Do you know that thing where you make up a very special word in your head, a word that no one else knows about, that no one else can know about, and then one day you get this horrible paranoid feeling that your special word might have become common knowledge and that everyone is secretly laughing at you? Even the dog in the street is laughing at you. This is of course just a perverse fantasy, you tell yourself sternly. There’s no one no way anyone could ever have guessed your special word. You decide to Google it just to make sure. Now – if you discover that your secret is out and your special word has been uncovered then that’s your worse fears come true, so that’s no good. It’s never any good when your worst fears come true, as I think you’ll agree. But – and this is the odd thing – if you don’t find the word then you feel strangely devalidated. ‘Do I even exist at all?’, you might ask yourself.
Life is full of different experiences of course. Everyone knows that. Life is full of lots of different experiences for sure, only sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes there’s only the one experience, sometimes there’s nothing but pure monotony – relentless, tedious, soul-destroying monotony. On and on and on – the dreadful remitting monotony of your own pointless existence. What we’re talking about here is the radical impoverishment of reality itself, we might say, and that’s no joke. That is certainly not what most people would understand as ‘a humorous situation’. No Sir – there’s no laughing here. There’s people grumbling, people complaining, people giving out stink left, right and centre, but no one laughing. Certainly no one laughing. What’s to laugh about, after all?
Life is full of different experiences, as I’ve already mentioned. Lots of people know this already of course, but – then again – others may not. Some experiences are generally held to be good, others bad, and yet others again neither the one thing nor the other. And yet what are we to make of these experiences – that’s the question every philosophically-minded person is necessarily asking themselves. ‘What’s the story, my friends? What’s the story? What do you reckon?’
We’re trying to come across as being a ‘worldly-wise’ and genuinely ‘street-savvy’ person of course. Or – at least – you’re trying to come across as your idea of what a worldly-wise and generally street-savvy kind of a person would sound like. How they would come across like how they would come across. The type of things they would say, the type of things they wouldn’t say, the type of facial expressions they might exhibit at appropriate moments in the conversation, and so on. You’ve got it off pat at this stage it’s become very nearly effortless for you and you’re glorying in your newfound freedom. The world is your mollusk, you tell yourself grandly.
It’s only a matter of time before you graduate to the next level, as you have now come to realise. It’s only a matter of time before you penetrate to the heady atmosphere of the Guru Zone and there is no way to tell what might happen then! It’s only a matter of time, only a matter of time, you tell yourself . You will think of special things to say. You’ll always think of special things to say. You will be soaring high, far above any public reproach, and it’s only what you deserve. ‘No better man’, you tell yourself approvingly, ‘no better man’.
‘Do you know that thing, do you know that thing, do you know that thing…’, you bleat piteously, pathetically keen (as always) to find the common ground; pathetically keen (as always) to strike the right note, to strike a chord that resonates with somebody. It’s only a matter of time before you ‘connect’ and you’re living for that moment. We’re all living for that moment, are we not? We’re all hanging in there, waiting for our chance. Coasting effortlessly on wings of glory, soaring high in the stratosphere of our own imaginations. You’re in the Guru Zone now and there’s no stopping you…
