I was adding up sums in my head. ‘Three plus three is six’, I said, ‘twenty plus fourteen equals nothing, seven plus seven is twelve and a half’. I was trying to keep the badness at bay, you see. ‘Stay away, you badness’, I said, ‘stay away from me, you rotten old badness’. It was no good however, it was no good because the badness was in me already. I actually was the badness that I was trying to keep away. ‘Keep away from me you dirty stinking badness’, I croaked. I was the Croaker, you see – croaking my heart out to a universe that just didn’t care.
I was the Keeper of the Gates, only the gates had been left open the night before and all the horses had fled. They were galloping free in the wild hinterlands at the Kingdom of Sorrow where no one ever has a good word to say. It was far too late for anyone to do anything at this stage – all I could do was look on and lament. I was the Lamenter and there was no end to my sorrow. I was the Guardian of the Sacred Scrolls but a vicious band of reckless Barbarians had broken into the sacred precincts and had defaced all the holy relics. They had scrawled obscene graffiti on the temple walls and torn the sacred scrolls up to use as toilet paper. I had tried my best to reason with them, of course, but to no avail. Barbarians will be barbarians, after all.
I was wrestling with my badness in the privacy of my own dismally distorted mind. I wasn’t getting on very well on account of how terribly unfit I was. I was getting my ass kicked. I was taking a hammering, in fact. I was taking a dreadful hammering and wouldn’t be able to take the punishment much longer. I would have to rethink my position – maybe I’d be as well off going along with the badness instead. I certainly wasn’t getting very far fighting against it. Maybe the dirty old badness wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe it was okay. Maybe it was fine. It depends on how you choose to look at things, after all.
‘Morkus Bejorcas the Big-Headed Lorcus’, I roared triumphantly from the very depths of my despair. People had said that I was finished, people had said that I was a spent force, a relic from the past, but now I was proving them all wrong. That’ll wipe the smile off their stupid faces, I gloated, now they shall see just how wrong they were! That’s when I realised that I’d been mistaken, that’s when I realized that I had been a little premature. I hadn’t emerged victorious from the depths of my despair after all. I’d been wrong about that…
All that was just weasel talk, however. We hear so much of it, don’t we? That dirty old weasel talk. The earth vomits us up and lets us run around for a while, working our mischief, before it drags us back down again. Back into the underworld. Brutal men, bearing heavy staffs shod with iron, come forth to serve their dark master. There’s never any shortage of brutal men when the Dark Master calls for them – the earth itself spews them up! They arrive in swarms, eager to do the Evil One’s bidding. So very eager.
How many narcissists can dance on the point of a needle? This is the question we have to apply ourselves to. There’s not much space there for dancing, you might say, but you can’t get out of it that easily. A definite answer is needed, I’m afraid. Is it six? Is it twelve? Is it nineteen and a half? Watch them dancing, my friends – say what you want about them, they certainly like to convert and frolic when the attention is on them. They certainly do and there’s no denying it.
Learn what everyone else is saying and then say it too. Find out what everyone else is thinking and then you can think it too! And not only that, of course – the point is to find out what other people think and then think that too, but in a smarter way! The point is to find out what everyone else is doing and then do it too, only better! It doesn’t get any better than that, you see. It certainly doesn’t get any better than that.
