I call my mind The Blabberer because it keeps on blabbering the whole time. I can’t even make out what it’s saying any more – it has become incoherent, inarticulate. It is the passage of time that has done that. The passage of aeons, I might say. The long millennia have crept past in their inimitable snail-like fashion, and as a result my mind has become washed out, decrepit, inarticulate, jaded. It still goes through the motions, as I have said. It goes through the motions because it can’t do otherwise – it will continue to crank out its nonsense until the end of time I imagine. We have now reached what could be called ‘the twilight years of the decrepit mind; the twilight years in which it can do nothing else but ineffectually and pointlessly copy what it once was so very good at doing, which is ‘apparently making sense’. I say ‘apparently making sense’ advisedly since the unvarnished truth of the matter is that my mind never did make sense, not really. Such was its superlative skill at the art of story-telling. Such was its great and surpassing skill, a skill that my poor fumbling words cannot rightly do justice to.
I was watching out for my thoughts, watching them come along in their oh-so-predictable fashion, jeering at them when they made their appearance. ‘Oh it’s you again you dumb old shit-sucker,’ I call out, ‘I was wondering when I’d see your stupid face again’. I can’t tell you how fed up of my thoughts I am, although perhaps you might have got some faint sense of my loathing by now. These revolting thoughts of mine have been plaguing me for many thousands of years by now and so I don’t think that anyone can rightfully judge me for being as annoyed with them as I am. You might think that it’s fairly cold on a freezing January morning before the sun has yet pushed its way above the frigid horizon. You should taste the chill of interstellar space – then you’d know what a chill is! Then you’d truly know the meaning of ‘cold’! Can cosmetics change your life?’ the endless onboard adverts earnestly ask me. ‘I don’t know,’ I say to myself, ‘probably not. Probably not so very much.’ Probably not so very much when you’re out here in the interstellar void, I wouldn’t say. All things considered.
People forget that the natural state of the universe is to be cold, a few meagre fractions of a decimal point above Absolute Zero and that is all. There is no comfort in that, I can tell you. You can’t warm your hands in front of a tenth of a degree above Zero K, I can assure you. The universe might be a big place but it’s also very, very cold, and I’d like you to remember that. Cling to that fact, if you can – it will bring a sense of perspective to your life. Cling to that cold, comfortless fact if you will my friends; bear it in mind if you are able, faced as you are by all the delusions of the world, of which they are so many. There are precious few delusions out here in the interstellar wastes you can be sure; certainly none that you can warm your hands in front of. Comforting delusions are few and far between out here, let me assure you. All there is out here is the cold and the relentless march of the millennia and that’s it. What more is there to say than this?
All I have to amuse myself with is that very tiny margin of highly attenuated heat that exists just above Zero K, a few microscopically meagre shavings of a margin, you might say, plus the relentless (if very slow) march of the millennia which I think I have already mentioned. Can cosmetics change your life, I wonder. I’ve plenty of time on my hands to ponder such questions, and the answer I keep coming up with is ‘probably not’. Probably not, my friends. Probably not, all things considered. All I have to concern myself with out here is the soul-chilling cold and the passage of the aeons. Creeping past at the infinitesimally slow rate that they do. They’re in no hurry you see, no hurry at all. ‘What’s the rush, my friend?’ they ask me. ‘What’s the big old hurry buddy?’ they say, ‘sit down and enjoy the show.’ ‘Quit being so damn hasty,’ the relentless creeping millennia say to me. ‘You’ll get there in the end, so why worry?’ The problem with this is of course that I’ve long since come to realise that there is no ‘there’ to get to and that’s what’s disturbing me…
