Every morning when I get a takeaway coffee from my local petrol station the machine congratulates me on my choice of ‘Rosa’ coffee and reassures me that very soon now I will be enjoying the fruits of my wise and informed choice. It’s in the bag. And this isn’t even science fiction – it’s real life! It’s my real life, every morning, every day of the week. How ridiculous this is, to be congratulated by the coffee making machine in your local petrol station on your choice of coffee when you don’t actually have any choice as it’s the only petrol station for miles. And what’s even more ridiculous is that I actually feel good when the damn coffee machine congratulates me on my good choice. I feel good every time…
The utter filth and downright degradation of socialised existence takes the biscuit really, doesn’t it? Is there anything more dismal? It’s so hard to extricate oneself from, too. Not that I have been trying very hard – I’m too demoralised by the whole thing to be trying very hard. Or trying at all really. I just allow myself to be swept along by the whole rotten ebb tide of it. The tide goes out and out and out until you can’t see any sign of the sea at all. You assume it’s there somewhere but there certainly isn’t any sign of it. It’s a rumour and nothing more. You don’t know whether to believe it or not. All that’s left are miles upon miles of stinking mudflats. Polluted mudflats, at that – toxicity is oozing up slowly between your gnarled old toes. And yet as you tune in you start to notice signs of life all the same – wide-eyed mud skippers, alert for danger, fiddler crabs out en masse and fiddling for all they’re worth, long legged wading birds, walking in exaggerated slow motion. For a moment you’re lost in this primaeval scene; you’re lost in it for a second but it’s a second that nevertheless seems to last forever. All traces of your stupid banal everyday life have evaporated, vanished without a trace. You are not there at all. Your so-called ‘existence’ is a stupid tedious dream, nothing more – a dream that will disappear forever if you let go of it. If you dare to let go of it…
And then the next thing is that you’re back again, turning up again just like a bad penny. Turning up again the same as always, going through the motions because you don’t know what else to do. You’re doing what you always do because that’s all there is. You don’t know what else you could be doing anyway – you’re stuck in the morass of everyday life, sunk right up to your eyebrows which are wriggling frenziedly just like two thick black furry caterpillars. Nothing else is moving in this surreal picture – just your eyebrows. Wriggling incongruously against a background of crushed red velvet. You could watch it forever. Vast realms of space open up within you – space that you never suspected to exist. You had no concept for it. You’ve taken too much LSD of course, far too much. Who knows how much? It’s too late to do anything about that now though – you’re just going to have to ride the wave! You’re just going to have to ride that wave, wherever it might take you. What choice do you have, after all?
