My supreme benevolence will provide unending sustenance to all beings’, I declare magnificently, in my most masterful voice. I speak of the munificent benevolence which I was bestowing freely upon the multitudes, quite free of charge. My generosity is without bounds you see – I’m not like the rest of them. Not like the rest of those bastards. Although it does get tiring after a while, all this giving, all this munificence, and for sure when you’re not in a particularly good mood you might start to get just a little bit cranky about it. It happens, after all. We may not like to admit to it, but it does. You’d find yourself resenting the recipients of your wonderful bounty and grumbling away to yourself. I hope that they are bloody appreciating this, you say to yourself, I hope those good-for-nothing free-loading bastards appreciate what I’m doing for them.

Those were the days, you see. Those were the days of my glory. Those were the days of my unsurpassed and unexcelled glory. It all went by in a flash however. It all went by in a snap of your fingers and that’s the sad thing. That’s the bit that gets me down. There are times when I wonder if the days of my great and surpassing glory ever happened at all. It could all be some kind of false memory, some kind of involuntary hypnotic self-deception. Or maybe I’ve mixed things up in my head, and it wasn’t my glory at all that I was remembering. Maybe it was someone else’s glory rather than my own and I had illegitimately appropriated it. Misappropriated, should I say. I don’t like to go down that road though; I feel bad enough already, living as I am in the twilight years of my great and surpassing glory, watching my power flee from me day by day, hour by hour. How bad would I feel end up feeling if I got to think that they never had been any glory in the first place? That it was all some kind of ghastly lie. A trick that I have somehow played on myself to make the years of my decline seem less painful. An invention of my own tortured brain, in other words.

It’s important to keep the faith, I tell myself bravely, it’s always very important to keep the faith. I feel a momentary surge of pride upon thinking this – it rises within me like a mighty ocean wave. Never doubt the days of your glory, I told myself robustly. Never doubt it. Keep the bad feelings at bay. Those awful, awful bad feelings. My own personal battle against Satan. Damn Satan and all his works, I say to myself, but somehow I can’t feeling help feeling distinctly dubious about these words of mine. The old battle cry fails to ring true; it leaves me feeling somehow guilty and tainted in some weird kind of away. I suddenly feel very confused, very unsure of myself. Maybe I am Satan? I wonder.

Unaccountably, I get the feeling that I might be. I get the feeling that I might have been Satan all along. Doubt’s a nasty thing, isn’t it? Once it gets a hold of you then you’re sunk. Sunk good and proper, sunk without a trace. I am mocked by my friends and enemy alike, it occurred to me then. I am mocked and derided by all and sundry. The days of my ascendance are long gone now, I realise sadly. If indeed any such days ever existed. Never doubt the bad feelings, I say to myself glumly, never doubt those lousy bad old feelings. They come from a part of my brain that I am unable to control. I’m able to maintain at least partial control for most of the time but these nasty thoughts and feelings keep creeping out from time to time, like dirty motor oil seeping from a cracked car engine. The bad thoughts and rotten feelings emanate from the part of my brain that has turned against me, the part of my brain that is now my implacable enemy. There is a bit of me in everything now, I tell myself, there is some small portion of me in everything I see. There is a portion of me in the cold mug of tea on the table in front of me, just as there is a small bit of me in the electric kettle on the counter, in the broken toaster that I haven’t got around to throwing out yet, in the dirty pots and pans heaped up so high in the sink, and in the big fat flies that buzz constantly around the kitchen. I am dispersed and disorganized and my powers – such as they were – have long since fled. The fire of my glory days burned so bright and now there is nothing left but cold embers.