I’m not myself and yet I’m not anyone else either. I’m not anyone. Or anything either. I’m an all-encompassing zero. I wake up sadly, full to the brim with quickly fading dreams.
My dreams aren’t me of course. They never are. Nothing’s me. ‘What exactly does it mean to be a person?’ I ask myself, as I clamber wearily out of my bed. ‘What kind of things might that possibly entail? ‘I’m asking myself these questions purely by habit at this stage, however – it’s a ritual, nothing more. It’s an empty pointless ritual and I’m mocking myself with everything I do.
It’s only words you see, the same old words every time. I go through the rigmarole of it, driven by pure force of habit. Habit is a very powerful thing after all – it is for me, at any rate! Habit is everything as far as I’m concerned. Habit is my whole world – it’s the alpha and the omega.
I am the habit of myself. My idea of myself persists by pure momentum – no active principle is involved. I’ve said it once, so I’ll say it again. I did it once so I might as well repeat it. I’ve started this nonsense and so I’ll just have to carry on with it.
I’m fond of repeating myself, as you would quickly find out if you ever got to know me. You’d find out quickly enough, I’d say. You’d find out fine and fast. You’d probably remark on the fact – why wouldn’t you, after all? Why wouldn’t you?
‘What exactly does it mean to be human bean?’ I ask myself solemnly. ‘What kind of stuff might this entail?’ It’s not that I actually care, you understand – it’s just my empty little ritual. it’s just ‘a thing that I do’, a terribly tedious formula which I like to repeat on occasions like this…
I was running off my mouth mechanically – spouting out whatever stuff there was in my head, spouting out whatever nonsense stuff there was there that wanted to come out. I was churning it out by rote, churning it out in exactly the same way I always do churn it out. In a mechanical way. Belting out the jolly old bullshit nine to the dozen. ‘Look at me and my mechanical mind!’ I cry out exuberantly, ‘check it out bro – isn’t it great!’
I was enacting the mechanical template, you see. Enacting it good and proper. ‘Look at me enacting all this cool mechanical stuff!’ I yelled, ‘check out how cool this is!’ I was playing a blinder for sure – I hadn’t a single original thought in my head, not even one. ‘Check out my mechanical bullshit’ I scream, ‘it’s so great!’ I was on a euphoric high, you see – you can’t beat being on a euphoric high, can you? Tell me what’s better than being on a euphoric high if you can. I know that you can’t…
My head was firing off in the dumb-ass way it always does. Firing off firing off always firing off. Cylinders pumping away like Billy-O. It starts firing off the bullshit first thing in the morning (or whenever I wake up) and it doesn’t stop again till I eventually pass out at the end of the day. Exhausted and tired by the effort of thinking so many absurd dumbass thoughts. Completely emptied out by it.
‘Whoopie!’ I cried out, ‘I’m so full of bullshit it’s unbelievable! The shyte in my head never stops’. ‘Hey lads’, I shouted out excitedly, ‘check out this bullshit thought that’s just came out of my head!’ My energetic expostulations were starting to be tinged with sadness and melancholy at this stage, however. The melancholy was starting to creep in – you know, the way it does. The way that it always does. That old melancholy, that old familiar melancholy. It’s like a guy who you haven’t seen for a while, isn’t it? Not a friend but just some character or other who you don’t like. Someone you don’t like at all but who keeps turning up all the same. Like a bad penny. ‘Oh it’s you again’, you say to yourself venomously upon spotting him, ‘you dirty old bastard…’
That’s what melancholy is like, isn’t it? You forget about it for a while but then there it is again. He catches your eye and grins at you in that horrible mendacious way of his and you know the party is over. He’s jinxed it for you, just as he always does. You had a good thing going there and now he’s gone and spoilt it. As soon as you see that loathsome grinning face your heart sinks it sinks like a stone. It sinks like a stone tossed casually into a deep dark mineshaft. You never knew that it was possible for a heart to sink so deeply, so fast. Your face turns to stone – you will smile no more. The stony face of yours may crack – given the passing of a sufficiently lengthy period of time – but it’ll never smile, not again. Those days are over.
The party has to go on though. That’s the thing about it, isn’t it? The party always has to go on no matter what, right? The party can’t stop for anyone – not ever. No matter how awful things get. No matter how terribly disturbing it all is. No matter what appalling nightmares may unfold. That’s the glory of the mechanical mind, you see – it doesn’t stop for anyone. You might come down with the old melancholia from time to time, you might feel that the bottom has dropped out of your world, but that’s all par for the course. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.
In the land of unspeakable body odour the person who smells only half bad is king! So they say, anyway – so they say. People always come out with stuff like that though, don’t they? People come out with all sorts of stuff when it comes down to it – they’ll come out with any bullshit under the sun if they think there’s some sort of advantage to be had from it. We’re quite shameless really – there’s no limit to the type of nonsense we’ll affiliate ourselves with if we believe it might benefit us in some way. No sir there isn’t, and the ultimate result of this is the world we find ourselves in today! It’s a circus really, isn’t it? Jackasses are elected to high office and anyone who dares to speak the truth gets publicly shunned; folk will cross over to the other side of the road rather than look you in the eye. That’s the kind of world we live in you see. That’s exactly the kind of world we live in. Jackasses are elected to high office, and anyone who… well – you get the picture, I’m sure. You know what I’m trying to say here. No need for me to keep banging on about it, right? It’s not as if you don’t know it all yourself. I wouldn’t want to insult your intelligence by implying that you don’t. You’re not a fool. The grotesque mockery which is human life in the 21st century only exists because of our tacit agreement that it should do however and so I don’t think we should escape responsibility as easily as we do. ‘It’s not my fault’, we cry out indignantly, ‘it’s the social indoctrination that made me do it. I was told what to think at an early age…’ We’d like to pretend it’s not our fault you see. ‘It was the others, not us’, we say. ‘It was the Illuminati’, we say. ‘Alien space lizards were controlling our minds the whole time, honest…’ Amazing the shit we’ll come out with, isn’t it? We would rather do anything rather than take responsibility for the mess we’re in. We’re as slippery as be damned when it comes to that. We are more slippery then a barrel of live eels. We are more wriggly than a sack of weasels. We’ll blame a stranger for our woes as soon as look at them, so we will. That’s how keen are we to avoid looking at ourselves In the mirror. We’re plenty keen. We’re as keen as mustard. ‘The buck stops over there’, we say, pointing into the distance. The instinct of avoidance reaches its apogee in the human race. I really don’t know what else I can say on the subject. There’s no point in feeling bad about it, though – that’s just the way we are. That’s just the way we are so we might as well get on with it.
How to fit into the jolly old system and be what it wants us to be – that’s the question on everyone’s lips, isn’t it? There are YouTube tutorials on that you know. How to make a name for yourself in the Copycat World, how to copy societal templates better than the next guy. How to be a better clone than your neighbour. That’s where the kudos is to be found, you see – all that wonderful, wonderful kudos. How to find respect and approval from the people who matter most to you. Or from anyone at all, basically. Whoever it is. Everyone likes to hear that they’re great. Everyone likes to hear that they’ve done well, everyone needs a bit of that ‘old social validation’ from time to time. Hunting for Kudos in the Copycat Realm, where the only sin that can’t be forgiven is the sin of accidentally being original. They’ll turn on you for that, you know. They’ll turn on you fine and fast…
In the special magical world of which I speak reality can be whatever you want it to be. You are the Boss of Everything in other words, and isn’t that what we all want at the end of the day? Isn’t that precisely what we’re all hankering for? In the special magical world of which I am King, reality not only can be but must be whatever I desire. I simply don’t give it any choice. My word is law, in other words – I am the great autocrat of my own super-fake reality bubble and if you don’t like it then you know what you can do. You can fuck right off. Damn right you can. Yes indeed my friends, I don’t take any shit from anyone, as you can plainly see! You bet I don’t. In the special magical / generic world within which we are all so privileged to live we are all free to seek approval from our fellow idiots in whatever ways we can and that’s a measure of just how far of both just how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go. Things could be good, but they could also be quite bad.
You’re trying to make a name for yourself you see, and who can blame you for that? You’re only trying to do what you’re only trying to do. You are doing your level best to adapt yourself to a system that just doesn’t care and why wouldn’t you? What’s the alternative, after all? What else are you supposed to do? This world we live in is special and magical and I don’t want you ever to forget that. It’s also a helter-skelter ride of madness and despair. You’re on top of the world one minute and then way down in the dumps the next, cursing and bemoaning the unfairness of it all. One moment they’ll say you’re great and then the next they’ll pretend you don’t exist! Folk are like that – they are as fickle as the day is long. They are as fickle as the day is long and yet what else can we do but keep on trying to please them, what else can we do apart from keep on trying to worm our way into their good books? It’s the only game in town, you see. It’s the only game in town and it’s also one we can never win…
What’s the bloody old Trash World really like? Is it actually as bad as they say, or is it perhaps even worse? Can it be good fun too sometimes, if you happen to be in the right frame of mind? Can it be a bit of a laugh, or is it dangerous for our mental health? These are just some of the questions that might be going through our heads. We’re curious, you see – we want to get the lowdown on the jolly old Trash World. The fabulously loathsome Garbage World. The Horror Universe of Pestilential Filth. Could it be a destination for a family holiday, for example? What’s the entertainment like there? Does it get good reviews on the relevant websites, Tripadvizor and the like…?
All these questions and more, my friends, all these questions and more will undoubtedly go running through your heads, like mice pitter-pattering through your attic late at night. What does it really like, aside from all the hype? Aside from all that vile sickening propaganda. The authorities tell us that it’s all good stuff and that we should be grateful for it. They say that we shouldn’t run around complaining so much. Like a bunch of lousy ingrates. They say that it’s what God intended for us and that we could get in trouble for questioning it too much. Or at all. They said God will be angry with us and send us to hell for our bad attitude. But then again, the authorities are always saying this sort of thing, aren’t they? What else have the authorities ever said? I don’t think we should pay them any heed. All institutions are fundamentally evil, after all. That is their nature. We don’t like to face the fact – understandably enough, you might say – but it’s true all the same. It’s a fact, like it or not. They’re is evil as evil can be but we’re in no hurry to take that on board. You can bet your underpants on that!
But enough of that – I have no wish to bore you with my interminable ranting about the crappy old Trash World. What good would that do? What would that solve? You see my point, I’m sure. You get what I’m trying to say, even if you don’t necessarily agree with me. You quite possibly think that the Trash World is great and – and if that’s the case – then I am content to ‘agree to disagree’, as they say. You might think that the loathsome old Garbage World is the bee’s knees, or the cat’s pyjamas, or whatever else, and I’m not going to waste what little energy I have by trying to argue with you. No indeed. You might say that the pestilential old Nonsense World is the coolest thing going, and that there’s lots and lots of good stuff going on there. The very best kind of stuff. You might say that the elected officials who are presiding over the shit show in question know exactly what they’re doing and that they’re real smart and everything like that, and who am I to argue with you? What kind of fool would I be to get caught up in that argument? What good would it do me? I’m not going to debate the point with you. Go for it, buddy, that’s what I have to say. Knock yourself out…
I started the story in the same way that I always do – in a manner that was both precise and yet vague; a manner that was poignant, edgy and yet at the same time utterly meaningless. ‘Start writing the important story,’ my brain told me crossly, and I scurried to obey. That’s all we can ever do, isn’t it? Scurry frantically to obey the orders that the thinking mind is always giving us. That’s the conditioned life for you in a nutshell – one order after another after another until – finally – we die. We’re hoping for a pat on the head, you see – we’re always hoping for a pat on the head.
I was an ego, I was a self. ‘Do the ego type stuff’, my mind ordered me imperiously, ‘act like a self, and make it convincing!’ That’s how it all began, that’s how it always begins. ‘Be a self’, I told myself, ‘be an ego!’ Some people are criminals and some people aren’t. That’s how it works, you see. I used to be a criminal but then I got caught. I was hauled in front of the magistrate. protesting my innocence loudly. Criminals always protest their innocence loudly when they get caught. All the ones I know do, anyway. It’s on the first page of the Criminal’s Handbook. It’s the first thing you learn. And then – when you’re hauled up in front of the magistrate – you have to protest it all the more. You just have to sound reasonably sincere about it, which is easy enough to learn once you’ve been through it a few times.
I watched this YouTube video last night about a guy who became enlightened by accident. He was just minding his own business, being a good little ego, being a good little self, when all of a sudden his brain got zapped by some cosmic energy (or whatever) and he became spontaneously enlightened. Just like that, he became the Eye that never Closes, he became the Eternal One, the Ancient of Days. Just like that, he became the Pocket Buddha, the Once and Future Messiah. He wasn’t like most people you see; most people become enlightened on purpose, by design, because they want to, and after putting an awful lot of hard work into it too. You wouldn’t believe the amount of dedication and hard work it requires. To just be making yourself a cup of tea or a sandwich or whatever it might be and then – all of a sudden – experience Ultimate Illumination is very unusual. That’s not the usual way it happens at all.
None of that is actually true, of course. I never watched the video – I couldn’t be bothered, to be honest. I just couldn’t be arsed. I’m more interested in those videos that show people making stupid mistakes so that everyone gets to laugh at them. You know the sort of thing – somebody goes to pat a dog but the dog bites the shit out of them, someone goes to jump into a pool but they’re clinically obese and they cause a tidal wave that washes everyone away. Or someone goes to take the piss out of the King’s Guard outside Buckingham Palace and they get slapped in the head for their pains and knocked out cold on the ground. That sort of thing. ‘Idiots at play’ sort of thing, providing richly succulent humour for the rest of us. There’s absolutely no way I could be bothered to watch a video about a person who somehow happens to become enlightened just by accident. I just made it up that I did.
My life’s a mess really. It’s a hell of a mess, in fact. It’s a fuckup pure and simple. I don’t like to think about it, I don’t like to focus on it. I tell so many lies that I can’t remember what is the lie, and what isn’t. I end up contradicting myself in everything I say. I’m my own worst enemy, as they say. I give myself a real hard time on a regular basis. I never let up on myself, I never give myself a break. And there’s a part of me watching on as I do so, in absolute disgust at the mess I’ve managed to make of it all. Dismay and disgust. Not to mention a fair size helping of utter horror. And dread. And other feelings too, feelings that I’m not too clear about. Feelings that I might possibly be the Future Messiah – the Future Messiah who – for whatever reason – just can’t seem to get his shit together.
Image credit – Am I dumb? r/Destiny2, on Reddit.com
I want to start off this discussion by saying a few words on the subject of machines. Machines are very purposeful, of course. That’s the thing about them. That goes without saying, really. They know what they’re at – they always know what they’re at. ‘Do the thing,’ they say to themselves with their characteristic mechanical earnestness, ‘do the thing!’ Yes indeed, that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? It’s all about doing the jolly old thing. To be sure it is. What else could it possibly be about, anyway? This is how it is with machines you see – they’re awful single-minded when it comes down to it. You can’t dent their single-mindedness. ‘Do the thing lads, do the thing…’ they sing merrily as they work. They know what they’re about for sure – no one can say that they don’t. We couldn’t blame all those folk who say that they want to be machines, could we? No Sir, we couldn’t blame them at all for that, not with this confused, mixed-up, crazy old world that we live in…
You were born to be the next Messiah of the human race and nobody can tell you otherwise. You know it in your water, you know it in your very bones. Your bones know it well, your bones know it instinctively. You yourself are very far from wanting this particular burden however. Very far indeed. It’s too onerous – nobody wants that. None of us want to take up that mantle. It frightens the bejesus out of us and that’s a fact! We’d put up with any ignominy rather than going down this particular road. We would rather have pins poked under our fingernails, we would rather have a great big handful of angry scorpions let loose in our underpants. To be sure we would. We’d consider ourselves to be getting off lightly, in such a case. We’d be thanking our lucky stars….
The days come and go in rapid succession and no one knows what to say about it. What do you say? What can anyone say? The best thing is simply to shut up and keep on with whatever it is you’re doing. Keep on pretending to be a machine! Pretend for all you’re worth. Keep your head down and don’t upset the boat. You have to learn to play the game of course and that’s the important thing. Your colleague comes up to you and gives you a meaningful look. ‘Play the game, old boy’, he says (without actually saying it). ‘Keep on playing the game, there’s a good chap. Keep on playing the jolly old game and you won’t go far wrong…’
Underneath your pretence you’re deeply unhappy however, the same as us all. We let on that we’re having a great time, but we aren’t. We’re actually as miserable as sin. Boy, are we ever miserable! You’d wonder what was wrong with us, wouldn’t you? How do we bloody manage it? How do we manage to screw things up so much every single time? Some people blame the devil, of course. ‘It was the devil’s fault,’ we say – ‘nothing to do with us!’ We were just minding our own business, doing all that stuff that is so important to do, doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing, when along comes the devil to create a whole lot of badness out of nowhere. For no reason at all! Just for the fun of screwing things up. Just for the fun of spoiling some poor bastard’s day. Satan’s like that, you see. You bet he is! That’s just the sort of thing he likes to do. He’s a bad ‘un and no mistake…
Everything will be made right in the end because it’s all going to be fed into the Scrunger, I wrote. The Scrunger always makes everything right, I wrote. I was writing in my book, you see. I was writing my notes. Feed them into the Muncer, I wrote, feed them into the Muncing machine. Feed them into the horrific maw of the terrible and delightful Scrunging Machine. I covered several pages with this and then I drew a detailed diagram of what I thought the Muncing Machine looked like: the intake portal, the belts, the engine housing, the incapacitators, the flanges, the decarbonizer outlet ducts, the waste removal tray, and so on. As I scribbled away, I started to perspire heavily – thinking about the Muncing Machine always makes me perspire. It makes me come out in a cold sweat. It makes me feel all shaky and weak on the inside.
Everyone has their own ‘thing’, their own ‘issue’, however and so there’s no point in being embarrassed by it. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Everyone has something to be ashamed about – everyone has some kind of a thing that they don’t want anyone to now about. We’re all the same that way. Put the ‘fuck’ back into ‘What the fuck do you think you are playing at’, right? As always, I’m playing to the gallery. As always, I’m looking for validation from the crowd. It’s a trick I learned back when I was only a little ‘un. I’d regressed back to an embryo you see and that was that. I was ready to start again. Some people say it’s good to move forward in life, others that we ought not to be so hasty, and that the safest bet is to stay where we are and count ourselves lucky. Others again say that what’s really important is to always do what the Creator Deity tells us to do because if we don’t then He can make things very difficult for us. On the other hand, I think I should point out that you can’t go around listening to what people say because people are well known for being the biggest morons going! Tell me that I’m wrong, I dare you!
I’m going back to what I do the best however – writing about the Scrunging Machine and how we’re all food for it. Every last one of us. As I write I perspire heavily and my hands shake like crazy. They shake so badly that I can hardly read what I’m writing. That’s not important though – what’s important is to always do what the All-Powerful Creator Deity says we have to do. It kind of makes sense that we should do this, after all. It makes sense that we should always do what the Supreme All-Powerful One commands us to do…
I have without any doubt been writing up a storm in recent months. In rapid succession, without ever taking a break, I completed three magnificently insightful and innovative novellas entitled, in order, ‘The adventures of the hard-done-by ego as it launches itself into the world and tries to make a name for itself against all the odds’, ‘The further adventures of our hero the hard-done-by ego as it struggles against an unkind fate and strives mightily to prove to the world that it isn’t the Greatest Loser of All Time’, and the final instalment in the trilogy, ‘The deeply regrettable denouement of our eponymous hero the self-deluding generic ego and its consequential humiliation, and how it attempts to spin this humiliation as some sort of perverse victory’. All in all, I feel confident in proposing that this trilogy of works represents a major contribution to the anals of world literature. As usual of course my critics elected to disagree with me on this point – their ridicule rings in my ears. Time will prove them wrong, of course. Time will always prove them wrong. Time – I do believe – will prove everybody wrong…
My mouth is a Swirling Maw of Darkness, my eyes Blank Portals into a World of Horror and Despair, whilst my ears are Revolving Radar Turrets possessed of the Very Greatest Acuity, picking up the treacherous thoughts of my enemies with Unfailing Accuracy. Picking up the thoughts of my enemies with near supernatural accuracy, I might even say. The tumult is of course all but deafening. On a different note, I can’t help noticing that I have become very superstitious of late, and this is galling for me, having a scientific background as I do. I am a man of science, after all, with many glorious research papers to my name. I have made many important discoveries, and all that sort of stuff. Why – just the other day I discovered that the universe is a malicious hallucination produced by one of the Forgotten Gods of Ancient Antiquity (although I don’t know which one it was). I proved it beyond any shadow of doubt. I have proved many things beyond a shadow of doubt. I’ve lost track of them many things I have proven conclusively proven. I conclusively prove something new every second – I’m literally brimming over with proofs. It seems to be a gift of mine, a special talent, one might say…
Perspicacity is never quite what one wants it to be, wouldn’t you agree? It’s either too much (which is alarming for everyone concerned) or it’s not enough (which is a bore, which is a tiresome waste of time). We’re all alike in this way, I think – we’re as nosy as hell in that we want to hear all the news before anybody else does, and yet at the same time we are wilfully deaf and blind when it comes to anything that actually matters! We’re such extraordinarily self-contradictory creatures, are we not? We are perverse in our ways, acting against ourselves in just about everything we do, and yet at the same time arrogantly claiming to have been made in the image of God, and yet at the same time regarding ourselves as representing the very pinnacle of the evolutionary process. When we band together we are a curse that afflicts the earth in the vilest, most horrible fashion, a curse which reduces everything we come across to share unadulterated nonsense. Viciously pestilential nonsense, in fact. We all know this very well indeed and yet at the same time we pretend that we don’t know anything about it. ‘Is there any hope for us at all?’ I hear you ask. ‘Probably not,’ I feel bound to reply, ‘almost certainly not…’
I took a nibble of the muddler, and I was muddled fine and fast. I was as muddled as muddled could be. I took a sip of the fuddler, and I was fuddled before I knew it. I was as fuddled as fuddled could be. I was as fuddled as fuck…
‘I’m muddled out of my brain!’ I cried out excitedly – ‘I’m as muddled as muddled can be…’ I am muddled in the morning and I’m muddled in the night. I am muddled the whole time – I don’t know what it means not to be muddled.
I was too muddled to know what I was saying anymore – too muddled by far, too muddled by miles. ‘I am the one who shouts in the dark’, I expostulated grandly, ‘I am he who wallows gloriously in the dismal slurry of his own confusion’.
‘I am he who…’ I whispered sorrowfully, losing my thread entirely at this stage. It had never been much of a thread in the first place, but now it was gone entirely, leaving me out on a limb with nowhere left to go.
‘I am he who, I am he who…’, I breathed out, having run out of things to say. I’d reached the end of the line and that was that. There was nothing more I could do.
I’d lost my bearings and was all adrift in a stagnant sea. I was tied to the revolving wheel of my constantly recycled thoughts. Nothing new ever happens here – my life had softly collapsed in on itself. It had quietly imploded and no one had noticed.
Auspicious one moment, ominous the next, the clouds track across the sky like a solemn procession of strange heraldic animals. The sight signifies the end of all things, I realize. ‘I’m sad to see you’, I whisper, ‘but I’m also glad.’ ‘I’m so happy to see you’, I whisper again, after an indeterminate length of time, ‘but I’m also very sad…’
When I look down at my arms and legs I see to my surprise that my body is made up of tendrils of clammy fog. There’s nothing solid about me at all. Before very long the sea breeze will come and blow me away.
