I was a ghost, haunting the dilapidated infrastructure of my own futile routines, my own meaningless habits. ‘Wow!’ I said, this is fun! I’m having so much fun haunting the dilapidated infrastructure of my own futile routines, my own pointless habits.’ Only it wasn’t fine at all you see – it was very far indeed from being fun.
‘Very far indeed, very far indeed…’ came back the multitudinous echoes, only they weren’t real echoes but only my thoughts, only my tired old thoughts. In my dream life had become very complicated, hideously complicated in fact, and I was under tremendous pressure to solve it. I absolutely had to solve it, but I couldn’t. The horror of that moment is etched on my awareness forever. I can never escape from that moment, no matter how long I spend wandering down the endless dusty corridors of what I am pleased to call ‘my life’.
When we are playing the game then we can’t let anything else put us off what we’re doing. The game is all that matters when we’re playing the game. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ I scream, ‘can’t you see that I’m playing the game?’ The thought that someone might interfere with me playing the game terrifies me; that’s just what some people would love to do however. They’d love to put me off playing the game. Can you imagine their wickedness? Can you credit it?
‘Wow!’ I said, ‘I’m having so much fun.’ I was a deteriorated personality shell and I was drifting inexorably towards my Entropic Doom. I was drifting inexorably down-stream towards my ultimate dissolution, the way deteriorated personality shells always do. ‘Wow, I’m having such fun.’ I declared. I was happy but at the same time nostalgic for a past that had never happened, a past that existed only an absurd story that I told myself. ‘You had a real past and you really do exist’, I told myself fervently. ‘Yes, yes, yes – those were the good old days, the good old days when things hadn’t turned ugly the way they are now.
Choices are the thing, so they say. Choices, choices, choices. Some good, some bad, but all bad really. All bad, all terrible. Awful from beginning to end. ‘What’s this all about, did you make a bad life choice somewhere down the line?’ you ask. You laugh heartlessly, rejoicing at my discomfiture. Rejoicing like crazy, jumping up and down with excitement. You’re being cruel to be kind. Or maybe you’re just being cruel. That’s your choice of course and I shan’t censure that you on that one. It’s all about the choices we make, apparently. So they say…
When I was young they taught me how to play the game. That’s a line from a song isn’t it? But who’s ‘they’?’ you snap back instantly, ‘what on earth are you on about now?’ You’re getting irritated. That’s your game, you see. That’s your game and I respect your right to play it. What else can you do, after all? What choice do you have? People come from the past as you know. They come from the past and they will do anything to stay there, as you know. They will literally do anything at all. That’s the basis for our existence, such as it is. Such as it is. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, after all.
‘What did you decide? What choice did you make?’ you ask, agog with long-awaited anticipation. ‘I decided to decide,’ I reply smugly, ‘I chose to make a choice. I decided to play the game.’ Only that isn’t true – the game decided to play me. The game decided to play me playing the game, only there isn’t a game, not really. That’s the joke. The game decided me – the game decided everything about me.
