11.

But why this obsession with getting published? Why not just write?

Once, in that apartment full of cockroaches I mentioned earlier, for about a month I was convinced I could send my thoughts to people on TV. And not only did the newscasters and talk show hosts know my thoughts, but everyone who was watching the shows knew them—it had to do with the airwaves, I don’t remember precisely how it worked. I was, for that month, the talk of the whole nation. Pot smoking college students would gather around their TVs and watch as my thoughts made the voices of the newscasters waver, made them uncomfortable, made them struggle to keep to the script. Sometimes the newscasters commented on this fact—the fact of me and my thoughts, which of course everyone was aware of—sometimes they commented on it covertly, in a way that everyone understood, because everyone was on the same page. No one discussed this telepathic phenomenon on TV overtly, but they did so around the water cooler in offices and on TV news sets when the cameras were off. My very thoughts, and all my personality, were known intimately by the whole nation. I was famous, and my sense of solitude only grew. It wasn’t merely because, as they say, "It’s lonely at the top". It was because this world in which I was famous, which was the world I saw when I went down the street to the grocery or bus stop, was one of my own spontaneous invention, and I was its sole inhabitant. No one lived in this world but I, so that it became a world of utter solitude for me. And I didn’t know it wasn’t real; all I knew was that I could not interact with another human being so that our minds really met, and we understood each other. We lived, after all, in different worlds.

I still have this sense of solitude, and I have had it all my adult life. When I think of people reading this, and knowing me, and understanding me, I say to myself, "Ah, yes, now people understand me, now I am not so alone." But I know this will not really cure my sense of solitude; it only seems like it now. Perhaps the only reason I believed the newscasters could hear my thoughts, was because I desired to make myself known to people so much, to live in a world of true interaction, that my desire could no longer be contained anymore by what was real and true and possible.