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I walked by Dublin House on 79th street yesterday, the first day in nearly a week when i hadn't felt too sick to leave the apartment, and i saw a man and a woman in their late twenties leaving the faux pub. They looked kind of exhausted, unmotivated, and unimpressed. The woman said "well, at least now we've been there," as they descended the few stairs between the front door and the sidewalk. At least she said something like that, at any rate. The pronoun struck me, sounded almost foreign, and that's when i realized how little i use it now, how rare it is that i invoke the collectivity of the first person plural except in the very past tense, the perfect, the concluded, how lonely my life is right now.

There's an episode in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which i now think is like ten million times better than Six Feet Under,) in which a classmate of Buffy's, ignored by teachers and students alike, becomes physically invisible, vanishes from sight when the rest of the world declines to see her. She goes on an invisible psychotic rampage and tries to disfigure and maim Cordelia, but that isn't the point (the episode's X-filesian conclusion, in which invisible girl winds up at a top secret training school where scores of invisible high school students become CIA assassins notwithstanding)- the episode's stregnth is in the metaphor, the adolescent fear or obsolescence and obscurity and yes, invisibility. I bring thsi up not to say that the metaphor resonates with my present secluded self-loathing, but rather to wonder if the loss of the plural subject is what's been arresting my blog productivity and quality of late. My writing feels oddly groundless, free-floating in an electronic netherworld of ideas with no connection to outside material reality or collective struggle. Clearly, i need a job.