from The Designated Mourner

by Wallace Shawn

And there was something else that began to happen, where every time I thought or spoke or heard the word “I,” it would sort of ring or echo in my brain, and it troubled me. The idea of the self was obsessing me now. The self. The self. What was the self?

Well, one afternoon, I was sitting in my apartment, writing in my diary, and unfortunately I’d managed to spill my tea, and so my hands were wet, and so was my diary, and my clean laundry, and a bunch of forks, and the clothes I was wearing, and as I reached for a rag to wipe things up, I suddenly understood, very clearly—and the clarity made me queasy.

As the rag sat soaking in the tea on my lap, I understood that my “self” was just a pile of bric-a-brac—just everything my life had quite by chance piled up—everything I’d seen or heard or experienced—meticulously, pointlessly, piled up and saved, a heap of nothing, a heap of nothing which had somehow been compressed into some sort of a form and had somehow succeeded in coming alive, and which now, quite ridiculously, sort of demanded tribute, declared itself great.

And the amazing thing is that I had gone along with it. We all had! Each apparently obsessed by a single question: what will happen to this self which is mine? Will “I” achieve magnificence and success? Will “I” be admired? Will my marvelous self express itself? How idiotic! And how boring. How boring, how boring, how boring, how boring, how boring.

And as I thought all this, I felt I saw in the dying light standing by the window that very creature, that unpleasant little self—and I went up to it and I grabbed it by its arm, and I spun it around toward me. And then I threw it on its back and I kicked it smartly in the face. And then I sat on its chest, and I grabbed its neck, and I choked it and strangled it and pounded its skull against the floor until it stopped howling, stopped squealing, gasped, and was gone.

And what a fucking relief it was.

— as performed by Sean Nelson
at Harvey Danger’s farewell show
in Chicago, August 15, 2009