the world is a vampire...

It is for these moments of delicate, naked sincerity that one lives. I now quote in full a voicemail message left by a Stanford Law School friend of mine at 9am Eastern Standard Time, after a night of bar-hopping in Hawaii. Only the names of the persons mentioned have been altered in order to preserve their dignity:

Apparently I’ve reached the wrong number. I was thinking maybe this was the, uh, voicemail of Unfashionable Observations, which I have decided in recent times has become rather fashionable.

Ok so maybe not. This is Quentin, if you haven’t realized. Um, Harold and I are walking down the street in Honolulu right now. And we would love if you’re gonna….because there’s nothing that says “Hawaii” like a black umbrella blotting out the bright Pacific sun, if you know what I mean. And the one thing I have to—I have to—remark, and I know you’re going to listen to this and be like, "Well they’re drunk, and they’re walking and they’re drunk." And really Harold is. Not myself but Harold really is. They didn’t appreciate—and by “they” I mean Harold and Maude—Bad Santa, which I feel like you really nailed down to a “T.” Because it’s not about fuck this, fuck that. They’re like, “What was this whole blood-soaked pickle carved in wood?” And really, that was the epitome of the movie. This was just like the freshest observation of a young nubile innocent young kid. And which just like, “Ho! This is my present,” and it was all about carving his hand—he’s just making a point. And you’re going to disagree with me, you’ll be like “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Enjoy. I don’t know.” But if we talked about it, I would, I would totally work out what I’m trying to say right now. But in the meantime give us a call back.

And, uh, Xavier, I still hate you for the fact you went to Harvard. You’re really this bitch. Really, you’re really this bitch. Because how can you just leave us hanging at Stanford? Paradise, possibly; but has the crappiest classes that you could ever imagine. You know what, the next semester I’m taking classes that I’m completely embarrassed about. I don’t want to take any of those classes, cause they just all suck. Like I’m taking Environmental Law of Pollution, I’m taking like Capital Markets, I’m taking blah blah blah blah blah—things that I could really care less about. And what I really care about are Doc Martens and people who have original style. So call me back and let’s discuss, and maybe trade I don’t know like queen, uhhh, uhhh, uhhhh, uhh….bishop to king seven, or whatever that means.

All right kid, love ya, bye.

How funny. I wonder if drinking makes one more sincere, or less so. One could argue either way: More sincere because it relaxes you to a point where social mores and expectations are given substantially less weight, and hence one's behavior is less encumbered by such artificial constructions; less sincere because the resultant behavior is more spontaneous, random, and unthinking, which leads to a kind of chaos that might be particularly unfit for describing a "self" insofar as one's "self" is a consistent, particular, identifiable entity. Indeed, Nietzsche saw Dionysus--the god of wine--as representing the death of individuation, for the essence of the Dionysian spirit was a kind of drunken merging with the whole (as in becoming part of a larger, orgiastic revel).