I couldn’t cut it in the Real World and so – instead – I created an infinitely degraded version in my own imagination. I then proceeded to lord it over all the poor bastards that I managed to trap there. Which was quite a few. You could number it in billions, in fact. You could easily number it in billions.

It’s an old, old story of course. The oldest story there is, quite possibly. I don’t know of any older. We’ve all heard it many times before, I know; we’ve all heard it too many times before. And what’s more, it’s not ‘a story that never gets old’, on the contrary, it’s a story that was always old. It started off being old, so very old that it made that it would make you want to gag. It would literally make you want to be sick, as I believe no lesser Existentialist then Jean Paul Sartre has duly observed. He’s gone down on record as duly observing that. He has made that point already, you see…

I bet you wish I could tell a different story but I can’t. I don’t know how. I don’t have it in me. That’s my curse you see, to be eternally recounting the same tired old story. And let me tell you right now, it definitely doesn’t get any better with age! It’s not so much a fine old wine as a barrel of rotting eels, if you can envisage such a thing. So let us be clear about this, let us be very clear (and also very fair) about this. Lethal, but at the same time entirely harmless. Very interesting, but at the same time atrociously dull, atrociously sterile. Stupendously dull. There’s never a right answer when you want one and so you have to make one up yourself. They never work out, it’s true, but then again, what else are we supposed to do? Our so-called solutions only ever make things one hundred times worse, but what other option is there?

I couldn’t hack it in the Real World and that’s why I had to do what I did. I wasn’t up to it somehow, and so I sank to the depths (if you know what I mean). I sank to the very depths of depravity. Some people will say, ‘Yes well, you shouldn’t sink to the very depths of depravity, you know; you shouldn’t do that because that’s not good,’ but it’s all very well for them to preach. Preaching is easy and it doesn’t cost a thing. Any fool can preach, as we know. But anyway, as I was telling you, I sank to the very depths and then the rest – as they say – is history. It’s a false history that I made up to cover my tracks.

I wanted to praise God, but I could only praise myself. Down through the ages I praised myself: ‘Praise me, praise me, praise me,’ I said, happy but at the same time guilty that I might be doing something wrong. There some would say that you shouldn’t praise yourself, I know. That there’s those that will say that self-worship isn’t a good thing. They say it all the time, of course. All very well for them, though. That’s my thought. I remember the days when we used to go to church every week to pray to the Lords of Degeneration to degrade the world still further. With us in it, of course. Folk can’t be bothered to go to church anymore though. They can’t be bothered to get down on their knees and pray. Things have gone to rack and ruin if you ask me….