Mechanical existence is such a bind, isn’t it? Such a terrible, rotten bind. There’s nothing worse, in my view. It’s the absolute pits. God help us all really – it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? How awful it is. It’s such a bloody horror, it’s quite unspeakable. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not some kind of punishment. What are we being punished for though? What’s our crime? It must have been pretty awful, whatever it was. That’s all I can say. How did we even know how to do something that bad?
‘Hurry up and do the thing’, my mind chides me. ‘Hurry up and do the bloody thing, would you?’ Because after that there’s the next thing to do. And then the next thing after that. My mind is constantly on my case – my stupid, stupid mind. ‘You didn’t do it right’, it tells me impatiently. ‘You didn’t do it right so go back and do it again and make sure you get it right this time…’ If I had it in front of me I’d beat twenty shades of multi-comoured shite out of it, I really would. I’d kick it from one end of the room to the other, so I would. I’d jump up and down on it until there was nothing left but a puddle of sticky goo.
‘Do the thing, do the thing…’ my mind advises me. That’s all it ever does – it just keeps going on about ‘doing the thing’. It screams at me, it berates me, it threatens me, and it abuses me. It never lets up – it calls me every name under the sun. It starts up with the abuse in the morning and it keeps on without ever a break until I finally fall asleep at night. If I’m able to, that is. It’s only happy when it’s torturing me.
Yes my friends, mechanical existence is a punishment – it’s a punishment that goes on forever. There’s no time off for good behaviour. We long for happiness, of course. We yearn desperately for happiness and fulfilment. We crave existential fulfilment and who can blame us for that? I can’t blame us for that. Is that too much to ask for, for heaven’s sake? Although – on the other hand – it could be pointed out that this absolutely is too much to be asking for. It could be pointed out that it is completely unrealistic of us to be hoping for a let up. There isn’t a hope in hell that it’ll let up. There’s absolutely no hope of that at all…
Days of sorrow, days of joy, days of sorrow, days of joy. But mainly sorrow, of course. Mainly sorrow. Mainly sorrow for sure. Well, it’s pretty much all sorrow really, I suppose. If I were to face up to it. If I were to call a spade a spade. And you might as well call a spade a spade. You might as well. Unless you don’t want to, that is. If you don’t want to then you don’t have to – that’s OK too. That’s fine as well. You can call it anything you want, really. It’s up to you. Who’s counting, after all? That’s no one else’s business but your own.
Yes my friends, we must have done something truly awful in a past life, that’s all I can say. For sure we must have done. You bet we did. Something terrible, I daresay. Something really low. Something inexcusable. We probably thought it was okay at the time, you see. We probably thought that we would get away with it. ‘No one will see us’, we probably thought. No one will see us and so we’ll get away with it. We were banking on that, you see. We were banking on it and that was very foolish of us. That was very foolish indeed of us, but what can we do about it now? There’s no point in us harping on about it, obviously. What’s the point in that?
Image – freepik.com