They call me the Despiser. They call me that on account of how I go around despising people, having contempt for people. That’s my hobby, you see – it amuses me to go around despising the people that I meet. Having pure contempt for them. Well, I’m not amused as such, you understand – that’s just a turn of phrase. I’m not really amused at all. It’s not as if I find anything particularly funny about my situation, because I don’t. As a rule, I don’t see that much to laugh at in life, when it comes down to it. I am well known for not getting the joke.
I despise people in general and myself in particular. I despise myself most of all because I know what I’m like! You may not know what I’m like, but I sure as hell do. I’ve got a fair idea, at any rate. I’ve known myself for rather a long time now, you see – too long, some might say – and I have yet to surprise myself by doing anything nice. Let’s put it like that, shall we? Why not, after all. Why not put it like that…
I even despise my own despising; I despise my own despising with a passion and that leaves me with nowhere to turn, as you can no doubt appreciate. Nowhere to turn, nowhere to turn. But everyone has to have somewhere to turn, you might say to yourself, but that’s where you’d be wrong. You would be wrong in this case at any rate. You’d be wrong in my case. You’d be dead wrong.
They call me theInsect Man on account of how I have a jointed exoskeleton, antennae, and six legs. Chances are, if you came across some sort of creature with a jointed exoskeleton, antennae and six legs it’s going to be an insect. Not always though, that isn’t always the case. It’s not universally true, just generally so. It could just be a hallucination you see. It could be a larger-than-life hallucination that came out of your very own brain and nowhere else. Your very own super-treacherous, super-devious little brain. Fake friends in a fake world you see – fake friends faking it for all they are worth in the big fat fake old world!
I’ve never known a world that wasn’t fake, now that I come to think of it. I’ve never known a world that wasn’t a lie. Drifting restlessly from one fake world to another, finding nothing to sustain my interest, finding nothing but more and more of this infernal pestilential fakery. There is a time to lie and a time to tell the truth (or so we’re told) but I have yet to come across the latter. I have yet to find myself in a situation where my core instincts weren’t telling me to lie my damn head off! ‘Lie you stupid bastard, lie!’ my core instincts keep telling me, ‘Lie as hard as you can you stupid useless twat, lie as if your very life depends upon it…’
Like a bastard, lie like a freak. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what your core instincts keep on telling you? I would presume that it is, at any rate. I presume as much. We can only infer what it must be like to be someone else, experiencing what they are experiencing, feeling the emotions that they do, making the rash decisions that they are making. We can only guess, we can only guess. I have yet to have a day in my life when I wasn’t lying my goddamn head off, lying fit to burst, lying like a complete out-of-control gobshyte. I know nothing else, you might say. I know nothing else but my own interminable lies. I take this as being perfectly normal of course. I assume that it’s the same for everyone.
Am I right in this assumption, though? I sometimes wonder if I’m right about this. Sometimes I get to wondering about it. ‘Perhaps it’s not the same for everybody’, I say to myself. Maybe it’s only me that’s like this. At times like this my thoughts turn against me and I become dreadfully agitated and ill at ease. I become troubled in myself. The thought ‘Am I an complete and utter freak?’ pops into my head. It tries to get my attention by flashing on and off at high speed. After a while I generally calm down, however. Eventually I calm down, to some extent or other, at least. ‘Probably everyone goes through this’, I say to myself reassuringly, ‘probably this is a perfectly normal thought process…’
