“At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less. I think the only one I called or went out with occasionally was Maria, but even my friendship with Maria began to cool. Still, I always more or less kept track of what Arturo was doing, and I thought of all the stupid things to come up with, how he can believe this junk, and suddenly, one night when I couldn’t sleep, it occurred to me that it was all a message for me. It was a way of saying don’t leave me, see what I’m capable of, stay with me. And then I realized that deep down the guy was a creep. Because it’s one thing to fool yourself and another thing entirely to fool everybody else. The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.

But that wasn’t what I meant to say.”

If this does not have an effect on you you are useless.