When I’m in a tricky situation – a situation that I don’t know how to handle – I always ask myself this question: “What would my old friend ‘Psycho Bill’ McNally do in a situation like this?” Straight away, this thought calms me down. It causes the mindless panic to subside within me. What would Psycho Bill do under these circumstances? And I think we all know the answer to that! By God we do.
My spiritual guidance counsellor was losing patience with me. “For fucks sake Nick”, he ranted, “don’t you realise that the thinking mind is basically Satan, and yet you keep on playing patty-cake with it? How many bloody times do we have to have this discussion? Are you some kind of complete fuckwit, or what?” I hung my head in shame – I was a spiritual failure, and I knew it.
Maybe I should write a book about the phoney crappy life of a spiritual failure, I thought to myself. It could be a best seller. Look at the shyte they published these days, after all. More to the point, just look at the type of self-indulgent bollocks people come out with when they publish their ‘long-awaited memoirs’. Their unbiased and truthful accounts of what great and meaningful lives they have lived. You know the sort of thing. The elation which I had been experiencing all of a sudden left me and I felt sorrowful. All of a sudden I felt despondent. Things didn’t seem nice any more. I was – I realised – utterly exhausted by my own loathsomely offensive bullshit.
I was a victim of the All-Devouring Generic Reality, I realised. That was the plain truth of the matter. I wasn’t to blame at all – the All-Devouring Generic Reality had sapped my essential essence quality, leaving a dead husk, leaving me no more than a hollow grinning sham. I had been lulled into a state of utter and complete stupidity and now – far too late – I had caught a glimpse of just what a hideous fool I really was. It was not a nice moment.
Not that it was my fault though, as I believe I’ve just said. Not that it was my fault. How are we supposed to know, after all? It’s not as if anyone ever warns us. They don’t teach you about this in school, do there? You bet they don’t.
I was trying to make the effort. “Make the effort, make the effort, make the effort, make the effort, make the effort, make the effort…” I told myself. I was trying my best to make the effort – I was bursting myself trying to make the effort but I just wasn’t getting anywhere. Despite all my straining. I was drawing a blank, making a totally ridiculous spectacle of myself. I was a failure at trying, I realised. I couldn’t try for shit. I was a fake Trier. In fact, if the truth be told, I was only pretending to try.
