The word on the street is that something pretty great is about to happen. I don’t mean ‘the street’ in the sense that most people would mean it; I don’t mean a stupid old street with shops in it – I mean out there in the astral realms. That’s where I pick up my information – on the psychic grapevine.

People write me off as a loser. I know they do. People write me off as a loser because I don’t go around sucking on memes like they do. That’s what folk do these days – they suck away on memes and then they think that they know something. They think that they know what’s going on. Not only that, but there’s this competitive thing going on which means that if you come across someone who hasn’t been sucking on all the latest memes (like you have), then you can feel that you have somehow got the advantage on them. That’s how modern society works, although you probably don’t want to hear that! Unless you hear it from a meme that is – you wouldn’t mind it then, I suppose.

I suppose I should I shouldn’t be bitching, but it’s hard for me to stop once I get started. I remember once I was sitting on a bench outside Maidstone Crown Court, scribbling down a few thoughts. It was a sunny spot and there wasn’t a lot of sun around that day. A young guy comes over and he sits right next to me. Almost immediately he demands to know what time was writing. I told him I was writing a story, which I was, and he became angry. “I don’t like stories”, he told me, his whole body radiating tension and hostility. Possibly he was psychotic. I don’t really blame him however – he was just full of bad means. “Hey buddy,” I could have said, “that’s the memes talking, not you” I didn’t though – I was smart enough not to do that. His friend was looking at nine years for aggravated burglary he told me later on, his attitude gradually softening with time.

You see the thing is that we have to keep on manufacturing these mental realities for ourselves, which seem good to us for a while, but then pretty soon we have to ‘jump ship’ to some other fabricated reality before we get bored, before it all gets stale. I remember reading some graffiti on the side of a storm drain in Villeneuve in France. “Friends are like chewing gum”, it said, “when they lose their flavour you spit them out”. I had to translate that from the French, obviously. Well that just about sums it up, as far as I’m concerned – we quickly tire of fabricated realities, and yet we never lose our taste for them. We are forever chewing and spitting out, chewing and spitting out, chewing and spitting out.

We are all living in the construct and the construct is made up of an endlessly unfolding two-dimensional surface – and there’s absolutely nothing behind this surface – as Baudrillard has pointed out – but at the same time there is a very temporary form of cheap satisfaction to be had out of it. It’s a bit like sucking a sponge full of glucose syrup or licking some kind of cheap lollipop that is sweet only for a very short time. Or it is like chewing gum of course – that’s probably the best analogy. We keep coming back to the chewing gum. We living in the garbage world in other words, and the garbage can actually seem very interesting if we keep on moving on quickly enough. We never see through it.

Always new fashions, always new crazes, always new fads enough. Aren’t we the most appalling fools? Isn’t this world of ours the biggest pile of shit going? Is this really the best we can do? It would be easy enough to become a cynical, confronted as we are by the garbage world in all its gruesome superficiality at every turn. But the word on the street is that something pretty great is about to happen. We just have to keep our eyes open…