Laughing out loud even though nothing is funny. Laughing out loud even though you’re not funny, even though you are angry and bitter. You are always angry and bitter and you have given up wondering why. You have long ago given up wandering why or trying to remember why. Doing strange things just for the sake of doing strange things, doing strange things just for the sake of being stranger than everyone else.

You’re angry at the meat machine for letting you down. You’re angry with it for refusing to perform properly, you can’t remember the last time it performed properly. Did it ever perform properly, you wonder? Did it ever? You’re shouting at it, berating it – ‘Work properly meat machine,’ you shout, ‘work properly, damn you!’

The meat machine ignores you though. It’s going its own way; it’s been going its own way for a long time. It’s sullen and sluggish and it ignores you when you  tell it to do. It’ll let you down if it gets the chance dash – it’s lazy and full of mute hostility. You’re cursing it as you walk along. You’re cursing it with every step you take.

‘You’re having a great life’, your invisible virtual friends tell you glibly, ‘this is your very own life and it’s so great!’ Your invisible virtual friends always tell you this. ‘It’s all yours’, they say, ‘this wonderful life is all yours, every tiny little bit of it. It’s specially for you and no one else. No one else can have it, only you…’

You used to believe the smooth commercial voices of your virtual friends. You used to believe them when they told you how great and special your life was. You used to get excited by it, but not anymore. It was a long, long time ago that you used to believe this. You haven’t been excited by your life for a long time. You can’t even remember how long it’s been. Now you’re full of hatred towards the voices: they are constantly mocking you with their bland cliched chatter, their slick and meaningless commercial messages. They belong to the Evil World – you realise that now. You didn’t use to know that but now you do. Now you do…

Somewhere up above you in the burnt-out sky the Maker of All Bad Things is looking down at you. You can sense him; you can sense his ever-present malignancy. He’s up there laughing at you. The Great Malign Brute, looking down at you with his infinite malice. You can feel the hideous oppressive weight of it pressing down on you, leaning on you, sapping your energy. You can barely find the strength to continue walking. You can barely breathe.

‘Walk, you meat machine, walk!’ you tell your body. You instruct it to raise a fist up into the air and shake it in a gesture of defiance to the Great Malign One, the author of all your misery. The meat machine obeys you slowly, reluctantly. The Brute in the sky continues to look down at you impassively. Your gesture is laughably futile and you know it. You wish you could find some feeling of satisfaction in the expression of your defiance but you can’t. All your victories are hollow ones.

There was a time when things were different, you know that. Before the Evil World crystallised around you to crush the good out of everything, before the Despiser took up his position of Authority on his Throne of Power. There was a time when life actually meant something. The meat machine is letting you down again, you simply don’t have the strength to keep on driving it anymore. It ignores your commands – it’s lazy and sullen and it doesn’t serve you anymore. It serves another. It serves the Entropy Lord. And it always did, if the truth were known. It always did…