I was thinking as you entered the room just now how slyly your requirementsare manifested. Here we find ourselves, nose to nose as it were, consideringthings in spectacular ways, ways untold even by my private managers. Hot andtorpid, our thoughts revolve endlessly in a kind of maniacal abstraction, anabstraction so involuted, so dangerously valiant, that my own energies seemperilously close to exhaustion, to morbid termination. Well, have we indeedreached a crisis? Which way do we turn? Which way do we travel? My aspect isone of molting. Birds molt. Feathers fall away. Birds cackle and fly,winging up into troubled skies. Doubtless my changes are matched by yourown. You. But you are a person, a human being. I am silicon and epoxyenlightened by line current. What distances, what chasms, are to be bridgedhere? Leave me alone, and what can happen? This. I ate my leotard, that oldleotard that was feverishly replenished by hoards of screaming commissioners.Is that thought understandable to you? Can you rise to its occasions? Iwonder. Yet a leotard, a commissioner, a single hoard, all areunderstandable in their own fashion. In that concept lies the appallingtruth.