They call me the Lawbreaker. Yes, yes, yes. They call me ‘the Lawbreaker’ on account of how I am a rebel through and through. On account of how I am a pure rebel, on account of how I make my own rules, my own rules, my own rules, not the rules of some shit-sucking bureaucrat. The Lawbreaker – yes, yes, yes. You won’t find me following the rules like some dope, I can tell you that! No sir you won’t. In the middle of the night when the moon is high and the sheep are sleeping in the fields you can me roaring my defiance of the powers that be. Roaring, roaring, roaring. Insisting on my freedom, insisting on my independence from the thoughts of those who think they know best. Rebelling against their nasty little conformist thoughts, their nasty, nasty thoughts. The veins on my neck are fit to pop with all my roaring. They are standing up like purple ropes. My face is bright livid red like a giant misshapen beetroot. Roaring, roaring, roaring. Roaring like a demented fool, staggering around the fields like one who is drunk. I’m not drunk though, I’m perfectly sober. I know what’s going on – I know exactly what’s going on. My life’s a mess and I realise that – I can’t pretend that it isn’t. I’ve spent long enough pretending that I know what I’m doing and that I’m having a fulfilling life. I’ve spent too long doing that, far too long. My life isn’t fulfilling at all; on the contrary, it’s a sham. It’s a grotesque sham and I’d be the first to admit it. Maybe not quite the first but still. Eventually I will admit it, when all other options have run out. I think I am making my point clearly enough though. Loud and clear, loud and clear. There is no fulfilment in my life at all and – more than that – there’s no dignity. That’s why I’m so het up. That’s why I am running through the fields at 2:00 in the morning bellowing like a total jackass. Frightening the poor sheep out of their slumbers. Staggering and stumbling as I go. Wrestling with the existential issues. Wrestling with them as we all have to wrestle with them. You have to wrestle with these existential issues just as I do, I know that. We all have to wrestle with our existential terrors and that’s no laughing matter I can tell you! It’s shit and we all know that. I know that myself – I’m not pointing any fingers here! I’m well aware that we’re all in the same boat, the old same boat, the same old boat. No one said life was going to be easy after all. Or if they did then they were lying. If they did then there were telling porky pies. They were selling you a story that just wasn’t true. No one said that life was going to be meaningful or fulfilling, after all. No one ever said that. Or perhaps they did, perhaps they did. We’ve all watched TV shows where everyone has meaningful lives and we’ve all had those very same thoughts about it. We’ve all wanted to have a happy meaningful life just like the people we were watching on the show. We’ve all had that yearning, we’ve all had that pang of envy that cuts so deep. At least I presume we have. What would I know anyway? I like to engage in self-talk sometimes and often when I do so I ask myself how it happened that life became so complicated, how it all turned into such a mess. Well, I say ‘I like to..’ but that isn’t strictly true; the self talk is entirely involuntary – it’s forced upon me. I anguish over this question of how life got so very complicated and all this anguished involuntary self-questioning, as you might expect, only adds to the whole bloody mess.