As a small child I was full of bizarre and improbable notions, even at such a very early stage of my life. Bizarre and improbable notions that didn’t make any sense at all. I was obsessed with the dark arts, obsessed with both the theory and practise of necromancy, and even then I couldn’t help realising that I would almost certainly come to a sticky end. The signs were already there – none of the other children would play with me, babies would cry when they saw me, dogs would bark hysterically at me in the street – the usual type of stuff. Even at that tender age I was deeply abnormal, you see.

Things could only get worse, of course – things could only get worse. I wasn’t to know it at the time but things were shortly going to get very dark, very quickly. I’m getting ahead of myself in my story however – I must reign myself in and stick to the proper order of things. Back in those days I still had ideals, you see – I still felt that one should aim for something positive in one’s life, something ennobling. I wanted to make something of myself so that I could receive acknowledgement, acceptance, approval and all that sort of stuff. Validation I suppose you could say – worship even. The masses would worship me. I was convinced of it. Only it wasn’t to be, you see – it was never meant to be…

It often happens of course we start off with a whole bunch of ideas about life which then turn out to be completely wrong, completely misguided! Not even one of them turns out to be true and that spells nothing but disappointment, as we know. It spells disappointment after disappointment in endless succession. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, after all. That’s the way it goes. Is it any wonder that so many folk grow bitter as they grow old, and end their days in sullen despair? Resentful (we might say) of the way in which life offers so many possibilities only to take them away again later on. Is it any wonder that the older we get the more cantankerous and miserable we tend to be? The only alternative is to lie to ourselves and say that our ideas about life did turn out to be true after all, that they are true, thereby giving ourselves permission to feel good about being hopelessly deluded in the way that we are. ‘Yes,’ we say to ourselves, ‘you were right all along – well done you! You’re due a pat on the back for that and no mistake…’

Self-praise and self-congratulation quickly grow stale though, as we all know. One’s own approval (or even adulation) of oneself is thin gruel to subsist on and one grows tired of it before very long. The taste grows sour – very sour. It all becomes a meaningless rigmarole that we go through out of pure habit – not because there’s any pleasure in it, not because there’s any good in it. It’s a joyless pastime, in other words, and I expect you know as well as I do just how dreadful this sort of thing is. I’m sure you know just how terrible it feels when your life becomes nothing more than a series of cruelly repetitive and profoundly meaningless routines. What a trap, huh? Part of you is watching (a deeply buried part) and wondering how it could have come to this. Wondering how you could possibly have ended up living a life that is bereft of any meaning, a life that is bereft of anything that actually means a damn. Your lawful abode is an unclean spiritual waste ground, haunted by a motley army of soiled souls, each one of them the very same as you…

That’s when you need the external validation, of course – external validation is the only thing that can remedy this particular malaise, this particular type of existential horror. When you start to feel like this then that’s the time to join a religious group of some sort or another and the more dogmatic, judgemental and petty-minded it is the better! That’ll do the job every time, you see. I was too proud for that, however – I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. My pride wouldn’t allow me to lower myself in this way and that’s why I find myself in my present situation. That’s why I find myself so cruelly tormented, locked in an interminable battle with my own better judgement. I won’t give in, you see – that’s the one thing I am determined never to do…