This week HBO's Horatio Alger story for hipsters fauxhemians told us that no matter how broken up you are, no matter how much of a loser you are, she will still come around to open up old wounds. Bitch.

That is what happened to poor Ben Sapstein. Just when he met a pretty girl with a shitty job and low aspirations, his ex girlfriend shows up drunk on his doorstep to cuss him out and tell him what an asshole he is. Then she goes inside with him, and they will probably sleep together. As we learned last night (and boy did we learn), Ben has some serious abs, and that is why all the ladies are fighting over him, because that is all it takes to get laid.

These are the two things exes are good for: guilt and sex. No matter how far in the past they are, they are always good for both. You could run into your high school sweetheart at the 30th class reunion and she would still drag you out into the hallway to harrangue you about that Valentine's Day when all you got her a pack of Juicy Fruit or she could give you a quick handy by the lockers, just like she used to do between fourth period and lunch. Even if both of you are happily married and have moved on to healthy couplings, the bond you share can never be broken. The petty grievances will fester and the consent given for sexual exploration can never be voided.

You can never truly break up with a person altogether. If you were together for a meaningful period of time, every time you see them, you will just see the person that you dated, slept with, fell for, and possibly dicked over by sleeping with a series of heavily tattooed white supremacists. The old feelings will rush back, and the scores will have to be settled once again. All of your exes are not people from your past, but little souls that you drag around with you. They are the guests at your spiritual funeral, perpetually mourning the past versions of yourself and spooking you constantly with their threats to return with the famine of uncorrected wrongs or the feast of revisited sexual favors. It's just like the James Joyce story "The Dead" where all the souls that you ever slept with are like little snowflakes falling into the Dublin night, tickling your skin with their teasing cold and smothering you under their crushing weight.