Very many people in these apoplectic times have come to believe, in all good faith, that they have one or more microchips implanted in their brain. ‘Yes, yes, yes, the old microchip narrative’, you say wisely. But we shouldn’t mock, we shouldn’t mock. I’ve got a microchip in my brain that tells me that all other people are lying about their microchips. My microchip won’t let me believe in their microchips, to put it bluntly, and as a result I laugh scornfully at them. I laugh scornfully because my narrative won’t let me believe in their narratives. My microchip is busy telling me that all this talk of microchips is piteous nonsense. I laugh myself sick every day to be honest. But we must not mock you see because that’s wrong. That’s the whole point. There has to be a point and that’s it. Each and every one of us has their very own microchip that has to be respected. Yes, yes, yes the old microchip narrative, you say. I laugh myself sick every day but that’s not right. ‘Don’t hide the madness,’ says Allen Ginsberg. Don’t hide the bloody old madness. Only perhaps it should be the other way around. Perhaps we should say ‘Don’t hide the vile conformity that is oozing out of you.’ That is the title of my third critically-acclaimed volume in sociology, as it happens. ‘Conformity in the Workplace’. In it I argue that human beings don’t exist. In my fourth – and yet to be published work – I intend to debunk the myth of the microchip once and for all. I haven’t particularly enjoyed writing it though, I must say. It’s a slog and those of you who are writers will understand what that means. I don’t actually want to write the bloody thing but there’s this frigging microchip in my brain that’s making me do it. You’ve read the book so now buy the tee-shirt. That’s life though, isn’t it? Or if it isn’t life then it’s something else, something hitherto unidentified. A parallel world in which what unfolds isn’t life at all but some glassy mechanical semblance of it. In this Glassy Realm illusory creatures gamble and skip through the streets, besporting themselves, capering like the imps they are. They experience torments of course, irrespective of all the gambling and all the capering. In this Glassy Realm illusory identities go on online dating sites looking for soul-mates, which is an irony that goes unnoticed by the average man or woman. At the very edge of your visual field something is flickering but you can’t look at it directly. You have to look without looking. It’s the Delusion Realm of course. In it Ages pass and Mighty Empires rise and fall…