"We--" And here, in deliberating the next word, his mind kicks off a near infinite wave of activation and re-activation, association and negation, synapse tickling synapse across a web of ideas, memories, literature, society, experience, books, tastes and sounds, but also feelings, and of course he cannot deny the influence of the cold pavement against his tailbone, or the bark that argues painfully with the curve of his spine, or most of all he cannot ignore her enormous eyes that plunge right through his and probably straight into that mess of dendrites, ensnaring him with weird orthogonal feelings: pride, lust, love even--feelings that terrify him because they are so primal; he has never known real fear, defensive terror, and so it is through love and lust that he has his most intimate knowledge not only of his slavery to his primal instincts but worse still the slavery of all mankind to history and to repetition, and here he faintly trembles at the thought of how many times in the past a man has sat or stood or lain in an unaccommodating position and tried to carve out a tiny shelf of thought for himself, and furthermore how many times a woman was present, how many times before his brothers had called on the aegis of sexual selection to protect their tiny, budding ideas, ideas that call for reproduction with almost more vigor than his own spermatozoa, these ideas unfolding out of cocoons like paper moths or dragonflies that can scarcely dry their wings before history snaps them up, that great black spider refusing to let anything take flight that has flown before; he knows this spider and he knows how his little thoughts are little more than youth mingling the past and present with enthusiasm and the self-assurance born of ignorance, but something burns him, some feeling right at the base of his medulla oblongata--the seat of breath and footsteps--a feeling that even though he cannot avoid death (or perhaps because he cannot avoid death) he must pace out his meager plot on the field of ideas, otherwise why should he continue to suck up food and education and resources, but of course this feeling is itself an old idea and not even a very good one and now he's drowning again, he's drowning and if he gasps for breath he'll choke on cold, wet words, his lungs will fill with old rotten thoughts and he'll sink to the benthos of the imagination and an ecosystem of sightless crustaceans will feast on his corpse as if it were the whole universe; here's a new idea: his body is the whole universe, maybe the flowers of the present grow from the stalk of history, and even if each petal is doomed to shrivel without growing into a plant itself the whole organism can still lean towards the sun, but this is a silly metaphor and he knows it, because there is no sun, the plant is actually growing towards an illusion, towards a mirror, towards its own imagination, and anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of chaos (slight pause to appreciate the oxymoron) knows that the initial conditions, the orientation of the seed, the salinity of the soil, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have already stamped their weight and implacable seal on the present, and that in all likelihood every facet of this moment, sprawling on the pavement, young, unsure, eager, spitting out words that are as much thoughts as they are codewords, signs, a way of reaching out to other people who might have their own islands of thought, hoping that we might pull together into some kind of Pangea, or at least Pan-archipelago, and his mind still a giant web that can wonder whether the next word will too strongly resemble Hegel while simultaneously registering hunger, some dim moment from childhood, even the silly problems of a self-aware youth that wonders if leaning to one side or the other makes him more appealing to he opposite sex, every facet of this moment is simply a flock of birds flying in an ever-tightening spiral around the output of a function whose validity is itself in question, and every single one of us is just a different hybridization of old ideas and old genes, and the best any one of us can do is kick the arrow of that original question imperceptibly to one side or the other, which is exactly the reason that he, like so many others, would rather sit in the gutter with a good friend than stand on a mountain by himself; a friend with an ear to listen, it turns out, can be the universe, and in spite of the many assertions to the contrary on the part of art, history and science that the world we inhabit is made of bits of mud, space and protons the truth is that everything is in fragments, shards, chips of sign and signifier--the words that build the shantytown we call civilization, the face of our friend who in spite of everything turns to us and says yes, please, tell me what you have to say.

"Yes?"

"We should probably find a bar."