Do you know that thing do you know that thing where you turn into the machine of yourself? That’s a terrible thing isn’t it? That’s a bad thing. That’s definitely a bad thing. You turn into a machine of yourself and you never notice it happening. You just carry on carry on carry on because that’s what machines do. They carry on. Machines are great at that aren’t they? They’re good at carrying on right up to the point when they can’t. Right up to the point when they don’t. Right up to the point when they break. Life simple when you are a machine, I guess. I’ve often thought that. The only instruction you need is ‘carry on until you reach the point at which you can’t carry on any more’. Or, ‘carry on until you finally break down’. Then stop. Because you have to. But it’s not really a good thing to become a machine. I didn’t actually mean what I just said there. Obviously. Being a machine isn’t as good as it sounds, despite the evident and undoubtedly highly appealing simplicity of the situation. It’s actually quite horrible – that thing that matters more than any other thing (that thing which is the only thing, when it comes down to it) is lost and we carry on regardless, never noticing a thing. Never noticing a thing. Who carries on regardless, that’s the point I’m getting at. Just who is it that is ‘carrying on regardless? Who’s living that life? You see, if there’s one thing we know for sure it’s that it really isn’t anyone – it’s only an echo. It’s only a ripple travelling on the surface of the pond after the pebble gets thrown in. The pebble has long since gone – vanished into the depths of the pond – but the ripples keep on moving outwards nonetheless. They always keep on moving outwards. The ripples are only echoes of us and we ourselves have long since gone. They not us at all, they’re just a mechanical disturbance. That’s left behind, a mere mechanical reverberation! That’s what ‘the machine of us’ is – it’s a residual mechanical disturbance. We leave a trace of ourselves, a footprint, a kind of imprint in the dead mechanical world, and that imprint then plays itself out, plays itself out, plays itself out. Until eventually there’s nothing left to play out. There’s just the desert wind, blowing everything away. The desert wind that never stops blowing. Blowing away the little piles of dust which are all that’s left of us, all that’s left of our hopes and fears. Scattering the dust far and wide. Dispersing it. To the four corners of the world. The hot dry desert wind. The machine of us is so superficial. So very superficial. It lives in the blank world. All there is in the blank world is the surfaces, all there is in the blank world is ‘appearances’. Nothing beneath them. Never anything beneath them. But we never notice. We don’t notice the blankness. We’re not really there to notice, we just think we are.