Maybe they are bad. Probably they are bad. I’m almost convinced that they are – you wouldn’t have to work very hard to convince me that they’re bad! Just one word would do it. You just have to raise one eyebrow, give me a knowing look, and – bang! – I’ll be convinced. It doesn’t even have to be a knowing look – any sort of look could do. You just have to look at me and I’ll be convinced. I’m convinced already. Perhaps they’re evil? Perhaps they’re under the power of the wicked one? People tell me that there isn’t any such thing as ‘evil’ – they tell me that Satan is just a myth. Poor deluded fuckers that they are. I see Satan every day!
When I look back over my life I wonder what I was thinking at the time. Do you ever to that – do you ever look back over your life’? Or is that just something people in third-rate novels too? Maybe I’m no more than a character in a third-rate novel. I don’t mean that literally, I know that it isn’t literally true, but perhaps it’s figuratively true. Anything at all could be figuratively true, after all. What I mean is that perhaps I’m just doing what I think I ought to be doing, in order to function as a human being. In order to be a proper person. Which is, no doubt, what I’m supposed to do, or supposed to be. Although probably no one really cares. They wouldn’t really, would they? They wouldn’t really give a damn…
But anyway, when I look back over my life I really do wonder what the hell I was thinking at the time. I really and truly am utterly baffled, and not in a nice way. It’s a mystery for sure, but not a pleasant mystery; definitely not a pleasant mystery. It’s leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth; my mouth feels like a dirty old piece of carpet that no one has ever bothered to clean. Never has anyone thought to clean it. No one has ever taken the responsibility for that. It’s too late to do anything with it now – the best thing you can do at this stage is throw it into a bloody skip and be done with it.
That’s all figurative too of course. It’s all just figurative. I still don’t know where my head is most of the time. I just don’t know where I’m at, I really don’t. What gets me every time however is the way everyone you meet automatically presents themselves or portrays themselves as knowing exactly what they are doing, knowing exactly where they are going, and also knowing exactly how they are going to get there. They’re smarmy bastards, in other words. I’m being deadly serious here – I’m not spoofing or trying to be clever or anything like that. It genuinely puzzles the hell out of me how people do this, and it always has done. This has puzzled me for as long as I can remember. The old question. ‘How do they do it,’ right? How do they do that? I didn’t know that I was baffled – I was baffled without knowing that I was and that’s the worst type of baffled. I honestly think I spent most of my childhood, not to mention my adolescence, in a state of low-grade perplexity. It was only relatively recently that I started to understand what the source of my puzzlement was, or is. I have – I suppose you could say – only gained a bit of sense of this rather late stage in my life, which I suppose you could say is a bit of a shame.
I’m still baffled now when I see people presenting themselves as knowing exactly what they’re doing. It’s like they’re saying “Yeah, yeah, yeah – I SO know what I’m doing…” They say that all the time. They say it with everything they do. It’s a studied posture of competency, only there’s more to it than that. It’s as if we all need to come across as being so very au fait with this little thing called ‘life’. So very au fait. We can’t ever look as if we don’t get it. There is no need for me to belabour the point; I know you understand what I’m trying to saying here. It’s not as if you are going to need a Masters degree in philosophy or something. We aren’t discussing Kant or Husserl or Heidegger. It’s like poker really isn’t it? We are just expert bluffers, that’s all. No more, no less. We have perpetrated a truly fantastic bluff, an absolutely world-class bluff. That’s actually what our so-called bloody ‘life’ is all about – it’s about ‘living the bluff’! Or does the bluff live us, right? Yeah? You get what I’m saying here, I presume.
So you see, I’m not confused any more, or rather I am still confused but I’m not confused about why I’m confused. I’m still baffled but now I know why. It doesn’t really help though because I’ve learned it too late. It’s an old story isn’t it? The insight has to come too bloody late. What the hell am I going to do with it now? My outlook has become soured at this stage – I have no time for people and their hideous bullshit anymore. I’m not speaking figuratively now by the way – that isn’t just a figure of speech. I mean exactly what I say – people talk hideous bullshit all day, every day and – what’s worse – they expect you to take them seriously. That’s what this poor sad world of ours is made of – it’s wall-to-wall hideous bullshit. Bullshit wherever you look. Why doesn’t anyone say anything huh? You’d think someone would say something, wouldn’t you?
