I was under severe pressure not to think the bad thought. I am always under pressure not to think the bad thought. ‘Don’t think the bad thought, don’t think the bad thought, don’t think about thought’, my thoughts hammered. ‘Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t ever do it’, my thoughts warned me earnestly. Don’t ever do it.
‘But what exactly is the bad thought?’ you ask slyly. You won’t catch me out that easily though – I’ve been at this a long, long time. Longer than you can imagine in fact. I’m like a clam at this stage – you’ll never trick me into thinking the bad thought, I’m too cunning for that. I have the cunning of a barnacle, the cunning of a clam…
This thought fills me with the irresistible urge to sing and dance. The thought about how very cunning I am, about how superlatively cunning I am. I break into my little victory dance, the little dance I do when I am victorious in some regard. I hope and I skip and I perform my little routine. This is only in my imagination of course – I wouldn’t want to be seen by anyone, obviously. They would think that I’m weird, and I wouldn’t like that.
When people think that you’re weird then that’s always very humiliating isn’t it? It is both humiliating and degrading. You become an object in their eyes, you become what they think you are and that’s always very degrading. I can’t think of anything worse than that. Apart from thinking the bad thought that is. That would be worse. I might for example blurt it out purely by accident – that could theoretically happen. Accidents can happen as we all know so I can’t really rule out the possibility of me thinking the one thought that I’m not ever supposed to think.
That possibility is the seed of our downfall, wouldn’t you say? That tiny, minuscule chance that an accident may happen – no matter how minuscule the chance may be, we still can’t out rule the possibility of it happening and so that is the doorway to never-ending insoluble anxiety right there. It’s never-ending because it’s insoluble and its insoluble because no one ever can never solve it – it’s as simple as that! That’s how anxiety gets into the system and sets up house there. That’s how all the trouble starts, that’s how the worm got into the apple.
That’s enough to set anyone’s ‘self-guarding’ into over-drive isn’t it? It’s not a recipe for a nice relaxed existence, that’s for sure. Whatever the recipe for a nice relaxed existence might be is certainly isn’t that! I’ve turned my whole life into a bunker but even then I can’t relax. Every inch of my life is protected with reinforced six inch steel plate but that still doesn’t give me peace of mind. And the whole time my mind is at me, yammering, putting pressure on me, roaring at me not to think that bad thought. The pressure is frankly unbearable.
Space was pretending to be me. Why the hell would space be doing that, I wondered? Particularly as I didn’t really exist anyway. Space was pretending to be someone who didn’t exist and it was doing a fairly OK job at it too. Not a bad job at all. It’s not easy pretending to be someone who doesn’t exist – what have you got to go on after all? It’s an audacious project, to say the least.
If I don’t exist then they can’t ever catch me – that’s my thought on the subject anyway! For many years I walked around in a constant state of dread dreading every minute, dreading every day. It’s not easy, is it? It’s far from easy. I dreaded being found by those who sought me so relentlessly. The harder they sought to find me the harder I hid, but I knew that they’d find me in the end, no matter how great my genius for hiding. I also dreaded having to own up to the secret knowledge that I carried in my heart, the secret knowledge regarding my own non-existence. I knew it but at the same time I didn’t want to know that I knew it, and so this made things very tricky. For very many years – how many I forget – I carried that particular burden around with me and it very nearly finished me, I can tell you! No one should have to bear a burden such as this. It is cruel beyond words. Then one day it came to me that if I don’t exist then they can’t find me, they can’t locate me no matter how omniscient they may be. I had one over on them. I felt like shouting out loud, “And you can take your telepathic scanning rays and shove them up your hole!” but I didn’t. Old habits (of concealment, that is) die hard, after all. Old habits die hard.
