The Excruciating Thinness Of Life

Do you know that thing where you’re trying your hardest to be real but you don’t know what ‘real’ means? That is a moment of horror my friends – that is a moment of true unexpurgated horror. You’ve been caught out and the exposure is pitiless. The exposure (as we know) is always pitiless – it is inevitably pitiless. You do your best to pull it off – you act in a calm and assured way, you arch your eyebrows in a knowledgeable fashion from time to time and you nod your head wisely at odd intervals – and all the rest of it – but all you’re doing is drawing unwanted attention onto yourself. People can spot that you’re confabulating from a mile away – that’s how very obvious it is. It’s painfully obvious…

 

The shocking truth is that you simply don’t know what it means to be real. You don’t know what it means to be real and you don’t know what it means to be anything. You’ve been bluffing your whole life and no you can’t bluff any more. You’re in trouble but you can’t ask for help because that would be humiliating. That would be worse than humiliating. You’re pretending as best you can but it’s all getting very thin. Like monomolecular thin. It’s getting so thin that it actually can’t get any thinner – you can’t stretch it any further and gaping holes are starting to appear. That’s just the way it goes, however. That’s the way it goes and there’s nothing you can do about it.

 

“Keep it real”, people love to say, “keep it real…” I hear them but I don’t know what they’re talking about. I honestly don’t know what they mean. “I hear you good buddy”, I answer back glibly, “I’m with you one hundred per cent on that.” It’s important to be with people one hundred per cent; it’s important to agree unreservedly with whatever there is to agree with and that’s something we all have to work at. It’s important to always say the right thing. It’s important to always say the appropriate thing and I’m aware of as aware of that as you are. And by the same token it’s important to never say the weird and uncomfortable thing, the kind of thing that makes people look at you strangely, the kind of thing that could make you lose friends (were it to be the case that you actually had any). That’s a basic. It’s a given under any circumstances that we should never say the weird and inappropriate thing. That’s a basic, and what’s more it’s so basic that we shouldn’t actually mention it. We should be careful to never bring this point up, in fact. We should be EXTREMELY careful never to mention it because if we do then that will make people uncomfortable and – what’s more – it could do irreparable damage to our social standing.

 

It’s important to be relaxed, nonchalant, and perfectly at ease in social situations. It’s important to be chilled out and casual and to make sure you only ever say things that are highly appropriate. Social situations can easily become awkward and tense as you know, and nobody wants that. No one ever wants that. We all want to have splendid and magnificent experiences as we journey onwards through life and that’s perfectly normal. There’s no need to feel bad about that. No need to feel awkward or embarrassed about it. We’re all in the same boat there, as I think everyone will agree. The important thing is not to be too greedy about it – if you’re too desperate that will spook people. That will leave you feeling like some kind of a grotesque abhorrent freak and no one wants that. No sir – there isn’t ANYONE who wants that.

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing As Evil…

There is nothing as evil as the Evil World that was created for us to suffer and despair in. For sure there isn’t! That’s a well-known fact, that’s a given. You can ask anyone – there can be no argument on this point. Nothing as evil, nothing as evil…

 

Isn’t this what we hear broadcast from the Digital Pulpit every Sunday? Isn’t this what we were taught as little children when we were compelled to attend religious education classes, listening dutifully – as we were of course obliged to – to the interminable droning of our robot teachers? Is that not part of the New Revised Catechism which we all had to learn by heart?

 

The Dark Creator created the Evil World, the World of Shadows, the World of a Million Sorrows, that we might be PRISONERS there, and become – in time – his pitifully corrupted servants. So were we taught by our robot overlords at any rate, and I see no need to doubt their words. It explains many things, as far as I am concerned. He created the Product, that we might worship it, and He created the Shopping Mall, that we might go there and buy it…

 

And the Malignant One looked upon what He had wrought, and He saw that it was dark and loathsome and full of wickedness and that it did sorely oppress the spirits of all who lived there, and He was pleased. That is the teaching at any rate, and I for one see no reason to doubt it. And the Loathsome One looked upon what He had wrought, and He saw that it was substandard, and not fit for purpose, and altogether cruddy and inferior, and He was pleased. He saw that the Product was shoddy and gimmicky, and that it would bring nothing but emptiness and despair to all those who purchased it, and He was full of delight.

 

We adapt as we must, of course. We always adapt as we must. It’s our trademark, after all. That’s what we excel at. We adapt as we were bound to adapt for we never had any choice in the matter. We bowed to the inevitable and learned to serve our Unpleasant Master and snitch upon our friends and colleagues if we got the chance. Power does not come from the barrel of a gun, as the ancient sages observed, but from encouraging complicity. Was this not always the way? We scurry to obey, we always scurry to obey. Obeying is all we know – we nearly trip over our own feet in our unseemly hurry to please the Corrupted One. “Tell us how we might learn to become better servants of your Wickedness”, we pray fervently, “instruct us on how we might enact your will more diligently in this Place of Bitterness and Despair…”

 

 

 

Image – wallpapercave.com

 

 

 

 

Suppose There Was No Such Thing As Reality

This is a good one, by the way – I’d say you’ll like it. You might like it, anyway. Possibly. It’s a bit of a philosophical conundrum, you see. Did you ever think of this – Suppose there was no such thing as reality and so you had to invent it. What then? How would this work out? Would this be a good idea or would it not? This is looking at things from a bit of a different angle you see, and that’s a very helpful thing to do. Or it can be a helpful thing to do, at any rate. It depends upon what you’re looking for really, I suppose. It all depends on whether you have an appetite for such things.

 

Yes indeed, one generally doesn’t get much from seeing things in the same old way that everyone else does. One doesn’t generally get very much from that at all! Unfortunately not. Only it’s not really unfortunate either because it’s kind of what you deserve, if you ask me. It kind of serves you right for being such a bloody muppet! That’s my opinion anyway. That’s what I tend to think. Nope – you will never get anywhere as a result of looking at things in the same old way that every other bloody eejit does. You won’t get very far at all and it will serve you right. What else would you expect?

 

Suppose there was no such thing as reality, and suppose there was no such thing as you supposing this in the first place? Did you ever think of that? Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. Maybe you’re the type of person who likes to think upon such things and maybe you aren’t. That’s none of my business anyway so I’ll say no more about it. I’ll pass on to other matters. I’ll go back to the matter under discussion. If there was no such thing as reality then you’d have to make it up for yourself, wouldn’t you? You’d have no choice. You would have to invent it for yourself but this would mean that it wouldn’t actually be up to very much. To be perfectly blunt about it, it wouldn’t exactly be real now would it? That’s the price you pay, however – that’s the price you pay for saying that it’s real when it isn’t. For pretending, in other words. You can’t get away with it, you see – not in the long run. It’ll catch up with you. It will all come tumbling down around your ears soon enough. Before very long. Before you know it, in fact.

 

“What’s the gain, then?” I hear you ask, “What’s the bloody point of the exercise?” You have put your finger on it there, my friend – you’ve put your finger on it and no mistake. Fair play to you for that. I take my hat off to you – you’ve spotted the weakness in the scheme. The fatal weakness, we might say. You have exposed the flaw the heart of it all. You can invent reality if you want to and that’s all fine and dandy but then you’re caught out because you can’t go anywhere with it. You’re caught on the horns of a dilemma (although why they say dilemma has horns I don’t know).

 

You invented reality to make up for there being no such thing but having done so you realise that you’re stuck with a bit of a turkey. It’s not actually real after all, and you’re only codding yourself if you say it is. You are only fooling yourself and what’s the point in that? There’s no gain there, as you yourself so rightly point out. As you yourself so perspicaciously point out. There is absolutely no point, and if you say that there is then you’re only codding yourself – you’re codding yourself like a big eejit. You’re talking out of your hat in that case. You started out with the one problem and now you have two! You’ve double the trouble!  You started out badly and now you’re worse… So that’s just about all I’ve got to say on the subject. There you are. There you have it…

 

 

 

Image – peakpx.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fake Friends in a Fake World

The Ego Realm just isn’t true of course; we all know it isn’t true, but that doesn’t mean but it isn’t real for the ego itself because it IS – it’s Very Real Indeed for the ego. It couldn’t be any realer, in fact! For every ego that ever was, bar none, the Egoic Delusion is the realist thing ever and there’s no point in trying to say otherwise. You might as well just suck it up and cut out all that pathetic whinging and whining…

 

This brings us up against what I like to call ‘the Reality Problem’, which is the inevitable result of the way in which we automatically and unconsciously struggle against reality (in what is essentially a doomed fashion). We’re doomed from the very onset of course but we keep on struggling just the same. We just won’t give up. We think that reality is Satan so if it against it with a religious fervour. We fight against reality with everything we’ve got and we say that God told us to do it but really Satan is controlling us the whole time and having a laugh about it too. That’s how it works – that’s how he plays us. That’s so-called ‘reality problem’ in a nutshell. One day scholars will write about it academic journals and that will be the devil’s work too! All that type of stuff is the devil’s work. It’s all ‘the effluence of Satan’.

 

No matter which way we turn we get snared. We get snared in the Serpentine Coils of the True Deceiver who is the one and only true Satan, the Master of all compliant egos. If your number is drawn then you’ll win a special prize – you’ll get to go on an intimate dinner date with your favourite AI pop star, or one of his/her many avatars. And – what’s more – it’s all taking place in the rich and tasty fantasy that is being rolled out in your head! You’ll receive VIP treatment all the way, no expenses spared. It’s not so easy when you’re addicted to the Delusion World you know. It’s not as much fun as it looks, not by any means – you can run into all sorts of awkward situations this way, situations which will be thoroughly embarrassing for everyone concerned. Regret will be your middle name (and your first and last name too); you’ll never be able to look anyone in the eye ever again…

 

Fake friends in a fake world! Fake sentiments admirably expressed. Artificial happiness, piped in from a central boiler house. Piped in from a central station… Everything is regulated down here, you see – everything comes in standardised portions. Your joy comes in standard portions just as your misery does. You’re the Amazing Generic Man. You’re the AGM and you’ve tales to tell to tell that will make people’s hair stand on end! Yes, you’ve tales to tell and no mistake. Plenty of tales. No shortage of tales. No one will ever believe you, of course. No one will ever believe you but – then again – that pretty much goes without saying, wouldn’t you say?

 

This brings us back to the highly contentious issue of the so-called ‘Reality Problem’ which is – as we have said – where we are obliged (due to forces that we are profoundly unconscious of) to fight against reality without even knowing that there IS such a thing. This is of course an issue that doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. We like to gloss over it. We’re in a big hurry to gloss over it. Whilst the Egoic Delusion Realm is widely acknowledged by many people to be ‘the realest thing there is’, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad thing, of course. It could be good. It could be great. It could represent the solution to a Very Important Problem. Just imagine how good you would feel if science could finally crack it. How splendid you’d feel. Imagine if you heard it on the radio (or read about it in the Daily Snarf newspaper): “Earlier today – at a very important summit meeting of our Reptilian Overlords – a panel of very distinguished international experts released a statement saying that the Reality Problem is finally under control and that no one has to worry about it ever again.” …

 

 

 

Image – pixground.com

 

 

 

 

Hero Status

I became an instant hero, I became a hero ‘on the spot’, as it were. I reached Hero Status in the blink of an eye. It happened, and then the very next moment, it unhappened!  I was back to Square 1 before I knew it – all my glory gone, just like that. No heroic acts or anything like that, no chance even to sneeze, never mind engage in any proper ‘hero-type activity’. It was almost too fast to register and I couldn’t actually be sure that it had even happened…

 

One glimpse of the dizzying heights and then the bubble burst and I was left wallowing in the foetid marshlands of my characteristic and (needless to say) utterly ignoble egoic existence. Back to the world I know so well, back to the wretched rigmarole that is as familiar to me as my very own… my very own whatever it is. Something very familiar, anyway. ‘Here we go again’, I say to myself glumly, ‘back here yet again’. It’s familiar, but not in the least bit pleasant. Pleasant is the one thing it isn’t my friends – pleasant is the one thing it isn’t…

 

‘Easy come, easy go’, I hear you say, an arrogant and scathingly supercilious look on your face.  ‘Tell us something we don’t know…’ You hate me, obviously, but I can’t blame you for that. No, I have to accept that, all things considered. It’s not my job to tell you something you don’t know however – it was never my job to do that. Absolutely not. Why would anyone want to do that, anyway? Nobody wants to know stuff that they don’t know, and you’d be a fool to try to tell them.  You won’t get any thanks for that. No one has ever been thanked for telling people stuff that they don’t know and it’s only the foolhardy that will attempt it. The foolhardy and the… um… something else. You can fill in the blanks yourself. The foolhardy and the… ‘some other kind of thing that people can be’ which – in the ultimate analysis – isn’t a good thing to be. Some kind of thing which isn’t a great thing to be…

 

Back to the rigmarole, huh? Back to the bloody old rigmarole. Back to the-oh-so-familiar routine that you know so very well (on account of you being so bloody familiar with it, if you take my meaning). Back to the bloody old dingdong. Back to saying the things that you love to say, and doing the things that you love to do. Back to being you, with all that this entails. ‘That’s the ticket!’ you say to yourself brightly, determined to look on the bright side, ‘that’s jolly old ticket…’

 

You’re trying to gather your scattered wits together whilst doing your level best to make sure that the effort – considerable as it is – doesn’t show on your face. You’re confabulating for all you’re worth, desperately trying to keep the show on the road. It’s unlikely that anyone will notice your distress, however – no one gives a shit and so you’ll probably get away with it. It’s amazing what you can get away with at the end of the day. I’d say you’ll probably et away with it, not that it makes much – if any – difference at the end of the day, of course…

 

 

 

Image – streetartcities.com

 

 

 

 

My Lips Were Speaking The Pure Words Of Truth

My lips were speaking the true words of truth, the wonderfully true words of pure undisputed veracity. My lips were speaking magnificent words of impeccable righteousness, only it was all lies of course. It was all terrible, terrible lies. Filthy lies. Scurrilous lies. The most awful lies ever…

 

People often tell me that I am a loathsome corporate tool – they say that I am a craven wage-slave and nothing more. A creep in a suit. That’s where they’re wrong, however. That’s where they’re wrong. I can bide my time however – if there’s one thing that I’m good at it’s biding my time! I’m in my element then, you see. When it comes to biding my time I really am in my element. That’s all I ever do, after all. That just happens to be my Forte

 

I’m so good at biding my time that I don’t even know I’m doing it – I think I’m doing something completely different. I think that I’m doing something else, like cutting the lawn with a pair of nail scissors or grating tiny crumbs of cheese with a microscopic cheese grater under a scanning electron microscope. Or whatever else. Or whatever else it might be. Whilst actually – if the truth were to be known – I’m biding my time. I’m playing the long game, I’m playing the waiting game like a pro and I don’t even know what I’m waiting for.

 

There’s nothing as stupid as human beings, is there? I don’t think that there’s anyone ever going to try to argue about that! By God they’ll be no arguing about that. Not with a track record like we’ve got. What the hell do we think we’re playing at, huh? Just what the hell do we think we’re doing? You’d wonder, wouldn’t you? You’d wonder for sure…

 

Your words are true and vibrant – they burst forth from you without your permission, and before you know it you have become famous, you have become a hero. You became a hero and you became a fool. You were top of your class, you were a whizz-kid and no mistake, but it was all for nothing in the end. A flash in the pan and nothing more. Now you wonder why you had bothered. You were taken in by all the lies.

 

Your words are tremendous, your words are great. Your words are both wise and perspicacious, and none shall dispute them. None shall ever dispute them. You rise to your feet, proud to have the chance to speak of many important things, proud to have the opportunity to speak words of seminal significance, words of undisputed substance and merit.

 

They said you were a liar and a cheat, of course. They accused you of plagiarism. They dragged your name through the mud. The police were called to move you on, and they charged you with obstructing a public thoroughfare. You had been debunked – denounced as a fraud and a charlatan. Your life work was exposed as a pitiful shambles of incoherent laughable nonsense. The absurd ranting of an utter scoundrel and nothing more. The ravings of a sick mind…

 

You endure all this as you must, however. You endure it because there is nothing else you can do. You are biding your time, of course. You’re lying low, waiting patiently for a more favourable age…

 

 

Image – wallpaperflare.com

 

 

 

 

 

Sniffing The Funny Stuff

I had been sniffing the funny stuff again, which proved to be a bad mistake. It is set up a reverberation in my head that wouldn’t go away. A bad reverberation. ‘I’m the man’, I said, ‘I’m the dude…’ Then the reverberation would come to bite my head off. The reverberation was my own echo, and it was ruthlessly negating everything about me. Before long I was trembling with fear, afraid to make a move lest I be punished. This too was an action however, this was also an action and as such it too was punished, instantly and irrevocably. That was the way of things, in this new and terrible reality that had now come my way.

 

‘The Great Negator is biting my head off’, I said to myself. It’s biting my head off every time I think a thought. Every time I think a thought (a thought like this one, for example) the reverberation comes to punish me. I am in the Hall of the Dead, undergoing the trial that awaits us all. I had misspent my life, I realised, I had spent my time lying to myself on what can only be called an outrageous scale. Somehow, I had chosen this as my preferred life activity, the activity of lying to oneself on an industrial scale. ‘Sounds good to me, good buddy’, I told myself, ‘I like the cut of your jib. You’re going to go far young man. You’re going to go far for sure. Good buddy good buddy good buddy…’

 

In my defence however, I never knew I was lying. I swear to God I didn’t. I lied to myself about my lying you see – I told myself that I wasn’t lying, I told myself that I was telling the truth and I believed what I told myself. I believed it without question. I believed this story in all innocence – I had no way of knowing that the whole time I was lying. I had no way of knowing that the whole time I was stitching myself up like a kipper.  ‘You’ve played a blinder there my friend’, I told myself, ‘Please permit me to shake you by the hand!’

 

Echoes in my head, echoes in my head. Everything is just echoes in my head. Nasty, mocking echoes, you understand. All echoes are nasty and mocking but we don’t see it this way. We think the echoes are good and that’s why we chose to live in the Echo World. That’s why we choose to live in a world that is made up of them. Stale, rotten echoes – frighteningly hollow echoes. Sinister echoes. We all echo each other on a constant basis, and this is called society, this is called ‘fitting in’. Who can echo the best, we ask? Who will win the prize? Who will gain the kudos?

 

We echo each other’s echoes and that makes us feel better about ourselves, that makes us feel good about the ‘life’ we lead. We find someone who is good at telling lies – better than we are, perhaps – and we hang around with them, applauding their words, applauding ourselves for our good taste in friends. Applauding ourselves for being on the right path. We are drawn instinctively to the ones who are most convinced by their own lies – this is what passes for truth in the World of Echoes, after all. That’s how we get to be a leader or a guru you see, that’s how we get the wonderful adulation that we desire so much…

 

 

 

 

The Man Who Says ‘Yeah’

I was sitting on the bench next to The Man Who Says ‘Yeah’. I didn’t know then that he was The Man Who Says Yeah but I was – in time – to learn this. He sat silently, not saying yeah, not saying anything, and there was nothing about him to make you look twice; he was just a guy. He was just another guy in a park, in a park just like any other park, in a city just like any other city. This is real life that I’m talking about here you understand, not fiction or fantasy or anything like that – it’s strictly autobiographical. It’s the true story of my life and all of the events I am about to describe actually took place, although you may not believe it. People usually don’t.

 

I was sitting there on the park bench, inventing new words, inventing words that no one had ever heard of before. This was a hobby of mine you might say, even though I am very well aware that no one actually has hobbies anymore, not in this day and age – certainly not in this day and age. It was my ‘hobby’ to have a hobby when no one else did. It was my affectation…

 

I would spend all morning inventing words that no one had ever heard of, and then when the afternoon came, I would forget all about them again. If you were to ask me for an example one of these words, one of the words that I myself had invented, I wouldn’t be able to think of any. I have forgotten them all. You’ll just have to take my word for it. I’m an artist of sorts you see, brimming over with all sorts of extravagant neologisms – neologisms that the world just isn’t ready for. I am so full of innovations that I hardly know where to start. I don’t know where to start.

 

I don’t actually know where to start and this is the whole problem. The field of possibilities is just too wide, the scope of my imagination too great for me to settle down to any one idea, any one innovation. To be limited or tied down by any one single innovation would be frankly suffocating to me. It would be too limiting, and I can’t bear to be limited. Who can, after all? No one likes to be limited but we put up with it in order enjoy the benefits that we’re being offered. The so-called ‘benefits’, might we say, the so-called benefits we falsely imagine we are going to receive…

 

No one likes to be hemmed in by other people’s dull preconceptions, by their crassly stereotypical expectations, by the unspoken game rules that govern what we can think and what we can do. It feels bad – it feels bad because we can’t help knowing that we’re selling ourselves short, because we know we are making ourselves into grinning compliant fools. Grinning away idiotically to ourselves as we rush to do the bidding of our loathsome masters. What have we got to grin about? What benefit do we imagine that we are going to accrue as a result of turning our backs on all that is honest and true? What is the Grand Advantage which we think we stand to gain? These are all rhetorical questions, of course – rhetorical questions are the only questions worth asking. Anything else is too tedious.

 

I was not to find out that the unassuming man sitting next to me on the park bench that day was The Man Who Says Yeah until many years had passed, but that’s another story. Perhaps that is a story that I might some day tell you. Or then again – perhaps it isn’t.

 

 

 

 

All My Words Were Wise…

‘Always excel at what you’re best at!’ – that was my advice to myself. ‘And does that advice help you?’ I hear you ask. ‘Do you find that this advice supports you in difficult or testing times?’ It does in a kind of a way, is my considered answer, in a limited kind of way there is a feel-good factor involved. For example, it may create a transient ‘mood-lift’ if one makes sure not to dig into it too much. If one is reasonably careful not to focus on what one has just said. If one is careful not to focus upon it unduly, so to speak. Or only very lightly, at any rate. ‘Always excel at what you’re best at…’ I told myself again, not quite so sure of myself this time. My voice quavered uncertainly; it quavered in a way that took away a lot of the reassurance that I would normally have obtained from this hearty statement. I came away short in the reassurance department; I came away short in the type of reassurance that I would have otherwise expected. And not just expected either, I might add, but positively relied upon. Yes indeed – I came up short, I came up short. Always excel, I told myself dubiously, always excel. Fine words, inspirational words – words to conjure with. ‘Always excel, my friend’, I told myself, ‘Always excel, because if you don’t then that’s bad’. Not excelling would be bad, most definitely bad, and once badness gets into the mix it has a habit of staying, it has a habit of contaminating everything else in the pot. Turning it bad too, you see – turning it rotten. ‘Expect badness from badness’, I told myself, ‘For from badness only more badness can come…’ My words were wise, my words were pertinent and to the point. My words were robust and insightful. My words were all these things, but the one thing they were NOT was reassuring. ‘Where is the bloody reassurance when you need it?’ I moaned, unhappy about this most recent turn of events. Unhappy and not at all reassured. Troubled, you might say, troubled in my mind. Once you let the badness in at all then you’re done for, you see. You’re finished. That’s the general rule of thumb here. Say no to negativity. You simply can’t afford to have any truck with that rotten old badness and that’s all we can say on the subject, I’m afraid. Keep that door firmly shut my friends, keep the hatch battened down…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smoking My Special Pipe

I was smoking my special pipe, puffing away on it as hard as I could. “Smoke the special pipe, smoke the special pipe”, my mind told me urgently. I was puffing away, puffing for all I was worth – my face was going purple with all the puffing. Smoking the special stuff in my special pipe.

 

And all of this was occurring within a hallucination, of course; smoking the special stuff that was in the bowl of my special pipe caused me to hallucinate like crazy and the outcome of this feverish hallucinatory process was the situation that I now find myself in. Which is the situation that I have just described to you, in fact.

 

I was puffing away madly on my special pipe, drawing the rich fragrant smoke deep into my lungs and then releasing it again, expelling the dense hallucinatory vapours through my nostrils, creating thereby the hallucinatory world within which I lived. The hallucinatory realm within which I am indeed obliged to live, there being – as I could say – no actual alternative to this particular arrangement. Given the lack of any viable alternatives, this was the arrangement that I had settled upon.

 

“Smoke the special pipe!” my mind told me sternly, but my mind was just another of the hallucinations that were billowing madly out of the glowing bowl of my special pipe. “Smoke the special pipe, smoke the special pipe, smoke the special pipe…” came back all the echoes, in a sudden confused tumble of words. My ego was fragmenting fast, which is a thing that often happens to me when I get carried away by my smoking obsession and start smoking my own smoking. That’s when you know you’re really in trouble – when that happens.

 

“Smoke your own smoking,” my mind advised me with great authority, taking the reassuring form of an elderly, angular psychotherapist from one of the older analytic schools. My mind – disguised, as I have said, as old-style Freudian analyst – regarded me shrewdly over the top of a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. “You have regressed back to the oral stage, it informed me, “you have an incest fixation and you think everyone else is sick when really it’s just you.”

 

My mind was a liar, however – it was a liar, as well as being a hallucination. I smoked faster, more determinedly, realising that I urgently needed to integrate the contents of my latest psychosis. The faster I smoked the faster I regressed however. I had become Chicken Man, an ungainly chimeric entity with the head and scrawny neck of a chicken, the dumpy body of a squat and unlovely toad, and the legs of a snake. “Just call me Snake Legs”, I said with a wink, spinning around and around on the spot like a giant hallucinatory spinning top.

 

I was hallucinating like crazy at this stage of course, I had gone too far and yet not far enough. I had lost the run of myself. I had become Horus – Father to my Father, Prince of the Emerald Stone. It wouldn’t be very long before the Dream Police turned up, I realised then with sudden alarm. Any minute now they would be knocking loudly on my door, shouting at me through a loudspeaker to let them in. They would tell me that they were investigating a very serious charge and that I was the main suspect. They would say that I was guilty as charged. They would accuse me of many crimes and sentence me accordingly. They are the Mind Cops, they are the Thought Police, and it was only a matter of minutes before they finally caught up with me.

 

 

Image – freepik.com