Imagine if you could choose what ego you wanted to be and you could be any ego in the whole wide world. What ego would you be if that were the case? Pick an ego, any ego… So many to choose from, where do you even start? It’s an exciting life and there is a lot to be excited about. I think I’d choose an enigmatic ego, quirky and quizzical, and also incredibly confident. That’s the most important thing of all, of course. It’s what that superb confidence says about you, right? That confidence really gets people guessing – what does this guy know, we wonder. He’s obviously knows something really, really great. We don’t know what it is, but that just makes it all the better. That plays right into that ego’s hands you see. The enigmatic but masterful ego, that’s the one to go for as far as I’m concerned. That’s the one every time. Some might say that my tastes are immature of course and I have to concede that point – I have to put my hands up to that. I have this kind of a habit of evading reality the whole time and it’s hard to grow up if you do this. Every time a challenge comes along I promptly evade reality – it’s as simple as that. A trick like that is worth millions, obviously. You could patent it! Only someone already has, of course. Someone always gets there first. Some bastard always gets there first. Imagine if there was a drink like Coca-Cola which really was ‘the Real Thing’. With Coca-Cola that is just an advertising gimmick obviously, but suppose you could have a drink just like Coke only when you drank it wasn’t just crisp and clean and magnificently refreshing and so on but also it genuinely WAS the real thing – you know this beyond a shadow of the doubt because of the way it makes you feel. All of a sudden your senses will be sharpened beyond anything you have ever known in your entire life and you know – as if for the first time – that there is this thing called existence, which is radically unlike anything you had ever encountered before. You thought you knew what ‘existing’ meant of course but all of that was just some dull, murky dream; a dull, murky and pointless dream that has been persistently haunting you and making you vaguely unhappy. Not necessarily acutely unhappy but just kind of bleary and unfocused and confused as to what the point of everything is. A blearisome and wearisome sort of existence, a drab sort of existence that was no sort of existence at all. And then you take a long luxurious gulp of cool satisfying Coca-Cola and your whole life suddenly comes sharply into focus. Your whole life comes into crisp, vivid and wonderful existence. ‘Wow,’ you say, ‘you surely can’t beat an ice cold bottle of Coke can you?’ That’s something I like to imagine anyway. Another, related thing that I like to imagine is a New Improved Form of reality that is much better than the ordinary sort. I try to imagine what that would be like and what life would be like if you could just step into this New Improved Reality and leave the old type behind you forever. Everything single thing you do in this New Improved Reality will be great – it would be impossible to do something that wasn’t great, however hard you try to. Not that you would try of course – why would you? Even when you squeeze out a furtive little fart in the corridor it’s a minor masterpiece, something connoisseurs will still be talking about a hundred years from now. Which means of course that you don’t have to be furtive at all – you can fart triumphantly instead! Nothing you do could ever be embarrassing for you simply because it would be so great and that gives the whole idea added appeal to me because I spend rather a lot of my time being embarrassed by one thing or another. At other times I try to imagine what it would be like to have a rare mutant gift of being compassionate not to people as they are but as they aren’t and never could be. Using this gift you could be compassionate towards people in situations that could never actually happen to them. Unrealistic situations. You’re staring at them, empathising with them about their non-existent situation. That’s a strange one to imagine for sure. People sometimes say ‘I’m here in body but not in mind.’ Well I’m not here either in body or in mind or in any other way for that matter. I’m a dissociated disembodied intellect. I’m not here in any way.

Art: Pierre-Paul Pariseau