For some unaccountable reason I began my next treatise by repeating the nonsensical phrase ‘fantasies of the ego-mind upon which all things are based’. This was a phrase that I had in my head – it was something that had been going around and around in my head for a number of days now. I was obsessed with the ego-mind and all its activities and was tying myself into knots trying to think about them, trying to work out what they meant. The activities I mean. Fantasies of the ego-mind, fantasies of the ego-mind, I said to myself. There was a strange satisfaction to be had out of uttering these words. I was the ego-mind and everything I ever thought was a fantasy. That was a long and the short of it. At the heart of all these tainted fantasies lay the ego-mind which I envisaged as a squat, purple coloured spider about the size of a grapefruit with the face of an old man smoking a pipe. Out of the pipe comes white, white smoke which organises itself into a giant spider’s web. The web is like a hammock and we are all bouncing around in that hammock – we’re trying to get comfortable but there’s no comfort there. You can be sure that there’s no comfort there. When I say ‘we’ there’s only me of course, and when I say that ‘the spider has the head of an old man smoking a pipe’ I mean that it has my head! It’s always my head. I’m the spider and I always have been and this is the obsessive thought that I can’t rid myself of. Is there an actual condition where you can get morbidly obsessed with a picture of yourself as a grotesque ego-entity sitting there in its spider’s web spinning out its perverse fantasies nine to the dozen? Churning them out at breakneck speed? It’s like the evil empire, isn’t it – only it’s a very small empire and there’s only me in it. No one else only me. And even I’m not really in it, I just think I am. I think that I am, I think that I am, I think that I am. I had been sniffing the stuff again of course – the stuff that puts you spinning, the stuff that puts you whistling. ‘It’ll put you whistling’, my friend told me, warning me to watch my step. He had warned me to try to keep my act together this time, but I couldn’t help myself from sniffing the stuff and sure enough it put me spinning. It put me whistling. In one of the fantasies I was a small dog running through the streets. I was a dog with a human face – the face was not my own however but that of a wizened old man with gunky eyes. It was a face afflicted with unutterable sadness. I saw this face looking up at me from the puddles on the pavement and I barked and I barked at the image I saw in those puddles. I barked and I barked and I barked. Seagulls wheeled overhead, evil in their eyes. I knew nothing I saw was true – I’d been caught out in a lie.