I’m so often tormented by sad old ghosts. I don’t know if that’s true for you? Some of these sad old ghosts pretend to be me, you see. Well, all of them pretend to be me really, now that I come to think of it. It’s just that some of them pretend better than others! Some do a better job of it, you could say – some do a decent job whilst others are a lot more sloppy.
‘Hello sad old ghost’, I say, ‘what’s the form like today?’ Only I don’t actually say that of course. In an ideal world I might say it. ‘Hello sad old ghost – how’s it kicking?’ Some of these sad old ghosts are me, that’s true as well, of course. So when a ghost comes along to torment me I have to ask it if it’s me. ‘Hello sad old ghost,’ I’ll say, ‘are you me?’ Are you me? Are you me? Are you me?
‘Hello sad old me’, says the ghost, ‘how’s your cotton-picking day going buddy?’ And he gives me a wink, just for good measure. Everything’s just for good measure really, isn’t it? For good measure, for good measure. I thought I’d throw that in, just for good measure. ‘Hello sad old me’, says the ghost. ‘Hello sad old me.’ Dreams come and go you know. That’s the way it is with dreams – first they come and then they go.
I find all of this very perplexing, I must say. What am I supposed to make of it all? I ask myself, ‘what’s my part in it all? What role must I play?’ We have to strut our feeble stuff, after all, isn’t that what Shakespeare says? Get out there and strut your feeble stuff for an hour or two, Shakespeare tells us. Or maybe he doesn’t. I could have that all wrong of course. I so often have things all wrong.
My role has been revealed to me. My role is to keep going around asking what my role is, no more than that. No more and no less. The part I play in all this is to be perpetually asking myself what part I’m supposed to be playing. Although why I asked myself this question I don’t know. I’m the last person I should be asking. I suppose when it comes down to it what this means is that I don’t have a role. ‘Sorry, no role for you,’ says the casting director. ‘No role for you here…’
Sad old ghosts, huh? What can you say, what can you say? Every day they come to plague me, did I tell you that already? What’s their bloody game, would you say? What’s their bloody old game? You won’t be drawn however – you’ve heard it all before and you won’t be drawn. You know all about the ghosts but you’re not saying a thing. You’re keeping schtum.
Some of the ghosts come with revelations of course. We mustn’t forget them. Revelations about the nature of space and time. Revelations about the nature of space and time are the best revelations of all, wouldn’t you say? Time is your neighbour endlessly trimming his hedge with a strimmer on a Sunday morning. Space is an eddy of wind in the corner of your garden, blowing dead leaves around and around. Space and time, my friends, space and time.
Normally I create my own private world by thinking lots and lots of stupid thoughts more or less continuously. These stupid thoughts spin around and around in a Great Wheel, only it’s not so much a ‘Great Wheel’ as a ‘Crappy Wheel’. It’s a Wheel of Crap. I call it the Garbage Universe and this is where I make my home. Sometimes I also call it Satan’s effluence because that’s what it is. People interrupt me sometimes to ask me pointless questions and when this happens I always feel intense annoyance – ‘Can’t they see that I’m creating the Garbage Universe’, I say to myself angrily, what’s wrong with them?’
