‘Is it a good thing to be a winner?’ I asked myself. Is it a good thing to be great? Is it a great thing to be great? Is it great to be a winner? Will everyone like me if I’m a winner? And then: ‘Is it actually a good thing for everyone to like me? Are they right to like me? Are they right to like me for being a winner, or are they wrong?’ These were some of the questions I was asking myself. These were some of the many questions that I was wrestling with.
‘I don’t feel at all good today,’ I realised. When you wake up aren’t you supposed to feel good? Isn’t there supposed to be a good feeling there somewhere? My body ached and my eyes were bleary and I could barely peer out of them. My mind was plagued by questions that no one could ever answer: ‘Is it great to be a winner? Is it great when things are great? Is it good when everything is good?’ I wanted to tell people about the suckers that suck the psychic energy out of you. So it gets so you can’t even remember that there is such a thing as ‘life’. You think that you know, but you don’t – you don’t know anything. You’re barely there anymore. You’re barely there but you don’t know it, you don’t know it because you don’t know anything and you don’t know anything because the suckers have got to you. The suckers always get to you.
‘Is it good to judge people?’ I wondered, ‘either out loud to their faces or silently, in the privacy of your own mind?’ I was attempting to attain the very pinnacle of success, in order to experience the exquisite essence of egoic gratification that comes with this supreme accomplishment, but I kept falling flat on my face. Life itself was taunting me, or so I felt. I was the object of mockery, I was the object of both contempt and ridicule. I wanted so much to redeem myself. I wanted so much to redeem myself both in my eyes, and in the eyes of the world, and yet at the same time I knew that my desperate attempt to prove that I wasn’t the loser that I was being taunted as being was in itself the ultimate manifestation of my ignominy. My desperate attempts not to be a failure were the sign that I was a failure.
I knew this with the greatest clarity but I was still powerless not to fall into the trap. I walked straight into it even though I knew that I was making things worse. I walked straight into the trap even though it was providing me with the exact opposite of the pure essence of egoic gratification! So what type of fool do you think this made me feel like? How many types of fool are there anyway, or is this a foolish question?
