Author Archives: zippypinhead1

Restart [3]

crashed spaceship 3

I was sitting on a wooden bench in Angell Park in Brixton, feeling the sun heat up my jeans. Behind me there was the ceaseless noise of traffic but here in the park all was quiet. Sitting there, I felt that I was in some way thawing out, or ‘coming to’. I felt that I was coming back to myself. If I was coming back to myself then it stands to reason that I must have been away but I didn’t know where. I had no recollection of being away. I had no recollection of being anywhere. This was an odd feeling, now that I noticed it. I felt that my past had been completely swallowed up by some kind of hungry creature. Or perhaps it had been erased or amputated, as if by a very sharp knife. It was as if I had only this very minute come into existence, sitting here on a bench in Angell Park off the Brixton Rd. I had no past.

 

This thought frightened me a bit, but at the same time it was strangely comforting. There was some kind of illicit pleasure in that forgetting, in that all-pervasive stupefying numbness. I wasn’t numb now though – I was warming up in the sun, I was slowly coming back to my senses but I could still feel the terrible hold that all-pervasive blankness had on me. I could remember the Great Forgetting, the Great Numbness, the Great Blankness and I was still in thrall to it. I was still it’s eager servant. Part of me wanted to stay there forever, part of me didn’t want to come back. All of me didn’t, in fact. I was returning only reluctantly. But I was being reborn into the park whether I wanted to or not and already I could feel the niggling of various awarenesses telling me that I had to be concerning myself with this, that and the other. There was stuff I had to do, even though I couldn’t quite remember what that stuff was.

 

I don’t want to make out that I was suffering from amnesia or anything like that. I could still remember my name. I could still remember where I lived. I could remember everything. It’s just that it didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t have cared less about it. It was all irrelevant information – it was coming from somewhere a long, long way away. It was me, but it wasn’t me. The details I could remember related to my life, and yet they didn’t relate to anything – not really. There was something very pointless about them. It was all stupidly meaningless…

 

I tried to focus on what it was I had to get done this morning but I couldn’t shake the intense mental lethargy off me. I couldn’t free myself from the hypnotic effect of the Numbness. Which is like a giant rubber eraser that instantly rubs out everything it touches – the Mind Eraser. The Big old Mind Eraser. Rubbing out everything. Numbing out everything. Numbing it and numbing it. The Great Numbifier. The Big Blank. Blanking it all out. Blankety-Blank. I didn’t know what I was saying exactly, I just kept repeating those words in my mind because it made me feel strange and I kind of liked the way it made me feel. Although I kind of didn’t at the same time. On a deeper level, the feeling was profoundly unwholesome and it chilled me to the bone. I knew that it was a manifestation of darkness.

 

I was getting uncomfortably hot so I got to my feet and started to make my way back into town down the Brixton Rd. I knew that there was something I was supposed to remember but I couldn’t and this left me with an unpleasant feeling. It troubled me. It was like a pain deep down inside me. A dull, blank sort of a pain – the pain of knowing that I had lost track of something important, something which became more obscure to me the more I got to thinking about it.

 

Go through the motions of doing stuff and it will all come back, I said to myself. Just keep on acting like you know what you’re doing. Eventually it’ll catch, like an old car engine. Your battery is probably drained. Or the starter-motor’s gone. Or the spark-plugs need replacing.

 

I was walking down the High Street. People everywhere. Volumes of people. Coming up the street and going down the street. Everyone knowing where they were going. Locked onto their destinations. Sure of themselves, sure of their destinations. Unlike me who was sure of nothing. Apart from the Big Blankety-Blank in my head.

 

I wasn’t just a little bit afraid then, I was terrified. I was horrified, shocked to the core. I was here but I wasn’t here. Something inside me was missing. Something inside me had been scooped out. I had been negated, it occurred to me. I had been erased on the inside. I had no inside. I was all on the outside.

 

I felt as if I was walking through something terribly thick. Something thick like treacle. Or thick like a dense, miasmic fog. This fog was reaching deep into my brain. Tendrils of it wrapping themselves lovingly around each and every brain-cell. It was the brain fog. The brain-fog clung to me as I walked like a heavy, sickly-sweet anaesthetic gas.

 

I couldn’t shake it off me.

 

I couldn’t shake it loose.

 

I couldn’t free myself from the tendrils.

 

The process had gone too far – it had advanced beyond the point at which it could have been reversed. I had allowed it to set in and now it had taken hold. It wasn’t going to let go.

 

At that point I didn’t know whether I was feeling very very tired or whether I was just very very lazy. Both possibilities seemed to me to be the same thing. It was the same either way. An immensely heavy weight was pressing down on me and I wanted more than anything else in the world just to close my eyes and give in to it. I could barely remain conscious.

 

I was on the bus. I tried again to focus. I stared at my trainers. I knew I had to do something. I have to go to Stockwell to meet Adrian, I suddenly remembered. There was something we had to do. It was important. I remembered that it was important but I couldn’t remember what it was – the attempt to recall it was painful.

 

Blackness swallowed everything up on all sides. Greedy, sucking blackness. An image suddenly flashed into my head: a symbol, and then a set of schematics. A complex diagram. There was a word that came with it – a word that rang in my head and sounded like ancient Greek. The word was intensely meaningful – it was like a talisman, it occurred to me. As quick as it came into my consciousness it was gone again, leaving behind nothing but that feeling of dull pain which had been with me before. The memory had sunk back into the darkness of my mind.

 

Then, as the bus approached Stockwell in heavy traffic, I remembered that I didn’t even know anyone called Adrian…

 

 

 

 

 

MIND-WORM!

mind-parasites

I can see now that there are things inside my mind – vile disgusting things, sickeningly repulsive things like grey slimy dead entrails, like pallid grave-yard grubs, like the semi-dormant larvae of some unthinkably unpleasant parasitic organism. They shift and they slide, coiling and uncoiling in slow motion in the most hideously repugnant manner. I fancy I can hear them talk to each other, squeaking hypersonically at each other like bats.

 

They are an unholy brood, an irredeemably malign infestation. Their very existence an abomination. As I watch them I am sickened – I want to retch, I want to heave my guts up and be rid of them. I want to puke them up on the grass by the park bench where I am sitting. But I can’t manage it – I haven’t the energy to be sick. I can only watch as they slowly undulate. It feels as if my will is paralysed, perhaps by some psychic toxin that they are releasing.

 

They control me, I realize. They have taken over my mind – they run me. They have total control over me and I am no more than a passive observer – the impotent onlooker of my own gruesome demise.

 

These vile things – it dawns on me – are my hidden thoughts and my opinions, my shadowy impulses and cravings, my deeply buried prejudices and preconceptions. As I understand this unpalatable truth the disgust I feel reaches unbearable proportions. I have never seen such horrors. My mind is a seething cesspit of horror – a place of unbelievable degradation and surreally sordid self-abasement.

 

The movement of the grub-creatures are hypnotic. After watching for what seems an eternity I see that in actuality they are all the one worm. I realize now what I am looking at – it is the mind-worm! For all I know it might have been incubating there inside me all of my life, growing fatter and sleeker and ever more extensive in its reach. And now that its power was unchallengeable, it was moving into the next phase of its existence. Whatever that was…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Chance

nightmare-ghost

I was losing strength very fast indeed. I knew that if I didn’t feed really soon it would be all over for me. Already, looking around me, I could tell that most of the people passing by in the street would be too much for me to take on. They would brush me aside without even noticing my attack. That’s how weak and feeble I was. I was in a bad state.

 

I didn’t look as if I was terminally weak – on the outside I reckon I still looked pretty much the same as usual but on the inside, where it counts, I felt painfully hollow and insubstantial. As if someone only needed to come up to me and tap me on the chest for me to cave in completely, collapse in on myself like a rotten melon. Not a pleasant image.

 

I knew very well that things could only get worse from now on if I didn’t feed. Before very long the thin illusion of my apparent outward stability would start to give way. It would become frayed at the edges. I would start to decay, decompose, disintegrate. I would come apart at the seams.

 

Carrying out a quick scan of myself I could already see the very first signs of fraying, of coming undone. I looked somewhat tattered and faded – not quite my usual robust self. I knew now that very quickly my last little bit of strength would flow out of me, to be snapped up by whoever wanted it, to be snapped up greedily by any passing scavenger. The scavenger scavenged, I thought to myself.

 

And then I would be nothing but a ghostly presence – an echo of something long since forgotten about. A residual disturbance that would itself fade away before too long. A dirty thumb print on the psychic ether. A mere psychic imprint.

 

Sure, I might persist as a shade, an insubstantial shimmering pattern in the air, for a few hundred years but there was zero satisfaction in this. The life of a shade is a protracted exercise in futility, frustration and utterly enfeebled decrepitude. In a word, complete gruelling agonizing impotence.

 

If I wanted to avoid this not very pleasant fate I had to feed, and very soon. I looked around me again, looking for a target, looking for someone who would not be strong enough to repel my advances, and this time my gaze fell upon a man who seemed to fit the bill – a man with the unmistakeable signs of inner weakness. I approached carefully, making sure that I made no mistakes this time. I couldn’t afford to lose this one. This was my last chance.

 

He was sitting alone on a bench on the high street, near the entrance to Barclays Bank, and I could see that he was thinking about getting up to go. I could also see that he was lonely, dispirited and unhappy. I walked up to the bench, caught his eye and then asked if he minded me sitting down beside him. Naturally enough, he didn’t. Timing it so that I didn’t seem so much in a rush, giving it a few minutes, I spoke again.

 

“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” I said, pulling a copy of the Bible out of my jacket pocket, “But I wonder if you’d like to hear about the Good News that the Bible holds for mankind, and about what God’s plan is for us in this wonderful Creation of His?”

 

Later on – after I had finished with the target – I felt good again. Saying that I felt good was an understatement – I felt fantastic. I felt ten feet tall. I felt like I was walking on air. I felt like a god. I felt invulnerable. I felt solid, clear-headed and powerful. I had fed.

 

As I walked down the street I promised myself that I would never let myself get that far gone again. Never again.

 

 

 

Checking Out

wall

I am walking down a hot, dusty street. The air is full of the sound of traffic. All around us is the ubiquitous down-market landscape of the inner city. There are three of us: a tall guy with red hair in front, me following behind him and a short, stocky guy with thick glasses in the rear. The short, stocky guy has a carrier bag swinging from his hand.

 

The sensation of walking strikes me as being odd in some way. It is as if it is happening all by itself – my body moves smoothly and effortlessly and for a moment I’m not sure where I fit in to all this. I seem to be an interloper, unnecessary somehow and chronically ill at ease, only getting in the way of things. I am tagging along somehow, unable to find my niche, my place in the scheme of things.

 

It’s not just the movement of my body – everything seems effortless and the world goes by me in a smooth flow. Everything around me seems sleek and luxurious, somehow expensive-looking despite all the litter on the ground and the soft air of urban decay that pervades our surroundings. The dirt and detritus on the pavement looks like a sumptuous carpet and the exhaust fumes hanging in the air are clouds of fine incense gracing our passage.

 

The street flows past slowly, a majestic river of rich sensory impressions. The scene is mundane – squalid even – and yet at the same time it looks lazily and fabulously opulent. Although I have only small change in my pocket I somehow feel in possession of limitless wealth. I feel like a prince, an emperor, a demigod even.

 

There are riches and wonders pressing in on me from all sides. Even the fat sausages of dog shit regularly distributed on the pavement appear wonderfully well sculpted, possessed of solid artistic merit, each one a masterpiece worthy of being displayed for the edification of the cognoscenti in a high-class gallery somewhere.

 

It feels good to be walking. The warm, late-afternoon summer breeze is heavily laden with layer upon layer of odours, some attractive like hints of exotic foodstuffs that I cannot identify, some rank like the smell of stale urine and rotting garbage. We are walking through a housing estate now and at one end of each block of flats are a collection of three or four huge cylindrical steel bins full to the brim with refuse heating up in the strong sunlight. Heat devils dance around us on the dirty tarmac.

 

We reach our destination, a block of flats just like all the rest, and silently climb concentric flights of concrete stairs. In the relative darkness of the stairwell I start to appreciate the acuity of my visual field, the depth and sharpness of detail in everything I see. My vision, now that I notice it, is enhanced far beyond what I am accustomed to. I am experiencing some sort of data overlay: flickering matrices of information are being superimposed upon my normal visual input. It is like having digital displays implanted in my retina, unobtrusively feeding in more and more data.

 

The sensation is quietly exhilarating. I feel detached yet in control. Removed, and yet present.

 

Inside the living room, sitting down on a worn out sofa and drinking from a can of beer, still cold despite its journey through the hot street, I can see pure geometrical shapes rotating slowly in some sort of n-dimensional space. They are both in the space of the living room, and not in it. They are like symbols of pure information, it occurs to me. Sphinx-like custodians of pure meaning.

 

We all sit, drinking cans of beer. No one says anything.

 

The visual activity is increasing… I am no longer quite comfortable. There is a new feeling, a sense of pressure or urgency. I am missing something, the understanding of which is – nevertheless – being forced upon me. It’s a bit like knowing that you have forgotten something, but not knowing what type of thing it is, or what realm of life it pertains to.

 

For the second time that afternoon the thought occurs that, in reality, everything runs itself. There is no need to do anything. No need for an overseer. No need for a driver. There doesn’t need to be anyone sitting there in the driver’s seat keeping tabs on everything – pressing buttons, pulling levers, reading dials and all the rest of it. There’s no need for that. No need for control.

 

With this thought I let go and enjoy the delicious feeling of detachment. The anxiety that had been building up somewhere evaporates. After all, if there is nothing to do, then what is there to get anxious about? It all happens by itself. It knows what it is doing, where it is going, even if I don’t.

 

The thought that there is no need to do anything (or to understand anything) shifts and deepens. It isn’t just that there is no need to do anything, there isn’t any need for anyone to be there to do anything. There isn’t a need for a driver and so there isn’t a driver. That is exactly why everything feels so effortless, so luxurious, so sumptuous. That’s why everything is so perfect, so immaculate. Because there’s nothing getting in the way. Because I’m not getting in the way. The anxiety starts to come back with renewed energy. There’s something there that I don’t like, something niggling at me.

 

A terrible jolt of electric fear runs through me. It occurs to me that the reason everything appears so hauntingly beautiful, so irresistibly majestic, so colossally rich and so uncannily peaceful is because there is no one there to see it. It occurs to me that I have been fooling myself that I was ever here at all.

 

Something in me starts to clench up violently and pull back – I have been so entranced by all this perfection that I didn’t notice that I am no longer an important part of the picture, that I am in fact no longer a part of it at all. The price of the perfection that I was marvelling at so much is my abdication. Only – I now see with terrible clarity – there is no need for any abdication because there is no one hereto abdicate. There never was.

 

For a moment I toy with the idea of bailing out of this process. Or trying to. I somehow doubt that I could at this stage – there is a feeling of inevitability about everything that is happening to me. The idea of fighting against it just seems too ridiculous.

 

Again, I have the sensation of being swept along in a majestic river of sensory impressions. The river is broad and the current is inexorable. I know deep down that there is no fighting against this river because this river, this flow of change, is all there is. I can hold on against it for a while perhaps, but not for long. I can’t help knowing that I will tire eventually – my strength is limited, its strength is not.

 

I am being carried along whether I want to be or not, and as I am being carried long the idea that I am me (that there is a me who is being carried along with the flow) becomes increasingly strange to me. The idea back-fires on me, it rebounds in my face, it doesn’t make sense. It is like someone shouting a nonsensical word. I used to know what me meant, but now I don’t seem to – my so-familiar sense of myself is rapidly fleeing away, it is spinning off into the distance like a piece of tinsel. It looks absurd, unimportant, untenable – silly in some way. It is an inconsequential bit of flotsam. Why pursue it?

 

The piece of tinsel becomes ever more trivial, ever more silly. It is rapidly dwindling away into nothing. I can’t keep track of it any more.

 

The thought strikes again, more powerful than ever, blindingly obvious: “I was never here at all!!!”

 

There is an experience of intense energy: vibratory buzz-saws are taking hold of my head. They are taking me to pieces with implacable efficiency. Nothing can interfere with this process – it has been accomplished before it even began. There was never any argument. There was never even any question of an argument. There was no need for such a question, no need for any argument. There was only peace – a vast peace, a tremendous peace, a peace that had never been broken and never would be. An unbreakable peace.

 

I see a great whirling wheel all around me. A spiral vortex, majestically turning. An Antimatter Galaxy sucking me in. Tractor beams taking me apart atom by atom.

 

I am falling towards the impersonal glory of the central spiral.

 

There is a frisson of awareness: I realize the identity of this whirlpool with the newly formed core of pure shining immaculate nothingness in the centre of my being.

 

A sheet of brilliant white light opens up in front of me, and in that moment as I finally understand what is happening to me, I feel an overwhelming pang of love for my two companions. A love so comprehensive that it extends to everything: the living room table, the over-flowing ashtray, the coffee stains on the carpet, the motes of dust dancing gaily in the bright sunlight…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blank Out

blurred man

There was a toxin in the air, I could tell. As I walked down the street I could feel it all around me like an invisible cloud, trying to settle on me, trying to gain a foothold in my clothes, trying to land on my hair, trying to infiltrate my defenses. I walked faster, hoping in this way to offset the progress of this airborne attack, just as one might walk faster in the rain, hoping thereby to get to one’s destination a little bit drier, a little less soaked to the skin.

 

 

But where was my destination, I wondered? It would help if I knew that much at least. I needed to know that much or else I was surely lost. The one thing about walking extra quickly when caught in a rain shower is that you have to know exactly where you are going, and keep that goal firmly in mind. Otherwise the whole thing would be a joke, a waste of time, a disaster. What is the point in walking extra fast if you don’t know where you are going? How is that going to help? All that happens then is that you get just as soaked, only you have to walk faster whilst it is happening to you.

 

 

I had two main problems, it occurred to me. The first was – as I have just said – that I didn’t have a clue as to where I was going and so my strategy of merely walking faster was not in any way going to help protect me from the airborne toxicity. The second and more serious problem was that even if I did have a destination that I could reasonably expect to reach at some point in the not-too-distant future, it was almost certainly far too late to do anything about the toxins that had already worked their way into my system. To put it simply, the process of toxic infiltration had already reached the point where the end result was an inevitability, a forgone conclusion.

 

The reason I knew this is that I could already feel the toxins at work in my brain. I could feel cold fingers penetrating deep, causing areas of numbness. Terrible numbness. The numbness wasn’t physical but mental – it was a sort of blankness that was reaching into me, fanning out within my brain and establishing little colonies here and there in strategic locations. I instinctively knew that once such a colony had been established it could not be dislodged. It would dig in, and then when it had consolidated its position enough, when it felt secure enough, it would send out a whole new batch of fingers so as to begin the process all over again.

 

 

The numbness was starting to scare me, although from time to time I had the peculiarly incongruent feeling that I was only imagining it. When I could feel the numbness it was like I was forgetting something – it was like I was forgetting how to be me. I experienced what I can only describe as mini-panic attacks when this happened, it was as if by getting panicky enough I could somehow scare myself into remembering myself. I felt like I needed to concentrate very hard on being afraid so that I didn’t lose the feeling, so that I didn’t forget to be afraid. I almost wanted to exaggerate what was happening to me so that I wouldn’t relax and drift off into whatever blank state of mind seemed to be awaiting me. The blankness was out there, it was all around me, and it was closing in.

 

 

But maybe that was what I was doing, it occurred to me. Maybe I was exaggerating so much that I was actually making the whole thing up! Maybe it was all in my head – the toxins, the cold fingers, the colonies in my brain, the forgetting, everything. Maybe nothing was happening to me at all – maybe I was just selling myself a story in order to get some sort of perverse twisted thrill. How mad was that, I wondered? Surely that was just as weird a thing to be experiencing as the original ‘airborne toxicity’ business. Or was this idea that I was only telling myself a story in order to scare or shock myself only a story in itself. Maybe when I thought that I was telling myself a story that wasn’t true, maybe it was only another story that I was telling myself a story.

 

 

But it couldn’t be ‘another’ story, I reasoned, if the first story wasn’t real, if I wasn’t really telling myself a story in order to freak myself out. Maybe the only story was the story that I was telling myself stories.

 

 

My brain was working overtime by now and I felt like I was losing my grip. Not that it had been much of a grip in the first place. It was surely more accurate to say that I was in the grip of these ideas that were currently infiltrating my head. I wasn’t the gripper, I was the one being gripped. The gripper gripped. Only I wasn’t the gripper and so that wasn’t right. There was only the being gripped, not the gripping. Even when I tried to get a grip, by working out in my head what was happening to me, this was really only the alien ideas trying to get a grip on me. Only they weren’t trying to get a grip on me, they were succeeding!

 

 

The idea that I wasn’t really being affected by the airborne toxicity, that I was only telling myself that as a kind of a make-believe story or fantasy, maybe that was an alien idea that had successfully infiltrated me. If this was true then that would mean that I was being affected by the toxicity after all, and the toxicity was trying to subvert my own brain against me, trying to make me believe that what was happening, wasn’t happening. Only it wasn’t trying, it was succeeding.

 

 

Or was it? Surely my brain couldn’t have been subverted otherwise I wouldn’t be thinking the type of thoughts that I was thinking. I wouldn’t be thinking that alien ideas where taking hold in my brain if they actually had taken hold. Or could it be the case that the thought that alien thoughts were being implanted in my brain was itself an alien thought that was trying to infiltrate me?

 

 

All these thoughts – alien or otherwise – were proliferating so wildly at this stage that I just couldn’t bear them any more. They were chasing themselves in tight circles. Multiplying, reproducing, turning into fractals, into patterns within patterns within patterns, into spirals which receded away at dizzying speed into the distance. The more I tried to concentrate on them the faster they receded. I felt like I was looking out of the window of a jet as it accelerates just before taking off, gazing at the ground rushing by me ever more rapidly. I couldn’t bear to look any more. I felt myself losing contact with the ground under me. I couldn’t feel anything there – it was as if my feet were dangling in space, like two rubber bands. I needed solid ground beneath me but somehow – no matter how I tried – I couldn’t seem to reach it. I knew the pavement was there somewhere because I had been walking on it only a moment ago. The problem was – how could I reconnect with it?

 

 

I knew I had to do something. I could see a shop just a little further down the road, a newsagent. If I made a huge effort I might be able to get to it. If only I could get out of the street – which was proving severely problematic for me at this point in time – and into the confined and presumably relatively unchallenging environment of the newsagent, I might be OK. Just possibly.

 

 

Somehow, I don’t know how, I managed it. I was back in touch with some sort of normality. I stood there, taking my time, professionally scanning the row of newspapers and magazines in front of me, pretending to be looking for something in particular. Perhaps what I was looking for wasn’t even there. In which case I would leave the shop without buying anything and go elsewhere. Row apon row of perfect faces looked up at me from the magazine covers. Immaculately self-absorbed faces – utterly blank, disdainfully devoid of any trace of actual personality, triumphant in their theatricality as if they had found some ultimate form of safety by surgically divesting themselves of every last vestige of individuality. Their blandness was their victory, their victory over life itself, I realized.

 

 

I found this thought very interesting. This was something of a revelation to me – it was something that had a very great relevance to my own personal situation. I wondered if this was indeed the perfect defense against all of life’s rottenness, all of its tricks and jokes. Perhaps the models glossily portrayed here in front of me where the consumer culture’s equivalent of Zen Masters. Perhaps each one of them had a black belt in some sort of extraordinarily arcane martial art. The martial art of leaving your body ‘out there’ all by itself, with no actual vulnerable real live person inhabiting it, no one to get hurt, no one who could in any way be ‘got at’. These models served as inspiration to us lesser folk, a shining (or rather blank) example to the rest of us of what we too could hope to attain to. If we tried hard enough.

 

 

Then I realized that this wasn’t the case at all. These blank-faced, leopard-skin wearing women already had been ‘got at’ – they had all been infiltrated by the same toxin that had very nearly done for me out there in the street only a few minutes ago. They were examples alright – examples of what happens when this appallingly effective environmental toxin gets a chance to really go to work on you. All that is left after that is the shell, the husk, the mockingly empty mask.

 

 

It is definitely true that we everyday people with our unsightly blemishes and unfortunate imperfections are doing our level best to look as much like the blandly perfect supermodels that we are daily compelled to look at. Isn’t this the whole point of shopping after all? And what else do people do other than shopping? Obviously this is the main event, the significant business, the actual focus of life. Why else is this called a ‘consumer culture’? Because it is all about consuming. We work it is true, but only to obtain the money necessary to enable us to carry on shopping. We eat and sleep as well, but also only as a means to an end – so that we can get up the next day refreshed and well-fed to resume the perennial quest of looking for that perfect top, the perfect hand-bag, the perfect pair of shoes.

 

 

But then, I realized, the only reason we do this is because there is nothing else left for us to do. Because our brains have been effectively infiltrated, invaded, taken over, subverted… Because our minds are chock-a-block with trashy memes, with mass-produced viral garbage, with endlessly multiplying, intensely malicious and incredibly highly invasive mental software. After that takes hold there is nothing left but the shell, the husk, the outer covering, and all this outer covering can do is shop. Or drink, or gamble, or buy scratch cards, or have sex, or listen to the radio, or watch mindless TV.

 

 

I know this sounds ‘over-the-top cynical’, as if I am desperately trying to be smarter than everyone else. But it really wasn’t like that at all – I was actually feeling scared. Genuinely scared. And fear is a pure emotion (if it is an emotion, which I think is debatable) in that it is absolutely free from the wretched taint of superiority, which I must admit I am afflicted with as much as anybody. And with as little justification too, as I must also admit. But right then I wasn’t feeling at all superior – I was feeling scared.

 

 

I was feeling scared because my train of thought had reminded me that the toxin that had already infiltrated everyone else was also about to start work on me too. I was scared because I knew that I had no way of stopping what was going to happen, from happening. Once this particular type of toxicity takes hold – as I have already said – there is no way to reverse the process. It might seem strange that I can be so sure about that but some processes are genuinely irreversible – that’s just the way they are. This is a scientific fact: all entropic processes (like a cup of tea cooling down) are impossible to reverse. Of course you can put the cold cup of tea in the microwave and give it a quick blast but then the energy needed to do this depletes something else, entropy is created somewhere else in the system and so no matter what you do you are creating entropy. And entropy, as the Victorians were quick to realize, is one day going to take over everything, like mindless DJ’s on popular radio stations, or scratch cards, or Hollywood films, or McDonalds, or Coca Cola. Or like the whole of American culture for that matter.

 

 

I was scared, very scared, genuinely scared, but weirdly – incongruently – I wasn’t scared at all. In fact on another level entirely I felt stupidly blasé about the whole thing. I even felt kind of bored. I pulled a magazine from the shelf at random to have a closer look at it. There was a ridiculous article in it about how some minor celebrity had discovered that her boyfriend had been having an affair with some other minor celebrity and how she had split up with him because of this fact. This story was obviously totally ridiculous because it was just so stupid. I mean, this was supposed to be news, that some celebrity I had never heard of had broken up with her celebrity boyfriend because he had been cheating on her with another celebrity I had never heard of. I mean, how fascinating is that? Do I really want to know all the banal details about their pointless shallow lives?

 

And yet the sick thing was that some part of me did want to know. I could feel the tug of attraction operating on me, hooking me in, engendering within me the irresistible whim to read on and find out more of the details. It was like some part of me wanted to feed on this trashy story, a wilfully greedy part of me that wouldn’t be denied. It had its snout in the trough and it wouldn’t be budged until it had had its fill. It wanted to feed and feed and feed, and it didn’t give a damn about how squalidly repulsive or gross or demeaning this behaviour was.

 

 

But when I say that this was some part of me this is of course not true at all – it wasn’t part of me at all, it was an implanted compulsion designed by highly-trained corporate psychologists who happened to be working for the magazine. This was how they got people to buy their magazine – this is how the whole consumer culture thing works in the first place. It’s all about implanted ideas, implanted desires, implanted inferiority complexes, implanted insecurity, implanted envy, and so on. They make us the unwitting (if not witless) hosts to all their filthy impulses which then multiply within us and control us like the larvae of particular sort of parasitic wasp will jack themselves into the nervous or endocrine system of a hapless caterpillar and cause it to eat and eat and eat and never actually pupate, never actually turn into a butterfly. While they feed on it the whole time. And then finally the voracious wasp larvae swarm out through the skin of the poor burnt-out caterpillar, leaving it for dead now that it has served its purpose.

 

 

That was actually a very appropriate metaphor I realized. That was exactly what was happening with us hapless so-called ‘consumers’. It isn’t us who are consuming at all – it was them. The corporate parasites, the high-street chains and the fashion houses and the trans-global multinationals, and so on, were busy consuming us, and at the end of it all, when we are burnt out from feeding on the toxic garbage that they make us crave for every day, then they will leave us for dead and turn their attention to the next generation. We are merely the hosts for their mass-produced commercial memes, their exponentially-proliferating toxic viral implants, their desire, insecurity and envy-inducing malicious software. And the whole time we are so frighteningly stupid that we actually think that we are the beneficiaries, that we are the ones calling the shots. We feel so damn cool in the very latest designer gear, the designer gear that their bent corporate psychologists have programmed us to buy at exorbitant prices.

 

 

I came out in a cold sweat when I realized this, but at the same time I could feel that terrible invasive blankness out there, inexorably closing in on me, slowly creeping up on me from all sides. The blankness was when I forgot to be frightened, when I forgot to be me. When I forget what it felt like to be me.

 

 

Does anyone really get this I wondered? Do people actually get how terrifying blankness actually is?

 

 

The terrifying thing about blankness is that it is blank. That’s all it is – just blankness. Utter blankness. The blankness of blankness. This blankness is blank to everything, including itself. It is so blank that it doesn’t have the slightest clue about how blank it actually is! It doesn’t realize that it is blank – and when it infiltrates us we don’t realize how blank we are. Our stupidity is so great that we think we have lives! Can you imagine that? How stupid is that?

 

 

And this terrible, terrifying blankness was almost on me now. It had me surrounded, it had me hemmed in on all sides. And it was so close by that I was on the very brink of forgetting to be afraid…

 

 

 

The Fear

paranoid-eye-is-watching-you

I remember the time the fear first hit me. I feel that I ought to spell that word with capitals, i.e. FEAR. I remember the time the FEAR first hit me. FEAR in capital letters. Needless to say I had known fear many times before that day and I have certainly been afraid in a lesser way many times since. But this was different, this was not your normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill fear at all but something far far worse, something as different from everyday fear as a falcon is different from a street pigeon, or as an attacking Doberman is different from a street cur that barks loudly but harmlessly from a safe distance. This was the real thing.

 

It hit me first in the stomach, very softly, like a snowflake landing. It touched me so very gently, it touched me as tenderly as a lover. People often say that fear has an icy touch, or perhaps a clammy touch, but for me the touch of fear was warm and intimate, like melting chocolate on my bare skin. Its intimacy was terrible. Its intimacy was such that from the very first moment it allowed me to know it completely. As soon as I felt it, it was as if I had never been without it. It made me feel as if I had known it forever. It made me feel as if it were the only real thing in the universe. My memory of a time when I was not afraid became instantly unreal. I could no longer relate to that time. My expectation of (or belief in) a future when I would not be afraid was non-existent. Fear was now my whole world, and I knew everything there was to know about it.

 

Only a second ago I had been my usual, cocky self. When I say usual, I mean usual for how I was then, as a relatively young man of 28 years of age. I wasn’t cocky because I had anything very much going for me, or because I had some sort of accomplishments under my belt, but because I was dumb. Such is youth. Or at least, such was my youth. I would hesitate before suggesting that all young men are as foolish, as clueless as I was then – although they may be, for all I know. I know exactly how dumb I was however because that – in immediate, garishly high-lighted retrospect – was the nature of the education the fear provided me with.

 

I could not believe that I could have been so completely dumb, so irredeemably stupid – and I wished with an intensity that I would never previously have thought possible that I could have stayed that way. But such incredible, blissful stupidity could never be mine again. I was – I realized in a flash – forever excluded from that most taken-for-granted, that most unappreciated of worlds – the sublimely oblivious world of normal human beings. The world I knew I too used to live in.

 

The fear came in the form of a perception, an awareness. It started out as a stretching or extension of my normal powers of perception – I simply found that I could hear that little bit better, see that little bit more acutely. This was a pleasant enough discovery, as far as I remember it. I delighted in the acuity of my senses, I marvelled at their scope and subtle sensitivity. The night was like a fine, richly woven fabric that stretched out infinitely into the distance. I could sense no end to this extension – the further out I sent my senses the more there was to become aware of. I fancied that my hearing had improved to what I can only describe as a ridiculous level. I could practically hear the beating hearts of birds that slept in the trees. I could hear people talking to each other as they walked down streets too far away to see. I could hear people thinking! Wherever I focussed my attention, there I would start to hear a wealth of detail – the more I listened the more there was to hear. All of this was impersonal; it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

 

And then, with a shift which was so subtle as to be unnoticeable, all that completely changed. Permanently. It became personal. By accident almost, it seemed, I tuned into a police radio channel in which the discussion of conversion was clearly me. Officers had been around to Beaminster House making inquiries, and several people there in neighbouring flats had spoken of seeing someone fitting my description a few days earlier. That was only a few miles away from where I was now, down the other end of the South Lambeth Rd, and I experienced that sudden nasty thrill that comes that you get when you realize that people who bear you no good will have come close to tracking you down. They were close and they were getting closer – I could feel their attention, their mental probing, turning slowly but surely in my direction. Someone had clearly tipped them off as to where I was now living.

 

Of course I knew that I was, in theory at least, a wanted man and that there had been a long-standing warrant out for my arrest for jumping bail over a year ago, but this was not something that had been particularly worrying me. I could live with stuff like that, but what I was hearing now was definitely not something I could live with. They weren’t talking about arresting me as they made their way along the South Lambeth Road in the direction of Clapham and the squat where I was presently staying, they were talking of snuffing me. They were talking about snuffing me without any further ado. This was no normal everyday bust but some sort of covert hit squad, the sort of thing the police sometimes did – possibly very rarely did- when they really seriously didn’t like somebody, and really seriously couldn’t be bothered going through the inefficient and time-consuming judicial system.

 

Two different emotions arose simultaneously in me. One was extreme relief at the way in which I had been able to pre-empt – even if it was only by a matter of a few brief minutes – the plan of these grim and lethally efficient police officers, and the other was fear. The type of Total Fear that I have been telling you about – the type of fear that is a world to itself. In that very short space of time it took me to realize my predicament my world changed its focus forever. I had only a few brief moments to savour and marvel at the gift of my new vastly enhanced senses, and the near-omniscient awareness that came with them, before it all turned abruptly into a curse. It stayed a curse from that moment on – it never turned back into the tantalizing blessing that I knew for these first few seconds of my tremendously expanded consciousness.

 

The freedom of all-pervasive consciousness transformed at the speed of light into the unremitting pressure of paranoia. I knew I had to act and act fast. It was all about acting: from now on there was to be no more leeway, no more time to savour this or any other moment – no more time to linger over the inconsequential. This was life without any leeway, life without any room for error, life without any safety margin. This was life on the knife-edge and I knew without any doubt that my first mistake would also be my last. All this came to me clearly in an instant, all in the same instant, and I didn’t waste any time thinking about it. I didn’t mull it over, I didn’t reflect on my situation, or analyse it, or try to see if there were any other possible courses of action open to me, I just tore down the stair-well as fast as I could and headed off at a run to the nearest exit from the estate.

 

I knew that if I moved fast and didn’t waste a second I would be gone by the time the police snuff-squad got here, but I also knew it would be a very close thing. Again, as I put Ashmole estate behind me and headed off in the direction of Clapham South I experienced that strange mixed emotion – I felt delighted that I had outsmarted my pursuers and acute pleasure in my clear awareness that they would not be able to figure out how I had been able to stay ahead of them. And at the same time I was deadly afraid, terribly afraid, more afraid than I had ever been in my life.

 

I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but I had just entered through a strange ‘one way door’ into a new and hitherto unknown world – a world of running. A world made up of nothing else but running, a world where running was all there was. This was a world where napping was not an acceptable pastime, and where the penalty was both swift and merciless. This was a world where you only got the one chance, a world where it was possible, only barely possible – and provided you thought fast enough and made no mistakes – to stay just ahead of one’s pursuers, but never by more than a hairsbreadth…

 

 

 

 

 

Unreality Syndrome

unreality

There’s this world called the unreal world, only there isn’t really of course because there’s no such place. It doesn’t exist. It never did (or could) exist because it isn’t real. You couldn’t even invent it. How could you invent it? Anyway, so there’s this plan – although I shouldn’t be saying it here – to sneakily bring in stuff from the unreal world into this world and pass it off as being real, and then sell it to people, by putting a spin on it so as to create a buzz. The plan is to work away at creating some hype, creating a kudos around the unreal stuff so that everyone wants to get some for themselves and everyone gets jealous of anyone who already has some, or at least anyone who says that they do, and then it kind of gets a name for itself which means that more and more people are willing to put in offers for it or gamble their stake for it or make deals for it – trading in the real stuff for the unreal. Eventually the idea is that the substitution process reaches the point of being irreversible or non-returnable. A lot of things are ALREADY unreal at this stage, of course. A lot of the food we eat is unreal. Most of the food we eat is unreal. A lot of the things people talk about on TV, on the news and on current affairs programmes and chat shows are all unreal. Most of our ideas are already unreal. Quite possibly all of them. A lot of the stuff we like to think about, in private, without telling anyone about it, is totally unreal. The unreal has at this stage already accumulated a lot of kudos and everyone’s getting buzzed about it. We all want more and more of it and those of us who haven’t got any of the stuff at all yet are extremely keen to get hold of a bit for ourselves. Nobody wants to miss out. Nobody wants to come out of the fray looking like a big fat loser. And we might as well face it – we’re all desperate not to end up being the losers at the bottom of the pile, the ones who never got a slice of the pie, the ones who never even had a chance. Somebody’s got to lose out for sure but as long as it’s not me that’s fine, right? And so there’s this buzz going on – it’s a happening kind of a feeling that going on and everybody wants some. There’s a very nasty undercurrent of anxiety too because we all have this feeling that maybe we are destined to lose out big time and come away with nothing. The plan is working very well indeed you see its gathering momentum all the time. Let’s face it, people are awful eager to be fooled!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Web

web_head_modern_techno_industrial_surreal_art_poster-p228266558708437907tdcp_400

I heard the other day that the interweb was full of spiders, and ever since then I have not been able to stop thinking about it. I have never been particularly happy around spiders, although I wouldn’t say that I have an actual phobia about them or anything like that. Neither do I have a phobia about computers – I like Facebook or You Tube as much as the next person.

 

But when I heard about all the web-spiders and web-crawlers and all that sort of thing that really did it for me. The penny dropped. It makes perfect sense after all – why wouldn’t there be robot spiders roaming around the web? Why should this come as a surprise? Where there’s a web there’s generally a spider or two not too far away…

 

But then after hearing about the spiders it was like I had figured something out. When I sit for hours on Facebook or You Tube, wishing on some deep-down level that I could break free and go and do something else, but at the same time fundamentally unable to do this, then – I figured – this must be because of the web-spiders. This is after all what spiders do – they paralyse their prey. That’s their trick. Then maybe they lay their eggs on you, or in you, or whatever. I must be full of eggs at this stage, it occurred to me. I must be chock-a-block with the eggs of the invisible web-spiders.

 

The thought of this freaks me out. It fills me full of dread and horror, and yet because it is such a morbid fascination I cannot stop going over and over it in my head. I sit around for hours obsessing over it. As I say, I can’t sleep at nights. I can visualize the virtual egg clusters as if in full HD, nestling amongst my neural networks, waiting to hatch. And when they do hatch, what’ll happen to me then? What’s the next phase?

 

This isn’t to say that I don’t go near Facebook or You Tube any more. I’m as bad as ever. I waste hours at it, still. It’s not that I actually want to – it’s definitely a kind of involuntary thing with me. I reckon that the virtual spider-eggs in my brain are telepathically controlling me…

 

 

 

 

 

Omega Point

fear

I was frightened, very frightened. More than just badly unnerved, or severely frightened, I was frankly terrified. I had never known fear of this magnitude before, never known anything even remotely comparable to it. “Right,” I thought to myself, desperately trying to take back some ground for myself, “I’m going to get myself out of this. I’m going to get through this thing…”

 

But even as I thought this I knew that it was only the fear speaking, not me. After a while the fear spoke again, “You’ll be OK,” it said, “You’re going to be alright, you’ll see. Everything’s going to work out…”

 

Hearing the fear speak like this made me more afraid than ever – it chilled me to the very bone. The fear started to blabber hysterically then, “It’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK…”

 

I could feel the madness bubbling up freely from within me now. Utter panic taking hold.

 

The fear was controlling me completely at this stage. The fear was the boss. It was the puppet-master and I was the puppet. I could feel its fingers. I could feel its icy hand reaching right up my arse. All the way up.

 

I wasn’t even a puppet, it occurred to me then, because at least puppets have a bit of substance to them, whilst I didn’t have any. I had no substance, none at all. I was like an infinitely thin membrane stretched across the fingers and hand of the puppet-master. “I am a membrane, I am a membrane, I am a membrane…” I kept on thinking to myself, trying my best to distract myself from what I had just glimpsed.

 

Only I wasn’t really thinking this at all, of course. The fear was making me think it. The fear was thinking it through me – it was the puppet-master and I was the membrane. Thinking whatever the fear made me think. “I am a membrane, I am a membrane, I am a membrane, I am a membrane…” the fear yapped on hysterically in my head, like some sort of insane tape-loop.

 

That fear frightened me. Listening to it babble away like that in my head frightened me because I could hear the outright madness in it – the sort of madness you just don’t come back from. You don’t come back from madness like that, the fear told me. You don’t ever come back. Not ever…

 

It occurred to me then that I was still holding onto some basic vestige of sanity. Holding on for dear life. It was stretched very thin by now. Very thin indeed. It had no more stretch in it, I realized. It was quite out of stretch. It was on the point of breaking. I had reached my limit, I could see. The limit of my sanity.

 

A new wave of fear broke over me – terror so great that I had never ever in my life even imagined that there might be such a thing, such a possibility. A new, uncharted realm of terror. A whole new world of terror, an unsuspected world made suddenly real. A revelation of terror. A negative epiphany.

 

I had to do something, I realized at this point. I had to take action – this was my very last chance.

 

And then I knew what it was I had to do. I would create a fear-proof world for myself, a private world, a private universe within which no fear would be allowed…

 

I would build it brick by brick. I would build it atom by atom, molecule by molecule. I would construct it detail by detail, bit by bit, unit by unit, section by section, out of nothing. Ex Nihilo.

 

I would specify what was to be in it, down to the last detail. Nothing would get past me. Nothing would be allowed to be in it apart from what I myself put in it. I would be like God, in this respect. In fact, it occurred to me, as far as this private universe was concerned I would be God. I would be the Creator.

 

I would conceive of and create every single thing in it – if I didn’t say for it to be there, then it wouldn’t be there. Everything would depend upon my word, upon my thoughts. It would be a water-tight world, a perfectly sealed world. Nothing suspect would be allowed in. There would be no windows and no doors. Via this supreme act of control The Fear would be blocked out.

 

And then I would enter the world and close the door behind me forever. I would enter my own private universe and seal it behind me, never to be re-opened. I would seal myself off in this world and then I would be safe. Safe forever…

 

 

 

Nothing is Real

nothing-is-real

“Nothing’s real in this world,” I commented to myself bitterly as I threw the empty plastic coffee cup into the bin. “It’s all just instantly disposable, instantly forgettable candyfloss crap.” The whole world seemed to me at that moment just like the crumpled ultra-thin white plastic coffee cup that I had just thrown in the bin – barely sufficient in a crappy sort of a way at the time to do the job it was supposed to do and certainly no good at all after this, no good at all after it passes its sell-buy date. “Designed obsolescence, isn’t that what they call it?” I commented again to myself with a touch of wry humour as I walked out of the canteen. “Nothing’s built to last these days…” As I walked out of the door it occurred to me that actually nothing WAS real in this world. It was actually true! The realization came upon me, so to speak, out of nowhere. What I had said was truer than I had known at the time. It was 100% true. Nothing was real. The Beatles had got it right. The plastic coffee cup wasn’t real and neither was the crappy coffee I had drunk out of it. Neither was this dismal shit-hole of a place. This place wasn’t real at all – it was just a particularly depressing consensual hallucination. “Just like the consensus reality to be dull and depressing.” I thought wryly to myself in the privacy of my own head. “Why does everyone always have to agree on the crappiest possible reality to live in?” I carried on walking. The idea that nothing was real wouldn’t leave me. It persisted. It hung on. It followed me around. It haunted me. It filled me with a peculiar melancholy bittersweet sadness. I came to an abrupt halt then, overcome with this strange melancholic emotion. I was almost choking on it. I knew then – with greater clarity than I had ever known anything in my entire life – that this world wasn’t real. It was a mirage, a phantom, a hallucination. It was a giant hoax, a put-up job. This absolutely devastating insight was followed by another, equally shocking one – I realized then that I wasn’t real either. I was a hoax, a fraud. I had only imagined  – somehow – that I was real. I didn’t exist at all. That was some kind of deranged fantasy I had had – I was actually just a figment of my own imagination…