Life’s not happening to me – life is happening to that grinning, smirking image of me, it’s happening to the diabolically corrupt image of me that was given to me by Satan himself. Life is happening to that grinning, disgusting fool, not me….
How I hate that vile stupid image, how I hate and despise it! It’s a horror that affects me without respite, day in, day out. It is a suffering that is visited upon me on a daily basis, and – try as I might – I cannot rid myself of it. I can no longer rid myself of this malevolent puppet of Satan that pretends to be me than I can rid myself of my skin, or my bones. It’s stuck to me. It’s stuck fast.
We are invited to identify with nonsense and we do so, we do so most obligingly in fact. We do so without being asked – we do so with great alacrity, because it’s expected of us. Even the thought of disappointing our invisible audience is painful – you know you couldn’t live with the guilt. It would get you down. You would hate yourself forever…
Life doesn’t quite reach me, you see. It never quite gets as far as me – I can feel it ‘falling short’, as it were, but I never get to taste the thing itself. The flavour eludes me – something’s going down but I couldn’t tell you what it is. I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. It’s gone before I get there, it’s gone every time.
Gone before I got there, missing the boat every time. Missing the bus, missing the party. Can you blame me for being so bitter? Could you bloody blame me? Can you blame me for being the rotten miserable way that I am? “Oh, don’t be so negative”, people say, “you’re always coming out with the negative vibes. You’re uncool, man…”
They are worried that I’ll jinx things for them, you see. They are scared that I’ll bring them bad luck and so to protect themselves they have to denounce me as quickly as they can. They have to denounce me so as to show they’re not like me, so as to show they’ve got nothing to do with me. They have to distance themselves from me by instantly denouncing me in public, making sure that everybody hears. It’s a time-honoured ritual and I’m kind of OK with it, however. I no longer take that kind of thing is personally as I once did. It’s their own fear and it’s their own ‘fear ritual’, so what’s that got to do with me?
It was only a dead thing that thought it was me (if you take my meaning). it thought it was me, but it wasn’t – it wasn’t anything. it was only a dead thing. I found this kind of sad, kind of piteous – only not so much when I actually thought about it. Not so much at all. ‘Good enough for it’, I said to myself then, with grim satisfaction, ‘that’ll learn it…’
‘I wonder what real life is like’, I wondered to myself. ‘I wonder what it must be like to be actually alive? That really must be something…’ My mind was working away like crazy, trying to work it out. Running around, running around – running around like some kind of mad thing. Running around like some kind of crazy spinning top, spinning away frantically all over the table. Running here, running there – running all over the shop. In the end it will fall right off the table and that will be the end of it.
