‘Make the Tastee Choice’, the ad was telling me, ‘make sure you make the Tastee Choice…’ As usual, the pressure only succeeded in flustering me still more than I was already . I wasn’t sure if I was making the tasty choice or not – I could very easily mess it up. I could very easily mess it up and end up in a universe of failure and despair, and that’s not a universe any of us want to end up in.
My nominal thesis was entitled ‘The sexualization of the inanimate world’ but I had plagiarised it from someone else. I was finding it increasingly hard to come up with anything original and yet my reputation – such as it was – depended upon it. In desperation, I copied the entire thesis from some archived material that I had found using the Wayback machine. It was appalling nonsense, as I could readily recognise, but at this stage I simply couldn’t afford to be fussy. I had gone way beyond mere desperation into some other domain entirely. I was totally panicked and this was causing to me causing me to make poor life choices.
I do have my own unique and valuable skill set however – I can own that about myself. I can take credit for that. It wasn’t easy developing it either. To look at me you wouldn’t realise what I’ve had to go through in order to obtain this particular skill set. The horrors I have had to endure, which no one else knows about. I used to try to tell people of course, so that I wouldn’t be the only one who knew about it, but they just used to walk away. They always used to walk away. They walked away as quickly as they were able and from that point on they would scrupulously avoid me. They would avoid me like the plague.
My skill set has to do with making it seem that I’m not really here. It’s a kind of self-camouflaging skill set. Invisibility skills, you could say. I might be standing in the queue in my local fast-food emporium waiting to order a Tasty Burger or whatever and as I stand there I will be focusing on being normal and not standing out. ‘Be like everyone else, be like everyone else, be like everyone else,’ I would be urging myself. Urgently urging myself, in fact. And then – as likely as not – a telepathic scanning ray would pass through the area and it wouldn’t pick me out. It would pass on and I would almost pass out from the unbelievable relief of it.
Of course, when I say something like this people always think that I’m joking, or that I’m trying to be funny or clever or something like that. I don’t even know what people think I’m trying to be, but they certainly don’t think I’m being serious. Folk just can’t relate to that kind of stuff – people are awful limited in what they can relate to, now that I come to think of it. Awful limited altogether they are – it’s like you could fit everything folk can relate to onto a postage stamp. There isn’t a hell of a lot there in other words. Practically nothing at all. More or less nothing, in my experience. It might as well be nothing, when it comes down to it.
I’m jealous really, of course. I suppose I should admit that to myself. I’m jealous of people who can just get on with their normal lives and who never have any awareness of all the potential horrors that surround them. It’s like they’re living in Disneyland every day of their lives – nothing more challenging than that. I’m resentful of that I guess – jealous and resentful. All negative emotions I know, and negative emotions aren’t healthy. I do realise that. Make the Tastee Choice, my mind tells me urgently. Make sure to make the Tastee Choice. I keep thinking about how great it must be for all those people who have made the Tastee Choice – ‘What must that be like?’ I wondered. I’m straining to imagine that. How extraordinarily good that must feel.
