‘Don’t tell me that there’s an ego that says that.’ I said, speaking into the Void. ‘Don’t tell me there’s an ego that says don’t tell me that there’s an ego that says that…’ An echo, you see. If you get my drift. Et sic infinitum. And so on forever… (and then some more after that). And then the next thing is that you discover it hadn’t even properly started yet, so you start to get that ‘old sinking feeling’. You know the one I mean, of course. How could you not?
They call that the Dawning of Awareness, as I’m sure you know. The penny drops, in other words. I was a policeman on the beat. ‘Hello, hello, hello’, says I. ‘What’s all this here then?’ says I. ‘I can’t be having nonsense going on like this on my patch’. Taking a firm grip on my truncheon. Ready to dispense the law in no uncertain terms. Dispensing the law left, right and centre. Dispensing the bloody old law like there’s no tomorrow! I AM an officer of the law, after all. ‘It’s the law!’ says I with a wink – ‘the Law of Truncheons on Heads…’
‘What’s all this here?’ I barked out authoritatively, my uniform crisply pressed, my boots as shiny as you please, the sun reflecting gaudily off my buttons. It was a day like any other. It was a day like any other, but it was all about to go very badly wrong. Which makes it a bit different after all. It was about to go just as just about as badly has anything ever could go! Things were about to go off the rails in a big way – weird scenes, horrors beyond the imagination, and all of that. All of that, and then some. I stuck my jaw out defiantly and waded belligerently into the crowd, raining down blows on the heads of my enemies. ‘I am the Destroyer of Enemies’, I roared, ‘and none shall stand against me!’
It was no good, though. It was all to no avail. The penny was in the process of dropping, and there wasn’t anything either I nor anyone else could do about it. When the penny drops then the penny drops, as you yourself know well. You know it as well as I do, so let’s not be coy. Let’s not waste time here. I stare sternly at my image in the bathroom mirror, holding up an accusing finger. Menacing myself with it. The finger that points, the finger that blames. I was Rehearsing for Reality – always rehearsing for reality.
No matter how many times you rehearse for reality however you will never get it right. Not when it comes down to it (and sooner or later it always does). It always does it always does come down to it. The rehearsal isn’t real, you see – the rehearsal is never real. Only the real is real, and all the rehearsing in the world isn’t going to change that! There’s comfort in the rehearsing though, I’ll grant you that. There’s comfort there for sure! You can tell yourself that life’s improving all the time, you can tell yourself that life’s never been better and that the future’s never been so bright. You can tell yourself that everything’s just dandy and that you’ve got that jolly old ‘rehearsing’ off to a ‘T’. For sure you have. Nothing to worry about…
Some of us are better at rehearsing than others, of course. That’s only natural. There are winners and losers in everything and rehearsing for reality is no different. There’s doing well and is doing badly there is playing a blinder and they’re screwing the whole bloody thing up. You know yourself. There’s rehearsing like a pro and there’s the poor sad loser who everyone laughs at. The butt of the joke. The butt of every joke going. The Universal Stooge, in all his glory. There’s the aristocracy on the one hand – the snobs or what have you – and then there’s the manky lower classes. The peasants. The commoners. And then beneath them there’s the Undocumented. The Underclass. The Subhumans. Whatever you want to call them. The ones with no digital identity in an age in which digital identity is mandatory. In an age where digital identity is everything.
That’s all fine and dandy until the penny drops, of course. Everything is always fine and dandy until the penny drops. That’s the Witch’s Curse, and it’s a curse that’ll always find you out in the end. It’s always there ahead of you, even though you think you’ve put it behind you. You think you’re running away from it but really you’re just keeping the rendezvous, just like Fate in the story. The tremendous amount of force and determination you put into escaping your Doom is the very thing that creates it. Everything is always fine and dandy until it isn’t and that’s the sting in the tail, as I keep on insinuating. That’s kind of ‘the punchline’ to the story, I guess you could say. It’s the punchline to every story. The story might seem like this to you, or it might seem like that, but once you get to the punchline you’ll see that the Big Joke was on you. It had been on you all along. You’ll see that it doesn’t matter what you might have thought you were doing, because – really – you were just making an ass of yourself. Big style. ‘He was infected with the Sacred Disease’, they will say, shaking their heads sorrowfully. There’s no need to feel bad on that score, however – we’re all like that at the end of the day. We’re all ‘Sufferers of the Sacred Disease’ here. We think that it actually matters what we think! Poor misguided fools that we are. What hubris! What colossal appalling arrogance! We won’t see it until the very last moment though and that’s the shame of it….
Image credit – tvtropes.org