Member-only story
I’ve had a few beers, I’m on the train — headed home finally; I’m trying to squeeze a few meaningful thoughts from my otherwise dulled thinking apparatus. I look at myself, turn inwards, sometimes, and can’t see anything; it’s like there’s a surface, or a glaze, that covers the material of consciousness. Consciousness hides itself; it is self-concealing. I am really a series of smaller selves, all in a delicate confederacy with one another. One self wants comfort, another romance, another eroticism, another wants to think deeply, another wants pure stimulation, and so on. Forces push up against each other and cancel each other out — so it is like I have no clear direction, just potentialities. I could be this, could be that, really, I am neither this, nor that: I am nothing. A brain on the train; a man in New York; a nervous system encased in a sheath of skin and bone.
