When I responded to his personals ad, I was under the impression he was normal.

He had all these pictures, see? There was one of him playing basketball, one of him laughing over something someone apparently said just out of frame at a nice dinner out, one of him paddling a canoe, taken from the bow. They made it seem like he had interests. Like he had a life. Like he had friends.

Fast-forward nine weeks into our relationship, and we haven’t done anything but hang out at his house and watch Netflix. He recites dialogue along with sci-fi classics, which is funny the first time, but then you realize he isn’t doing it to be funny. For him, this is like reading along with the liturgist at church.

We haven’t been hiking, we haven’t been out to dinner, and watching him fumble with the DVD remote control, I’m starting to seriously doubt he’s a regular at pick-up basketball games.

So I ask him. “Hey, Tim,” I say, all casual-like, “do you want to maybe go camping this weekend?”

He can’t. His back.

“How about tomorrow night I take you out to eat?”

He can’t. His food allergies.

“Well, when do you think I might meet some of your friends?”

He pauses the DVD. Harrison Ford as Deckard is frozen with an expression of alarm, like he knows what’s coming. “This is about my Jdate photos, isn’t it?”

“No, I just… well… Maybe a little. You just seemed so active from your profile. How come we never do any of that stuff?”

“Fake,” he says. “All fake.”

“What do you mean, ‘fake?’” I ask. Who took the pictures for you?”

“I took them myself. I didn’t want to go the hold-the-camera-at-arm’s-length route, though—I thought I’d come off better if it seemed like someone else took them.”

“You… what?”

“I took my Sunpack Flexpod Gripper mini-tripod to a restaurant, I ordered enough food to make it look like a big group dinner, I pretended to talk to someone seated off-camera, and there you go. It was easy. The Flexpod makes a great tabletop tripod, actually.”

“But… canoeing? Basketball?”

“Yeah, that was a busy day. Paddling a canoe is a pain in the kiester, I’ll tell you that. But the photography part was a cinch. The Flexpod can bend to fit almost anywhere. I wrapped it around one of the thwarts and took that photo in about three seconds. Basketball was harder. I can’t dribble worth a turd. It took a long time to get that shot.”

“So… you really don’t have any friends at all?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I consider the Flexpod a pretty good friend. It helped me score with you. Name another wing man with the patience to take almost three hundred photos of his buddy in hopes of getting one where it doesn’t look like the aforementioned buddy is having an epileptic fit. Plus I can play WAR OF THE WORLDS with it.”

“I… I just don’t understand how you could do such a thing.”

“Simple! I play myself, and the Flexpod pretends to be one of the Martian tripods.”

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