This leaves me flat

So, as many of you may have read, a man in Japan has created a petition allowing him to marry his favorite cartoon character.

The man, Taichi Takashita, says he really likes the two-dimensional world and would prefer to live in it. Since the technology for such a transfer doesn't exist, he wants to be able to be legally married to the two-dimensional character of his choosing. Insert your favorite Hugh Hefner girlfriend joke here.

Now, while I am a fan of the four-color medium and pick up about three or four books a month, I can see many problems with this plan. Some are serious. This guy would like to be married to someone who doesn't really exist, and while there are plenty of folks who wake up after a few years and wonder who the heck is that aging wreck next to them and what happened to the handsome hunk/hot babe they pledged their forevers to, we like people to stop having imaginary friends (or spouses) after about the age of seven or eight. After that we call them "the voices in your head" and we ask that you see a doctor. We also like societies to take marriage a little more seriously than that, unless we live in Hollywood or are Brad Pitt. In the latter case, we find we don't have to take marriage seriously, because we are, after all, Brad Pitt.

Mr. Takashita hasn't ever read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in which he points out that two-dimensional beings would face a distinct problem when it comes to the ingestion of nourishment and elimination of waste products. To wit, any kind of digestive system that resembles the one we poor old 3-D dolts have -- stuff comes in one end and goes out another -- would leave a 2-D creature in two separate pieces. Therefore, a 2-D creature would have to be able to convert 100 percent of its food into fuel for the body, which is something I think I remember my physics class saying was impossible. Or it would have to have the waste leave by the same route it used to come in, which would make the invention of 2-D mouthwash an absolute priority and render those 2-D romantic dinners with the pen-and-ink honey of your choice somewhat less romantic.

I'm not familiar with which character Mr. Takashita wishes to wed, but my experience with comic books leaves me wondering if volunteering to be the spouse of one is such a good idea. To be honest, the only super-female I whose steady fella I remember is Wonder Woman's Steve Trevor, and he got killed. Twice. One version of Supergirl got stuck with Lex Luthor for a beau, and that doesn't seem to be a healthy relationship, since Luthor was actually a clone of himself pretending to be his own son. It ended badly when Supergirl found out Lex had cloned a hundred or so of her, giving himself a host of interchangeable svelte blonde lovelies. Insert your second favorite Hugh Hefner girlfriend joke here. Black Canary had Green Arrow, who was a hero in his own right, but who I think died once himself, or at least seemed to.

Things go worse for you if you're a gal with an eye on your favorite member of the colored longjohn set. Superhero girlfriends have a very high and somewhat grisly mortality rate. Plus, it takes the bum some sixty years to marry you, after he's spent most of that time pretending to be someone else (the less said the better, about how you're so dumb you can't recognize him just because he has glasses on. Insert your third favorite Hugh Hefner girlfriend joke here).

Of course, all of these things will, it seems in Mr. Takashita's opinion, be dealt with someday by advancing technology. But I'm going to stake out my position here in defense of the third dimension, no matter who may decide to abandon their relationships with me because of it. You see, I happen to think we're just not complete without that third D, which stands for depth. Width and height are crucial to existence as well, we know, even if a lot of us would like to have a little less of the former and more of the latter. But depth is what makes the whole thing go, adding that crucial third aspect that makes our existence worthwhile.

Because the abandonment of the third dimension would mean a loss of a number of aspects I, speaking as a guy who has a fondness for female-type persons, find highly interesting. If you know what I mean. And I think you do.