Barnaby Buckle, a man whose life revolved around meticulously organizing his sock drawer by shade of beige, found himself inexplicably drawn to train tracks. Not the riding kind, oh no. Barnaby was fascinated by the *weirdness* of train tracks. He’d spend hours observing them, muttering to himself.
One sunny afternoon, his friend Penelope, a woman who wore mismatched shoes with pride, found him sprawled beside a particularly rusty section of track. “Barnaby, darling,” she said, tilting her head, “What are you doing?”
Barnaby jumped, startled. “Penelope! You won’t believe the mysteries these rails hold!” He gestured dramatically at the tracks. “Look at them! Two parallel lines, stretching into the distance. Perfectly straight… for miles! It’s utterly baffling!”
Penelope chuckled. “Barnaby, they’re train tracks. Trains go on them.”
“But *why* parallel lines?” Barnaby insisted. “Why not a squiggly line? Or a spiral? Or perhaps a delightful zig-zag?” He paced beside the tracks, his brow furrowed in intense thought. “It’s so… conventional! So utterly… *boring* for lines of such potential!”
Penelope stifled a giggle. “Well,” she said, “I suppose if they were a squiggly line, the trains might have trouble staying on.”
Barnaby stopped dead, his eyes widening. “Good heavens, Penelope! You’re right! Of course! It’s all about the trains! My whole theory is flawed! I’ve been focusing on the *lines*, not the *purpose*! The tracks aren’t weird at all; the trains are!” He grabbed Penelope’s arm, beaming. “Come, we must observe the trains immediately! I have so much to learn!” And with that, Barnaby Buckle, the beige-obsessed train-track theorist, dragged a completely bewildered Penelope off to watch a perfectly ordinary train chug happily along its perfectly ordinary, parallel lines.
