I had achieved legendary status in my own febrile imagination. I had achieved supreme epic status. I was playing the game, you see. Everyone knows the game and yet no one knows it. Everyone is playing the game and yet no one knows that they’re playing it. You can’t tell me that that isn’t a funny sort of thing! By God you can’t – that’s the funniest thing I know of. They’ll lie to your face and tell you that they don’t know what you’re talking about; they’ll try to bamboozle you. They’ll ALWAYS try to bamboozle you. They’re bastards that way…
I kept telling myself that I was supreme, you see. Repetition is the key. Positive thinking can help even when it’s not true – that’s a well-known psychological fact. My head is full of well-known psychological facts. It’s full of well-known psychological facts that only I know. I had finally achieved legendary status in my own imagination. All around me I see people doing good things and I want to do them too. I can’t though – I can’t do anything good. I can only look on like an impotent onlooker. I look on and I yearn; I’m full of impotent yearning these days. Why can’t I do good things like other people do, I ask myself. I’m not just full of impotence and yearning, I’m also full of envy and corrosive bitterness. One follows on from the other, of course: it’s a logical progression and there’s no way to get around it. The whole point about logical progressions is that there is no way to get around them.
‘What’s it like to have achieved legendary status in your own febrile imagination?’ you might ask me. ‘Well, I must say it feels pretty damn good,’ I’d reply. ‘But only in my own imagination that is, not in reality. It doesn’t feel good in reality. In reality it doesn’t feel like anything. In reality it just feels like a big fat existential blank.’ You know this as well as I do, of course. You’re only asking to be polite. Shallow pleasures for shallow people. Trivial satisfactions for trivial folk. We don’t want to be shallow, no one wants to be shallow or trivial, but that’s just the price you have to pay. That’s the price you have two pay for living your whole life in your imagination. There is a price for everything, you know. There’s no point in acting all surprised when they walk up to you and hit you with the bill, after all! Dumbness is no excuse in the eyes of the law…
Do you know that thing when someone has sadness deep down inside of them and they try to communicate that sadness by calling you bad names and undermining your fragile self-esteem? I get that a lot. I get that an awful lot. There are an awful lot of unhappy, unfulfilled people out there, I guess. That’s probably just the type of world we live in – a world that is full to the brim of unhappy, unfulfilled people. I know I should feel compassion for them but I don’t. I’m way past compassion at this stage. There is nothing in my heart but darkness.
Simple minds are easily pleased, so they say, but it just so happens that I’ve got an extraordinarily complicated one. I keep on inventing new improved personalities for myself but none of them seem to work out. Each one comes with its own special set of problems. Each one turns into a nightmare. I’ve always been what you might call ‘an unpopular guy’, but recently my popularity has hit an all-time low. Even the curs in the street despise me. Or maybe that’s only in my imagination. He who lives by the imagination dies by the imagination, isn’t that what they say?
