You’re coughing up beetles everywhere and that’s a bad start to the day. You’re coughing up crawling bugs and that’s a very bad start to the day. You’re coughing your guts up and there are small chitinous creatures all over your bedroom floor. Your own body is a source of horror to you. You are in bad form; you are grumpy and full of bad intent. You know that you’re not open to the healing energy of the spiritual realm. You’re definitely not open to that. No way are you open to that.

I had this idea of myself of course and I won’t say that I didn’t get a lot of satisfaction from it along the way. I got plenty of satisfaction from it but I also got hideous pain. We all know that this is how it goes of course – we’re all wise to that. We’ve all been round the block enough times to know that, I’d say! If I go to the trouble of imagining you sitting in a circle around me then I can immediately see that you are all nodding in agreement – you all know know exactly what I’m talking about. ‘Oh yes,’ you say, ‘that’s the way it goes alright. Everyone knows that. That’s the way it always goes…’

Yes, I have many fond memories of those times. Those times when I used to hang out with my idea of myself and we’d get up to all sorts of crazy shit. Good times, my friends, good times. We will never see their like again, no matter how long we wait around. You’ll never see times like those again. I chuckle nostalgically as I think of them. I can feel two great slow tears making their way down my creased, leathery cheeks. I do indeed have many memories of happy times spent when I believe myself to be that old idea of myself that I used to have back then. It was such great fun; there was great Craic there for sure. There was pure satisfaction to be had out of it but – at the same time – there was also hideous pain. The words don’t exist with which I might paint a picture of that pain – I can’t explain what it was like for me to be locked up, as I was locked up, in my own private hell world for all those long years. For all those long decades, should I say. The English language doesn’t have the vocabulary necessary for me to be able explain what I went through then, it really doesn’t. Even so, however, perhaps you can get at least some slight hint of what I’m talking about. I’m trusting that you can.

You’re not feeling so hot this morning anyway, and that’s a fact. Not so hot at all. You’re not in great shape – every bit of you aches and your muscles are almost entirely wasted away at this stage. You can’t stop coughing. Cough, cough, cough. That’s the only sound that is to be heard. That’s the soundtrack to your life. That terrible, dry, hacking cough. All the beetles inside of you trying to escape. You’re like a rotten sack of flour that has burst open only instead of flour coming out of you it is weevils. They want to infect the world. The life energy itself has deserted you now and in its place came the beetles, reddish brown in hue and marching in great columns! They are at least well-organized. ‘Is this what it’s like,’ you wonder, ‘when the life energy itself finally deserts you and your body dissolves into unclean insects?’ No matter how bad you might feel, another day has dawned and you know that you have to get on with it. There’s no escape – your life awaits you, no matter how unpalatable that might presently seem to you. No one else’s life awaits you, just your own, so you had better get on with it. No one is going to come and give you a better one.

You’re not feeling so great this morning, but there is nothing to be done about it. ‘It is what it is’, you tell yourself. It is what it is. You just have to get on with it and you realize that well. No one realizes that better than you. You have to shave and get dressed. You have to eat breakfast and make yourself ready for the day. Through the kitchen window you can see that the sun is already high in the sky – it must be mid-morning at least. It’s later than you thought. The sky is – you notice – a strange orange colour. It is as if there is a great rusty stain that is spreading from one horizon to the other. You have the feeling that you are hallucinating. Nothing seems real. The light is unhealthy, sick-looking and there is a sense that some great natural disaster – or even cataclysm – is about to unfold. There is utter silence – even the birds are afraid to sing. Something terrible is about to happen but you don’t have a clue as to what it is.