I had been swallowed up by the horror of the meme wars and very little of me remained. Practically nothing. A token residue, I shall call it. “Pleased to meet you,” I say brightly, “I’m the token residue…! I am the token residue of who I used to be – I have a name, an address, a national insurance number, a list of hobbies and interests, but that’s about it. I have a favourite colour. Well, that’s actually taking it a bit far – I have to admit that I don’t have a favourite colour. The concept of a favourite colour is profoundly meaningless to me. I don’t really have any hobbies or interests either. Who has hobbies or interests these days? I suppose I could at a pinch say that my interests include distracting myself on a full-time basis by whatever means come my way. By utilizing the infernal distraction-machines that our age is so very good at mass producing. Instead of leading us in prayer the High Priests of our horribly corrupt culture lead us in self-distraction. No longer is it ‘Let us pray’ it is ‘Let us distract ourselves for the duration of our vanishingly brief lives and remain as profoundly unconscious as it is possible to remain, as frighteningly numb as it is possible to remain. Such numbness as ours is not easily come by – this is something that we need to work very hard at! Dedication is needed. In numbness we trust, we intone humourlessly, in those dreadful flat mechanic voices of ours. Sometimes I think we sound like robots. Sometimes I think robots have more personality than we do. Ours is a very pure form of numbness – laboratory grade numbness, you could say. Free from all impurities. Free from those nasty impurities that one so easily picks up on one’s travels. From toilet seats and the contaminated handles of shopping trolleys. Contaminated with the truth. There’s no poison like the truth, is there? Cherish your numbness, say the High Priests of our modern age, for it will disclose unto you horrors the like of which you could never have imagined. This frighteningly pure essence of numbness – the pure isolate – is as addictive as heroin. No heroin addiction could ever be as terrible as this. We gobble up our stash in minutes and go looking for more. We gobble up our stash in a second and start nodding furiously. We’re furious nodders. Rows upon rows of furiously nodding nodders, nodding our lives away in unison. It would be enough to hypnotize you just looking at it – you’d start nodding too. I’m not joking here; I’m really not joking at all. The sight would put you nodding in a flash. You probably think that you’d be able to look upon the ranks of the nodders and yet retain your integrity. You’d be wrong though. If that’s what you thought then you’d be wrong. Everyone thinks that. It’s a type of universal fantasy, I suppose you could say – we all imagine that we’re not like the average person. Everybody despises the average person – isn’t that true? Everyone despises the average person and yet that is exactly who we are…