In DUMBO, Jenny dumps the buttons or whatever out on the table and tells Dan that she is no longer eating, but would enjoy a nice cold popsicle; their mother is at South Pacific with Alexander Bancroft. Dan asks about the buttons, and she asks if he's finished his story yet: "I'm hoping by reading it that maybe I can figure out why you and Serena broke up anyway," too true. Except by not writing it, he's even more eloquently explaining why they broke up, which is that he is a shithead who fucks things up due to his enormous self-obsession. "Yeah," Dan sighs dramatically. "Yeah, me, too." The title of the story, which is all he's written, is "5.19.08," which in addition to being precisely as pretentious as Dan must be, but also clever of the show in a whole other way. Rather than fetching some coffee and a wee trampoline to get the fuck over himself, and actually applying some goddamn elbow grease to the situation, Dan decides that he is simply too delicate a flower to write a single word, and lumbers out of the house to go suck McInerney off instead.

Chuck is looking ... quite presentable when Serena enters for a bit of role-reversal, and catches him checking himself out in the mirror. "This is the first time I've seen you look in the mirror all summer. Here I thought if you did, you'd turn to stone. You must be pretty nervous about something if you're willing to take that risk." To be honest, I don't even know what she means. I guess he hasn't looked in the mirror because he's been having improbable sex, but the turning-to-stone thing, I don't get. Is Harry Hamlin involved? "Ha ha, sis. I'm on my way out to Lily Pond. With the triplets returning to Rio, I thought I'd continue my tour of South America. I'm thinking Argentina." I mean, he looks great. His hair is all dorky-cool and it's like he's impersonating somebody from the future impersonating somebody from that movie Pleasantville. Which is, incidentally, my favorite look of all time, which is in turn reason number like twelve that Mad Men, or what we call "Gossip Girl For Grownups," is total porn.

"Then what are the flowers for?" Chuck's face gets scared, and you know that is a lot of face to be all one thing at once. "You wouldn't perhaps have overheard a recent phone call with a certain best friend of mine? Who mentioned she's on her way out here on the jitney?" Chuck's ironic answer is perfect; perfectly Chuck, perfectly Gossip Girl, and perfectly hilarious: "...What's a jitney?" Serena says great, because he hasn't got a chance in hell after the way Chuck deserted Blair at the helipad. (And I mean, the fact she went from choppers to shuttle busses says it all, doesn't it?) Chuck says if she's getting her info from her "boyfriend Nate," she can shut it, because who wants relationship advice from somebody in a fake relationship anyway. And man, if he's exhausted by the fake relationships now, wait until the end of the episode. (And on that note, where the hell is Lily?) He takes the flowers and wishes her a good evening alone with her thoughts. She smiles that above-it smile she always gets with him, which I love, and tells him in turn to enjoy his suicide mission.