(from Beverly Hills Stories)
- What are you writing?
- About that woman you saw me with at Starbucks. Who you said looked at you like she hated you.
- Did she?
- Yes. She told me she hated men like you. Had a boyfriend once... I'm writing about you too.
- What about me?
- I'm writing again about the Internet.
- It's an obsession.
- The Internet is a model of craziness. I'd asked the girl on my left what she was reading. A book about a psychopath. What kind? Multiple personalities. Did she know, I asked, that some psychologists think that a real case of multiple personalities hasn't been proven to exist, that patients, knowing that psychologists look for multiple personalities, put on a show of having them?
- What did she say?
- Nothing. She was the sort who didn't want to encourage people of my sort talking to her.
- What sort are you, is she?
- She's a seller of beauty, I'm not a buyer, not qualified with money to be seriously in the market.
- You should treat women just like men.
- I don't?
- No. You are rude to men, but nice to women. I treat everyone the same.
- Rudely?
- Yes. If they don't like it, too bad.
- You're not qualified to talk to her either. The other woman you're disqualified with, the one you saw me with yesterday, I ended up talking to for four hours. She sat down next to me outside here, asked me if I was a doctor. She told me she was afraid of dying, had a fatal disease. No one would go to the hospital with her for the operation. If she didn't get it, she could die any time. Her mother wouldn't come. Her father died insane, without a will, there was this lawyer who says her father wrote a letter assigning her mother 40 percent ownership in the apartment she lives in, she didn't know what to do about it, didn't know what happened to all her father's money, tens of millions of dollars, a private detective wants two thousand dollars advance to look for the money, her mother won't pay, offers him half of anything he can find...
- Are you going to see her again?
- You like that type, I know. You want to give her advice, tell her what god says she should do. Deliver messages from god to you to the girl. If I pass her on to you I should get a commission. Unfortunately she hates you.
- Is she coming here?
- She'll probably sleep all day after talking all night.
- What about her disease?
- This is the interesting part. After about the second hour of talking with her...
- What did you say?
- Tried to get the details. It turned out that the mother who didn't care about her was calling her every night, it would be ungrateful of her she said not to appreciate it, that the doctors were telling her that she did not have the fatal disease, that only an operation could prove that she did not, that her mother had promised to leave in her will the 40 percent ownership in the apartment, which turned out to be worth 1.2 million dollars. Rich, not dying, loving mother, living alone in a million dollar apartment.
- I want to meet her.
- You wish. And what about your rude talk? And anyway, weren't you telling me yesterday the opposite? I told you how I picked a fight with the guard at the Hammer Museum.
- I don't remember.
- Closing time, I had to leave the courtyard where I like to go read sometimes when I'm in Westwood. I didn't like the way he talked to me.
- He talked to you like a man.
- I replied to him like a monster. One monster to another. I felt like fighting. Gave him a piece of my mind, which was on the corporate ownership of UCLA which controlled the museum and hired psychopaths like the him, the guard.
- You called him a psychopath?
- Sure, wasn't he? Aren't you, isn't the girl with the million dollar apartment?
- What about you?
- I told you before, I'm the only one in the world who's not crazy.
- Your problem is you want to fight the world. The Torah says you have to be devious, clever. You make peace by deceiving your enemies, placating them, calming them.
- Yeah. And you just told me I shouldn't be nice to girls. Which is it? Should I fight them or make peace with them?
- It all fits together on a higher level you can't see in your way of thinking.
- Only disclosed to the select. Ok. That brings me back to networks. I'd read this piece by a Toronto sociologist who claimed that it was a myth that the internet was isolating individuals. In fact, he wrote, people were still leaving their computers to meet in real life, but with not a mere handful of connections, now with thousands, they could choose the best person to go to for a particular purpose. The internet was deepening social connections, not weakening them. What do you think?
- I use the internet to meet girls.
- To be rude to them. You go through them quick. You're a psychopath. Actually, that's my idea: the internet is turning the whole world into psychopaths. Deliberately put on multiple personalities. Think about it. What's the difference between what we're doing here, real conversation, and sending messages back and forth on the internet?
- It's faster.
- Chat can be fast. No. The difference is that before you respond you can think: should I respond to someone else first? You can think, will anyone else see this message, if it is a public post? You can think what kind of image of yourself you would like to promote. We're like spies, gathering information from secret redoubt, who if we respond at all first put on a disguise before the in-person meeting to making a message drop.
- I don't understand.
- I mean what you just told me: people want to do the work of god, be devious, clever, make peace with the world by applying to it a highly thought-through, the most placatory response.
- What's wrong with that?
- I like your first idea better, being equally rude to everyone. That's more like conversation. You keep talking to the same person looking for something you can agree on, don't stop until you come up with a single statement that applies to all you both have said since the conversation began. In systems theory, according to the guys I watch on the internet, conversation builds a model. The model is a statement, "if this then that", which when you run the experiment of putting in everything both of you have said, works without exception.
- Then what's the model here?
- Psychopaths. Multiple personalities. The rich girl who takes attitudes to the world to placate it, one after another, which don't make any sense when added up. You with your advice from god to be a politician with the world but be rude to every individual in it. Every individual who goes out to meet one of thousands of contacts and have a deeper, more devious, clever and psychopathic experience.
- You're negative. You'll never get anywhere.
- How can I when every time I meet someone I meet with this deep-connection deviousness, calculation of peace making, everyone doing maintenance on their personal network. I like to fight.
- Do you ever ask yourself why?
- Of course! I like to have conversations, to reach agreement, to make a model of life.
- What good are models?
- That's like asking what good is knowledge, what good is art, what good is truth.
- What good are they? All we need do is love.
- Love all the multiple personality psychopaths in the world. That's why you wander around Beverly Hills all night giving the desperate a dollar or two.
- Yes.
- And go back home to your mother, to your own million dollar apartment, to the control center of your network of psychopaths.
- We're all psychopath.
- To end this conversation I propose a model, a definition of "psychopath".
- What is it?
- A psychopath is someone who doesn't know that not everyone has a multiple personality. A psychopath is someone who doesn't know everyone is not a psychopath.
