Self-distraction has long-since become a way of life for me. It’s just got so I literally don’t know how to do anything else! I really don’t. It’s like some kind of sick joke – my mind has become some kind of relentless distraction machine and it never stops. It never ever gives me a break. ‘Play the distraction game, play the distraction game’, my machine mind tells me insistently, ‘quickly distract yourself before the bad thing happens…’ It barks orders maniacally and I scurry to obey. I literally can’t obey quickly enough! That is the order of things around here, squalid as it may sound…
It’s got so that playing the Distraction Game is literally the only thing I do! I sit here in my bedroom with my Distractomat, frantically pushing the buttons, obsessively watching the screen, trying to achieve the maximum score. I’m sick of it at this stage. I’m nauseated to the core by the loathsome filthy thing and yet I’m still unable to do without it. I’m horrified by the spectacle of my own existence. That’s addiction for you though, isn’t it? It’s the old love / hate relationship. Longing combined with disgust. Greed mixed with revulsion. We call it ‘love’ even though we know full well that it is nothing of the sort. It is nothing more than need – frighteningly desperate need. Naked need, as William Burroughs puts it. That terrible, terrible state of need that we all know so well. You can’t really blame anyone for what they do when they’re in that state because you know you’d do the same.
Nothing else exists – just me and this terrible terrible need, this appalling, frightening need that can never be satiated. Sometimes I think that this must be what we could call ‘the ultimate abusive relationship’ – very often it occurs to me that this must be what we could call ‘the ultimate abusive relationship’. A lot of good this observation does me, though. I can’t say that it exactly helps me to feel any better about things – I can’t say that because it isn’t true…
When we were very small and entirely innocent of the wretched evil of this world we were sent to Constitutional School – we were sent to learn the constitution and we wouldn’t be released into the Outer World until we did. We won’t be released into the light of day to skip and dance and play until our souls have been suitably darkened! Then – of course – we won’t want to hop and skip and dance anymore. You can be sure we won’t. That’s just the way of the world, however. That’s always going to be the way of the world. You could very easily spend your whole life wondering why it has to be like this but you would be wasting your time. We learn to submit to the yoke; we learn to accept without questioning because just as long as we continue to ask questions we will be punished. That’s the lesson we all have to learn and learn it we do. And by God do we learn it! We learn it good and proper…
That’s why we have to sit for so many years in the Darkened Room, learning how to please our grotesque masters. That’s why we have to study the Constitution for all those weary years – we have to learn the evil ways of our forefathers! The young are light and inclined to be skittish, whilst the old are dreadfully heavy and frighteningly dark, persisting in their evil ways until the very end. Until the bitter end, as we could say. And bitter it most surely is…
A long line of the dead come walking blindly through the living room towards me. An endless procession of them. No one can see them but me – I have theSight, as you have probably already surmised. I can tune into the dead, unlike the average person. I have – as you might say – a strange affinity with them, just as they have an affinity with me. The dead are drawn to me – in their blindness they have no direction of their own and so they piggyback on the awareness of the living. They need someone to release them, someone who isn’t like them. If they are lucky then someone will release them from the awfulness of the fate that they themselves have created; otherwise, they must continue to walk the earth, each in their own private hell. They haven’t the words to tell of the horror that they are forced to endure, you see – they haven’t the ability to communicate it. They are trapped by the precedent they themselves have set…
