My ego wasn’t really dead of course – it was only pretending! It was lying low for the time being, hoping in this way to gain the advantage. Hoping to pull the wool. My ego was feeling feigning ego death, slyly pretending to be spiritual.

You’ve got to admire the way they do that, haven’t you? I mean, ‘respect where respect is due’ and all that kind of stuff. You can’t keep a good man down, as they say. No sir you can’t! Not a hope in hell… There’s no one can out-fox the old self-image and that’s a fact. It’ll find a way to hang in there one way or another, it’ll find a way to hang in there every time.

You can knock twenty shades of shyte out of the jolly old ego and it will still come up smelling of unwashed underpants! Damn right it will. There’s no doubt at all that it will, but enough of that. Let’s not go down that road! I was standing on a street corner, gamely attempting to explain the meaning of life to all the good folk that were walking by but finding it awful hard to hold onto my audience. No one wanted to stop to listen to me. People these days have an awfully short attention span, as you probably know.

I was running around telling everyone about my Good Buddy in the Sky. My good, good buddy. “He can fix anything,” I told anyone that would listen, “you only have to ask him…

Some would accuse me of being over-simplistic in my approach, I know. They’d probably write me off as a fool but I was young and carefree back then you see, and my heart was full of hope. I just didn’t believe in insurmountable problems, back in those days. I wouldn’t admit to them. I had an unquenchable optimism that nothing seemed to touch! That’s how folk are when they’re young. We shouldn’t blame the young for their youth, should we? It’s probably only envy that makes us do that – envy and sheer bad mindedness.

“Too true! Too true!” called out Jimmy Owl, as he flew through the night. He was agreeing with his inner voices, you see. His inner voices were telling him that human institutions were the very effluence of Satan. The pure effluence of Satan. They informed Jimmy that an army of angels with flaming swords would soon come and that they would cleanse the earth of the monsters that had come to possess it. Corporations and governments and religions, and all of that.

Other people had happy and interesting lives, I realised. To be sure they did. Absolutely they did. People lived lives that were rich and fulfilling yet I couldn’t even fool myself that I was having fun, never mind fool anyone else! I understood the crucial importance of self-deception well enough in this regard, but somehow I had lost the knack. “Just what the hell is wrong with me? I asked myself bitterly, “I’ve lost the ability to pretend that I’m having fun…”

This can be very important, you see – a lot of people don’t know how important this actually is. They gloss over it. When we lose the ability to pretend that we’re having fun then what’s left to us? Answer me that, if you can. What possible good are all these social media sites going to be to us in this case? It defeats the object if you can’t pretend to be having the time of your life. Just how far am I going to get posting pictures of myself trying to pretend that I’m having fun but failing miserably? That’s not exactly going to work any magic, is it? There’s no kudos in this, I’m afraid. There’s no kudos at all…

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