This is from Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner. All due thanks to Mr Sean Nelson.

After the night I saw Judy, as the months passed, I lost my job, but I kept up my habit of walking through the city. And there was something else that began to happen, where every time I thought of the word “I,” it sort of echoed or rang out in my mind, and I was troubled by it. The idea of the self was obsessing me now. What were we all constantly talking about? I didn’t get it. The self. The self. What was the self? Well, one afternoon, one cloudy, drizzly, late afternoon, I was sitting in my apartment writing in my diary, and unfortunately I’d managed to spill my tea, , and 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 and started to wipe things up, I suddenly understood it, very very clearly — and the clarity made me queasy, as if a door had been opened and bright light and oxygen had flooded into my brain. 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 a sort of form and had somehow succeeded in coming alive, and which quite ridiculously now sort of demanded tribute, declared itself great. And the amazing thing was that I’d gone along with it. We all had! We had all bowed down, we had all worshipped, each one kneeling before his own separate self, each apparently obsessed by a single question to the exclusion of everything: 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. And was this obsession even sincere? Did we honestly feel that no questions but these were of any interest? I wondered if the show of adoration wasn’t perhaps just a little overplayed — whether all this overacting didn’t possibly reveal an element of pretense.

And as I thought all this, I felt I saw standing by the window in the fading light that very creature, that self which was mine, that ludicrous figure whom I’d approached until now with such ostentatious displays of respect — such fervor, groveling, hand-kissing and tears — and I went up to the figure, the unpleasant little self, and sort of pulled it by the arm in the fading light, and I spun it around toward me. And then I threw it on its back and kicked it smartly in the face, and then I sat on top of it, grabbed its neck, and choked it and strangled it and bashed its skull against the floor until it stopped squealing, stopped gasping, and was gone.

And what a fucking relief it was. All that endless posturing, the seriousness, the weightiness, that I was so sick sick sick to death of — I’d never have to do any of it ever again.

I would walk the streets like a cheerful ghost, and no one would know my secret. It would really be funny.

Reposted for reference, I guess.