10 You may or may not want to spend a line or two inviting the reader to consider whether it’s strange that there are literally a billion times more ways to ‘use’ somebody than there are to honestly just ‘be with’ them. It depends how long and/or involved you want this PQ9 to be. My own inclination would be not to (probably more out of worry about appearing potentially pious or obvious or longwinded than out of any disinterested concerns about brevity and focus), but this’ll be a matter for you to sort of play by ear.
11Ibid. footnotes 8 and 9 on feeling/feelings too — look, nobody said this was going to be painless, or free. It’s a desperate last-ditch salvage operation. It’s not unrisky. Having to use words like relationship and feeling might simply make things worse. There are no guarantees. All I can do is be honest and lay out some of the more ghastly prices and risks for you and urge you to consider them very carefully before you decide. I honestly don’t see what else I can do.
12 Yes: you are going to sound pious and melodramatic. Suck it up.
13 (among other things you’ll have to puncture)
14 Yes: things have come to such a pass that belletristic fiction is now considered safe and innocuous (the former predicate probably entailed or comprised by the latter predicate, if you think about it), but I’d opt to keep cultural politics out of it if I were you.
15 (… Only worse, actually, because in this case it’d be more like if you’d just bought a fancy expensive take-out dinner from a restaurant and brought it home and were just sitting down to try to enjoy it when the phone rings and it’s the chef or restaurateur or whoever you just bought the food from now calling and bothering you in the middle of trying to eat the dinner to ask how the dinner is and whether you’re enjoying it and whether or not it ‘works’ as a dinner. Imagine how you’d feel about a restaurateur who did this to you.)
16 (… and of course it’s very probably also the issue they’re feeling self-conscious about — w/r/t themselves and whether other people at the party are liking them—and this is why it’s an unspoken axiom of party-etiquette that you don’t ask this sort of question outright or act in any way to plunge a party-interaction into this kind of maelstrom of interpersonal anxiety: because once even just one party-conversation reached this kind of urgent unmasked speak-your-innermost-thoughts level it would spread almost metastatically, and pretty soon everybody at the party would be talking about nothing but their own hopes and fears about what the other people at the party were thinking of them, which means that all distinguishing features of different people’s surface personalities would be obliterated, and everybody at the party would emerge as more or less exactly the same, and the party would reach this sort of entropic homeostasis of nakedly self-obsessed sameness, and it’d get incredibly boring, * plus the paradoxical fact that the distinctive colorful surface differences between people upon which other people base their like or dislike of those people would have vanished, and so the question ‘Do you like me’ would cease to admit of any meaningful response, and the whole party could very well undergo some sort of weird logical or metaphysical implosion, and none of the people at the party would ever again be able to function meaningfully in the outside world. **
*[It’s maybe interesting to note that this corresponds closely to most atheists’ idea of Heaven, which in turn helps explain the relative popularity of atheism.**]
**[I’d probably leave all this implicit, though, if I were you.]
17 This tactic is sometimes, at belletristic-fiction conventions and whatnot, called ‘Carsoning’ or ‘The Carson Maneuver’ in honor of the fact that former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson used to salvage a lame joke by assuming a self-consciously mortified expression that sort of metacommented on the joke’s lameness and showed the audience he knew very well it was lame, a strategy which year after year and decade after decade often produced an even bigger and more delighted laugh from the audience than a good original joke would have… and the fact that Carson was deploying this Maneuver in LCD commercial entertainment as far back as the late 1960s shows that it’s not exactly a breathtakingly original device. You may want to consider including some of this information in ‘PQ’9 in order to show the reader that you’re at least aware that metacommentary is now lame and old news and can’t of itself salvage anything anymore — this may lend credibility to your claim that what you’re trying to do is actually a good deal more urgent and real. Again, this will be for you to decide. Nobody’s going to hold your hand.
18 (at least I sure do…)
* (In this, her epiphany accorded fully with the Western tradition, in which insight is the product of lived experience rather than mere thought.)
* [N.B.: narr tone here mxmly flat/affectless/distant/dry → no discernible endorsement of cliché.]
** [/‘cloven’? (avoid ez gag)]
1 Her parents, by the way, did not beat her or ever even really discipline her, nor did they pressure her.
2 Her parents had been low-income, physically imperfect, and not very bright — features which the child disliked herself for noting.
3 The phrases lighten up and chill out had not at this time come into currency (nor, in fact, had psychic shit; nor had parental abuse or even objective perspective).
4 In fact, one explanation the soon-to-be mother’s own parents gave for their disciplining her so little was that their daughter had seemed so mercilessly to upbraid herself for any shortcoming or transgression that disciplining her would have felt, quote, ‘a little bit like kicking a dog.’