I graduated with enhanced skillsets in Superhuman Agility and Time Manipulation and very quickly found work in a world-renowned multinational corporation, where my talents were richly rewarded. Such is always the way in this world, as you know. Such is always the way. We become tools at the disposal of malign mechanical forces, do we not? Of course we do, of course we do. One would have to be a real dope to argue otherwise! Could anyone really be that stupid, I hear you ask, as to deny such an obvious truth? How could it be possible that a person could be that absurdly idiotic? How indeed, how indeed. We all opt to serve the Great Malignancy in the end, no matter what crap we might come out in our youth. I’m sure I’m no different to anyone else in that respect. We take all the mind-expanding drugs, all the LSD and all the rest of it, we come out with all the usual inane bullshit, and then we opt to serve the Great Malignancy!

Such is always the way of course. We are all compliant tools in the of malign mechanical forces and that’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to say on the matter. Please use me, we say. Please please use me in any way you see fit, oh Great Malignancy. Because you’re so great. That’s what we say every day – we may not say it out loud but we say it all the same. We say it every day of our lives. It’s true that there is precious little dignity in this. To be perfectly honest, there’s no dignity in it at all. There is zero dignity in it, we might say. Precisely zero dignity is what we have left to us. We couldn’t really expect anything else though, could we? We cope however, we cope perfectly well. We cope as we have always coped – by creating a custom-made state-of-the-art fantasy narrative for ourselves. What great mileage we get out of our fantasy narratives! Great mileage indeed. What lives we lead! What mighty lives. They say no one can both have their cake and eat it but I think we do pretty well, all things considered. How is it possible, you ask, that a person could be a craven crawling coward of the very worst kind and yet be offensively arrogant every single minute of the day? It  doesn’t seem right, does it?

The price we pay is a certain ‘brittleness of the ego’, I suppose you could say. There has to be some kind of a price after all. There always has to be some kind of a price. Name your price, we say to the forces that govern us, and the price is a certain brittleness of the ego. We’ll cut up rough very quickly indeed about nothing at all, in other words. We’ll cut up awful rough – very rough indeed dash and over absolutely nothing at all. There is I suppose a definite comedic element to this. We are partaking in the great comedy, in other words, although our intense arrogance won’t allow us to see this. We are playing our part in the comedy, whether we want to or not…

I’m trying very hard to believe that my life is meaningful, although it very obviously isn’t. I’m straining myself to the very limit in the attempt and the cracks are starting to appear. Rather serious looking cracks too. I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in this situation? No doubt you have, no doubt you have. I feel I should give you the benefit of the doubt in this. I’m taking a long hard look at my life and I’m trying to work out if I might not have taken certain poor life choices along the way. And not just a few of them either but a whole series of them, one after the other after the other! A type of ‘domino effect’, you might say. That could be it, I say to myself. That could well be it. That could well be where I went wrong…