I was writing a lengthy treatise on the Reality Principle. Needless to say, it was an important piece. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ I said to myself, nodding my head solemnly as I spoke, ‘the Reality Principle – very important, very important, very important indeed’… My brow furrowed up impressively in anticipation of the seriousness of the task that lay ahead of me. ‘I’d better not get too jokey now’, I warned myself, ‘not when it’s the Reality Principle that we talking about. Very serious, very serious, very serious…’
Needless to say, I didn’t know the first thing to be writing about it. I hadn’t a clue. I’d hit a brick wall and I hadn’t even started. I’d run out of inspiration and I hadn’t even written a word! ‘The Reality Principle, the Reality Principle…’ I muttered to myself under my breath, ‘very important, very important, very important’. I realised then that I’d been overthinking the matter! The thing about the Reality Principle is that you have to sneak up on it; a head-on attack on reality never worked and it never will. That full-frontal approach to reality is doomed to failure every time. Like a complete fool, I had jinxed myself and now I couldn’t rid myself of that jinx. I’d over-thought my approach to reality and there was no backing out of it. I’d queered the pudding and no mistake!
‘Perhaps I had permanently jinxed myself with my headstrong approach,’ I worried, ‘perhaps I have placed myself permanently on the wrong side of the Reality Principle’. Not a good thought, as I’m sure you’ll agree! Not a good thought at all. Reality has got me well and truly banjaxed when it comes down to it, no matter what type of a brave face I might try to put on it. I was starting to freak out inside, I was losing my cool. I was going down a bad road and things were only going to get worse…
The best chance was a sneak attack, I decided. Take the damn thing unawares. I would use the tried and trusted technique of pretending not to be interested. It’s an old one had a good one, an old one but a good one! It shouldn’t even be that difficult of an act to put on, come to think of it; most of the time I’m not particularly interested in reality anyway. Most of the time I don’t give a damn about reality, one way or another. And let’s face it, who does?
It’s one of those things, reality isn’t it? It’s one of those things people pretend to be interested in but aren’t. ‘Oh yes reality – how interesting… How fascinating…’ we say in voices that are too loud, too shrill to carry conviction. Or perhaps we get into mouthing off like gobshytes about reality. We’re all guilty of that! ‘Oh yes,’ we pontificate, ‘reality’s like this, reality’s like that… We blabber on and on: ‘Oh yes the thing about reality is of course that….’ and then we come out with some sort of dumb shit, some sort of pathetic nonsense. Something terrible, terribly lame…
We are all guilty of that, as I just said, we are all guilty as charged. Poor deluded fools that we are. Poor over-inflated, pompous, ludicrously self-deceiving halfwits that we are. Mouthing off about reality the whole damn time, whilst not knowing the first thing about it! Yapping away like a bunch of overexcited poodles! What a sad travesty, huh? What a deeply pathetic state of affairs….
Reality is a tricky customer – that’s what I wanted to say! I remember now – that’s the first point to be made about the Reality Principle; that it’s counter-intuitive – you look in one place and it’s in another. You say one thing and the truth turns out to be quite another. You come out with some fine-sounding rigmarole and reality makes a barefaced liar out of you, it makes a pure mockery of you. You dodge cleverly to the left and it dodges to the right, anticipating and avoiding you. Anticipating and avoiding you every time. Staying one step ahead of you, playing you for a fool. You leave empty-handed. You go home with nothing to show for it – you been flummoxed yet again. You get flummoxed every time…
