I was stuck in my head again, as usual. This caused me to rail against my fate, as I always rail against my fate. As I always rail, as I always rail. ‘What type of life is this?’ I railed, ‘what type of life is it to be always stuck in your head?’ What type of life, what type of life, what type of life? What type of bloody old life would you call this? What type of a bloody old life…
‘How big is a life?’ I asked myself then, ‘or how small?’ I had written all this before, of course. I had gone through this routine, this wretched rigmarole many times before. My mind was stuck in a groove. My mind was always stuck in a groove. I wished my mind would stop, I wished it would get out of the rotten old groove that it was always stuck in. ‘Why does my mind keep saying the same old things over and over again?’ I asked. ‘Why does it, why does it, why does it?’ What kind of life is it to keep on thinking the same old thoughts over and over again?’ I asked myself, but this was an old thought. I had already thought it many times before and there was no joy left in it – no joy at all. It was a very joyless thought…
I was trapped in a loop, I realised. Trapped in a bloody old loop. Trapped in the bloody old loop. The bloody old loop-the-loop. The whole of life was out there, I told myself. The whole of life was out there just waiting to be discovered, and what was I doing apart from going around and around in my head thinking the same old stupid thoughts like some kind of mad fucker? I was thinking the same old thoughts even though the flavour had long since gone out of them. My thoughts tasted like stale chewing gum. ‘Spit out the chewing gum’, I told myself, ‘spit out that rotten old toothless chewing gum because you know you hate it so much!’ ‘Stop chewing it on it like some kind of stupid moron’ I told myself angrily. Stop chewing it, stop chewing it, stop chewing it, I told myself. Stop chewing it you stupid bastard…
I couldn’t stop though. I couldn’t stop chewing on that rotten tasteless gum. I couldn’t stop chewing away like some kind of dumb stupid moron. Of course I couldn’t stop – that was the whole problem. Chew chew chew, that’s me. Chewing away. Chewing like a bastard, chewing like a fool. Always chewing. I was the tasteless old bit of gum, I realised. I was the tasteless bit of chewing gum and I was chewing myself! I was chewing away on myself. I was hoping that if I chewed long enough and hard enough then I would get some last tiny bit of flavour out of it, some last tiny morsel of joy. Some scrap that I had missed up to now in all my previous chewing. Some scrap that had somehow escaped all interminable ruminations that I had engaged in up to this point! What a sad, forlorn hope, huh? What a sad and deeply forlorn hope…
