barthelme never did this..

--you ever drive a car around here, maybe say, late at night?
--sometimes.
--were you drunk?
--sure. Probably had a lot of things going on, a lot of pills and what not.
--pills and what not?
--sure. Yeah. Whatever, you know?
--seems like not the safest way to be going through the streets at dawn when maybe you’ve been up all night too, and are all hopped up on…
--hopped up on? You can’t talk like that. Not to me. Let’s get one thing straight.
--ok
--no more bullshit about drugs or whatever. Got it.
--got it.
--now what the hell has all this, whatever you said, late night driving got to do with anything.
--it seemed important at the time. I’m not sure now. Just trying to make a living.
--yeah. Me too. What else can you do?
--I don’t know. Drive around late at night in cars I guess.
--so you’re sitting at a red light, right?
--sure. Sure I am.
--and then you kind of, I don’t know, start revving the engine.
--revving?
--just putting your foot to the pedal a little, you know, put the car in park and just rev the engine a bit.
--a bit?
--yes. So you start to kind of make up a story in your head about who you are.
--who am I?
--an asshole. So you do this and the story isn’t anything you want to keep telling yourself. It’s something, I don’t know, idiotic, pointless, nothing.
--so why am I telling this story? What’s the…
--it’s just a stupid story and you realize it doesn’t matter what it is, you’re just distracting yourself from really living, from being a thing out in the world.
--man is the social animal.
--what? Anyway. This thing has been going on your whole life. Everyone you know expects you to be this things that you’ve created, this thing that keeps changing just to try to stay the same. But it’s all a lie. There’s nothing really real about you.
--really?
--I mean, you are you of course.
--of course.
--but there’s still that whole deal with what really constitutes being you. Just this random accumulation of particles and bacteria, this solar-powered biped with opposable thumbs and a medulla oblongata and all the rest. What makes you you.
--you.
--shut up, I…
--no really. You make me the person I am. Without other people I don’t really exist. I mean not in reality, not in other people’s reality, which is what the world is, a giant soup bowl of other people’s reality. Otherwise it’s just solipsism to the infinite power. And that doesn’t work because I can drop a rock on your foot, and that pain will be real to you, not just some separate kind of real.
--it’s useless talking to you.
--I agree. But think about it. What makes you a person, an individual with a soul and mind and thoughts and all that other garbage? It’s all other people. They see you therefore you are who you are, to them, to yourself, it’s all part of a giant game we play, a lie we keep telling ourselves, that there’s any difference.
--between who I am and who everyone thinks I am? Or between who I am and what other people are?
--you’re not asking the right question. Or maybe you just need to see that those two questions are the same question, and the neither matters at all.
--they matter to me. I don’t want to just spill away into the ocean of everybody else, to be like a droplet of water in a waterfall that slams into the water below to join all the other droplets in a river. I don’t like that. I want to be separate, alone, untouched by others.
--that’s impossible. Even that fucking droplet of water you speak of came from a river filled with innumerable other droplets, and then there were no drops, it was all one thing, one body of water flowing on and on, and it came to a cliff and for a short time each droplet was formed and had an identity of its own, its little life that each drop thought would be forever, and it was really just a short time, but it was forever, because before the cliff there were no droplets, and after they were no more.
--have fun while it lasts.
--until another cliff comes around.
--sure. But those droplets, they won’t be the same droplets anymore.
--it won’t matter. It’s all the same. You just have to look at things differently. You are part of something much larger and more beautiful than you could ever imagine. A drop of water can’t imagine a river as it’s falling. You can’t get outside of your own head, you can’t be greater than the whole. But you are the whole at the same time. It is all one thing.
--no cliff can change that I guess. It’s all only temporary.
--that’s about it. It’s all a dream, and when you wake up to a river you will no longer be the you that you’d always thought you had been before.
--so in the mean time don’t run to try to catch busses, drive around late at night if you like, and don’t worry too much about things. The river will still be there in the end.
--there is no end. But that’s okay. I think living more will take care of that too.
--shit. I could really go for some French fries.
--yeah. I love dipping French fries in ketchup. It’s a simple pleasure. Something about the hot fries and the cold ketchup.
--you never stop this shit do you?
--what?