conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'The Misfortunates'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Misfortunates
  By raising all that racket I'd managed to attract Frankie's attention, and that, of course, was my plan.
  It depended on what you considered long. I've known days that passed with the utmost difficulty, I've seen the hands of the clock revolve around each other with sadistic reluctance often enough, like two lovers playfully postponing their little death, but the twenty years between two encounters with Frankie had been a sigh. My attitude reminded me again of how rude I can be, a grudge bearer, incapable of forgiving, furious at everyone who has ever declared war on me, no matter how fleetingly. It's a character trait, not my most appealing, but I engrave the name of anyone who's ever bumped my car on the list that includes Frankie's. 'Man, it's been a bloody long time,' he said, and I felt again that I could accept nothing less than his complete destruction. What if I worked down that list, making everyone with an outstanding debt settle up their account with me, starting right away with Frankie? I would make him pay his debt to my father – and my uncles while I was at it, I still had that much sense of honour. He had called them the dregs of the sewers, my father a madman; I couldn't allow that. What if I publicly humiliated Frankie right there and then? But despite the impression I might have accidentally given here, I'm not always that smug about my character, and instead I spontaneously suggested going for a beer. That's my misfortune, I often suggest things I don't feel like at all and it's only rarely that people sense that I don't mean it when I ask them if they feel like going for a drink to catch up on the years that have passed irretrievably beyond our reach, making it impossible for us to ever go back to do a few things better the second time round. Asking them if they want to go for a drink is simply my awkward way of fobbing people off without rubbing their noses in it. So there I was, sitting at a table in a beer tent with Frankie.
  Yeah, of course I knew. I was just surprised to hear the word on his lips. Judaica, how did he come up with something like that? Since Frankie, I had obviously met other people who built up collections, of glass owls, for instance, and I always wondered how they had struck on the idea of starting up. Had they received a glass owl as a gift one day and been so blown away by it that they immediately wanted a thousand glass owls? What was the process? Do people sometimes accidentally buy an extra cupboard and then need to fill it up? Can someone wake up one morning and suddenly say, 'Starting today, I collect Jewish stuff'?
  I was overdoing it, I knew it, I'd even shocked myself by crapping on so ardently about Smurfs – the things I was capable of. I'd even run the risk of being believed. If I'd achieved anything with my blathering rant, it was that Frankie got sick of the subject of collecting and suddenly changed tack.
  That's another reason I hate conversations: they can be about Smurfs one minute and the next you're talking about your father's headstone.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I know the story. It was what you'd call a classic for the occasions when my parents sat around a table with other young couples. Apparently the birth of a child had made such an impression on them that they found it hard not to raise the subject. It was either that or dredging up sleazy jokes that made the women feel like they'd been reduced to the level of the hunk of meat now bleeding on their plate, next to a couple of potato croquettes that slurped up the excess juices and tasted like soaked newspaper, my mother's culinary speciality that we all praised and would continue to praise until the day we were forced to poke our forks into other pots.
  It was already the third or fourth time my mother had checked in with the nuns who were supposed to help me be born, and each time she had been sent home again because the sisters couldn't stick three fingers, let alone their whole fist, into her. In other words, there was no question at all of an alarming degree of dilation. Besides being something of a hypochondriac, she was also scared of pain, a combination you encounter often and one that I too am sometimes guilty of. On the other hand, I would like to leave a chink open for the possibility that my mother didn't entirely trust those nuns, and I wouldn't blame her for it at all. No woman alive should have an easy mind about giving birth in a Catholic maternity hospital, where jealous nuns can always give in to their sadistic tendencies the moment they get their paws on someone else's sin-drenched genitals, taking revenge for their own life of abstinence and prayer by using the forceps a little more often than strictly necessary. I have no trouble imagining a nun like that: she appears to me as a smirking hypocrite, five foot three tops, prising the pubic bones apart with a badly sterilized spreader, justifying her perversity with quotes from the Bible that describe labour pains as a necessary punishment, the fateful inheritance all women are condemned to, simply because the first woman on earth was a deceitful moron. So I do understand my mother's suspiciousness and the way she must have screamed blue murder every time she thought she was about to give birth to me.
  The woman my father had very recently been forced to marry because of poorly controlled urges came back from the maternity hospital three or four times without a baby, and there can be no doubt that he ridiculed her for it. When she finally got her real labour pains on a Sunday afternoon full of cake and football results, he no longer believed her and she headed off to her torturers alone. When it was time she could call him at the pub, the Las Vegas, because we didn't have a phone. It made sense: he had to wait somewhere she could reach him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It hasn't gone the way I expected, I think while drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. I should have come without the boy, so I could get drunk with my uncles, not stopping until we were singing and sobbing our mutual declarations of love. I'm the one who acted like a stranger, the stranger I may well have become, and I'd been a prig for not wanting to talk about my happiness for fear they might not be interested. They would have been glad to hear it was going so well.
  My son waves Girder goodbye for a very long time. Now we'll have to sit in the car together for a good hour and I don't actually know what to say to him. He could make things easy for me by falling asleep, but that's not his style. I ask him if it's been a fun weekend, and I see his reflection nodding in the rear-view mirror. He's nodding because it's easy that way, he thinks it's what I expect of him.
  The service station is crawling with fathers and mothers whisking their kids off to the toilets. The cubicle doors are open, you can see the kids doing their best with their pants around their ankles while a parent looks on approvingly or intervenes when things get out of hand. What am I doing here? In the old days I at least got a hint of a holiday feeling at a service station. Just one hour to go, I think, while my son amuses everyone by standing there completely independently and singing a song about birds while pissing into the urinal.
  The misfortunates : a novel / Dimitri Verhulst ; translated from the Dutch by David Colmer.— 1st U.S. edition.