‘Super-nice burgers are always super-nice,’ the billboard advertisement stated. The poster showed a man with a huge smile on his face, stuffing a burger into his mouth. ‘Wow I bet they are,’ I said to myself, eying the attractive poster, overcome with feelings of longing, ‘I just bet they are!’ The poster showed a man with a huge burger in his face stuffing a smile into his mouth. Friends are funny things aren’t they? You think someone is your friend and then the next thing is you discover they’re not really your friends at all, they’re not really your friends at all because you made them up. They are only mental constructs you see – they’re not really there at all. ‘I wondered lonely as a cloud,’ I quoted indifferently, ‘in the world made up of mental constructs.’ I didn’t know where to go after that. ‘I wandered lonely as a construct,’ I began again, ‘I wondered lonely as a construct in the world of bitterness and grief.’ I tried to tell the therapy-bot about my unrelenting feelings of bitterness and grief but it didn’t understand. It couldn’t relate, you see. It just stared at me blankly, trying to compute what I had just said. ‘I wandered lonely as a friggin asshole,’ I began again, but then grew weary of my own bullshit. My mood wasn’t good. ‘Super-nice burgers are always super-nice’, the billboard continued to state. It was starting to grate on my nerves at this stage. That’s a metaphor for life itself I realised. The adverts always say that life is super-nice but is it really? It always looks very nice, it looks super super-nice from the distance but then when you get right up close to it you realise it is covered in lots of little blemishes, like a bowl of fruit that’s gone off or like a loaf of Mother’s Pride Bread that’s covered in lots and lots of little specks of blue mold. As soon as you get up close and personal you can see the defects – no one looks good when you’re looking with a scanning electron microscope into the pores on their face do they? Similarly, life isn’t as pretty a picture as you might have thought when you actually see what it means to you personally. When you do that then you see that it’s full of problems! The problems in life are never-ending. Didn’t someone say that? You’d like to enjoy life of course, naturally you would, but then you look a bit closer and you see all the problems and that puts you off. You not sure that’s what you want. No one told about all those problems when you watched the promotional video. There was no word about that in the brochure. Suppose you find yourself knee-deep in problems, what are you going to do then? How would that make you feel? I was getting ratty at this stage you see. My thoughts were going in a bad direction. You used to have a life that millions would envy; you used to have friends, plenty of them too – only now you realise that they were all just a mental constructs in your head.