I was only playing at being playful – it wasn’t real at all. Every single gesture, every single facial nuance, every single throwaway comment, it was all calculated down to the very last detail. Nothing left to chance. I’m playing the Cosmic Game, the same as anyone else, and there’s nothing any of us can do about that. Playing at being carefree, playing at being whimsical and amused. Playing at giving damn. It’s all just one long act and it has me worn out at this stage, but it’ll be worth it in the end. You put in the effort and then you reap the reward, right? Oh to be an ego, oh to be a self, huh? That’s the ticket, for sure. That’s the jolly old ticket. You can’t beat it, can you? Oh to be an ego, oh to be a jolly old self. That’s the dream after all, and who doesn’t want to live the dream?

Music is playing from a myriad hidden speakers in the ceiling above our heads and the fleas are jumping the Fandango in the living room carpet. Do fleas jump the Fandango? These ones did. They were having a party, their little flattened bodies flying like crazy bullets in every direction. A small guy, yet with an unusually expansive multicoloured arse on him like that of a particularly magnificent mandrill, he often used to try to get the better of me. Well, he often did get the better of me, as it happened. He always got the better of me. ‘He’s not playing the Cosmic Game’, I used to complain angrily, ‘he’s playing the basic primate game, he’s playing the mandrill game’.

The lesser mandrills used to kiss his multicoloured butt, if they got the chance. They actually used to queue up for the honour, if you can believe that. Occasionally some poor bastard would fail to show him the proper respect and then he would have to play dead whilst the chief honcho and his top cronies pissed on him. That would usually settle the score satisfactorily. Usually but not always. I remember wishing one day that I could get to be a crony too, even a middle-ranking crony would have been fine. Anything to get me in a position higher up in the power pyramid; anything to reach a position where there gets to be more pissing than being pissed upon. That’s what makes all the difference, after all. A simple thing like that, and yet when you’re on the wrong side of the great divide between ‘pissers’ and ‘pissed upon’ it makes life so wretchedly miserable, so sadly lacking in opportunities for joyous ego-fulfilment.

It never happened to me however – I never made the grade. That was never on the cards for me – I was a misfit, a loner, and on this account unable ever to mobilize my way to the higher levels of the status hierarchy. I lacked that ability, that knack, that would have allowed me to heartily slap backs and exchange crass banter and enter into unspoken but nevertheless very important agreements with the ‘movers and shakers’ of the hive. The Golden Circle was never going to be more than a myth to me – a dream, a fantasy that was never to come true. I was wrong about your man however – I had misjudged him. He was playing the Cosmic Game after all, he just didn’t know it. We were all playing the Cosmic Game, whether we knew it or not. ‘Oh to be an ego, oh to be a self’ – isn’t that how the song goes? Probably not, come to think about it. Probably not. Everything gets so mixed up in my head…

The light was too bright for us, too terrifying, and so we fled en masse down into the subterranean cave system. ‘Allow us entry into the fetid bowels of the earth,’ we cried out as one, ‘permit us to escape from the terrifying Upper Realms’. Everyone always wants to escape the terror of the Upper Realms of course – that’s only human nature, after all. In the sweaty subterranean darkness, things are much kinder on us – we not held to account so much. There’s much more in the way of ‘wriggle room’, so to speak. Events can be redefined – the situation as a whole can be redefined. Everything can be redefined. We fled, pissing ourselves in our abject fear, into the Welcoming Darkness of the Lower Realms and before very long we had completely forgotten the vast airy spaces of the world above. It had become a dim and distant memory. We mutated, adapted, conformed to the Infernal Template; we grew leathery useless little wings, scaly tails, and great hooked claws. We became moral monsters, feeding on each other and also upon ourselves. In none of this had we any choice – things had gone far, far beyond that now. We chatter gaily about the terror of the Upper Realms and congratulate each other heartily on our good luck in escaping it so successfully.