My friends, my friends, my friends. My very good friends… Do you remember those generic good times we used to have before everything turned so very sour? Before the rotten old bad times came, that is to say. I know I do, for sure I do. I remember them well. I can hardly forget them – they are just about all I have to hang onto these days, after all. These memories will keep me going, now that I come to think of it. Without them I’d be sunk. Sunk like a battleship that has been holed beneath the waterline far too many times. Sunk without a trace. When you get sunk like that then there’s nothing left to say that you ever existed. Perhaps you didn’t, after all. Most probably you didn’t…

Do you remember all the generic discussions we used to have? All those generic discussions. Sometimes we’d stay up late into the night. They never meant a thing of course but that wasn’t the point. That was never the point. All those heartfelt generic discussions – I remember them all. I remember them all as if it were yesterday. You can’t beat those days you see. That’s the point I’m trying to make here – that you just can’t beat those days. Those good old generic days. Call me sentimental if you will but I have to have something to cling to, something to help me make sense of my life. My generic memories are the hook on which I hang everything you see, so please understand me on that one. My whole life is hanging on that hook. Hanging rather precariously it is true but hanging all the same. Dangling rather dangerously in a stiff breeze but dangling nevertheless. In defiance of all the odds.

It’s all about the forces that are acting against us, you see. All those terrible, terrible forces. What can we say about those forces? How can we characterise them? Are they quite as bad as some people say they are, or are they worse? Are they worse than we can imagine, worse than we are willing to imagine? Whatever you might have to say about them the bottom line is that we have to defy them for all we’re worth. We have to defy them and keep on defying them, for all we’re worth. For all we’re worth. Which may not much as much we like to think of course. Which may not be nearly as much as we like to think…

We could be illusions, you see. Nothing more than illusions. Figments of our own jaded imaginations. Trying to survive as best we can in an impeccably hostile universe. Grimly struggling to hold on when all the odds are against us. Did you never think of that one? I expect you did. We all think of that one, you see. It pops unwanted into our heads when we least expect it. ‘Maybe I am just a figment of my own impoverished imagination, desperately struggling to survive in a profoundly hostile universe’. That’s the thought we all have at some point or rather in our lives. And then – as soon as we have the thought – we immediately repress it. We repress it for all we’re worth. We struggle to bury it. We struggle to bury it no matter what the cost. And there is a cost. There is always a cost of course. There’s got to be a cost for that kind of thing, even though we struggle as hard as we possibly can not to find out what it is. That’s human life you know. That’s how it is. That’s human life in a nutshell. You may not want to hear it of course, but that’s the plain and simple fact of the matter.