The fact that Ginsberg feels up to a tangent like that, up to a crack about how little he makes at his job, tells Ned that he's doing somewhat better. He feels like his presence here is helping, if only a tiny amount. His eventual plan is to get Ginsberg feeling stable enough to leave the closet, then to whisk him out of the building and back to his place for the night, to get him ready for that inevitable meeting the next day. But he doesn't want to rush it and ruin this small improvement.

Ned thinks that his memory from before he was five is fairly spotty, too, that some of that is natural, but he gets the feeling that what Ginsberg is talking about is more complete than that. He remembers what Ginsberg said about being in the meeting and drawing that complete blank, tries to imagine how alarming that must be.

"If I couldn't remember years of my life, I'd be pretty freaked out, too," he admits. He doesn't have any words of advice, or wisdom, to make that gap any less daunting. Nothing he hasn't said already, anyway. "I don't think people make ads about childhood memories because they're more important for shaping who you turn out to be, though. I think... I mean, I'm not gonna pretend I know anything about advertising, but I would think it's because nostalgia is missing something you can never have again, so it would make sense to take that desire and try to redirect it towards something that you can have. Right? It's an easy way to make people want things. It's not like the first five years of your life are more important to making you who you are than the last five have been."