I was thinking like a bastard. Thinking thinking thinking. I couldn’t stop thinking. I was thinking like a complete maniac. If you had seen me you would have me pegged as some kind of mad idiot, as some kind of a mad fool. The eyes in my head were going this way and that, like as if each one possessed a life of its own. The mad eyes would give it away. They would give it away every time. The way my eyes were practically leaping out of my head. And that furtive, preoccupied look I would have on my face. The queer look of me. The way I’d be twitching and jumping about, never staying still for a minute. Like one possessed. Possessed by god knows what devils.

So like I say my head wouldn’t stop going. I was all over the place. I was thinking, thinking, thinking like an insane bastard. I was thinking about the thing. What was I going to do about the thing, I wondered? What was to be done about the thing? Maybe I should do this about the thing, maybe I should do that about the thing. Or maybe I should do something else. Or maybe I should do nothing. What was my strategy to be? What was the best approach? What was the correct angle? What were the ways in which my strategy could fail? What were the possible alternative scenarios? How could I cope with them? What safeguards should be taken in case my plan for dealing with the thing didn’t work? What was the back-up plan? What was the back-up plan for the back-up plan? What were the safeguards for the safeguards?

I was thinking, thinking, thinking. I was driving myself around the bend with this thinking. I was driving myself stone crazy. I was driving myself entirely mad. As mad as a rat. A very mad rat indeed. The maddest rat you’d ever see. None madder. I was running around the place – running here and running there. Looking this way and looking that way. My whole body was twitching and jumping as if someone was giving me electric shocks. I was tying myself in terrible knots with my thinking. Getting completely tied up and then having to figure out a way of untying myself again. Thinking myself into dead-ends and then having to think myself out of them again double-quick. Trying to sidestep my own thinking. Trying to jump over my own thinking, trying outrun my own thinking. I was trying to out-think my own thinking. I was trying to outmanoeuvre my own diabolical manoeuvrings, outsmart my own accursed incorrigible smartness.

I was thinking about the thing and just what the hell I was going to do about it. I didn’t know what the answer was. I thought I had all the angles covered but I wasn’t sure. I had a big list of calculations in my head. A big unwieldy list. One hell of a list. Had I made a mistake in my thinking, I wondered. I doubted myself, then – I went back on myself. And then, moments later, I doubted my own doubting! My mind was regressing into infinity at lightening speed. And yet, although though I didn’t know it, the joke was on me the whole time. The joke was on me because there was no such thing as the thing! There WASN’T a thing! There never had been.