Suppose you’re just too greedy for the old ‘sleepy stuff’, that wicked old stuff that makes you dream your life away? What then? Suppose you’re addicted to it? Suppose you’re hungry for it all the time, supposing you can’t ever get enough of it? What then? You’re burning the bottom clean out of the pan and you know that’s not good news. You’re going to have to get a new saucepan and there aren’t any. They stopped making them a long time ago. Civilization has moved on – we’re all living on the cloud now. Everything’s turned into code, and bad code at that…

We’re all guilty of the same crime but that doesn’t stop us despising each other for it. Boy do we despise each other! Despising each other is how we blind ourselves to our own gross culpability and there’s nothing worse than having an awareness of one’s own gross culpability, there really isn’t. Reality is a funny thing, wouldn’t you say? How do we get away with being such appalling fools? Suppose you had to say something pertinent about reality or else you’d be fed to the crocodiles, what would you say? Well, you could say reality is a bit like this, reality is a bit like that. Reality is that thing which we all know very well to be real. We learn about reality at school. People we know might tell us about it.  Reality is trending on Google search right now as it happens – everyone wants to know about it. Tell us more about reality, they say. Tell us all about it. Folk are jumping on the bandwagon because they’re good at that.

Suppose you were famous but no one had ever heard of you? What then? Suppose they ignore you to your face? Would you be angry or would you be sad? Would you perhaps have an out-of-control rage attack? Suppose the ‘in-crowd’ refused to have anything to do with you, suppose they mocked you, suppose you were publicly humiliated? The more frighteningly degenerate and dishonest we get the more horrifically vicious and unprovoked we become on our attacks on each other, and this is so obvious that there’s no need for me to try to prove the point to you! You know it as well as I do. The more we sink into the foul-smelling mire of our own personal unconsciousness the more we vilify and castigate our neighbours for doing the very same thing that we’re doing, and such is the path that has been mapped out for humanity. Ours is an ignominious fate, to put it mildly.

‘I don’t take the licks I dish them out!’ I roar out ferociously, trying to cunningly turn the tables on my adversary. Trying cunningly to be cunning. It wasn’t working though – I was only living my own fantasy and my fantasy had run out of steam. It was a poor beaten-up kind of a fantasy, like a tin of baked beans that’s been run over by a truck. ‘What’s wrong with my fantasy?’ I ask myself morosely, ‘it used to be so much better than this…’ This becomes my new song and I sing it all day long. What’s wrong with my fantasy – it used to be a Rolls Royce saloon and now it’s a crushed tin can! This becomes ‘my new thought’ and I think it all the time. I think it every hour, I think it every minute. It’s as if asking the question alone itself can save me! It’s as if restating my shocked incredulity at the failure of my fantasy to hold water can somehow (miraculously) solve the problem. Moral outrage is the only tool I’ve got left in my toolbox so what am I to do? ‘I’m the only tool left in my toolbox’, I realise glumly, and the only thing I’m good for is making complete and utter fuckup of everything.

I am the unerring instrument of my own destruction I realise, but at the same time I also realise that this is the one thing that one can never truly accept. I need to find a good CBT therapist it occurs to me – I need to turn this dirty old thinking around. ‘You need to turn this thinking around,’ I told myself, ‘you need to turn the negative into a positive’. This becomes my new song and I sing it all day long. I sing it in the morning and I sing it in the night. I sing it at strange times. ‘You’ve got to turn that negative thinking around boy,’ I sing to myself, cruising at altitude on my newfound optimism. It was no good though – not really. I burned the bottom out of that particular pan a long time ago. I’ve burnt the bottom clean out of it. It’s like trying to ride a bicycle that’s got no wheels; it’s like trying to ride a bicycle that’s got no wheels and – as if that weren’t bad enough – with the bloody chain fallen off it too. Lying there buried deep in the nettles.