When things go well for me then I’m pissed off – that puts me in real bad form every time. And if things go badly for me then I’m delighted. ‘That’ll learn you, you stupid bastard!’ I say – ‘serve you right, you little piece of shit!’ I do my little dance then, my vicious little victory dance. My notorious little victory dance. People hate me for that dance. I’m widely despised for it, despised and reviled. This suits me perfectly well of course, as you might imagine. It suits me very well indeed – I love it when they hate me.
Things very rarely do go well for me however and so there’s no need to worry on that account. No sir no need to worry on that score – everything is going perfectly to plan. Each one of us is a walking prison house, a perambulating gaol. What a shocker, right? That’s one for the books. We do our best to put on a good show, we burst ourselves putting on a good show, but no matter how well we do we can’t help knowing – in some secret corner of our soul – it’s all a horrible sham. There never was a more horrible sham. That’s a burden we have to bear though, and I think we all know that. I think we all do – that’s the meaning of putting on a good show, after all it means we have to bear the onerous burden. It’s a secret we can’t ever tell.
‘Who will help me bear the onerous burden?’ I ask plaintively but no one answers – they’re all far too busy pretending. They’re pretending for all that worth. They trampled me in their heedless rush – the heedless rush towards ultimate egoic fulfilment. They were only pretending really of course. I’m pretending too; I’m pretending that I’m not pretending. I’m pretending that I’m different to everyone else. I’m pretending that I’m a decent human being, but underneath it all I’m not. Underneath it all I’m just a pretender, pretending as hard as I can. I’m pretending to myself that my pretending is actually going to work.
As someone who likes to pretend to be a philosopher, I like to say that I’m very interested in the fundamental contradiction of reality itself. Which you might also call ‘the fundamental contradiction of existence’. Only I don’t really care, you see. I don’t really care at all- it’s all an act. Everyone’s got to pretend to care about something otherwise the situation will quickly become very dire indeed. It will be unbearable. Everyone’s got to pretend to care about something because that’s all there is. There’s no point looking for more than that because there isn’t any more than that. There’s no point wearing yourself out doing that.
In the beginning there was the Immaculate Void. In the beginning there was the Immaculate Void and then one day the Arch Pretender came along and started pretending that stuff was real, pretending that there was such a thing as reality, pretending that there was actually such a thing as the truth. But he was only pretending to pretend, you see – it was all a Big Fake. One Big Fake from beginning to end. Only – of course – it wasn’t.
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