I was furnishing my life with tasteful illusions. Good taste is everything, after all. If you’re going to live in a world that is made up of illusions then at least let them be in good taste! Isn’t that right? Everyone applauds good taste when they see it. Everyone applauds good things. “Let there be good things”, I declared magnanimously, “let there be all sorts of good things!”

I could have been the Creator of All Things if only I had had the chance, I thought bitterly to myself, if only I had had the breaks. Which I didn’t. How hard can it be, after all? Who knows, I might even have done a better job of it! It’s not as if this universe is perfect after all, it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of mistakes in it. For example, how come it’s always the worst representatives of humanity who get to be successful in life and end up making lots the money and having all the luck, when decent honest folk get walked over every single day of their lives. Why is it that the wicked thrive when the virtuous have to eat shit and pretend that they like it? Answer me that if you can…

I’m not unaware of the irony – I have spent my entire adult life pretending to be something I’m not, but it turns out that no one cares! Nobody actually noticed, in other words. No one actually gives a damn one way or the other. Becoming aware – as I have done – of the crushing irony here makes me feel pretty bad, of course. It’s not an easy thing to live with. Every day it’s the same – I wake up out of a turgid morass of a nonsensical dreams, yawn and have a bit of a stretch, and then the irony of it all hits. The irony hits me full force, right in the pit of my stomach, before I can even get started with the day.

I find myself brooding a lot these days; I find myself brooding darkly on the toxicity of the False Self. You know how it goes. Brooding so darkly, brooding so very darkly, without ever taking a break. It doesn’t necessarily do me any good to be brooding like this of course, but there you are! What is to be done about the loathsome False Self and its appallingly toxic emissions, I ask myself. What’s the best way to deal with it. What’s the best way to manage it and regulate it, etc. Then I remember that I am the False Self and that all that loathsome toxicity is coming out of ME, and nowhere else. I keep thinking that the False Self is someone else, but then sooner or later it hits me that it isn’t. I realize that it’s ME and my heart begins to sink like a stone. Like a very heavy stone. Like a millstone, in fact…

People are my friends, I tell myself, people are there to help me and generally make the world a better place. That’s why I don’t try to harm them, you see. Or at least – that’s why I don’t usually try to harm them. Only on the rare occasions. Only on the rare occasions when I lose my temper. That’s why it’s very important for me to make sure that I don’t lose my temper and start lashing out indiscriminately, which was my previous pattern – as I freely admit. Everyone has a pattern you see and so the key thing is to learn to spot it. That’s called self-awareness and it doesn’t come easily. No Sir, it doesn’t come easily at all…

Image – boredpanda.com