I was counting my chickens. ‘One hundred and one chickens, one hundred and two chickens, one hundred and three chickens,’ I counted. The chickens were only in my head, however; all of them – all untold thousands of them – were only in my head, and there was I counting them all like some kind of damn fool…
‘How great is reality?’ the keen young market researchers wanted to know, brimming over with ingratiating smiles. ‘How great is reality? Is it – [A] Very great, [B] Quite great, [C] OK, [D]reasonably OK, or [E]pure crap.’
‘There’s one chicken’, says I to myself, ‘and – by jingo – there’s another…’ There was a whole long line of chickens and – what’s more – they were all mine! The chickens in my head were all mine. They continued to walk by, and I continued to count them off, never missing a one, never missing a beat. I was safe and sound in my very own Toy Universe, you see – it existed only in my own head and it went around and around in circles forever. The chickens kept a-coming and I kept a-counting them and that’s what keeps the whole thing going. That’s the whole trick right there.
‘I’m trapped in a perfectly loathsome fantasy that came out of my very own mind’, I cried out then, suddenly aware of the sheer horror of my (purported) existence. ‘I’m trapped in a fantasy that has gone bad, a fantasy that has turned evil, and now I’m powerless to get away from it!’ This dark and unwholesome fantasy has me in it’s clutches and it is dragging me down to my inevitable doom. I’m doomed in my very own fantasy! Not how it’s supposed to work out, is it?
I am unanimous in my own lifetime – everyone agrees with me straightaway, no matter what I say. Folk automatically follow my lead. I’m a trendsetter, I guess you could say. I agree with me straightaway too – I agree with myself without question. I don’t even know what I’m talking about half the time but what the hell, right? Who gives a shit? I’ll believe in any bullshit just too long as it’s the right man coming out with it. ‘Give that man a medal’, I’ll cry out, waving my hat in the air. ‘Give that man a bloody medal…’
There are people going around saying that I’m not all that I’m cracked up to be. They’re trying to present me in a bad light – ‘He’s nothing but a crazy chicken counter’, they’ll tell you, ‘he goes around counting chickens in his head the whole day long. You can’t believe a word he says! I’m wise to them now though, you can be sure of that. I know what their game is and I’m going to put a stop to it, all in my own good time.
Things are good, but at the same time they’re bad – if you know what I mean. I’m in top form, raring to go, but at the same time I’m like a total bastard. I’m like a living antichrist. A crucial thread has come loose in my jacket and the whole thing’s starting to unravel. A stray chicken got past me when I wasn’t looking. My life is significant and real, but at the same time it’s a tissue of lies. It’s a toilet roll of lies that I can wipe my ass with every day. The lies will stick and the truth will have to go underground! It’s the same story that anyone will tell you, if you get them half a chance. No more and no less. My advice however is to keep on walking: keep your head down and keep on walking and that way you won’t have to listen to them…
“Do you remember the time, do you remember the time?” I cried out gaily, with both brightness and perspicacity, and we all duly set about slapping each other heartily on the shoulders, grinning broadly and making amusing quips. Life was good and spirits were high. We were not long at this however before the atmosphere changed abruptly for the worse and everyone grew serious. Serious matters were afoot, although none of us wanted to be the first to admit it. A New Reality was dawning and before we knew it reality shifted its gears on us and we found ourselves in a great empty barn – we were bats, hanging deftly from the rafters. Our time would soon come, we reassured ourselves nervously, our time would soon come…
We were walking the streets, mingling with the crowds that were there, slapping shoulders and making light-hearted jests as we went. Such was our way. Such was ever our way. Our souls were black and shrivelled things however, despite all our finery and evident good humour. We had bought and sold the earth, and all that was in it, and the party was soon coming to an end. It had seemed like a good idea at the time of course, it always seems like a good idea at the time, as you know. Until it ends up that your soul has gone all black and shrivelled.
I was wearing the silver filigreed emblem of Certified Compliance along with the Golden Badge of Heroic Conformity and was strutting up and down the corridor, admiring myself in the body-length mirrors that had been hung up on the walls there at regular intervals for that very purpose. It was the Corridor of Mirrors through which all have to pass. I knew I looked good and pride flooded my being – “None may criticise me now”, I crowed delightedly, “for I bear the Mark of Great Renown and they shall not castigate nor criticise me anymore, as they so love to do”. Folk are fickle you see, they don’t mean to be, I suppose, but they are. Folk are horribly fickle and it doesn’t do to forget it.
All of that is just fantasy of course – I have never been awarded the silver filigreed Emblem of Compliance and I knew I never would be. Neither had I ever won one of these highly-coveted coveted badges of Heroic Conformity. Not that I hadn’t tried, you understand. Not that I haven’t tried. God knows I have tried time and time again to gain approval but it never seems to do me any good. People can sense that I am desperate and this gives the game away. I am shunned and cold-shouldered wherever I go. In my fantasies everyone likes and approves of me. In reality – not so much. In reality, not so much at all…
In the meantime, a New Age had dawned and when we came to our senses again we were sea lions, barking happily amidst the crashing of the great Pacific combers, preparing ourselves for yet another day of feasting upon the bounty of the sea. Spirits were high and whiskers were aquiver and none of us wished to address the uncomfortable fact that it was all just a consensual hallucination. That would have been something of a party killer, of course! No one is ever going to thank you for that. Instead, our thoughts were turned eagerly towards the prospect of feasting to our heart’s content upon the schools of the sleek silver pilchards which swarm ceaselessly as far as the eye can see…
For some utterly inexplicable reason I started all of a sudden thinking about the Burning Heart of the Great Deathless One. I even fancied that I could hear that heart pounding away out there in the darkness. A most unsettling sound – as it beat it ate the souls of the dead. It calls them to it, and they cannot resist.
That’s one thing I started thinking about anyway, the Great Deathless One. He whose heart. He whose heart beats silently for all of us, out there in the terrible Outer Darkness. On the one hand there is the personal darkness, whilst on the other hand there is ‘the darkness that lies beyond’, the darkness that hems us all in, and between these two rotating Spheres of Darkness, between anvil and hammer, ‘the life of manne is grounde out’. Such are the teachings of our new robot leaders, at any rate…
There are never any shortage of teachings, at any rate. There’s a teaching for each and every conceivable occasion. There is no shortage of teachers either – gurus are everywhere – a veritable plague of gurus has descended upon us. Their demented devotees slug it out in the streets, disrupting the lives of ordinary decent folk like you and I. Evil times have fallen upon us and no mistake, although there is of course no point in getting too down in the mouth about it. Life has to go on.
Everyone has their own private mythology of course and I don’t think we should lose sight of that. My own personal private mythology is a case in point. My own private mythology is all about the Terrible Burning Heart of the Great Dead One, as you have no doubt already guessed from my earlier comments and remarks. I don’t know which to fear the most – the inner darkness or the outer. I ought to try to be more courageous I know, but I just don’t know how. No one ever told me how to go about being more courageous and at this stage in my life I have to admit that being timid and fearful has become a way of life for me. Constantly lying to myself out of fear has become a way of life for me. It has become a long-established habit. It’s just ‘who I am’…
We’re all searching for success in one form or another and the reason for this is – of course – that success is so fabulous and splendid and great and magnificent and all of that. But what we DON’T understand is that success can so easily become a mask to hide behind. Picture this if you will – a grinning smirking ‘success face’, such as we can see every day in all the celebrity magazines, but hiding behind it is this poor terrified creature, desperately trying to look as if they are living life to the full when the sad truth is that they’re being controlled all the way by alien mind-manipulators. Picture that, if you will – or if you dare…
The inner darkness is the fear, you see, whilst the outer darkness is the hideous False World that we are driven to participate in. That would be another way of putting it. The hammer and the anvil, you see – the hammer and the anvil. The twin evils of this Earthly Realm. The outer realm is evil because it is the domain of the Accursed One who holds court here (as the Bible repeatedly informs us) and the self within us is evil because it is a creature of that Diabolical Domain, and thus the sworn instrument of the Dark Master who has his power and his dominion here.
Where to turn my friends, where to turn? To deny that we are in something of a tricky situation here is something of a euphemism, you might say. Is it any wonder that folk have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the light, desperately fighting every inch of the way? Is this not the way of things? The Light of Truth is no friend of ours you see – on the contrary, the truth is something we fear more than any other thing and so it is scarcely surprising that when we come into the light then we do so against our will. We are then going to be forced to confront the darkness that lives so eagerly, so greedily within us, just as we are compelled to witness this world of ours for what it truly is, a veritable Citadel of Evil. Or perhaps not – perhaps I’m exaggerating? Perhaps the world we humans have created isn’t a Citadel of Evil at all but a Joyful ‘fun-for-all-the-family’ Disneyland? Who’s to say, after all?
Even we gods have limitations, no matter what we might like to project as being the case. I for example have an atrociously bad memory. The only time something like that would be a problem would be if I happened to be an official ‘Memory God’ at the same time. That would then constitute serious professional misconduct and you’d get struck off for it. It’s rather like saying you’re the ‘God of Humour’ when the truth is that you’re the single most boring deity in the Pantheon. There’s no end of examples you could give, I suppose – you could be a God of War who runs away crying every time he runs into any opposition (which – given the nature of the job – is something that’s bound to happen sooner or later). Or you could be a ‘Creator God’ who never actually created anything – anything like that would do. Any kind of a thing like that…
When you lie unhappy things happen to you. Unhappy, sad things. You know this on some level of course, but you won’t be able to stop doing it all the same. Sometimes you’ll try to stop lying and sometimes you won’t try. Most of the time you won’t try – most of the time you’ll believe your own lies just as soon as they pop into your head!You’d believe them before they pop into your head of you could. But we shouldn’t worry about it, that’s the point I think I’m trying to make here. What else can we do, after all? We just have to carry on lying and then having sad and unhappy things happen to us as a consequence. We’ll have to put up with it. I don’t really see any alternative, do you? And the dismal way we all waffle on and on about ‘improving ourselves’ all the time is so very annoying. At least I find it so.
In case you’re wondering, I’m The God of Small Places. Small places in your head, that is – very small, very claustrophobic little spaces in your head. You’d run away screaming if you could, but the whole point is that you can’t. Anyway, enough of that. Enough of the ‘small talk’ (if you will excuse my feeble attempt at humour). If you’re anything like me then you probably spend a lot of the day trying – in a perfectly futile way – to transcend the harrowing limitations of your false ego-identity. It’s a pain, isn’t it? Why do we bother, I wonder? Why do we keep on putting ourselves through it? (That was meant as a kind of ‘philosophical aside’, by the way, but it didn’t quite work).
If – like me – you spend most of the day brooding angrily on the Enigma of Creation then you’ll know what I mean when I say that it can sometimes get to you. You will feel fed up, sulky, whiny, irritable, frustrated and all that kind of thing. You will feel like throwing your toys out of the pram. You want to lash out viciously, with murderous intent. I guess we can all relate to that one, right? I know I sure as hell can. You hate that awful old Enigma – you loathe and despise it with a passion. You’d poke it viciously in the eye, if you could…
I’m just trying to reach out, I guess. I do that kind of thing, ever so often. Every few thousand years. ‘Trying to connect’ – isn’t that what they call it? The trouble is that all my ‘attempts to connect’ are ‘stabs in the dark’. I can’t connect with anything, not even myself. I can’t even connect to my own disconnected efforts to connect with my own chronic disconnecting. ‘Trying to reach out, trying to reach out!’ Yes, it’s all a Grand Joke really isn’t it? We might as well give up and stay disconnected. It’s a grotesque farce, so why persist with it? Why do we continue participating this soul-denying parody of all that is good and wholesome? That’s another philosophical aside by the way, just in case you missed it. Like in those old-style plays where someone off-stage says something for the audience to think about between the acts.
Deities often try to help people out by telling them how to act it and what NOT to do and important stuff like that. Sometimes there’s a book involved. It all comes down to the same thing though, it all comes down to “Don’t do the dumb thing guys – do the smart thing!” Do yourselves a favour, for God’s sake… The key point to note about this however is that humanity never benefits from this Divine Guidance because they just keep on doing the dumb stuff over and over again anyway (because they can’t help it, as we’ve already said) and yet now they know that they shouldn’t be doing it. Now they know they’re ‘doing wrong’ and that God is judging them for it so there’s this new whole ‘internal conflict’-type thing going on.
You get what I’m saying here of course. Of course you do. I know i don’t need to spell it out, but I will anyway – it’s all just ‘another level of torment on top of the level that you’ve already got’. You’re suffering but you’re not suffering enough so some ‘higher being’ comes along to screw things up even more than they were before. Don’t think it doesn’t happen like that because it really really does. It happens like that all the time! We all knowit too – we just pretend we don’t. ‘Keep on doing the dumb stuff,’ the voice in your head tells you – ‘keep on doing that good old dumb stuff’ it tells you, and so you do! You’re keen to win the game you see and so we can’t blame you! We can’t blame you at all. You’re looking for your slice of the cake. You’re looking for that lovely warm super-cosy ‘social-acceptance feeling’ you get when people no longer think that you’re a frighteningly loathsome creep. We’re all the same that way, of course. All the same when it comes to basic stuff like that. That’s my experience anyway. If you say one stupid thing then you might as well follow it up with another! That’s also my experience…
I realised that I needed to get my story straight before I went any further, “Well this is the story lads, this is the story right, this is the story this is the story…. As I spoke great clumps of dirty yellowish foam became dislodged from where it had gathered around my mouth and drifted aimlessly through the air in a rather disconcerting fashion. My mouth was working away overtime but nothing coherent was coming out – it was working away bravely but it had nothing to work with, you see. I had reached a bit of a low point, a bit of a hiatus. I was running for all I was worth but getting nowhere. “It’s like this, lads, it’s like this,’ I began again but the moment had passed and you know what it’s like when the moment passes – with everything you say you’re only digging a deeper hole for yourselves. It’s like you’ve got your very own JCB. That’s how it always works, although you don’t know it at the time, of course. You can’t see it and so you end up digging a fine old grave for yourself. You end up digging a very fine grave indeed and there’s absolutely no getting out of it. To be sure there isn’t. Some things there’s just no getting out of, as I’m sure you know. Like when you’re dead and in your grave and they’re shovelling the earth down on top of you. A kind of moment like that. There’s no way out of that, you see, unless it’s Rapture Time of course, in which case a hole in the roof will appear, no matter where you are. Even if you’re in a house you will go flying out of it, called by the power of God. Nothing will stop you then of course – even iron won’t stop you. God’s not worried by iron you see – He invented it in the first place so of course He’s not worried by. It’s His show after all. It’s His show and what He says goes. I suppose the point I’m making here however is that you can’t rely on the Rapture coming to get you out of a tricky situation! That’s not the right way to be thinking about things. I wish I knew what the right way of thinking about things was but I don’t – I don’t because no one ever told me! Or rather they did tell me but they got it all wrong as usual. They got it wrong the same way they always get it wrong. They sent me on the wrong path and that’s how come I ended up in my present unhappy situation. It always comes down to this, doesn’t it? At the end of the day it ends up with you standing there awaiting judgement in the Halls of the Dead. You’re dead and you’re standing there with your knees all a-tremble – they’re knocking together so loudly that you can hardly hear yourself think. You’re waiting for your turn to be tried by the Deities, and all the while Ammit, the Eater of Souls, is looking at you with its lazy piggy eyes, licking its chops absent-mindedly. It knows you’re in the bag…
Of late, I keep having all these repellently grotesque little ego-fantasies. That is to say, my ego, (which is me) keeps on having them. In these fantasies I get to be the Supreme Being and everyone has to worship me. I give all the human beings free will of course, but they have to worship me all the same. They know what will happen to them if they don’t! Then I snap out of it again and remember that it wasn’t a fantasy at all – I realize that I really am the Supreme Being. I’m the Supreme Being playing a trick on myself that I’m not, and then fantasizing that I am the Supreme Being when all the time I didn’t need to go to the trouble of fantasizing because it was actually true all along…
Perhaps I’m getting absent-minded with age – I’m very very old, after all. I am so old that I can’t even remember my own birthday! My sad sense of humour betrays my impending senescence, of course. I have not only become absent-minded but feckless and whimsical. Such was ever the way with us Old Gods, however. These days all I ever want to do is tell pointless never-ending stories. Which I therefore do, even though no one ever pays them any heed. My fate is to tell stories that no one ever listens to.
When I was young I had no time for stories, only action – now all I have are my stories, and I don’t even know how true they are. There’s barely anything else to me apart from my ramblings. Sometimes I tell stories of my youth, and all the action that happened back then, and sometimes I tell stories of other, less-interesting things. It all depends upon the mood I’m in. I wasn’t at all well-behaved or sensible in my younger days, I have to say. I was no angel, you might say. Naturally I wasn’t an angel – I was a Tyrant Deity in his Prime, which is a different thing altogether. You can’t confuse these two things. I was willful and vengeful in those days, as no doubt you have heard. Very vengeful, in fact – although what exactly I had to be so vengeful about I can’t really say! I can’t remember, for one thing, and I can’t relate to my the vagaries of my mental state back then for another. I wasn’t really right in myself.
I can’t remember and I’m glad that I can’t – although why I should be so glad of not being able to remember is something of a mystery to me! Another sign of my impending senescence, no doubt. I don’t wish to speak of those days when I was so very vengeful – I confess to feeling rather embarrassed when the subject comes up in conversation. Things tend to get a bit awkward – at least in my own head they do. Instead, I shall tell you a story from the time when I was a Hidden God, which is something not many people know about. This was a very ancient time indeed, you see, and so it’s no wonder no one can remember it. It was a kind of ‘prologue’ to existence.
At that time I wasn’t very mature you see, I was only just starting off and prone to acts of great stupidity – as are we all in our youth, as are we all. It so happened that I became erratic and perverse in my nature, running amok whilst amusing myself with various ill-advised pranks and misdemeanours. Then one day I did the Bad Thing. There’s no use you asking me what it was either because I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to be budged on that one. I still can’t bring myself to talk about it. Suffice to say that once I realised what I had done I was horrified. I shocked myself when I carried out that act; I traumatised myself as well as everyone else in the vicinity.
When I did the Bad Thing I was afraid that I’d be found out for doing it so I did what anyone would do under the circumstances – I covered it up. I covered it up and covered it up and as the millennia went by I started to allow myself to believe that I got away with it. I told you I was young and foolish, didn’t I? The Elder Gods (who – I am very happy to say – aren’t there anymore) caught wind of my misdoings and came looking for me. Or – at least – their highly unpleasant telepathic servants, armed with many terrible weapons, came looking for me. That’s when I went into hiding – I had no other choice. I hid for many thousands of aeons and in the end even I didn’t know that I was there. I was lost in my own darkness, entombed in sleep. Bats lived in my ears, hordes and hordes of great leathery winged prehistoric bats – Genus Necromantis, I believe. I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to bats. Not that I knew anything about it at the time of course. I worked that out later because of all the dung they left, which had become fossilized. Anyway, I eventually emerged from my tomb of sleep and – ever so slowly – came back to myself, and that’s the story of how I became – for a while – the Hidden God…
My ego was basking – basking like a great basking shark, basking in the glory. I love basking in the glory, don’t you? The great, great glory. It’s all so wonderfully glorious that I don’t even know how to tell you about it. Good times, my friends, good, good times…
Only it isn’t really glory at all of course – it’s imitation glory, ersatz glory, make-believe glory, glory that turns out to be not so glorious after all. It’s glory that turns out to be just as crappy as everything else in my life, in fact!
It’s all very dismal – my whole life is very dismal. There – I’ve come out and said it! I was wretched in myself, down in the mouth, demoralized and dispirited, but I could never admit it. It would have been bad form to admit it; it’s a terrible thing when you have to come right out and admit stuff like that to yourself. ‘How could things ever have come to this?’ I ask myself. ‘What has happened to all my splendid dreams of unmitigated success in the world?’ I knew the answer to this question only too well however – they’d all gone down the toilet, and that was the end of the matter…
I have many regrets in my life – many, many regrets. No end of regrets. I know people sometimes say that they have no regrets and stuff like that but I for one find this highly implausible! It’s all just talk you see – nothing more than empty words. I’d say they’re only making it up when they claim, in such a cocky fashion, to have no regrets – I bet on the inside they’re hurting like hell! You bet they’re hurting. They’re all screwed up on the inside about it but they won’t let on out of pure, dumb stubbornness.
The first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning is all the poor life choices that I’ve made – the choices that have resulted in me being where I am today, and that’s a long, long list. It’s a list of bad choices that seems to go on forever and – to cap it all – I’m still making them. It seems that I’m not able to get through a single day without adding to this wretched ignominious list…
Positive thinking is very important though and so I make a big effort to leave all that crappy negative thinking behind and attract positive life-enriching experiences with my hearty positive vibrations. Life-enriching experiences are so very important, aren’t they? It’s very important to stay in a positive mind-state and attract wealth, success and self-worth and all that sort of stuff.
I spend many hours every day making robust life-affirming statements to myself and engaging in positive self-talk but I must say that it hasn’t paid out for me yet. It hasn’t made any difference that I can notice. Sometimes I wonder if all that stuff on the internet we keep getting bombarded with isn’t just a load of old bollocks. Sometimes I suspect that they’re just taking the piss. Having a bit of a laugh at my expense. It all seems so generic and superficial, after all. I can’t help suspecting that one day I might look back on all the effort I’ve put into as a pure waste of time. And that will be yet another regret for me to brood over…
I was shopping for a new ego-identity. ‘Be confident and full of shit’, the advert said, ‘you’ll be wildly popular in no time’. Everyone likes a confident idiot, after all, I reflected. It would certainly be something to consider. As a possible road to go down, it had a lot to recommend it I felt. An awful lot.
Folk will like you for that, you see. They’ll want to hang around with you and absorb some of your special kudos, simply by virtue of their proximity to you. You’ll be at the centre of attention for a change. Instead of being ignored or dismissed; instead of being treated as if you don’t really count. People will want to know what you think – ‘Well, what do you think about that, Stevie?’ they will ask you, waiting respectfully for your intelligent reply. If your name happens to be Stevie that is. You can fill that bit in for yourselves of course.
All that and more can be yours, my friends. All that and more. I was shopping for a new ego-robot – the old one had developed some rather unpleasant habits. It had actually become something of a liability and it was – I felt – time to broaden my horizons. Before things became too dark. Maybe I should purchase one of these new super-shiny spiritual egos that everyone seems to be talking about? They’re very popular with the chicks, so I have heard. Very popular with the birds. Selecting a top-of-the-range spiritual ego could be the best move you ever made. It’s a big initial outlay I know but then once your new spiritual ego is up and running all you’ll need to do is chill out like a boss and enjoy the trip. Pretty cool, if you ask me. Pretty damn cool…
I’m no good with choices, however. I’m too afraid of making it a mistake and walking away with the second-best option, you see. I wouldn’t be able to bear all that abuse and self-recrimination that comes with making a poor choice. I would never be able to live it down – I wouldn’t be able to endure the self-criticism. Selecting the top of the range ego. Making the perfect choice. Enjoying the admiration and respect of your peers – that sort of thing feels so good. Finer than even the very finest grade of cocaine. It’s the king of buzzes.
When you’re flying high and enjoying the respect and admiration of your peers that feels so very fine. Or at least I imagine it does. I’ve heard that this is the best anything can ever feel, this is how you know you’ve got it made and that’s what it’s all about in my book. This is what we should all be working towards. ‘Bankable kudos’ is what I call it, kudos that you can take away and put in the bank. Kudos that only exists in your fevered imagination. Kudos that you can earn interest on.
So, my friends – this is where it’s at, this is what it all comes down to. This is the deal. This is how things work in this world – it’s all about being the right type of idiot. The whole world loves a confident idiot, an idiot who never runs out of the right sort of bullshit to spout out and so why not be that idiot? It could be you. There’s nothing to say it couldn’t be you. It has to be somebody, after all…
I was trawling laboriously through the Multiverse, as is my wont, as is my Great Predilection, when to my delight I came across a universe which was so similar to our own that no one but an expert could tell the difference. And possibly not even then! I could pass it off as the real thing, I said to myself. I could sell it to terrorists on the Dark Net. Or maybe I was mistaken, maybe my mind was simply playing tricks on me, cunning little bugger that it is. Maybe there was a flaw but I just couldn’t spot it.
That’s what it’s like, you see. That’s what it’s like when you’re trawling through the Multiverse for years on end – your mind starts to play tricks on you. You’re looking for cheap sensations and you’ve forgotten what your original agenda was. You’ve lost sight of the difference between what is real and what is only half-real, what is significant and what you only think is significant. You’re looking for kicks, in other words – you started off being the parasite but now you’re the host.
It was my own fault – I had become blase. I had become cynical, weary both of myself and the world. I had become fickle and foolish, vain and pretentious, shallow and obnoxious, and all that sort of thing, and now look where it has got me! One minute I had been a respectable member of society – possibly an accountant, newspaper reporter or parliamentarian or something like that – and the next I had become a disgusting endoparasite, floating unpleasantly in a sack of milky fluid, dreaming my parasitic dreams. I was trapped screaming in the Dream Box, unable to get out…
From time to time I remember moments of exquisite bliss. ‘How exquisite the bliss was back in those days’, I say to myself sadly, ‘how very exquisite and also how very precious…’ We live in a Deteriorated Age, as is well known – nothing is a patch on what it used to be. There’s no bliss anymore – only an onerous sense of duty, which we know on some deep level we’re never going to fulfil. Our duty becomes our doom therefore, and I’m sure there’s no one here prepared to argue with that! Our duty always becomes our Doom….
There’s nothing worse than having to protect an illusion, is there? It’s so very annoying, so very irritating. ‘Oh. I suppose I’d better protect the stupid old illusion,’ you say to yourself with resounding bad grace and you grudgingly go through the time-honoured movements of whatever ritual it is you believe in. But then the next thing is that the Fear comes a-knocking briskly on your door. You’d know that knock anywhere. ‘I’m not here’, you cry out, ‘go away and pick on someone else instead’. Shit has suddenly got real, and you’ve been caught short. You’ve been caught with your trousers down and that’s just the beginning. You try your best to be friendly but you’re just not very good at it – the illusion’s got you on the run and it’s playing you like a fiddle…
You’re doing your best to be friendly, always doing your best to be friendly, but it’s just not working out for you. It’s so hard keeping a convincing smile going – your skin is stretched taut and pink with the effort. The universe is reflecting you back at yourself and that’s never much fun! You’re not a very nice person, after all. Not so nice, not so nice at all. You’re a bit of an old bollocks really, if the truth were to be told. ‘Be friendly,’ you tell yourself, ‘send out the good vibes…’ It’s awful hard sending out good vibes sometimes though, isn’t it? It can be awful, awful hard and I don’t blame you if it gets too much for you at times.
‘Protect the illusion, protect the illusion, protect the illusion’, my mind tells me. Orders me, really. Protect the goddamn filthy, dirty, lousy old illusion. You’ve been hooked on the bait you see, you’ve been hooked on the bait and now they’re slowly but surely reeling you in. Don’t feel too bad about it, though. It’s happened to us all, it’s happened to every single last one of us, so no one here is about to throw any stones, I can promise you. You’ve been doing it for so long now that you can’t give it up, you’re frightened to give it up, but that’s the same for all of us…
My ego was in a terrible huff – firing little darts of pure malice at whoever happened to be nearby. You’re not as good as me, was the message in the darts. Designed to sting, you see. Designed to cause very real pain. I’m no happier than I was three minutes ago and that’s your fault, I whine piteously. Whining is my forte, you might say. I have made many foolish life choices over the years but none of them were my fault – not really. Life is a deterministic process, after all. Pain is designed to hurt you see, it’s designed to send a very particular message and it’s not a message anyone likes. All around us the suppurating Garbage World, pressing in on us from all sides – the sickly-sweet stench of it assailing the nostrils. The smell of corruption that no air freshener can ever mask. There’s no masking here, I’m afraid – things have gone too far for that! A brisk knocking is heard at the front door, it’s the horror film which is your life and it’s about to unfold on your very own doorstep. You make a point of not answering – you’re too wise for that. You’re too wise to make a rookie mistake like that! Instead, you force yourself to pretend that nothing is happening. There’s nothing to see here, you cry out, nothing to see here. Your skin is clammy with the Fear – it’s always the same old fear, knocking ominously on your door, banging away on it, rattling that poor old door on its hinges. Will I ever crawl out from under this fear, you ask. It certainly doesn’t feel like it, not with all that commotion coming from the front door. The signs aren’t good. The omens – as always – are dire in the extreme. Outside the cracked and discoloured windows of the Survival Dome the party ratchets up a notch – if things had been pretty wild before then they were downright unpleasant now! Things were very bad indeed, possibly as bad as they could be. Although one can never be sure. It had all started off as a joke of course – albeit a joke that had very quickly turned sour. You know how it goes – you make some kind of light-hearted comment and then the next minute the room goes dead quiet and everyone is looking at you, their eyes full of judgement and vicious condemnation. You’ve made an inexcusable blunder, you’ve blotted your copybook big time. You’ve copied your blotterbook and you know whatthat means! We all know what that means… Life is good, I tell myself – only just not for me…
