All what?

About your parents, the paranoia…

What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows. They are famous in their deaths. This will be my memorial to them. I give you all these things, I tell you about his legs and her wigs–I do so later in this section–and relate my wondering if I should be having sex with my girlfriend in front of their closet the night of my father’s service, but after all that, what, in the end, have I given you? It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing. I tell you and it evaporates. I don’t care—how could I care? I tell you how many people I have slept with (thirty-two), or how my parents left this world, and what have I really given you? Nothing. I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is that? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, two seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all of the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet.. .what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter’s boyfriend, but…then what? We will die and we will have protected… what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please. We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more—more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

Wait a second, how many of you do you think are self-obsessed?

All the good ones. Or rather, there’s actually two ways the self-obsession manifests itself: those that turn it inward, and those that turn it outward. For instance, I have this friend John who just channels it all inward – he talks about his problems, his girlfriend, his poor prospects, how his parents died, on and on, to the point of paralysis – he literally isn’t interested in anything else. It’s his whole world, the endless exploration of his dark mind, this haunted house of a brain.

And the other kind?

The people who think their personality is so strong, their story so interesting, that others must know it and learn from it.

Let me guess here, you -

Well, I pretend that I’m the latter, but I’m really the former, and desperately so. But still, my feeling is that if you’re not self-obsessed you’re probably boring. Not that you can always tell the self-obsessed. The best sort of self-obsessed person isn’t outwardly so. But they’re doing something more public than not, making sure people know that they’re doing it, or will know about it sooner or later. I guarantee that the applicants for The Real World – I guarantee that if you put all these tapes in a time capsule and opened it in twenty years, you’d find that these are the people who are, in one way or another, running the world – at the very least, they’ll be the most visible segment of the demographic. Because we’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortably homes, given the time to think about how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible. And thus, there is a lot of talking about it all – surely the cultural output of this time will reflect that – there’ll be a lot of talking, whole movies full of talking, talking about talking, ruminating about talking about wondering, about our place, our wants and obligations – the blathering of the belle epoque, you know. Environmentally reinforced solipsism.

Solipsism.

Of course. It’s inevitable, it’s ubiquitous. You see it, right? I mean, am I the only one seeing the solipsism?

That was a joke.

Yes, yes. So.

All these people–we should close the doors and dim the lights and be naked together. We could start with all of us, K.C. and Jessica, go from there. That would make it all worthwhile, that would justify everything. We could move the tables, bring in some couches, matresses, pillows, towels, stuffed animals…

But this–this is obscene. How dare we be standing around, talking about nothing, not running in one huge mass of people, running at something, something huge, knocking it over? Why do we all bother coming out, gathering here in numbers like this, without starting fires, tearing things down? How dare we not lock the doors and replace the white bulbs with red and commence with the massive orgy, the joyous mingling of a thousand arms, legs, breasts?

We are wasting this.

from far away. Choose one from nearby

the way a sensible house will choose local stones

that have frozen in the same cold and baked

in the same scalding sun.

Take one with the golden wreath around

the dark pupil of her eye, she has some

knowledge about your death. And love her also

in the midst of ruin

the way Samson took honey from the lion’s carcass.

And advice for bad love: with the love

left over from the one before

make a new woman for yourself, and then with

what’s left of her

make yourself a new love,

and go on that way

til in the end you are left with

nothing at all.