miserable creations float around you like apparitions from an old dream and never come close to touching you. they might have been something you watched on television half asleep with the walking pneumonia or mono, the kissing disease. and these are just the things you see between the three-dimensional sequences, the commercials between acts, the black and white funny pages between sunday color spreads. and what doesn't matter? in some cases, the things that you do while at work: what you think about, organize, put off, choices, resentments, near misses, mistakes, even emotions. what does matter: these exact same things when you're with people you care about. what is important to a person who doesn't care about other people? could it be themselves? that seems doubtful that you could really value yourself if you don't value other people that either support you or you support. how could you care about art or literature or cooking if you didn't care about other people? it would be like being a dentist who believed teeth were hollow. my very best guess is that they don't care about anything and, paradoxically, they act as if they did just because otherwise it would look funny to the other people in the world, all of whom they despise. phantoms and tangibles overlap, or, to put it differently, they are the same thing. people, places, and things have a perforated edge and can be torn out and pasted elsewhere. coordinates are like dyslexic numbers in a nightmare.
