I made myself into a person; I made myself into a thing. I made myself into a thing and now I’m stuck with it; I made myself into a person and now I’m stuck with me. I’m stuck with myself on a full-time basis but I don’t usually pay it that much attention. I’m kind of used to it. You can get used to anything really can’t you? I’m used to being stuck with myself but all the same every now and again it gets a bit much. Every now and again it gets to me – every now and again I get the rough end of the stick.
Just how rough is that, you might ask. Tell us about it. Just how rough is the rough end of the stick? Plenty rough, I can tell you! Seriously fucking rough. Actually – if you really want to know – it’s the roughest anything can ever be. There is no rougher. Rougher there is none, as the man said. Whatever his name was. And he knew what he was talking about I can tell you! Fucking right he did. He knew all about it…
The rough end of the stick – the particular type of a stick that I’m on about here – would tear the very flesh from your bones, so it would. Is it EVER bad, that rough old end of the stick! Boy oh boy it is and I’m not joking here. I’m not larking around, although it might seem that I am. It surely is very rough indeed. Sand-paper has nothing on it!
But we won’t dwell over-much on that now, will we? We won’t go into it. We’ll hush it up. We’ll sweep it under the carpet. We’ll keep it under wraps. Out of sight, out of mind, isn’t that right? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Only of course it can – it can hurt you very much indeed. It can hurt you like nothing else but we won’t go into that. By jingo we won’t. By all that’s false and phoney we won’t. Instead, we’ll concentrate on the other end of the stick, the smooth end, the good end, the end we all like! We’ll go on and on about the end we like, the smooth end, and we’ll pretend as hard as we can that the rough end doesn’t exist. We’ll pretend that the stick only has one end – the good end, the end we all love so much…
That’s what we’ll do. Isn’t that what we always do? Of course it is. I made myself into a thing and now I’m stuck with it. I made myself into a person and now I’m stuck with myself full-time. I follow myself around wherever I go, like an after-thought. I keep repeating on myself, like something I ate. I dog myself relentlessly. I’m always on my own tail. I follow myself into the toilet. I watch myself as I’m picking my nose. I haunt myself on a full-time basis, quite pointlessly. I just can’t get rid of myself!
You don’t want to hear any of this, do you? Of course you don’t. You don’t want to be hearing any of this old talk. You’d like to pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about. You probably are pretending that you don’t know what I’m talking about, aren’t you? And do you know what – I don’t blame you! I don’t blame you at all. I’d do the same if I could get away with it. Damn right I would. Act dumb. Play stupid. Plead ignorance. I swear I’d be doing exactly the same as you if I could. I honestly would but the thing is I just can’t!
