I IS FOR ... ME?

 “Where does a thought go when it is forgotten?” 

- Sigmund Freud

Freud suddenly wore glasses and looked slightly sad.  "We have reached the letter I, Roland.  Quickly, what occurs to you?"

"Me."

He sighed, "I cannot believe I am about to say this, but I wish you would be more like Lewis and less like Twain."

"Doctor, I mean it.  You say "I" and I think of Me as in the 'Me Generation'."

He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.  

"Young Man, it has always been the 'Me Generation.'"

"But not like now.  

It is now possible to hire, yes, hire your own private paparazzi to follow you around, taking photographs of you wherever you go one night.  

You even get a faux celebrity magazine with you on the cover and more pictures of you on the inside."

Freud slowly shook his head.  "What starved, stunted personalities they must be."

I nodded.

 "Worse, high school students beat a detested classmate to pulp and then post video's of the beating on YouTube."

"You Tube?"

"A worldwide video access for the bored."

"You are saying there is a relentless rise in narcissism in your culture?"

Mark Twain slid into the chair beside me.  

"Tell the old coot of that Kim Kardashian gal pasting pictures of her naked self for the all world to see ... with nary a pasty to be seen."

Freud gave Twain a look that should have left welts, and then turned to me. 

 "It would appear that you are living in changing times, an era of a poorly studied morality shift ... much like I did in Nazi-dominated Vienna."

"What do you suggest I do, Doctor?"

"Be unlike my four sisters ... survive."

I sighed, "Well, this brings us to J."

Freud looked over my shoulder.  "Excuse me.  I must be leaving."

Mark looked in the same direction and wryly smiled, "Of course he does."