‘Go to your happy place’, the pleasant-mannered AI group facilitator told us, ‘go to your wonderful happy happy place and think all your very best happy happy thoughts to make yourselves as happy as possible…’ We all hurried to obey, scurried dutifully to obey – looking for the happy place that is inside us. The really special super happy place that feels so good. You can read all about it in the brochure. We didn’t need telling twice you see – we absolutely didn’t need telling twice. We were all mad keen to hightail it to that special happy place inside of us and pull up the drawbridge. Maybe we won’t ever come out again. Maybe we’ll stay there. Who knows, after all? Maybe we will decide that we’ve had enough of life in the non-happy place, and we’re going to give up on it entirely. Maybe we’re fed up to the back teeth with all the crap we’ve had to endure, day in and day out, and that rotten stinking pile of shit they call ‘reality’.
You could hardly blame us for that, of course. No one could blame us for that. Enough is enough, after all. There’s a limit to how much shit a person is going to be willing to take, wouldn’t you agree? Any self-respecting person can only take so much, and then it’s a case of ‘Well the hell with you buddy I’m off to my safe place space, I’m off to my special happy place inside my mind that only I can go to, that only I can know about’. ‘The hell with this,’ they will say, ‘I’m out of here…’ ‘Beam me up Scotty, and all that kind of stuff’, they will say. The safe place, is calling out to me, don’t you know. ‘You’ll be safe here’, it’s telling me, ‘you’ll be super-safe here, good buddy…’
That’s what we’re like and could you blame us? All things considered, could you bloody blame us? We are fed up with all the crap you see, we’re fed up to the back teeth in fact. We’ve had enough. ‘Can everyone please go to their safe place’, the voice on the speaker system tells us. The voice is calm but insistent. ‘Please remain in your safe place until the emergency has past…’ it tells us. Only the emergency never did pass, did it? The emergency never did pass and we’re still here, we’re still here hiding in our safe space to this very day. Holed up there. We won’t come out for anyone. We’re cowering in fear, suspicious of every noise we hear…
‘The chicken, the whole chicken, and nothing but the chicken…’ – isn’t that what they say? No half measures here my friend, none of that damnable faint-heartedness here! Start as you mean to go on, I always say, and if it suddenly goes sideways on you – well, so be it. Have the courage of your convictions… I wasn’t born to be smart, or wise, or funny, or helpful in any way – I wasn’t born to be anything like that. I was born to be fate’s tool, fate’s instrument. That’s all I am at the end of the day and when fate is done with me it’ll toss me aside carelessly without a second thought. Fate doesn’t bother much with second thoughts, as we need hardly point out. Fate is fate at the end of the day and ‘second thoughts’ aren’t exactly its style. No sir, they’re not…
