My ego was in a terrible  huff – firing little darts of pure malice at whoever happened to be nearby. You’re not as good as me, was the message in the darts. Designed to sting, you see. Designed to cause very real pain. I’m no happier than I was three minutes ago and that’s your fault, I whine piteously. Whining is my forte, you might say. I have made many foolish life choices over the years but none of them were my fault – not really. Life is a deterministic process, after all. Pain is designed to hurt you see, it’s designed to send a very particular message and it’s not a message anyone likes. All around us the suppurating Garbage World, pressing in on us from all sides – the sickly-sweet stench of it assailing the nostrils. The smell of corruption that no air freshener can ever mask. There’s no masking here, I’m afraid – things have gone too far for that! A brisk knocking is heard at the front door, it’s the horror film which is your life and it’s about to unfold on your very own doorstep. You make a point of not answering – you’re too wise for that. You’re too wise to make a rookie mistake like that! Instead, you force yourself to pretend that nothing is happening. There’s nothing to see here, you cry out, nothing to see here. Your skin is clammy with the Fear – it’s always the same old fear, knocking ominously on your door, banging away on it, rattling that poor old door on its hinges. Will I ever crawl out from under this fear, you ask. It certainly doesn’t feel like it, not with all that commotion coming from the front door. The signs aren’t good. The omens – as always – are dire in the extreme. Outside the cracked and discoloured windows of the Survival Dome the party ratchets up a notch – if things had been pretty wild before then they were downright unpleasant now! Things were very bad indeed, possibly as bad as they could be. Although one can never be sure. It had all started off as a joke of course – albeit a joke that had very quickly turned sour. You know how it goes – you make some kind of light-hearted comment and then the next minute the room goes dead quiet and everyone is looking at you, their eyes full of judgement and vicious condemnation. You’ve made an inexcusable blunder, you’ve blotted your copybook big time. You’ve copied your blotterbook and you know what that means! We all know what that means… Life is good, I tell myself – only just not for me…

Image – playgroundai.com