I wanted to video chat with my friends but I don’t have any. I wanted to post a selfie but I had no face. I wanted to post my thoughts but nothing came into my head. I wanted to build a website that I was proud of but all I knew was despair. All I knew was rage. These were the first few lines of the story I was writing but somehow it all seemed so stale. ‘Am I a stale person?’ I wondered, ‘is that what’s wrong with me?’ When you clearly identify the problem then you also identify the solution, says Tony Robbins. Perhaps I should have been a motivational speaker, I think to myself. Perhaps I took up the wrong career? Perhaps I went down the wrong road. Perhaps I made poor life choices?’ I’m joking there, of course. That’s a big, big joke as far as I’m concerned. A big fucking joke. Do people really make choices in their lives? Is that really what you think? Maybe they do, I suppose, but I sure as hell never did. I just did whatever came to my head regardless of consequences, and even that’s not really true. I just acted upon my short-term desires, such as they were. That’s called blind mechanical tropism. Blind mechanical tropism will get you places other tropisms can’t. They could make an ad for it, couldn’t they? People could come knocking on your door, excuse me sir, they would say, have you ever considered handing over to your life to blind mechanical tropism? We can come in and talk about it, if you like. Folly is the best teacher, as you know. Folly is always the best teacher. That’s a laugh isn’t it? If someone like that was to have come knocking on my door I would have welcomed them with open arms. The tears would have come streaming down my cheeks. All I got were Jehovah’s Witnesses though. The Jumping Jehovah’s. A bad case of the jumping Jehovahs. They have their own form of tropism of course, as mechanical as you please, and so we mustn’t knock them for that. Days of sadness, days of rage, huh? Days of horror, days of despair. Days that were as bleak and pointless as a desert. I look back at those days with nostalgia, of course. I know well that I’ll never see those times again, and that thought brings tears to my eyes too. Those days are gone. There will never be their like again, never ever. So when people, in their thoroughly obnoxious way, tell me that I have made poor life choices, and that that is where I went wrong, I feel like laughing out loud. ‘You poor retarded twats,’ I feel like saying, ‘you poor godforsaken fuckwits. Why do you bother talking at all if all you can do is come out with inane shit like that? Life choices, indeed. Isn’t it interesting the way that certain phrases or ideas can enter the public domain and then run riot? Then you get every twat in town coming out with them, for all the world as if they had just thought of it themselves. Patting themselves on the back for being so clever as to say it. If there were some other empty generic idea around then they’d be coming out with that too. If there were some other dumb meme that happened to be the currency at the time. They’ll do that their whole lives, of course. You bet your underpants they do. And then they die, content in the knowledge that they have, in their time, been a mouthpiece for every dumbshit meme going. That’s the way of it however. You’d have to have a sense of humour about it though, otherwise you’d get quite cynical. You see an autonomous human being, I see a machine for transmitting dumb-arse memes. You see a person, I see a viral replicator, utterly incapable of originality of any sort. Originality is a dirty word around here, needless to say. You can get in trouble for that. You can be socially ostracised for that. Not that there’s any other way of being ostracised. Just don’t fucking talk to me about poor life choices, that’s all I have to say. When you identify the problem then you also identify the solution, isn’t that right? Of course it is. Makes perfect sense, after all, doesn’t it? Don’t see problems, see solutions. Here comes a solution, oh happy day! Here comes yet another bloody solution. All these bloody solutions would wear you down, wouldn’t they? Can I not just have a day that isn’t chock-a-block full of solutions? Is that too much to ask? It’s a big joke really isn’t it? Or it would be if I could find a sense of humour…