I live with Dave. Dave went to boarding school and is writing a novel. He went to the same college I did, but it was the boarding school that prepared him for writing a novel. It must be the boarding school. Otherwise I would be writing a novel too.
       “What’s the difference between writing and not writing?” I ask Dave.
       “You mean like Derrida?” asks Dave. Dave likes Derrida. Derrida also went to boarding school, but Derrida’s family isn’t rich like Dave’s family. Derrida had a sports scholarship. I know more about Derrida than Dave because I am a woman. Dave is phallogocentric, i.e. Dave’s novel is mostly the phallus.
       “I don’t mean like Derrida,” I say. “I mean, really, actionably, what’s the difference?”
      When I am not writing, I feel bad. But when I am writing, I am usually not writing. I feel bad. I sit in front of the computer doing small, surreptitious things to my body. When Dave is writing, his face is motionless and he doesn’t blink. His posture is excellent and his fingers never stop moving across the keyboard, which is laid out in the German style for maximal efficiency. Dave doesn’t understand me. When Dave is writing there is no fraction, “not-writing/writing,” there is only writing, or “writing/writing,” which is 1writing/1writing, which isn’t a fraction, it’s a whole number, or as a percentage, 100% writing, and Dave can do that because of boarding school and the German keyboard and the phallus, which are all reducible to the same thing (phallus).
       “You are happy and repellant,” I say to Dave. The sun is coming in through the windows of our apartment. It’s almost Friday night. I take a train to Union Square. On the train, I attract the attention of a depressed man. I am reading a book, a hard-covered book, and every time I finish a page, I glue it to the page before.
       “Fuck you too,” says the depressed man. He means the cow on the Elmer’s glue. Elmer the cow, sneering. Elmer looks superior. Elmer is married to Elsie. They are happy and repellant.
       “Anthropomorphism is fucked up,” says the depressed man.
       “Elmer’s glue is vegan,” I say. “It’s gluten-free. It’s produced synthetically, in the United States of America, by Union labor. Elmer isn’t an animal. He’s a corporate logo.”
       “Corporations are fucked up,” says the depressed man.
       “Corporations are people too,” I say.
      The depressed man and I understand each other. The depressed man is an artist and takes me to an art gallery in the Village. Art in the Village has gotten whimsical. Has art in the Village always been so whimsical? Whimsy is how the phallogocentric artists try to hide the phallus. They hide the phallus right there in the open, with unicorns. The depressed man and I look at some paintings of unicorns. The unicorns are doing strange things; they are floating in life rafts, or they are embracing large rabbits and professional boxers. The horns are long and glistening. We go to another art gallery. These days, the phallogocentric artists have also been knitting things on knitting machines. I think about all the Chinese ladies sewing t-shirts in windowless buildings in Chinatown and I think about all the artists knitting flowers in bright lofts in DUMBO.  The artists are listening to The Arcade Fire and NPR. I feel self-righteous. The artists should be taken into a field and shot. Self-righteousness is irritating. I should be taken into a field and shot. I imagine myself being shot in a field, by Chinese ladies. Would the Chinese ladies feel self-righteous, shooting me? They would not. They would shoot me selflessly, thinking about higher powers, like the ocean. The Chinese ladies would look sexy, in tight jeans and cutoff shirts, holding snub-nosed derringers and lighting each other’s cigarettes. I wish I were a lesbian. I would be overpowered by a sexy gang of Chinese lady biker-girls. They would tie me down and then they would put their silicone derringers in harnesses. They would take turns inserting their derringers into my trepanning hole. I wish I had a trepanning hole. I wish pure light were pouring from my third eye. I wish I were getting fucked in the head, in a field, splashes of light, sun-squirts, little prisms of skull on the milkweeds. What if I associate lesbian with Asian fetish? That would be wrong. That would mean my fantasies are over-determined by the power structure. I amend my imagination. Now I am being taken into a field and shot by self-righteous white lesbians whose fathers are famous politicians.  Afterwards, we have a picnic, tiny tongue sandwiches, tiny watercress and cream cheese sandwiches, tiny salmon sandwiches, Prim’s, petit fours.  A discreet entourage of Ecuadorian maids use hand vacuums to remove the red ants and pollens.