So I go to the grocery store and Steve's there and he's got these lazy sideburns, you know, the kind that taunt you with their unevenness and reckless demeanor. Steve's with his mother but he walks at least fifteen feet in front of her as if on some invisible leash and when she asks him which cookies he likes, the soft kind or the crunchy kind, he gets really upset and mutters from the back of his throat that he likes the soft kind, like it should be blatantly obvious and we go to the ice-cream aisle to pick out some kind of cherry ice-cream, but we don't. Instead we talk about scoring weed for later tonight, which is really all I've been thinking about all day, but half-way through the conversation I realize it's not weed I'm thinking about, but Van Gogh. I'm thinking about how when somebody refers to Van Gogh's other ear, which ear are they talking about? The one he cut off or the one he kept? And I'm thinking about how it probably means something very significant about you as a person, which way you look at it. So I interrupt Steve, who's in the middle of an intense story about finger-fucking and ask him which ear he thinks is Van Gogh's other ear and he just stops and says, "What?" so I repeat the question and kind of explain my thoughts on it and he just kind of shrugs and says, "I dunno, the one he didn't cut off." And I look at him and he looks back at me and I don't really know what to say about it so I just say, "Yeah..." and we continue walking down the ice-cream aisle, fifteen feet in front of his mother. I'd always thought of the ear he cut off as the other ear.