I was trying as hard as I could to think only the right thoughts. ‘Think the right thoughts, think the right thoughts, think the right thoughts…’ I said to myself. I was on an eternally repeating loop – ‘think the right thoughts’, I said to myself. I was harsh on myself; I was without mercy. ‘Never think the wrong thoughts’, I told myself sternly – ‘never think the wrong thoughts because that’s the wrong thing to do.’ I was taking a Zero Tolerance approach with regard to wrongness in general, and no exceptions were to be made. ‘I will never make any exceptions’ I resolved then and there, ‘not even a single one!’ I wasn’t going to permit any wrongness, not even a tiny smidgen of it, not even the merest hint of it. Even the slightest suspicion that there might be something not right would trigger a Major Corrective Response. A Nuclear Response, in fact. I added, sticking out my chin a little. Trying to look at the part. By God – I reflected – there would be no tolerance of wrong things just as long as I was in the driver’s seat. ‘Not on my watch, buddy’ says I, ‘not on my bloody watch…’ I was adamant, you see – I wasn’t going to be swayed. ‘There’ll be no tolerance of any wrong thing on my watch and that’s a fact’, I reiterated tersely, my chin jutting out even further than it had been. There was a certain grimness evident in my voice at this stage – ‘Wrong is wrong and that’s all there is to it’. Doing wrong stuff has got to be wrong, I reasoned, and anyone doing it should be punished for breaking the law. Because breaking the law was against the law. The law was that no one should ever break it, the rule was that everyone should always obey the rule. Nothing too hard to understand there I wouldn’t have thought! Nothing too taxing for the old grey matter, no matter how undeveloped that grey matter might be in some cases. In a lot of cases, in fact. My point is that there’s no excuse – there’s no excuse for not obeying the rule when the rule plainly states that you have to obey the rule. ‘What’s wrong with people these days?’ I wonder. ‘Are they just plain bad? Is that it?’ My thoughts were going around in circles at this stage; they were going around in very tight circles. Painfully tight circles, as it happened. My thoughts are always going around in very tight circles, come to think of it. The tightness is pretty much unbearable if I’m to be honest. Which has a rule I’m not. It feels suspiciously as if there are a vicious gang of filthy unhygienic rats running around in my head and they’re having fun chewing my brain up. Ripping great slices out of it with their vicious yellow teeth. I don’t know what’s happening – either I’m in the process of dying or I’m about to be reborn as a god.
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