In the smoky aftermurmurs of a surprisingly graceful fuck it struck me that I'm ready to become a full-fledged something, to have some aspect of myself clearly betoken something, rather than merely suggest the possibility. I'm ready, in other words, to be convicted of something, instead of just suspected, in the court of public scrutiny, to display discomfiting oddities in one harsh glare or another. It doesn't matter what, much. Neither the outward marker nor the thing marked are that important. I feel a little smudged is all. What is a personality? As it is I'm a thinly-veiled portrait of myself. I could out myself as something of an idiot, perhaps, someone for whom simple arithmetic and the most basic kinds of higher-primate reasoning are constant sweaty struggles, or maybe give full expression to my latent transvestism, or reveal my bizarre fixation on doomed actress Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire, an identification bordering on psychosis. These are just hypothetical examples. I could become an eccentric, or more of one, push further into eccentricity, give in, as they say, to my eccentricities, or certain of my eccentricities, perhaps not the ones so grotesque they're usually called something else, some ugly cutting term from the pages of a thick green book. Which ones should define me? I have several qualities ripe for candidacy, if oonched to the surface just a bit, it's not like there's far to go. Of course if one goes to all the trouble of fashioning oneself in this manner one wants the effort recognized, otherwise why bother? The dense core of me remains untouched, as ever, maddeningly inviolate. The only me that matters is the me I'm stuck with, the me that wakes up. I could never be born again because I'm extremely claustrophobic.