I was trying to have a nice life, a pleasant life, a satisfying and rewarding sort of life but my self kept tripping me up. I can see it now, glowering in the corner, sulking and sending out bad vibes, The damn thing has jinxed me for as long as I can remember – I keep on trying to make a go of things and my self keeps on jinxing everything I do. It’s a bad egg. It’s a filthy loathsome spiteful thing and that’s being nice about it. That’s giving it the benefit of the doubt, which it doesn’t deserve. It deserves to be shot, is what it deserves. I’ve tried everything to get rid of it but nothing seems to touch it. I took up meditation because that’s supposed to be a good way of eliminating the self. ‘No self, no problem,’ isn’t that what they say? No self, no problem. I don’t doubt it but chance would be a fine thing – the longer I meditate for the sulkier my self grows, the worst of a mood it gets into. It becomes sinister and evil. I’d sit down to meditate in the practice room and the whole time my self would be smiling at me with sick malevolence. I’m not asking for much, as I’ve said – I just want a pleasant and not-too-stressful life. I’d also like to transcend egoic existence if possible, because egoic existence is a pile of shit, as we all know. Egoic existence means that you are compelled, every minute of the day, to be identifying with this embarrassing asshole construct called ‘the ego’ which runs around making a right dick of itself. It’s a deeply peculiar thing but the ego loves to draw attention to itself – as we know – when it’s best move would be to lie low and avoid doing this because when it succeeds in drawing attention to itself it unfailingly goes on to show itself up as being a complete asshole! Needless to say it doesn’t like being shown up as an asshole because that is devalidating for it. Is the ego stupid or what? My own personal ego is very energetic and completely uncontrollable and it’s constantly running around making a knob of itself whilst I look on, in terror of what it might do next. My ego makes me have a horrible life believe me; my loathing for it is absolute. It grows stronger and more intrusive every day whilst I become more and more mortified as a result. I’d like to tell people ‘it’s not me, it’s my ego’! Sometimes I do tell people this, not that it helps any because they just think I’m weird. It’s like a sinner who continuously claims that it is the devil who was the causative factor behind his bad actions. That’s an old one, isn’t it? It’s a very plausible excuse to be making in religious circles because everyone knows that this is exactly the kind of thing that the devil does – i.e. he gets people to do bad stuff so as to get them into trouble. This is in fact probably the only thing the devil does. That’s his role after all; that’s his job description. Messages are going around and around in my head driving me crazy: ‘the six habits of very intelligent people’; ‘four things that highly successful people never do’; ‘seven sure signs you might be dating a sociopath.’ That’s from spending too much time online of course, passively absorbing the astonishing filth that resides there. The internet is like a pathologically enlarged colon isn’t it – it has a very large capacity but everything in it smells pretty much the same. I’m so disillusioned with the human race, I really am. I’m disillusioned with myself and I’m disillusioned with the human race. I read this thing yesterday saying that you should wrap your left foot in aluminium foil and leave it all wrapped up for at least four hours. Why the fuck would you do that? How many people actually read that and then go ahead and do it? People are so empty, so lacking in initiative, that they are literally desperate to be told what to do…