The Swamp

I call it ‘the Swamp’. Other people may prefer to call it something else, but I like to call it ‘the Swamp’. That particular word makes sense to me – as far as I’m concerned it has a nice ring to it. I know what I’m talking about when I say ‘the Swamp’. The Swamp’s a funny thing – it’s a very funny kind of thing actually. It’s actually the damnedest thing you’ll ever come across. The Swamp’s a funny thing because when you’re in it you don’t know that you’re in it. You are totally clueless – you’re clueless in a big way. It’s not possible to be any more clueless than this – it’s just not physically possible. No where no how no way is it possible! The clue is in the cluelessness, you might say. That’s what tips us off.  So the thing is if you pick on anyone in the Swamp and you ask them – politely of course – what exactly they are doing there they won’t know. They won’t have a clue. They won’t say ‘I’m stuck in the Swamp’ because they don’t know that they are. They’ll say something else; they’ll come up with some story or other which they’ll totally believe in, even though it isn’t true. It isn’t true because the truth is that they’re stuck in the Swamp.  They’ll never admit that. They’ll never admit it because they don’t know it – they think something else is happening, although what could possibly happen in the Swamp I can’t imagine! Nothing ever happens in the Swamp. It’s enough to make you cry, if you’re the crying sort. What do people do when they’re stuck in the swamp? You can be sure they have a good story, anyway. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, I’ll say. I’m such and such a person and I’m doing such and such a thing. There is always all this narrative going on. Some kind of endlessly intricate but at the same time totally pointless narrative. Have you ever noticed how bored you get when someone starts telling you their narrative? That’s because it’s totally pointless. We feel like screaming, we feel like stabbing ourselves in the leg with a sharp thing. Because of the pain of having to listen to yet another pointless narrative. There’s nothing worse in the whole wide world than the pain of having to listen to yet another pointless narrative, and yet we all have them. We have to have them because otherwise we’d know that we are stuck in the Swamp, pitifully trying to make sense of the utter nonsense of our existence. How often do you think that we allow ourselves to glimpse this? How often? How often do we allow ourselves to see that we’re stuck like flies on the flypaper of this absurd nonsensical life that we have made for ourselves? You know the answer to that question as well as I do of course – ‘not very often at all’ is the correct answer, and even when we do we make sure to forget about it as quickly as we possibly can!

 

 

 

 

 

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