Chillin and Grillin

Prius the mius the big-headed bius I said, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. I hadn’t a clue. Has language got the better of me, I wondered. Is it crushing me? Is it imprisoning me? Am I the master of language or is the master of me?

 

Then a darker current caught hold of me and I became a mouth-piece for a much more sinister strain of verbiage. Because it’s the summer that means that it’s time for chillin and grillin, I spouted whimsically, and then found that I could not stop. Chillin and grillin, chillin and grillin, chillin and grillin I babbled, and I could feel the real evil at work deep in me. Evil that makes a mockery of life. What else does evil ever do anyway, I asked myself. Apart from make a mockery of life. It twists life to make a joke of it, but pretends that it doesn’t. It twists life to make a joke of it and then it encourages us to join in, on the ostensible basis that this is the right thing to do, the responsible thing to do. It demands that we join in. On the basis that this is the moral thing to do, the respectable thing to do.

 

Did you ever feel that you were vomiting up Satanic Darkness? Or is that a stupid question? That’s how I felt, anyway – I felt as if I was vomiting up Satanic Darkness and I couldn’t stop. Chillin and grillin I said, over and over again. Chillin and grillin chillin and grillin chillin and grillin chillin and grillin chillin and grillin chillin and grillin chillin and grillin. No matter how much of it I vomited it up there was always more there. It wasn’t a case of scraping the bottom of the barrel because no matter how much scraping you did you never really hit the bottom. You never got close. There’s no bottom to it because it’s a bottomless barrel. It’s a bottomless barrel of evil. Pure pure evil – the purest evil you can get…

 

Did you ever get the feeling that conforming to society was like selling your soul to Satan, only without admitting it? Only pretending that you were doing something good? Prius the mius the big-headed bius I warbled, as happy as Larry. Language gets the better of us all really. It lets us feel that we’re the boss but it’s got us under control every step of the way. How pitiful we are! We strut about, thinking that we have mastered language, thinking that we are expressing ourselves. What a joke that is! What a sad, sad joke…

 

Language is a virus from outer space, as William Burroughs says it is. It truly is. I can see that now, more clearly than I have ever seen it. I wonder if he ever escaped from it. There’s no hope for the rest of us anyway – we don’t even know that we’ve been infected. We’re such fools, such fools. Such such fools. It hurts my head to think what fools we are. We’re totally enslaved and yet we strut about the place, spouting. Spouting out of ourselves. Spouting out loud. Spouting our heads off. Spouting out like the damn fools we are.

 

We go to creative writing classes and we write our little pieces. Enslaved by language as we are. Mastered by it. Imprisoned by it. It allows us our petty freedoms to be sure. It allows us to strut like self-satisfied fools. It allows us to spout hideous nonsense. No one sees the terrible bleakness of language, I think to myself. That terrible bleak and rocky field through which we wander, imagining all the while that we are rolling in clover. Prius the mius the big-headed bius, I say out loud. Prius the mius. Purius the murius. Purius the murius. Burius the curius, the long-nosed lurius. I’m going to beat that virus, I say to myself. I’m going to beat that dirty old virus…

 

 

 

 

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