For me, conversation is a daredevil act, a personally risky performance not less daring than that of a trapeze artist or Philippe Petit walking on a wire between soaring highrises. In conversation I am the littlest Chinese acrobat, the one doing a headstand on top of a stack of precariously balanced chairs twenty feet above the stage. In general (and this may surprise one or two people who have spoken with me in person) you could say that I am not a capable conversationalist but rather a hapless one who inadvertently resembles a capable one from time to time. So I hold my own fairly well, publicly. I usually look like I'm doing okay. Then I go home and have a miniature nervous breakdown.

The main problem is that in a profound way I have no idea what I'm doing when I'm speaking. I haven't got the slightest clue what I'm going to say next, from word to word much less sentence to sentence or idea to idea. This startling level of groping conversational blindless is due to the white terror with which I face the very prospect. Have you ever flown with someone who's afraid of flying and as the plane takes off they grip your hand in theirs so tightly you feel the bones crunching as if in a vise or clamp? When I just plunge headlong into conversation I need to achieve a certain forward momentum in order to keep from falling apart, and this manifests as a reckless flailing, like a car whose brakes have failed down a winding mountain road, careening around blind verbal corners at high speed, terrified of crashing through the guardrail of comprehension and bursting into flames of blathering idiocy or plunging into the abyss of total incoherence but more terrified of slowing down so that I have time to hear myself and think about what I'm doing, crippled by self-consciousness. So to the casual observer I might at times resemble a loquacious individual, but really only in the way a man on fire running down the street resembles an Olympic sprinter. One is running with consummate skill and natural talent for the sheer pleasure and achievement of it, a supreme expression of gracefulness, while the other is running out of panicky desperation and a sort of mindless animal terror, waving his arms and screaming. Sure they're both running.