I was stuck in a terrible, terrible place but I didn’t know it. I hadn’t a clue. I had inadvertently departed from the main thoroughfare of life a long, long time ago and had branched off in some meaningless, pointless direction of my own. A direction of my own that wasn’t actually a direction at all! It wasn’t anything. So everything was okay and yet at the same time everything was far from okay and that’s just the way it was. What you don’t know won’t hurt you – isn’t that what they say? But then again, maybe it will! Maybe it’ll hurt you a lot…

I was the Game Maker and people came to see me from far and wide hoping that I would sell them some new game they could play. Something fresh, something different, something zany, something exciting. The next Big Sensation, perhaps. God knows it’s been long enough since the last Big Sensation’! What was it after all – can anyone even remember? Oh yes, that was it – the invention of the space-time continuum. Well yes that was a big enough thing at the time, I admit. It was something we all got quite excited about it. It was a pretty neat trick, I admit, but it was still only a trick at the end of the day, and now it’s all starting to wear just a little bit thin.

Entropy sets in you see and you don’t need me to tell you about that! You certainly don’t. It would be like me making a big deal of introducing you to your oldest friend, someone that you have known the age of eight. ‘Have you met so-and-so,’ I would say, and you’d look at me as if I were some kind of fool. We all know about entropy. Things lose their zing. Life becomes dull and predictable – life becomes a tedious routine that you feel you have to go through with because you don’t know what the alternative is. You’ve forgotten the point but you act as if you still know it – it’s embarrassing to have to admit that you have forgotten the point of life and that you are carrying on just out of pure force of habit, after all.

People come to see me from far and wide but I have nothing to offer them anymore. Not even a smile – I just look at them, as if to say ‘What you want? Why are you bothering me?’ I’m too tired to actually say anything. I’m too tired and too jaded with the whole sorry business. I’m tired of the game of being the Game Maker. I have nothing to offer any more. All my games have gone stale, and there’s nothing worse than a stale game. That’s not just mere ‘word play’ either – there really isn’t anything worse than a stale game. I really do mean that! Imagine playing a game that you are very, very tired of – a game that has no spark, no freshness left in it any more. You play it anywhere because you don’t know what else to do. You play it anyway out of pure force of habit, but you don’t know why you’re doing it.

You do the thing you’re supposed to do, even though you’ve done it a billion times before. You do the thing, and then the thing that always happens when you do the thing happens, just as it always does. You always knew it would happen and it did. You always knew that it would happen and that knowledge is pure suffering for you. That knowledge is torment itself.