had seen you there. It’s…good…
    Agonizing silence.
    QUINN’S BRAIN : MOUSTACHE!
    QUINN’S MOUTH : You should try to see it.
    NEW PERSON : I will.
    More agonizing silence. We both sip our drinks. She looks for other people who might save her from me. I look anywhere but at her upper lip, where I swear her moustache is leering at me.
    New person gives up waiting and bolts for freedom, her moustache waving in the breeze.
    At the start of Alice’s preschool career, I made an offhand remark to her teacher, something to the effect that I thought another child was behaving like Satan. (Oh, stop looking at me like that. If you knew this kid you’d have said it too.) Turns out, this sweet woman, being a devout Christian and all, took some offense with my having referred to an innocent (ha!) child as the Dark Lord of Hell. So I apologized, sincerely. And, to the degree that I regretted having made the teacher uncomfortable, I meant it. (I do, however, stand by my assertion. Trust me, this kid reeked of sulfur.) So, could someone please explain to me why, for the next two years, I could not speak to this teacher without injecting sin or perdition into every conversation? There was no subject so ordinary that I couldn’t drag malediction into it somehow. “Sorry, I’m late, but the traffic was hellish. It was evil and Godless. And damned if I could get a single green light.”
    To which the nice Christian teacher could only reply, “I’ll be praying for you.”
    It’s not just the Christians or the hirsute. If I meet observant Muslims, I’ll blurt out something about the joys of bacon. If I meet someone in a wheelchair, I’ll drone on about how much I’m enjoying the treadmill these days. If the other person is blind, I won’t rest until I have extolled the architectural details of the room we’re in. If you’re British, I mention dental