I was eating signature truffles – not just any truffles but signature truffles. Eating, eating, eating! Eating my head off. Forgetting everything in that dreadfully monotonous mandibular chore. ‘Will I ever stop eating,’ I wondered, ‘will I ever stop?’ I’m eating to forget, or am I simply forgetting to stop eating? Everyone remembers the day when the Terror Clown first appeared on the streets of the capital, none who lived in those times can forget the horror that he brought. None can forget the evil of those days. That’s where my story begins you see. That’s where my story always begins.
Not just any truffles but signature truffles and that’s the point I would like you to bear in mind. That’s the point I’d like you to bear in mind as I progress in my narrative. Every story has a beginning so they say, but that just happens to be where they’re wrong. Some stories start halfway through, others at the end. Some stories are completely isomorphic – the beginning is the same as the middle and the middle is the same as the end. Many stories turn out to be isomorphic: the end was inherent in the beginning and the beginning is reiterated yet again at the conclusion of the whole thing. The end is reiterated in the beginning and the beginning is reiterated at the end and so it doesn’t actually make the slightest bit of difference whatever way we look at it. This is how it is with our stories, this is invariably how it is when we make the mistake of living our own narratives – we think we’re getting somewhere but we’re not. We are the victims of our own excuses, our own pointless self-justifications.
Horrible things can be pretty bloody horrible my friends and I don’t think that we should forget that. We’ve been talking about the nice fluffy things for far too long and it’s time to embrace a bit of actual reality. Reality has become a dirty word around here of course. A very dirty word. Suppose you could make up any reality you liked with your own mind, what would it be like? Let me give you a clue here – it wouldn’t be anything like real reality, would it? Whatever else it might be like it certainly won’t be anything like real or genuine reality. It’ll be like something else, my friends, it will be like something else. Some other wretched crappy dismal old thing. It’ll be a travesty. I’m popping signature truffles into my mouth absentmindedly, a dribble of thin chocolatey fluid running unnoticed down my chin. Littered around me on the carpet are the accumulation of empty truffle boxes, piled up two or three boxes deep in places. Time has passed and I – as ever – am playing the part of Rip van Winkle falling into a convenient time-warp. ‘How’s it going, old timer?’ they ask me, ‘how’s it going…’
The fire in my living room has long since gone out and it’s turned terribly cold. The TV is droning on in the background, as it always does. It’s a late-night shopping channel advertising ingeniously designed kitchen utensils. No household should be without them. I’m wondering what the point of my life is – I find myself being confronted with an undeniable and highly corrosive sense of meaninglessness. It’s like a type of deja vu. I must be having one of my ‘existential crisis moments’, it occurs to me. Nothing to worry about, just one of my regular old existential crises. Time for some positive affirmations, I tell myself, time for some serious self-affirming activity. I’m losing impetus though; I’m losing impetus and I haven’t even started yet. That’s the story of my life really, it occurs to me – some people complain of never being able to finish anything but for me the problem is more fundamental than that, more deep-rooted than that. I’m playing the part of Rip van Crinkle, you see – coming groggily back to myself in the midst of all this banal chaos and wondering what I’m doing here. Is this really my life or is someone just playing a nasty trick on me?
