As the somewhat reluctant owner of a small and modest life, I constantly waver between a desire for notoriety and a wish to be invisible, even to disappear completely. I like to think of invisibility as a nice compromise between notoriety and extinction. And invisibility is not only easier, it has the bonus of purity and credibility despite requiring no effort whatsoever. Zealous dedication to one's invisibility demands only that one sit at home and watch porn videos with the shades drawn, in a beanbag chair surrounded by chewed pizza crusts. Conversely, I really need to shake my ass for my life to be noticed at all. See me spin shamelessness on my thrusting hips like a hula hoop, perspiration beading on my forehead. The world is full of people! Most people don't know who I am. An extremely tiny percentage of the world's population has seen me briefly from a passing car, bus, or train, nothing more than a blurry face or the color of a jacket, a fleeting impression of ill-chosen outerwear. What is the ratio of people who know and cherish me to the number of people who have seen me once and never again? It's extremely humbling, how easy it is to acknowledge the existence of another person and then to almost immediately erase that experience from your mind. How terrible to be unknown, how much worse to be forgotten! I lingered only briefly in the minds of the vast majority of the relatively minuscule number of people who have ever interacted with me, all memory of me jettisoned as soon as more interesting memories needed the space, and of course by more interesting I mean subsequent. Anything that pops into anyone's mind at any moment is more interesting than the blurry face of some stranger seen from a car, unless that person is doing something extraordinary, like fighting off a grizzly bear with a tennis racket. I don't want to fight off a grizzly bear by the side of the road just to be noticed. I'd rather live a life of utter obscurity than fight a grizzly bear.