Worry not my friends, for I am here. I am here and yet I am not here, both at the same time. I’ll help you but I won’t. That’s my party trick, if you will. I’ll solve all your problems, and yet I’ll leave them with you as well. You’ll be saddled with them forever…
I’m always looking for new things, and yet I get tired of them the very next moment. I’m always hungry for novelty, and I’m also sick to the back teeth of it, sicker than you can possibly imagine. I am sickened by myself, sickened by the sickening attitude I have towards myself.
The ticket inspector is approaching where I’m sitting in the carriage and my ticket is nowhere to be found. It’s a bad moment. It’s OK though because I’m not really here at all. It’s always like this – there’s a moment of horrible raw panic, a feeling of things closing nastily in on me, followed by the unexpected and distinctly humorous relief of discovering that none of it really happened anyway. Nothing happened, and it didn’t happen to anyone.
I am tortured on a daily basis by the exquisite tedium of my own horrifically sterile existence – events come around according to a routine that no force can change. The events of my life come around with the type of superb predictability one might associate with the finest Swiss watch, and yet at the same time I can’t help knowing that it’s all just some kind of joke. It’s not what it seems at all. Somewhere, someone is laughing…
I express many fine sentiments, sentiments that are expressive of many different and varied things, and yet expressive of nothing at all. My words and phrases – although polished to perfection – are only there to cover up the greedy void that lies within me. It’s not really me, you see – it’s just the void talking through me. It’s just the void talking through me, trying to keep itself company. Trying to keep itself company throughout all those unspeakably vast and lonely Eons of time. Eon after Eon after Eon. Eons without end.
I am myself, and yet not myself at all. I am awake but at the same time fast asleep. I know exactly what I’m doing, but at the same time I haven’t a clue. I know and I don’t know. That kind of thing. I stare absently out of the train window, watching the trees and ponds and fields flash by, and as I sit there I find myself suddenly overcome with a strange sadness because now I know that I’m not really there at all.
It’s very important to be pliant and obedient all of the time, just like toothpaste in its tube. Going where it’s squirted. That’s what I’ve always been taught anyway, and I don’t care who knows it! It’s kind of the key thing in life really, and that’s no word of a lie. Once you understand this basic principle then everything will go swimmingly for you. You just have to comply with whatever it is that you’re supposed to be compliant with… I still remember the day this became clear to me – it was like a magnesium flash gun going off in my head, it was like a big brass gong being struck with a hammer by a giant. The reverberations resounding throughout my entire body, and since then – as they say – I’ve never looked back…
It’s very important to think the thoughts you’re supposed to think and dream or the dreams you’re supposed to dream. Dream them well, my friends, dream them well. Sign on the dotted line. Take the pledge. Subscribe to the monthly newsletter. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. Don’t disturb the beast, isn’t that what they say? Don’t get up its nose because you’ll be sneezed out if you do. Amidst a conflagration of mucus. Infected mucus, at that. It’s very important to compete hard for the prize, even if the prize is only a slap across the side of your head with a dead haddock. A dead and stinking haddock. A haddock that had seen better days. It’s very important to always compete hard for the prize. That’s what I always say, anyway!
Compete for the prize my friend, compete for the prize. I know that’s always worked for me! It’s the key to success, in fact. The key to fame and prosperity. I’ve written a great many books in my time but none of them were particularly popular. I never broke through to the ‘mass market’, you see – I never had the breakthrough that I needed in order to launch my career. I was never invited onto any radio show or daytime TV programme to talk about my ideas, and that hurt. I don’t mind telling you that that hurt a lot. More than I would like to admit. My pain was great. It truly was. And over the years it turned into a particularly potent form of bitterness, which is very often the way (as I’m sure you know from your own life experience) …
Compete for the prize, my friend, I instructed myself dolefully, reciting this tired old formula to myself more by force of habit than anything else at this stage. I had long since forgotten what the prize was, you see. Was I competing for life, or – as seems more likely – was I competing for the means of avoiding it? They dress it up as something magnificent, of course. They always dress it up as something magnificent. Something truly spectacular. It turns out to be nothing of the sort, of course. It turns out they were lying to you. Lying is the name of the game, after all. They call it the Ocean of Lies, do they not? Indeed they do, indeed they do. We’re all bobbing up and down in the Ocean of Lies my friends, slowly but surely drowning in it, telling ourselves the whole time that some great and spectacular future awaits us…
It’s all to do with Satan and all that kind of stuff, I said knowledgeably, ‘it’s all to do with the Wickedness of Satan and how he tries to make us all do all that bad stuff and how we have to fight against him as hard as we can. It’s all about how we should only do the stuff that God wants us to do. Thank God for Satan, that’s all I can say. If it wasn’t for him then we’d have to take the blame for all that bad old stuff ourselves and no one wants that. No Sir – no one wants that. That’s heavy shit.
Satan’s got a lot to answer for, in my book. He’s got an awful lot to answer for. He’s a real scumbag. It’s no wonder we all love to hate him so much. He is the Author of all our Woes. Thinking thus, I became full of righteous wrath – perhaps I should become a street preacher, I mused to myself. Laying down the law. Maybe even a prophet. Everyone likes a prophet, after all. Being a prophet is instant kudos. You’re a cut above the average gobshyte then.
Thinking in this way, I took to banging my fist vigorously on the table and roaring, ‘Down with the Evil One! Let’s all go and teach him a lesson…’ Before long I had the crowd whipped up into a frenzy. You know what crowds are like, after all – it doesn’t take much. They’re just waiting for someone to come along and whip them up into a frenzy. That’s when the crowd comes into its own you see – otherwise they would just be a collection of people standing around looking stupid, looking like a lot of dopes, looking like a bunch of aimless gorms…
The crowd wasn’t really there, however. The crowd was only in my head. The crowd is always only in my head. The filthy dirty crowd. ‘Yeah – the devil really is a bad egg’, I told myself, ‘he’s the worst person in the world so someone really ought to take him out. Someone ought to put on the Armour of Righteousness and then go out there and stomp him. Someone ought to stomp him good and proper. Teach him a lesson that he won’t forget. Put the big hurt on him…’
It wasn’t going to be me though, I decided. I wasn’t going to take on this role – I’d had second thoughts about it. I’d lost my appetite for the job, you see. Prophets often tend to get hurt, after all. That’s just the way it works – you stick your head out and then someone comes along and knocks it off. Someone comes along and takes the head clean off you. What else would you expect – you’re kind of asking for it really, aren’t you? You’re bloody asking for it. The thing to do is keep your head down, therefore. Keep your head down and make sure you don’t stand out. Merge with the crowd. Merge with the crowd as hard as you possibly can. Merge as you’ve never merged before…
“I am the Purposeful Doer,” I stated proudly, “I create purposes and then I go straightahead and I realize them. I enact them, I carry them out. Pow!! Just like that!” I was full to the brim with myself, I was over the moon. “Yippee!” I cried out exuberantly, “watch me do all this cool purposeful stuff. Watch me realize all my great goals…”
I was feeling fine about myself for sure. Never finer, never finer. As I went about my house I sang a little song to myself, a little song about how fine it was to be feeling fine, about what a gas it was to for everything to be a gas, about how great it is when everything is great. That kind of thing. That sort of idea. You know what I mean. “Yes, yes, yes”, I said to myself with satisfaction, “everything is very fine for sure…”
It didn’t last long of course. That kind of thing never does, does it? Before long my mood unaccountably sank like a stone that has been thrown into a deep, dark well and the next thing was that I found myself in some kind of a dismal subterranean cavern, shivering in the sudden chill. There was a smell of decomposition in the air, I realized. Something had obviously died. Some poor wretched unfortunate creature had met its end here, in this dreadfully dank and dismal hole of a place. The thought of this was too much for me and I burst into tears. “Is there any chance of me ever getting out from here at all?” I cried out piteously, “What is to become of me? Can no one save me?”
The answer wasn’t long coming either. It came via a flat dead little voice that spoke out eerily from somewhere in the dim recesses of my deeply melancholic mind.” No,” it said emotionlessly, “no, there isn’t any hope for you. There’s no hope for you at all and so you should just suck it up and quit whining like a fool. The offensive odour you can smell – that’s you. You’re the poor wretched unfortunate creature that met its end here. You’re the one who’s stinking the place up…”
I had somehow managed to manufacture my very own hyperreality, you see. I didn’t know it at the time of course but that’s what had happened. I had inadvertently closed the circle of my thoughts and now my mind had started to feed on itself. It fed and it fed and it fed and the more it devoured itself the hungrier it got. It was on a journey to hell, and it was taking me with it! That’s what always happens in these situations, as you yourself know very well, I’m sure. You’re not a fool after all. You’re not an idiot, despite what people might say. What I’m talking about here can hardly be called unusual, it’s pretty much par for the course – there’s nothing unusual about it at all. The mind loves to devour itself and once it gets going then it simply can’t stop – it has to see it through, it has to continue until the bitter end.
We shouldn’t let stuff like that get us down though, should we? No, no, no – indeed we shouldn’t. It’s best to keep a stiff upper lip under trying circumstances such as these. A quivering lip is no good at all! Loud and piteous lamentations are no good either – where’s that shit going to get you? That’s just dumb. You can wail and lament as much as you like but it’s not going to do you any good. Absolutely it won’t. You’ll just annoy everyone else. You’ll irritate whoever happens to be around. You’re creating bad vibes you see and no one likes that. No one likes the old bad vibes and that’s a fact.
Obsessed with necromancy as I was as a young man, I never made very many friends. The ones I did make were not true friends at all but were – on the contrary – simply looking for some advantage at my expense. They were in it for what they could get, in other words. They were simply parasites and scavengers. In retrospect, I can see that my way of life had not been a healthy one back in those days, not by any means. Not by any stretch of the imagination had it been healthy. But at the time – what can I say? I was obsessed, possessed even… My mind was not my own – I was driven by dark impulses. I wasn’t responsible for actions in those days, you see.
I am – I suppose – implying that things are different now, that my lifestyle is appropriately healthy, and that people actually like me now, and don’t despise me, and so on and so forth, but that isn’t strictly true. That’s not entirely true. You could quite justifiably accuse me of lying if that’s what I’m trying to imply and I’m not going to insult anybody by denying it. Of course I’m a liar and I would be a fool to deny it. I lie all the time – I freely admit it – but at the same time I do have certain standards. There are certain things that I won’t lie about. Such as for example the big question as to whether Reality itself is a dirty stinking lie. Or whether it isn’t. Or whether it is. Or whatever the hell. I would never lie aboutthat you can be sure. Never lie about the important things, that’s what I always say. That’s my motto. It’s important to have some kind of moral code in life, after all. Or at least, it’s important to be in a position to be able to make that claim in some kind of a semi-believable way. That’s called ‘having standards’, that’s called ‘being a decent human being’.
There are certain things in life that we’re not supposed to lie about, wouldn’t you agree? Things can get very dodgy very quickly if you do and – furthermore – you’re not going to get much sympathy when you come a cropper. Folk will say that you deserve everything you get. They will be delighted to see you get your comeuppance. They’ll be dancing in the street. They’ll be crowing over it, but that’s just the way folk are. Your pain will be their joy. Folk are small-minded and vindictive in their nature, rejoicing in the misfortunes of others as if that were the best thing in the world. People are such awful creatures when it comes down to it. You’d be wondering what got into them, wouldn’t you? You would be wondering just what the bloody hell got into them. What’s their excuse for being so malicious? What’s their excuse for being so horribly toxic, for being so viciously, unpleasantly small-minded? How is that supposed to be OK?
They were trying to take the good things away from me, I realised. They were coming across all friendly and easy-going – with all the backslapping and the banter and the camaraderie and all of that – but really they were just after my good things. I let out an almighty roar, I let out a roar that would have split a mountain in two and gathered up all my things together in my arms. “Get away,” I bellowed, “get away from my special good stuff…” I was blind with rage and laden down with malice. My voice shook with passion and my face was brick red with indignation and outrage. Never in my life had I known such outrage. I was more than just indignant and outraged, I was visibly apoplectic. Every single molecule in my body was vibrating with anger, vibrating like a rattlesnake’s rattle does just before it strikes.
There was no one there trying to take my good things away from me, however. What’s more, I didn’t have any good things for anyone to take! What the hell would I be doing with ‘good things’, anyway? I had nothing of value, nothing that anyone would ever want to take. All of that was just in my head, all of that was just a ridiculous fantasy…
Underfoot, there was a dull clanking and rumbling, as if of ancient underground machinery that was starting – at long last – to fail. Above my head wheeled melancholy seagulls, only they were long since dead – decomposing corpses and nothing more. Bits of them fell off around me as they flew. I was full of terrible, frightening guilt – I knew I was guilty of an unbelievably dreadful crime, but I wasn’t able to remember what it was. A crime against nature, a crime against life itself… a Cosmic Crime – a crime the enormity of which was beyond my limited ability to grasp.
The important thing was to make sure knew no one could associate what had happened with me, I realised numbly. I had to somehow dissociate myself from the crime, whatever it was. I had to distance myself from it as much as I could. I had to remove myself from the scene, and not waste too much time about it. If questioned, I had to deny all knowledge, I had to make sure no one could ever pin it on me. I had to find myself some sort of alibi.
He was a person who had put a huge amount of effort into not acknowledging to himself what a sly, good-for-nothing bastard he was, and that – in my book – is exactly what made him such a sly, good-for-nothing bastard. That could be true of any of us of course. It could be true for any of us but in this particular case it wasn’t. In this particular case it was me. It was yours truly, and this was the first time I’d ever admitted it to myself. ‘It was me all along,’ I cried out, without being able to help myself, ‘it was me that did it!’ I didn’t know what it was that I has done, however. I was shooting in the dark…
The moment of madness passed, and I duly came back to my senses. I came back to my senses with a jolt. ‘What have I done?’ I asked myself – ‘what mess have I landed myself in now? What had possessed me, to give myself away like that. I hoped that no unseen ears or concealed recording devices had overheard me. All the silent however, all was still. No life stirred and after a while I allowed myself to relax a little. ‘Never give the game away’, I told myself severely, ‘whatever else you may do, never ever give the game away.’
The moment of madness had come and gone, and I was left sitting there in the semi-darkness in what appeared to be a burnt-out bunker. I felt hideously exposed. I had dropped the ball this time and no mistake and – despite appearances of all being well – I couldn’t allow myself to believe that had been lucky enough to get away with it. No one gets away with anything in this world, you see. There’s too much surveillance for that. Spy bots disguised as harmless bacteria crawled all over my skin. Psychic probes nosed around in my personal unconscious, discovering stuff about myself that even I didn’t know. I’d be the last to know of course. I’d be the very last to know.
You live in a world of entertainment but it’s all starting to wear very thin. Holes are beginning to appear everywhere in it. ‘How thin can it wear’, you want to know, ‘how thin can it wear before what’s behind it starts to show?’ It can’t wear much thinner than this, you think to yourself. The oh-so-thin entertainment of everyday life…
The fear began in your brain and now it’s spreading out through your entire being – you can feel it travelling through your veins and visiting all the parts of your body. It will soon have reached everywhere. Your brain already knew it you see, but now the rest of you has caught on too. You’re starting to get the picture… The impersonal mechanism of your cerebral cortex, coldly calculating away. There’s no calculating your way out of this one, though. You can calculate away as much as you want to, but it won’t do you the slightest bit of good. There’s no answer there that’s going to help you, you see.
You live in a world of entertainment and that entertainment is all that stands between you and what is going to happen to you when you finally see through it. It’s painful stuff at the best of times! It’s painful stuff at the best of times for sure but now it’s starting to wear terribly thin. It’s starting to tear in places – like a garment that has grown too threadbare to be serviceable anymore. It’s starting to tear asunder, and it cannot be made good again. ‘Alas the garment of sleep doth tear’, you cry out dramatically. ‘Alas for the garment. Alas, alas, alas…’ But no, it’s only a dream you are having – a troubled dream admittedly, but a dream nonetheless.
You leap out of bed, confused and ill at ease. You leap out of bed so recklessly that it’s very nearly the end of you. You very nearly break your neck. Your bedroom is a dreadful mess – it’s full of heaps of old discarded clothes, untidy piles of books and stained china teacups that have been left there far too long. You leap out of bed, eager to distance yourself from the dreams that have been haunting you ruthlessly all night. Your eagerness is very nearly the end of you however because your foot lands upon a teacup and your ankle twists sharply underneath you. The pain is instant and savage and it swiftly brings big fat tears to your bleary eyes. You blubber helplessly, feeling very sorry for yourself. And if that were not bad enough, innumerable disorganized fragments of last night’s dreams now come flooding back to you – poignant dreams, disturbing dreams, dreams of unbearable sadness, dreams that you can neither correctly remember nor properly forget…
Other people’s minds can be rather dangerous places, can’t they? They can be frightening. Unless – like me – you’re a Mind Dweller. If you’re a Mind Dweller like me then other people’s minds are our habitat of choice, of course. ‘Nothing is real,’ you say, but maybe some stuff is. Maybe the bad things are real. Maybe all the nice stuff is ‘feel-good fantasy; and the dark side is where it’s at. I don’t know if you’ve ever challenged the Inner Demon that everyone else in the world is simply tooafraid to challenge, but if you have then you know this isn’t particularly wise! If you have then you will know that the best thing is not to do this. You’d know this very well. Yes indeed my friends – the moral of the story is to make very sure that challenging the ‘demon within’ is the one thing you never do. Not ever. Don’t poke the bear. Leave it alone and maybe it’ll never even know you’re there. If you’re lucky it’ll never know that you’re there. Maybe it’s sleeping. You better hope that it’s sleeping.
The cry of the despairing ego is a very terrible thing to hear, so I have been told. A very terrible thing. It’s tragic in the extreme, as you might imagine, but at the same time it’s sumptuously rich comedy, the sort of sumptuously rich comedy that would give any of us a deeply satisfying belly laugh. ‘Places to go, things to do’, you cry out gaily, ready for anything life can throw at you. Or so you imagine, at any rate. So you imagine…
You like to imagine you’re ready of course but the truth is that you’re not. You’ve never been less ready. You’re the Mind Dweller, doing your thing, trying your best to hang in there, feeding on the negative emotions, stirring them up whenever you can. Sneakily engineering situations that will be to your advantage. You are subtly guiding your host, manipulating it, make it think that it’s having such a great time. You’re moulding it to your will, hoodwinking it. You’re the system, distorting everything you meet. It’s always been you. You’d distort the whole universe if you could. You’d distort it and warp it and turn it into a hideous mockery of all that is good and true. You’d make a nightmare of it – you’d make a nightmare of it and then you’d get trapped in that nightmare because that’s the way it always happens…
That’s the cry of the despairing ego you just heard there! It’ll haunt you. It’ll haunt you until your dying day. Once you’ve heard it you can never unhear it, you see. ‘Who was that ego?’ you wonder, ‘what was its story and what was the hideous fate that it had somehow glimpsed, right there at the end, right there at the very end of all things?’ These and many other questions are racing through your brain and it’s only natural that they should do so, of course. You want to learn, even though you also want to stay ignorant. Even though you’re actually committed to staying ignorant. You want to stay ignorant no matter what. I respect you for that, you see – you’re dedicated to discovering the truth and yet at the same time you’re determined to ignore it at any cost. We’re such conflicted creatures, you see – we don’t know what we’re doing and we’re determined to keep it that way…
I had been preparing for the main event’ for many years (ever since I was knee-high to a brine shrimp, in fact), but then when the time actually came for action I fluffed it. I fluffed it good and proper. I made a complete horrible mess of things. A very bad mess of things. ‘So it goes’, I told myself philosophically, ‘so it goes, so it goes…’ I was paying unconscious homage to Kurt Vonnegut. I had been preparing for this moment since further back than I can remember but when the moment finally arrived I made a complete hash of it. A complete and utter hash of it. I tried to be philosophical about this too of course, as one does, as one necessarily does under these circumstances. ‘Never mind’, I told myself glibly, ‘it probably wasn’t that important anyway…’
When people stand next to me it feels as if they are actually in my head – I get claustrophobic, I get panicky. I run shouting incoherently through the streets, viciously cursing at anyone who gets in my way. Screaming vile abuse at them at the top of my voice, howling out my resentment for all the world to hear. I have learned a lot during the course of my life, including a good many things most people never have to learn, but none of it did me any good in the end. When it came to the crunch I was just another witless freak running down the street, roaring his head off, hollering and screaming like a dumb-ass fool.
Just another freak, just another ‘screw-up’ freaking out in the street, shouting and roaring stuff that even they don’t understand, never mind anyone else! If you were to come up to me and ask me what exactly my issue was I wouldn’t be able to tell you. ‘Prepare for the event, prepare for the event’, I told myself determinedly, trying to get ‘one up’ on the situation that was about to unfold. If you were to ask me what event it was that I was trying to prepare for I wouldn’t be able to tell you, however. I hadn’t a clue. And if you were to ask me how exactly I was going to prepare for it I wouldn’t be able to tell you that either. I hadn’t the foggiest notion and that of course makes a lot of sense when you think about it – how can you prepare for something when you don’t know what that ‘something’ is going to be? That’s something of a conundrum, wouldn’t you say? It’s a conundrum we all have to cope with one way or another. Not that there actually is such a thing as ‘coping’, of course. That’s the biggest lie of all.
That’s life, though. That’s how life is. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that if life itself is the conundrum, then how can any all the bits and pieces that go to make it up be any LESS of a conundrum? Even the simplest, most of apparently straightforward components of life will sooner or later show themselves up to be absolutely perplexing, absolutely confounding. It’ll hit you one day (if it hasn’t done so already). It’ll hit you one day and then you’ll be the one running down the road, shouting bullshit that no one – including yourself – understands. Everyone fluffs it up in the end you see, and that’s the big secret they don’t want you to know. Everyone makes a hash of it sooner or later, no matter how highly trained they might claim to be. That’s just the way it is, after all. That’s just the way things are and so there isn’t really any point in fighting against it. You’re just being a dumb-ass if you do that…
My mind was grazing upon sanctified pastures, avidly consuming what was there to be consumed, enjoying the delights that had been approved for me to enjoy. Yummy, yummy, yummy – right? We’re all having a lovely time, after all. Feed away my fine feeders, for if you enjoy feeding half as much as I do then I can promise you that you’re in for a treat! Feast away my fine feasters, feast away on those marvellously delectable delights that have been deemed both suitable and appropriate for you – don’t hold back because there’s no reason for you to. You deserve it, after all! Or perhaps you don’t, perhaps you feel unworthy, perhaps you are experiencing that very unpleasant sensation of being an outrageous impostor? Pretending to a glory that you never had. Aspiring to a greatness that was never meant for you…We all know what that feels like, do we not? That’s just my little joke, of course – there’s no one unworthy here. We have all been deemed worthy to feed contentedly upon the pastures that have been provided for us. Every one of us has been granted that privilege. Each and every one of us has been granted this boon – that we might graze contentedly upon the pasture lands that have been deemed suitable inappropriate for us and enjoy wholeheartedly the very many excellent items that have been included both for our edification and general well-being. All items are of course regulated by the central regulatory authority and are guaranteed free from all harmful content. No one likes harmful content, after all – that stuff can be nasty, as we all know. Unauthorised grazing is a criminal offence after all! So feast away my fine feasters, imbibe of that rich content that has been curated for its safe and non-harmful nature and if you enjoy it half as much as I do then you’re going to be a very happy bunny. If your mind is anything like mine then you will know rich satisfaction beyond your wildest imaginings! For sure you will my friend so don’t hold back, don’t linger in the sidelines but get stuck straight into it and see if it doesn’t put a big old sloppy smile on your face! And if you’re anything like me then I can promise you – well – you know the rest. You’re running from the Fear of course and you’re running for all you’re worth. Fear is putting the big squeeze on you in the way that fear does and when that happens – well – you know the rest, of course. We all know the rest. There’s no one here that doesn’t know the rest… The big old fear is putting the big old squeeze on you and you don’t need me to tell you that that ain’t nice! No sir, you don’t need me to tell you that at all…
