It's My Manner of Being Alone

I suppose I get my ideas in three major ways: primarily, I imagine that I am the villain of somebody else’s story, or some character or other apart from the protagonist (like a forgotten girlfriend, or some oblivious perpetrator) and I frame a story around that personage, or, alternatively, I might find the neglected figure in a painting, song, filmstrip, opera, or textbook and justify their insignificance, and if none of those work, then I just imagine the least talented of my colleagues and the biggest failures that I know, and I desecrate their graves with irony and hygiene products.