“Why does everything always have to be so shit?” I asked myself bitterly, for the millionth time. Nothing ever seems to work out for me. “Why does nothing ever work out for me?” I asked myself for the ten millionth time. I was not in a good place. I was in a hell-world of my own construction. I was in the hell-world of my own complaining thoughts. “Why am I always moaning and complaining the whole time?” I moaned. It seemed unfair. Other people don’t have such a shit time of it as I do. I know they don’t – it’s no good coming out with all that stuff about ‘everyone having their own difficulties’. That’s just something people say to fob you off. That’s obviously nonsense. It’s classic bullshit. I know by the look of other people that they’re not having such a shit time as me. Most of them actually look as if they’re enjoying life. Their lives are more fun than mine. My life isn’t any fun. It’s total shit.

Every now and then I catch myself wondering what it’s like not to be a total scumbag. It makes me sad when I think this. To be honest I can’t really imagine what it feels like not to be a total scumbag – I have nothing to go on, I have no point of reference. I suppose what I’m saying is that I just don’t know what that means. I fundamentally don’t know. But all the same I feel that it must somehow be good – I feel that there must be a tremendous freedom in not being an out-and-out little shit. I can’t imagine that freedom. I have never known it and I probably never will and when I get to thinking like this it makes me very sad. The tears run freely down my face and some of them drop onto the notepad I’m writing these words in and make the ink run.

Do you know that feeling when you’re putting lots of spin on something and you’re doing fine and then suddenly – unexpectedly – something happens and it all snaps right back at you like an elastic band and catches you painfully right in the eye? It’s not very nice is it? I call that spin-reversal – I don’t know what other people call it, or whether they would know what I’m talking about at all. Probably not, I guess. Probably they wouldn’t. Anyway. It’s a profoundly disheartening experience, to say the least – you’ve put all that energy into putting all that positive spin onto something and then the next thing is that it reverses on you. I’ve put a lot of spin onto things in my life and that’s a lot of shit to hit you when it all comes undone. It’s a lot of shit to come back on you. It’s a hell of a lot of shit, trust me. My thinking is the spin, my words are the spin. What I have just written just now is the spin and I’m the dodgy spin-doctor caught in his own web, caught in the web of his own ever-proliferating lies. And none of it’s my fault really – I honestly didn’t know what I was doing.

The excuses are slavering from my tongue like doggy-dribble. I’m slavering like a mad rabid thing and the slaver is running all down my neck. My tee-shirt is soaking with it. A great curtain of slaver is dropping from my chin – I’m not just frothing at the mouth, I’m foaming big time. Great big bubbles of sticky rabid saliva are forming and popping as I speak, as I feverishly articulate my excuses. No one’s listening to me though. I’m in the Bardo realm. I’m running down the street in fear of my life. The retribution machine is kicking into action. I’m making a break for it and all around me are the demons. They are demons from the Demon realm. They all come from my mind – I’ve gone mad with fear. I’m running down the street, running away from my own mind, screaming excuses as I go. No one’s listening though. Even I’m not listening…