I was planning my dream life. This is going to be great, I told myself. This is going to be amazing. I could hardly wait – even though I knew I’d have to. Life’s a waiting game, I told myself, you have to settle in for the long haul. You have to get smart about it and use your loaf a bit. You have to play the long game, I said to myself wisely, but even as I said this I knew that I was lying. I wasn’t playing the long game at all – the long game was playing me!
The big seagull was glaring across the street at me, its angry eye full of cold menace. It had found a half-eaten snack-box full of chicken bones and soggy chips in the course of its scavenging and it wasn’t about to relinquish its prize. It was the apex scavenger on this street, its glare told me, and it wasn’t about to let any weaker form of life come along and takes its rightful spoils away from it. The seagull thinks I’m a weaker form of life, I thought to myself incredulously. It thinks that I ought to be afraid of it! I took a threatening step towards it whilst maintaining eye-contact but the creature didn’t budge. On the contrary, it continued to look me straight in the eye, its indomitable will daring me to come any closer. Other, smaller birds – mainly crows, blackbirds and a few street pigeons – watched on with interest. They were watching from a safe distance, obviously anticipating a showdown. Who’s going to win, they were probably thinking – the big old seagull with its savage beak or the newcomer on the scene who was daring to chance his luck? They wanted to see me get my comeuppance, I felt. They would enjoy seeing me get well and truly trounced.
Should I retreat, I wondered. Should I back down? I had a feeling that this showdown wasn’t going to go very well for me. It might not go my way at all. I was worried that I might come off the worse. I might even get badly hurt – the seagull was awfully big-looking. Perhaps I should opt for a tactical withdrawal before things got nasty, I thought to myself. All the other birds looked on, obviously hoping that I would try it on. Go on, they seemed to be saying to me, what are you waiting for you pussy? My nerve finally cracked and I jumped back out of range of that cruel beak and slunk into the shadows, trying not to look beaten. Trying to make it look as if I didn’t really care. I made to fly off to the safety of the nearest roof-top but then realized that I couldn’t fly because I wasn’t a bird but a human being with arms and legs. I knew that, I said to myself. I knew that I was a person…
Nothing in life happens quickly, I told myself. The important thing is to have a strategy. And to think positively. Always think positively because that way you will attract good things into your life. Because that way you will attract abundance into your life. I wanted to attract some abundance into my life because I felt so hollow and empty. Terribly, terribly hollow. Terribly, terribly empty. I was in dire need of abundance, I realized. Lack of abundance was killing me slowly. In some ways it was as if I was already dead. It was as if I was just hanging around waiting for the actual event to catch up with me…
Don’t worry everything will be great, I told myself. Everything’s going to be fine. All you need is a strategy and then you can settle in for the long haul. That way you can relax and take it easy secure in the knowledge that you are playing the long game. Waiting for things to work out for you. I wonder what my strategy is, I wondered glumly. Is it to be a complete fucking moron? Is it to slowly devolve into a worthless street scavenger, some pathetic cowardly creature existing miserably at the very bottom of the pecking order? Is my strategy to undergo some sort of degenerative transformation so that I become a type of hungry ghost whilst still actually alive? Is it my strategy to act like a total knobhead at every available opportunity and make myself into an object of ridicule – the butt of every joke going? If so then I’m doing rather well, I told myself. I’m definitely onto a winner here….
