I used to grant myself many favours, back in the day. Many, many favours. Too many favours. Nothing was too good for me – I indulged myself terribly. I indulged myself disgracefully in fact and – as you might expect – I became entitled and insufferable as a result. I became obnoxious and people didn’t like me anymore. Well, they never had done, if I’m to be honest, but you get the point. The point being of course that I was an obnoxious person and that no one liked me.
I was playing a game with myself, a light-hearted party game, you might say. A fun game. It was that game where you have to ask every person in the room what their most special thing is, their most special thing of all. “It’s me!” I reply enthusiastically to my own, somewhat ritualistic question – “I am my own most special thing, no one else!” I jump about then, clapping my hands delightedly, doing my little dance, shouting “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me – I’m the most special person!” I dance and I caper and I clap my hands together until eventually I get sick of the game and wander off to do something else instead.
It’s easy to judge, isn’t it? It’s so easy to judge but at the same time you know it’s the right thing to do. Judging is good and you shouldn’t feel bad about it – who are they to judge you for your judging, after all? What right have they? I was in search of the secret of immortality and eternal youth, you see. I was an esoteric student, a earnest seeker, like the guy in the Tarot Cards. Plodding on in the darkness, in an unassuming way. Stumbling occasionally because I can’t see where I’m going. Wearing a cool looking monk’s hood. That’s what I call a cool look, my friends! A very cool look indeed. I am an esoteric seeker, I said to myself importantly, unsatisfied by the cheap and tawdry inveiglements of a crassly materialistic society. This is another game I like to play, just in case you haven’t guessed!
Play the game boys, play the jolly old game. Play it for all you’re worth – which might turn out to be considerably less than you expected! To be sure, play it for all you’re worth -what have you got to lose, after all? It does get awful wearisome sometimes however, I must confess. The game that is. It gets appallingly wearisome and when some brain-dead jerk pipes up “Play the game boys” you want to hit them in the head with a length of steel piping. To be sure you do and you’re not ashamed to admit it either. You’d give them a good solid crack in the head that they won’t forget about in a hurry and that’s no lie. Playing the game snuffs out your life spark you see. It’s an addiction. Playing the game always stops at your life spark. It hollows you out – it hollows you out so bad that one day you discover there’s actually nothing left of you!
It’s a game I invented myself, you see – I call it the Me Game. It’s a kind of solitary game, I guess – a bit antisocial perhaps, a bit ignorant, a bit isolationist, but what the hell? It’s every man for themselves so what are you going to do? So anyway there I was playing the game as usual, playing the jolly old Me Game the same as always, when all of a sudden I realised to my horror that playing the game too much had caused me to lose all my essence-quality and as I realised this fact I felt myself imploding in slow motion. I felt myself caving in on myself, amidst a cloud of choking dust.
I’m in the Funhouse having fun. Having a great time, as you might expect. Having a whale of a time. Whaling it up like a boss. Giving the finger to the man. It’s all fun and games in the Funhouse of course, only sometimes not so much. Sometimes not so much at all. Sometimes the Funhouse can turn out downright spooky, full of echoes and unexplained creaking noises, full of feelings of loneliness and despair and suchlike. Feelings that roam around dolefully, rejected and reviled, turned away at every door. Condemned to walk the weary road until the end of it all, until ‘The End of All Days’ comes. Hypnotized by the sheer horror of your experience, unable to believe that this is actually happening to you.
The terrible weary old road, huh? How well I know it. How well you know it too. How well we all know it. It’s the weariest thing ever, it’s the ultimate grind, the ultimate in doleful tasks. There’s never anything more doleful, just as there was never anything more futile and that’s not mere hyperbole, I can assure you! Absolutely it isn’t. How frighteningly sinister that weary old road is – it would give you no end of nightmares. You wake suddenly in the dead of night, drenched in ice cold sweat, drenched in clammy fear sweat. You know the dream had been bad – no one needs to tell you that – but you can’t remember any more than this. You remember the horror but not the content. You’re sitting there on the edge of your bed, shaking. You were dreaming about your time in the Funhouse…
Does it define me to say that I am a person who appreciates the finer things in life? Does it define me to say that I don’t share the same crass interests and vile obsessions as the ‘toxically unconscious masses’? ‘Well,’ says I, ‘if that is so then I shall most gladly accept that definition, the accolade, because it is nobler in the spiritual realm to be noble than it is to be a dirty good-for-nothing scumbag. Because it is nobler in the eye of the beholder and all that kind of craic. You get what I’m saying, I’m sure. Everyone always gets what I’m saying. It’s a gift of mine, I guess you could say. They always get me. People, that is. As soon as I walk through the door they get me. Yes my friends – if having a taste for the finer things in life defines me, then so be it! That’s all I can say. It’s not ‘all’ I can say, obviously I can say other things too, if I wanted to. It’s just that I don’t. I was spotted early on in life as being somewhat unusual, somewhat atypical. I was spotted as being atypical and then beaten soundly for it. Properly beaten, that is, not just given a few slaps on the wrist. Or whatever. Or however it is you might like to put it. A poke in the eye with a rancid gherkin. Soured chicken livers served with the very finest camomile custard. That’s the ticket isn’t it? We’re all famous here you know, every last one of us. Towering figures you could say. Mighty Avatars of the Age that is Yet to Come, the Age which is only just Dawning. You know the age I mean, I am sure. Of course you do. I was spotted for not being the same as the others and beaten. Beaten soundly, and with gusto. Great gusto. That’s how it was for me, you see. That was the type of life that I had back then and I never once complained. I never once complained because I never knew any better! Being beaten every day for being different was the only life I knew and I accepted it without question. Until this one fateful day, that is. This one fateful day that changed everything forever. You know the sort of day I mean, I’m sure. Days of longing and horror, my friends – first comes the longing (for the wonderful terrible thing) and then comes the horror that unfolds with grim inevitability when we finally win the prize for ourselves. The horror persists like an evil smell. It lingers like a fart you do not wish to be associated with. It has the most uncanny ability to stick around, an absolutely astonishing ability. Definitely, nothing good would ever stick around that long! It would be gone before you could say Jack Robinson. It would be gone before you could say ‘How’s your father?’ It would be gone before you even got a chance to introduce yourself. You’d be left standing there gormlessly like a big fool with your mouth wide open. You’d be left standing there like the big Gorm that you are. Rehearsing the lines that you will never get to speak. Because life has moved on and you haven’t…
It’s bad to do bad things, isn’t it? Goes without saying really. That’s why – when you are a Primordial Creator Deity like me – you absolutely have to punish the hell out of the ‘created beings’ (which is to say, the creatures that you yourself have taken it upon yourself to create) when they get uppity. You have to punish them if they don’t praise you enough. Boy do you have to punish them! You absolutely have to…
That’s how it’s done, you see. That’s how the game is played. It has been played that way from time immemorial. It’s a tradition, if you see what I’m saying, and tradition is a very important thing to us Creator Deities. Very important indeed. We’re kind of funny about stuff like that; we’re ‘bound by our own rules’, you might say – first we make the rule, and then we get bound by it. Rules are rules, after all.
So it was, is, and always will be! That’s how it is with us ‘Angry Father-Type Gods’ – it’s the order of things, you see. Never go against the order of things, that’s my advice to you, my friends – just don’t bloody do it! Whatever you do in life, don’t do that. Because you know what will happen if you do, you see. Never transgress against the Established Order of Things, my friends, because things will go badly for you if you do. And that’s putting it very mildly. The Established Order of Things is very important.
Some people say that this obsession with rules is frankly pathological, that it is evidence of deteriorated mental health, and that The Malign Patriarchy is a pile of shit but that’s not very respectful, if you ask me. There are responsibilities on us, you see – very responsible and very serious responsibilities. Life’s different when you’ve got serious responsibilities like this to be thinking about all the time, you see. It’s no longer possible to live the sort of lives normal people can – they can be as irresponsible as they like and it doesn’t matter a damn! It simply doesn’t make any difference – no one cares in the least. No one cares in the least because it doesn’t matter WHATthey do – they are insects, you see. They are insects that crawl insolently across my skin and annoy me.
Yes, punishment is good – I think we can all agree on that! Pain and horror that goes beyond what could ever be imagined, and all that kind of thing. I can feel a poem staring within me, wanting to be born. A poem about judging people and then punishing them (after you create them, that is). The type of poem only a Creator God like me could appreciate. That’s another of my responsibilities, you see – to be creative, to keep on creating more and more Cosmic Content to demonstrate that you are the best. To demonstrate one’s supremacy. To demonstrate that you are the One and Only, and all that kind of thing. It has to be done, after all. Thus shall the evil aeons unfold, as it has been ordained that they should do. Thus shall the terrible aeons unfold, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it…
I am sometimes accused of being without a sense of humour. And in a spectacular way, at that. I think there’s probably some truth in this, perhaps a lot of truth. I am one of the Old Gods and that’s just the way we are. Senile, temperamental, wayward, and with more than just a hint of malice. All-consuming malice, at that. Malice with no end. That’s how it works, that’s how the Wheel turns and who are any of us to gainsay the Wheel? The Wheel is the Wheel my friend and we’d all do well to remember that. Remember it if you know what’s good for you, that’s my advice to you. Don’t annoy the Big Guy because He can be awful cranky – psychopathic, even… I have had many names in my time, but I’ve forgotten them all now. There were too many to keep track of – I’m as well rid of them. It’s all just foolishness at the end of the day, of course. Nothing but foolishness. I am He who rants, I am He who raves…
My Glory was great, of course. Very great. Back in the day. People were mortally afraid to come near me, in case they were blinded by the intensity of the Glory that shone out from me. They tended to scatter like mice the moment they saw me coming. Great indeed was the dread I inspired! So the old legends tell us, at any rate. So the old legends say. They say a lot of stuff come to think of it, and most of it is the most awful garbage you can imagine. Fake legends, if you will. Fake content, and – as such – an insult to the Divine Content Creator Himself. Which is me. Although there are times when I’m not sure of things as I used to be. Not so sure at all – the ideas I have about things aren’t quite right. They’ve all gone awry and it makes me very erratic – it makes me erratic and disturbed. That’s what happens to us Patriarchal Creator Gods, however. It’s our tragic fate you might say – we eventually become evil. What doesn’t, though? Answer me that, if you can…
It’s great to be owned by someone, isn’t it? The government, the Church, a political party, our slimy stinking corporate overlords – whatever. That kind of thing, that kind of crap. Who really cares, right? Who really gives a damn just so long as someone owns your ass! Someone or something, right? Or however it might work out, and who gives a damn anyway?
It’s great to be owned. Great to be a gimp, great to be a simp. All that kind of thing. All that kind of craic. A tool, a stooge, a patsy. Whatever. A kind of wind-up dummy, all wound up with nowhere to go! A real action man. A gimp of the system, a wimp of the system. I’m a wimp and a simp – a smirking tool of our vicious sociopathic overlords.
Simping and fawning, simping and fawning, how can anyone ever love and admire our corporate overlords enough? Surely it just can’t be done? My mind is baffled, baffled and without a clue. Without any clue at all. Surely it can’t be done. Gimping and wimping, gimping and wimping, pleading to be owned. Always pleading to be owned. By whoever (or whatever) might be out there. And who’s to say, after all?
Pleading to be owned, begging to be owned, that’s me. That’s me down to a ‘T’. But what does it all mean, you ask? What’s the universe here for? Is it all just a horrible trap? Part of me wants to be a better man of course. A very small part, admittedly. A homoeopathic trace, but still. Credit where credit is due, and all of that. We do what we can, we do what we can. Only of course we don’t. Not really.
I always wanted to be owned by some group or other. The Church, the state, a pollical movement, some ridiculous doomsday cult – anything. I wasn’t fussy, you see. No one would have me, however. No one had any interest and I was left out in the cold. I was left to roam the Shadow Worlds – a sad outcast from the World of Half-Men. Simps in suits. The world is a very different place when you’re looking at it from the eyes of an outcast, you see. A very different sort of place indeed, as you might imagine. It’s a very unfriendly place.
Laughing one moment, crying the next, I entertained the crowd with tales of their imminent and horrible demise. They won’t believe it no matter how many times you tell them, and that’s where the fun is. As a small child I used to keep eels. I used to keep eels in a vast underground eelery. I have moved on from then, however. I no longer prize eels, instead I devote myself to loftier causes. I dedicate myself to more noble pursuits, as you might say. Only not really, of course. That’s just my little joke. I have decayed beyond all recognition, you see – both physically and mentally…
I am Master of this crummy world, you see. I am The Lord of All Unclean Things. I am the Wormy One – the Foreteller of Things Yet To Come.
A whole new cheezy flavour has landed, so the ad on the billboard tells us. From outer space, one might suppose. Gifted to us on planet Earth, from the great cheezy gods – gifted to us from the Lords of Cheeze high up in their celestial abode in the Cheezy Heavens. Immortal beings made up of pure undiluted cheeziness, looking down at us from their cheezy thrones – they are playing with us, having sport with us. They amuse themselves playing tricks on us, sending one man good luck and the other bad, and then maybe switching it around a little, mixing it up a little, sending in a multitude of wild-eyed bearded prophets to usher in the Age of Cheeze. Amidst a beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets.
I was sitting in my special place and because of this everyone knew who I was. There wasn’t anybody who did not know me – everyone knew me but at the same time they pretended not to. I had my bits and pieces with me – my accoutrements, you might say. That’s one of the prophecies of course, and you shall know him by his accoutrements, and by the special seat upon which he shall sit. Some people will argue otherwise, of course – they will say that true unimpeded spiritual attainment comes about as a result of some sort of inscrutable ‘internal process’ and that it has nothing to do with special seats and various mystical trappings of one sort or another. I would strongly disagree with the people who say this, however; I firmly believe that it’s all about the seat and the trappings. Very much so, in fact. One cannot overemphasise the importance of the seat and the special bits and pieces that go with it, I would say. That’s my opinion, at any rate.
I am, in my own imagination, a supreme genius of the very greatest stature and status, without peer, without any rival in the world of men. Or in any other world for that matter. In actual reality this doesn’t happen to be in the least bit true of course but it’s a long time since I left reality get in the way of my fantasies! That’s my characteristic incurable bravado, you see. It’s been a long time since I had any contact with reality at all, come to think of it; I wouldn’t know reality if it came right up to me in a busy street and punched me on the nose. I really wouldn’t! “What’s that?” I would ask, “what the hell just happened there?” Reality can play tricks with you like that, you see – it can mess with your head. Reality is the main thing when it comes to stuff that messes with your head – it’s one of the worst offenders in this respect, as I’m sure you would agree. It can mess you up real bad sometimes, and that’s no word of a lie.
No word of a lie, no word of a lie. We are, each and every one of us, fortunate enough to be living in the Age of Cheeze and we shouldn’t forget to be properly grateful for that. These are times like no other. There’s a whole new cheezy flavour that has just landed on the streets – that’s the rumour, at any rate. That’s what people are saying, anyway. That’s the vibe. That’s the vibe that’s out there, my friends, and a very ripe and rich vibe it is too! All those cheezy extraterrestrial astronauts from outer space, coming here to Earth to spread the word, coming here to turn us on to all that Super-Cosmic Cheeziness…
I was enjoying ethical coffee and freshly prepared food. ‘Wow this is great’, I said, to no one in particular. ‘it feels so good to be drinking all this ethical coffee and eating all this freshly prepared food.’ ‘It’s totally legendary,’ I said, full of my usual misplaced enthusiasm. ‘This is living, and no mistake…’
It’s nice to be a tool of the system, isn’t it? So nice to be a tool, so nice to be a tool. Everyone likes to be a tool, and can you blame them? Be a tool, my friend, be a tool. You know it makes sense. Tools don’t ask the reason why, do they? Indeed they don’t, to be sure they don’t. Tools do what they’re supposed to do, what they’re designed to do, what they’re bloody told to do, and that’s the beauty of it. That’s how to get things done, you see. That’s the only way to get things done.
I’m a bit of a sucker for stupid experiences, the same as us all. The same as anyone. That’s why I opted to be a human bean, after all! That’s why I opted. We all willingly opted into the human game and it’s good to remember this. It’s a bit rich for us to go around complaining about this thing and that thing, after all. Moaning from morning til night. Aren’t we responsible for it all ourselves? We’re trying to get away with just a bit too much here, in my humble opinion. We’re kind of taking the piss, when it comes down to it.
It’s all about making sure that you get the proper human experience though, isn’t it? The genuine human experience not some piece-of-shit fakery! Although to be honest more and more people are turning their attention to fake news, which I’m sure you have spotted for yourself by now. Humankind’s long and tortured love affair with fake realities has been well documented at this stage. It’s a full-scale retreat. Lots of top-notch research has been carried out. You always know exactly where you are with a fake reality, you see – a fake reality is always going to do exactly what you expected to do and there is reassurance in that. There’s powerful reassurance in that. When it’s reality you’re talking about then – as we all know – it’s a very different story. Very different indeed. With reality we can never be sure what it’s going to do next, and that kind of general unruliness can be a serious problem. Steps need to be taken, in other words. Legislation needs to be written and then passed into law. Not content with the way things are, we’ve created our own spurious lame-ass version of it and some would say this could be humankind’s greatest achievement.
Yes, on balance I think I would have to say that it’s great to be a tool. You get respect for that. You get plenty of respect. Respect and acceptance. People will nod their heads at you in the street, acknowledging the many sacrifices you have made. Your status as an actual genuine autonomous human being for one, and that’s rather a biggie wouldn’t you say? That’s a biggie for sure…
‘What is the primary delusion?’ people often ask me, ‘what is the actual basis for all this samsara-type business, what’s the fundamental delusion – the delusion behind all the other delusions, if you will?’ I won’t tell them anything, though. I won’t entertain them. ‘Let them find out for themselves’, says I. ‘Don’t come bothering me about it…’
The spider was tiny – barely perceptible to the naked eye – but extremely evil at the same time and it sat in the middle of a vast, all-pervasive web, a web of darkness. That was one of my visions. The web was the Human Realm, of course. It was the human conglomerate of which we are all a part, of which we are all a part. We all go to make it up. In my vision each one of us was an extension of that little spider, a protrusion of it. We are all protrusions. We work away, as best we can, serving evil in all its forms, responding to evil’s prompts, acting according to its commands. That’s how it is with us – we have betrayed ourselves (along with all that is good and clean and honest), but we persist in believing that we have accomplished something truly great, something truly monumental. We are in fact convinced that we’re heroes, which is a perversity beyond all measure. Our perversity is grotesque in the extreme and don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.
Yes, I’ll never tell them what the primary delusion is. I’ll never give them the satisfaction! They need to get off their lazy arses and find out for themselves. They need to put on their hats and coats and get themselves out in the Real World for a change, where nothing ever works out the way you want it to, where nothing ever happens the way you think it ought to. What a pisser, huh? You couldn’t invent a more annoying and frustrating universe if you tried. What we’re looking at here is a universe where nothing ever works out for you. Nothing works out for you no matter what lengths you go to and you are going to go to some lengths, I can tell you. I can promise you that. You will go to extraordinary lengths, desperate lengths and all to no avail. You’ll end up selling your soul to the devil and that won’t do you any good either. But I suppose I have to leave that for you to find out for yourselves…
Yes, the vision lingers yet. It lingers to this day. If I squint my eyes, I can still see that awful little spider, with its tiny red eyes glowing in the shadows, waiting patiently and malignantly at the centre of its web of evil. I can still see it, there at the heart of all things, governing every aspect of our existence. I can’t help seeing it and – at the same time – I also can’t help knowing that this hateful little spider is me, was me all along. That’s the nature of the game we’re playing, you see. This is the secret they don’t want you to know. Only there is no ‘they’, of course. That’s part of the conspiracy, part of the narrative they want you to believe. There never was any ‘they’.
They took what was most precious – precious beyond words – and they ruined it, they turned it into a mockery of itself, an unholy mockery of what – in better days – it once had been. Then, having done this, they compelled us to worship it. They kept us ignorant so that we knew no better, and thus we were content – to some extent at least – to spend our lives adoring the Great Monstrosity or, at the very least, pretending to adore and worship the Great Monstrosity so that if anyone happened to be checking up on us they wouldn’t know the difference. That’s what it’s come to, you see. We have sunk so very low, we have degenerated so far that our only source of joy is to abuse and degrade others. We have gone right over into the infrared region of the degradation spectrum, the region that is so extraordinarily degraded that most people don’t even believe it to be possible. They would deny it in a court of law. That’s how bad it’s got, you see. That’s where we’re at. They took what was precious beyond words and they disneyfied it. They told us to put all our trust in Mickey Mouse. They told us that Mickey was the man, the one and only true and worthy saviour of humankind. We have become so frighteningly perverse that the only way we can have a good day is by seeing someone else have a bad one! That’s the only way we can get any happiness – by enjoying someone else’s bad luck, by taking pleasure in someone else’s misery. It’s got so that the only thing that can bring a smile to our face is the discomfiture of our fellows! They took what was good, and wholesome, and turned it into a poisoned chalice. They turned the bountiful fields and meadows into a breeding ground for plagues, a source of horrors and evils beyond our power to imagine. A channel has been opened to Lower Realms, a channel that can never be shut, and out of that Channel pours a vast and stinking river of corruption. You know this as well as I do, of course. You know it very well indeed – were you not there, the same as I was? You can testify to the truth these things. You have seen it with your very own eyes. They have taken possession of the Holy Source and turned it into an evil smelling sewer. This they have done, and none can deny it. How can they deny it? They did it right before our very eyes, after all. They have been so emboldened by their successes that they no longer seek to hide what they’re doing. They are the Sewer Men, they are the Violators. They are the chattering servants of a Great Uncleanliness. They are the Doom Bringers. They are the Harbingers of Wretchedness, the Instigators of Decay…
‘Go to your happy place’, the super-slick group facilitator told us in his saccharine voice, ‘go to your wonderful happy happy place and think all your very best happy thoughts to make yourselves as happy as possible…’ We all hurried to obey, scurried to obey, looking for the happy place that is in us. That really special super-happy place that feels so good. We didn’t need telling twice you see – we absolutely didn’t need telling twice! We were all mad keen to withdraw to our happy place inside of us and pull up the drawbridge. Maybe we won’t ever come out again, even! Maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll decide that we’ve had enough of life in the ‘non-happy place’ and we’re going to give up on it entirely. Maybe we’re fed up to the back teeth with all the outrageous crap we’re having to endure, day in and day out, in the rotten old non-happy place.
You can hardly blame us for that, of course. No one could blame us for that. Enough is enough, after all. There’s a limit to how much crap a person is willing to take, wouldn’t you agree? Any self-respecting person can only take so much, and then it’s a case of ‘Well the hell with you buddy, I’m off to my super special safe space, I’m off to my special happy place that only I can go to, the super special place that only I know about…’ ‘The hell with this’, they’re going to say, ‘I’m just not going to hang out here anymore with the rest of you losers. No Sir I’m not.’
And could you blame us? All things considered, could you bloody blame us? We are fed up with all the crap, you see. We’re fed up to the back teeth in fact. We’ve absolutely had enough. ‘Can everyone please go to their safe space’, the voice on the loudspeaker system tells us. The voice is calm but insistent. ‘Please remain in your safe space until the emergency is passed.’ it tells us. Only then emergency never really did pass, did it? The emergency never really did pass and we’re still there to this very day, aren’t we? Still here after all this time. We’re still here and we’re none the wiser as to what exactly is going on. Wiser we most definitely are not…
The chicken, the whole chicken, and nothing but the chicken – isn’t that what they say? No half measures here my friend, none of that damnable faint heartedness here! Start as you mean to go on, I always say, and if it all goes sideways on you then so be it. I wasn’t born to be smart, or wise, or funny, or helpful in any way – I was born to be fate’s tool, fate’s instrument. That’s all I am at the end of the day, and when fate is done with me it will toss me aside like a thing that doesn’t matter anymore. You know the sort of thing. It will toss me aside without a second thought. Fate doesn’t generally bother very much with second thoughts as far as I can tell. Second thoughts aren’t exactly fate’s style, you might say. There’s simply no room for regrets in this imperfect world of ours – you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, after all.
I have suffered from something of an identity crisis all my life. I’ve had it as long as I can remember, really. When I was a kid I’d read some kind of dumb comic book about Moose Boy or whoever it was that was popular back then, and then – in my own imagination – I’d actually BE Moose Boy. Or I’d read a comic strip about Protozoa Man and for weeks after I’d BE Protozoa Man, capable of assuming any shape, capable of reproducing asexually by binary fission, and – most thrilling of all – capable of engulfing his enemies and absorbing them into his own primitive but all-powerful unicellular body.
Then when I moved out of this phase I’d engross myself daily in reading those crummy little pulp Sci Fi paperbacks that there used to be so many of. I would devour them, spending all my time reading about galactic heroes like Johnny Neutron the intrepid Space Ranger. Embarrassing really, I know, but in my own head I would BE Johnny Neutron, travelling the cosmos in his FTL spaceship with his trusty crew of mutants.
Normal enough for a lonely, socially-dysfunctional, highly introverted kid with too much imagination and not enough friends, I hear you say, but even then I took it too far. Even then I was deeply abnormal.
Looking back to those childhood days I have no consistent memory of being anyone. Don’t tell me that’s normal. If someone asks me about my childhood I just go blank. I don’t know what to say. I can’t remember who I actually was back then because I had been so busy imagining that I was someone else. Somebody more interesting.
When I became a teenager things only got more confusing for me. I stopped reading comics and crappy pulp Sci Fi and moved on to Philip K Dick. This allowed me to go around feeling that I was not human at all but only some sort of highly advanced android programmed to think that it was human and which had been provided with memory implants taken from somebody else. I need hardly say that this did little to improve things.
As time went on I found myself less and less able to function in a social setting – or any other kind of setting, for that matter. I couldn’t relate to people. I couldn’t fit in, no matter how in tried. I was the perennial outsider – always looking in from the outside. I grew peculiar in my ways. I developed odd mannerisms, mannerisms that tended to attract the attention of passers by as I walked down the street, with consequences that were not very pleasant. I was being noticed in a bad way, a way that could easily get me beaten up,
I was not in a good place, at this point in my life. I abused drugs. I remember keeping a stack of low-grade Moroccan ‘slate’ hashish (along with the obligatory soap-bar) which I would periodically bring out when I was feeling low and subject to the vilest insults. I would say some very bad things indeed to that poor Moroccan slate hash for being so crap – I am mortified when I remember it. I got arrested eventually – the neighbours overheard me shouting and screaming and they called the police. Community social workers got involved and I had to go to a treatment centre.
That was a very dark time in my life and I am grateful to have come out of it. These days I still socially isolate but I have found some kind of peace in myself. Life has taught me the lesson that it’s okay to be a freak. That it’s OK not to fit in. It’s all OK. We live in a very spacious universe. A very ‘allowing’ universe, if I may put it like that. People may not be very allowing but the universe is.
I got into blogging for a while, ranting about society and writing perverse, self-mocking stories, but that didn’t work out.
Now I spend all my time on Facebook, making lots of new friends for myself. Friends who I know I will never have to meet.
