My mind is anybody’s. It really is. I meet one person and he has such-and-such an opinion and so I have it too. Then I meet someone else and straightaway I’m agreeing with everything they say instead. I’m so damn fickle. And I never even notice the transition! I’m anybody’s – I really am.

 

Adverts play havoc with me. I’m an advertiser’s dream target audience. If only everyone were like me, what a great time they would all be having! They’d be in paradise! They’d be having orgasms. Whatever anybody tries to sell me I straightaway want, I straightaway feel that I absolutely have to have it, that my life isn’t worth a crap without it. I get positively panic-stricken with my need to buy whatever the hell piece of shit it is that they’re trying to sell me. I’m falling over myself in my rush to buy it…

 

It’s very easy for anybody to get me to feel bad too. The slightest suggestion that I might not be good enough, that I might not have been trying hard enough, that I have failed somehow to meet the required standard and I am crippled with guilt and self-denigration. If I meet with the suggestion that I have made a balls of things then I am cut to ribbons – I’m crushed, I’m eviscerated. The sense of sheer tortuous unworthiness that I experience goes right off the scale. I can’t even begin to tell you how bad I feel. And if you were to go a step further than this and tell me that I was a fuck-up, a screw-up, a complete waste of space, then I would believe this too just as readily. Naturally I would. I take it on board so fast you wouldn’t believe it. I’d go along with that in flash…

 

When people find out that I’m like this then that makes them a thousand times worse. Of course. Then they really go to town. They have a field day. They have a party, at my expense. That’s what people are like. Believe me – I know! When people discover that you’ll believe anything they say then boy do they press home the advantage! They’ll take you for everything you have. They’ll rob you blind. They’ll fuck you over good and proper. Boy will they ever. I’m telling you straight. And I know what I’m talking about here – believe me. Why wouldn’t I know? I’m the ultimate mark, the ultimate sucker. People see me coming a mile away and they have their knives and forks out…

 

Of course I feel terrible for letting everyone walk all over me like this. I feel lousy. I feel like such an idiot. I hate myself for being so stupid. I’m harder on myself than anyone else ever is, believe me. Boy do I give myself a hard time! I tear strips off myself. I take myself to the cleaners. I kick myself up and down the road. I sneer at myself. I insult myself. I call myself bad names. The worst sort of names imaginable.

 

And the thing is that when I insult myself and call myself bad names, I believe everything I say. I take it all in. I absorb everything. I believe every word! I abuse myself in the most horrendous way and I absolutely believe every word I say. I swallow it all. Each and every malice-filled accusation finds its home, each and every hateful insult finds its mark. Like an arrow from an expert marksman. What kind of a ridiculous situation is this? Isn’t it bad enough that everyone else is making fun of me, without me joining in too? Isn’t it bad enough that everyone else is having a field day at my expense, without me making sure that I put the boot in too? Kicking a man when he’s down, jumping up and down on his head, and then pissing all over him into the bargain? What kind of an idiot must I be? What kind of a frigging moron am I?

 

And yet – in my more reflective moments (between bouts of frenzied self-denigration) – I wonder about things. I wonder if it really is because I’m such a hopeless fucked-up idiot. I wonder if it really is all all about me and how stupid I am. That I deserve to be treated like this. Taken for a sucker all the time. Pissed on at every turn… You see, I’m getting wise! I’m the kind of guy who will believe anything he’s told and so the world and his grandmother are queuing up to rip me off. Either that or they’re just out for a bit of good old-fashioned sadistic fun mocking and belittling me and calling me everything fucked-up thing under the sun they can think of. And believe me, they can think of some pretty fucked-up shit. They really can. What people can come up with when they get a chance. They excel themselves. They really do.

 

So anyway, when you get to being a bit reflective – when you take a break from beating yourself up – wouldn’t you get to thinking that there’s something deeply fucked up about the human race? Wouldn’t it start to look that way to you?