Trapped in the all-pervasive swirling darkness of my own toxic unconsciousness, I took to wearing historical garb of one sort or another – I wouldn’t leave the house without jamming a tricorn house hat over my head for example. It didn’t fit but I insisted on wearing it all the same. I was determined to have my own way, no matter what the cost might be. And there always is a cost, you can be sure of that. I have suffered a lot for being the helpless fool that I am but I stick to my guns all the same. What I lack in insight I undoubtedly make up for in terms of stubbornness, so that’s something at least. ‘I should be grateful’, I always tell myself, ‘I should be grateful for small mercies…’

I was – in those days – always full of theories. I’d come up with a theory and then I’d be running around all day long telling people about it. ‘Get this you guys,’ I’d say, ‘you’ll never believe what I’ve just worked out.’ ‘Tell me one of your theories then’, you say, even though you honestly couldn’t give a damn. Naturally you couldn’t give a damn, why would you? You really couldn’t care less – you’re too busy living your life, you’re too busy thinking your own private thoughts. You absolutely don’t care about anything else – that’s human nature, after all. That’s what we’re like. Who cares what someone else might think? We pretend to care because that’s how society works, because that’s how social interaction works – you put up with the dreadful nonsense that other people talk so that you can get a chance to come out with your own crappy old nonsense. Isn’t that the way it works?

That’s something we should all be grateful for – the fact that we all have our own theories that don’t seem like rubbish to us. If we didn’t have our own theories then if we didn’t have our own theories then if we didn’t have our own theories then if we didn’t have. I’d say more if I could, but I can’t. I just can’t. I can’t say anything really – I wouldn’t know where to begin! I wouldn’t know where to end either. There is a theory going around that claims all that theories are ultimately nothing more than an attempt to evade the truth. According to this particular metatheory every theory you will ever meet, without any exception whatsoever, is nothing more than an elaborate ruse, an elaborate deception. Critics of the new metatheory said that this simply isn’t true, but then again they would say this, wouldn’t they?

‘The Mondo Privado, the Mondo Privado’, I intone ceremoniously, ‘the time has now come to bring this meeting to an end, the time has now come to bring all things to an end.’ I raise my hand slowly into the space of the room and make the sacred gesture of dissolution. Or what I fondly imagine to be the sacred gesture of dissolution. What I thought to be the appropriate gesture. I forget the rest – the rest is just a blur. ‘Drink deep of the Soup of life’, I intone murmurously, gesticulating in a somewhat disorganised fashion. Drink deep of the Soup of Life. Drink as deep as you can. I have my audience’s attention however, and that’s the main thing. That’s always the main thing. ‘Drink deep,’ I tell myself, ‘drink as deep as you possibly can. Enjoy fully the experience of being alive…’

I was trying not to see myself as being special. ‘Don’t see yourself as being special’, I told myself sternly, but then as soon as I said this I realised that the very fact I was talking to myself made me special, or implied that I was. Why else would I be talking to myself? Why else would I be talking to myself and not someone else? ‘Don’t see yourself as being special,’ I told myself, ‘I want you to try to merge with the Universal. Harmonize yourself. Think spiritual thoughts. Chant and meditate.’ The exercise was going very badly wrong of course and I’d be the first to admit it. I put my hands up to that. There’s no point in trying to pretend. No point in that. The very fact that I was talking to myself so much prove that I believed myself to be special. It proved – much to my chagrin – that I was nothing more than yet another self-obsessed ego.