Do you know that thing where you know your life has gone off course and you know that there is nothing you can do about it? Or rather – should I say – do you know that thing where your life has gone off course and you know that you could do something about it but at the same time you also know with absolute certainty that you won’t because you’re just too bloody lazy? Maybe you do know that thing and maybe you don’t. Who knows? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, right? I don’t know. I know that thing anyway and since it’s me that’s writing about it that’s the important thing. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, right? Isn’t that the way? And if it wasn’t the one way it would surely be the other, wouldn’t you say, and so all’s well that ends well. I’m fine and fast once I get started but the thing is that I never do get started and that’s the problem right there.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I’d like to go and pay my respects to the King. Sometimes it just feels right to do that. Sometimes on the other hand it doesn’t feel right to do that and so I don’t; and at other times I just know that is what I have to do. It’s indescribable really. The feeling, I mean. You know, but you don’t know how you know. That’s how it is, that’s just how it is. Pay your respects, pay your respects. Yes, yes, yes. You have to pay your respects. My feet will be shuffling along all by themselves, shuffling away down the road. Doing some kind of strange shuffling dance without any intention or guidance on my part. They’re responding to the magic. Responding to the siren’s call. Not a police-car siren that is – the other kind. The kind that lures you to doom…

The only thing you can do when your life has gone off course and you’re too lazy and cowardly to confront the fact is to make out that everything is going to plan just the way you want it to. You have to make out that you’re on track just the same. Bang on track just the way you want to be. That way you can get to be angry with anyone that says anything to you. You can cut up rough and show the ugly side of your personality, which is all of it. You get to unload some of your personal negativity, of which you have plenty. Plenty to spare, plenty to go around. Where would you be without all your personal negativity, after all? What would you actually do with yourself if you weren’t perpetually busy unloading your personal negativity everywhere you go?

We’ve all got goals of cause and goals are important. Everyone knows that goals are important. When I meet someone new the first thing I do is to ask them what their goals are. Then I tell them mine. I tell them what mine are. I list them off, ticking them off on my fingers.  I enumerate them: the short-term ones, the medium-term ones and also the long-term ones. Goals are so extremely important. I generate goals as I go along – I project them ahead of me like dazzling shooting stars burning themselves out in never-to-be-repeated streaks across the night sky, like bright sparkling lights shining in the dead of night. When the fuel tank runs dry and I run out of goals then I make the goal of having some new goals. I do a bit of goal-setting. My Number One Goal is to always have some goals. A whole bunch of them. That way I will never run out of goals. Never ever.

What’s your goal? What’s your goal? On another level of course my goal is to make sure that I never see that my life has gone totally off course. That’s an important goal too. You bet it’s important! I make up goals for myself as I walk down the street – today I’m going to do this, tomorrow I’m going to do that, the next day I’m going to do the other. I’m firing off goals nine to the dozen. My fantasy is that I actually know what the hell I’m doing in my life! It’s pure, pure fantasy but I believe it all the same. It’s an outrageous fantasy, an utterly ridiculous fantasy, but there you go! So what’s my point here, what’s my point? Sometimes I struggle to come to the point and I freely admit that. Sometimes I quite forget what my point is, but not this time. No sir, not this time! This time I’m coming right at. The effort is giving me a shocking headache as it happens but staying I’m on track with it for once. ‘Stay on track and don’t look back!’  – that’s my motto…

My point – if I can hold onto the thought for a moment (which as I say isn’t easy) – is that it involves this weird type of effort to convincingly pretend to yourself that your life is proceeding just as you want it to when it totally isn’t, to make out that you’re in charge of the whole show when really it’s as if you’re in a rickety old bus careering out of control down a steep mountain incline with the brakes busted and the steering not worth a damn! Your life is utter folly, utter madness, and yet you’re telling yourself that everything is hunky-dory and that you are doing great. You’re pretending that there’s some sort of sense, some sort of sanity to what you’re doing, in the face of all the evidence and although you believe it, there’s still this weird kind of effort involved, as I say. There is this weird kind of ‘forcing’ going on that you are totally not acknowledging. You are perfectly relaxed – if not to say downright complacent – but at the same time you’re not, not really…