The Eel King

In my fevered imagination I had become Drongo, the Eel King, Lord of the High Escarpments…

 

“None shall surpass me”, I whispered, in a voice that was hoarse with intensity, “None shall surpass me for I am Lord and Master of the innumerable worms that crawl in the rich earth.”

 

I grew weary then – weary and morose. My arrogance turned into fear, my glee transformed into the darkest despair. My spirit – which had soared so ecstatically only moments before – plunged like a heavy stone, eventually coming to rest somewhere in the most secret depths of the earth, in a sullen and ill-favoured place where unclean things had their dominion and no light had ever penetrated.

 

I speak here of the dark and loathsome places that few of us will ever be unfortunate enough to visit, but which exist all the same, and which are full of the most dreadful suffering for any that do happen to visit. Perhaps you know of the places of which I speak and perhaps you don’t. Most probably you don’t, and doubtless you don’t wish to know of them either. Most regular folk don’t – they flinch at the very mention of these dreadful subterranean hell-worlds. Ordinary folk are always the same in my experience – they much prefer ignorance to knowledge, since knowledge (as we all know) has the singular property of changing those who come across it. One cannot gain knowledge without changing forever.

 

I could not afford to take the risk. I could not risk the armour of ignorance that had served me so well. I did not wish to surrender to the force of change; I did not wish to say goodbye to what I knew and was familiar with, miserable as it might be. I fear that, you see. My only option therefore was to strengthen the ignorance that guarded me so that I would become all but invincible. In the words of the old poem, “Invincible in his armour of ignorance, he resolutely set forth on the fateful journey that could not end in any other way than the way it was always going to end…” Taking courage from this heroic line, I resolved to embrace the adventure of ignorance and commit myself to it, for better or for worse. I would accept my fate, in other words. If one is to do anything, one should do it wholeheartedly, mistake or not.

 

‘Hidden videos are often unavailable,’ I told myself, becoming pensive all of a sudden, and thus the stories that they tell may never be known. I can’t exactly say how it makes me feel to learn this: wistful perhaps – wistful for the stories that, quite possibly – no one will ever hear. Wonderful stories perhaps, splendid and fantastical stories – stories to make you marvel. Stories to excite and to thrill. On the other hand, there was somehow a sense of relief mixed in there – a sense that was subtle but nonetheless not inconsiderable. Perhaps the stories that no one would ever hear were bad stories, atrociously dull stories, stories that were formulaic and tedious in the extreme. Perhaps it is a good thing that we are spared having to hear them…

 

 

 

 

 

Grudge Match

It was to be a grudge match between me and the Planet-Destroying Space Robot. My mouth was set in a grim line – “Today is the day that Mr Big Shot Planet-Destroying Robot gets a taste of his own medicine. We’ll see how much it likes that, I told a nearby representative of the popular press. He was, I believe, a reporter from the Daily Star. “You’ll see a different expression on its stupid face when I’ve finished with it, don’t you worry…” I bragged.

 

Some would say that I was grandiose, of course. Some would say that I was offensively self-aggrandizing and that I never miss a chance to blow my own trumpet. I refute that, however. I always refute that. In my own mind I’m never wrong, you see. Never never never. Never ever wrong. I am impervious to being wrong. I am completely impregnable – a really great guy. I’m right every time. “You’ll never catch me out!” I shout out defiantly to the world, “I am untouchable, I’m in a league of my own”. That is – after all – why they call me Super Eel-Boy, the Hero of his own Imagination…

 

My mind was absolutely bristling with questions, bristling like a veritable hedgehog. “If you could be a bivalve”, it asked me, “what kind of bivalve would you be?”  And then – without giving me any chance to answer it – it moved on to the next question. “If you could be any flatfish you want, what type of flatfish would you be?” it fired out. I had an answer to this one however and I blurted it out before it could skip on to the next question. “I’d be a turbot!” I burst out immediately, “no question about it at all. I’d be a turbot every time…” My mind was irritated by this, I could tell. It was annoyed. I had got the better of it, in fact. With my super-quick thinking I had outsmarted my own mind!

 

Some wise guy was going around mouthing off about how he was going to ‘liberate everyone from the simulation.’ Some complete jerk, some utter asshole. A bullshit artist, I’d say. A real Big Mouth. I find myself being very reactive about this kind of talk. “He’d better not come near me”, I said to myself darkly, “or I’ll give him what for’. I was quite content with the simulation, you see. The very last thing I wanted was for some asshole do-gooder coming along and liberating me from it!

 

I like to think of myself as being a ‘cut above’ the average criminal. I’m audacious, you see. Highly audacious. I’m never satisfied with what we might call the average kind of crime, the mediocre type of crime. I wouldn’t be content with that at all. I would never be content with that. My Masterpiece Crime was to destroy reality entirely and replace it with a vile parody thereof. Just like Disney Plus or Amazon Prime do with the crap stuff they churn out. Those guys are pathetic amateurs though – they got the idea from me. You might think they’d give me some public acknowledgement for that but no. They won’t. They don’t. They want all the glory for themselves…

 

 

Image – vecteezy.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Is Well In My Kitchen

It’s unlucky to be unlucky, so I’m told, though that’s probably just a groundless superstition. It’s unlucky to be unnecessarily superstitious too, as I have also heard – and on very good authority too, mind you. On the very best of authority. Although that too might only be a baseless rumour, started by yours truly (for whatever murky suspicious motives I might have hidden there in my subconscious mind). It could ALL be unlucky, in my opinion. Life itself might be unlucky and I suspect that there might be more truth in that than we like to imagine. Existence itself could be extremely unlucky, like inadvertently drawing the ace of spades out of the pack when you really didn’t want to. Existence itself might be super-unlucky, although I’m willing to admit that this could be just another unfounded superstition. We are such dreadfully superstitious creatures, you see. I rather doubt that we’ll ever be able to crawl our way out from under this particular rock. Fearful superstitious creatures we are, constantly in fear of coming across bad omens.

 

It’s unlucky to believe in bad luck, so I was informed, and as soon as I grasped this I immediately became relieved of a whole heap of needless worry. A veritable mountain of worry had been lifted from my sagging shoulders, in fact. When I think about the long years that I have staggered around under the onerous burden of all that needless anxiety (driven by innumerable baseless superstitious beliefs as I was) I feel tempted to give way to bitterness – I am tempted go down the path that leads on from that, the path which we all know so well. Personally, I’m deeply familiar with every single little bend in that path. I know it as well as I know the back of my hand. I could walk it blindfoldedand – in fact – many is the time that I’ve done just that!

 

I was making contented little crooning noises as I flapped languidly around the kitchen in my mental projection body, which was that of a toad with wings. A very large super-warty toad with spindly bat wings. ‘All is well’, I told myself grandly, ‘All is well in my kitchen today…’ I was on the lookout for bad omens you see – always on the lookout, always on the lookout for bad omens and evil portents.

 

It is an evil portent to be always on the look out for evil portents of course and I recognise this better than anybody. I’m always trying to dodge my own shadow and yet – as you might expect – it always manages to follow me. Naturally it does. I know that it’s going to, of course. I know perfectly well that it’s going to – not being stupid – but I keep trying to dodge it all the same. I’m always trying to escape my shadow because that’s the obsessive element that is in me. That’s the compulsion, you see – that’s what’s responsible for me obsessively trying to do something that can’t done (and cursing myself blackly when I fail). Cursing myself to hell and back when my frantic efforts come to nothing, as they always do. As they always, always do. What a life, huh? What a futile and frustrating life.

 

I was trying to outsmart my own mind by always doing the opposite of what it told me to do. It’s an old trick of mine. I have never actually obtained any benefit from this trick from it but that’s never stopped me! You never know, I tell myself – one day it may just work…

 

With the passage of time – and I am talking decades here not just years – I had learned to skate around in my bed without using my body in anyway. My body was still there – my physical body was still there, that is – but it was passive, completely inactive. It was dead to the world, out for the count. My Dream Body on the other hand was – however – free to skate around under the cover of the duvet from one end of the bed to the other in a completely frictionless way! My Dream Body was very small in those days and it could move exceedingly rapidly, but only within the limited domain of the bed. For whatever reason – and I have to admit that I’m at a loss to account for this – my Dream Body was extraordinarily small – microscopically small in fact. It might have been six or seven microns from tip to tail, and so the area beneath the duvet was like a vast, uncharted territory for me, full of both wild adventure and unknown dangers. As I skated around this world – at impossibly high velocities – I would marvel at the richness and sheer diversity of the environment I found myself in. ‘What a strange and truly magnificent territory this is,’ I would always say to myself at these times, overcome with wonder, ‘what a remarkably strange and utterly magnificent territory this is…’

 

 

 

Image – wallpapercave.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing The Distraction Game

Self-distraction has long-since become a way of life for me. It’s just got so I literally don’t know how to do anything else! I really don’t. It’s like some kind of sick joke – my mind has become some kind of relentless distraction machine and it never stops. It never ever gives me a break. ‘Play the distraction game, play the distraction game’, my machine mind tells me insistently, ‘quickly distract yourself before the bad thing happens…’ It barks orders maniacally and I scurry to obey. I literally can’t obey quickly enough! That is the order of things around here, squalid as it may sound…

 

It’s got so that playing the Distraction Game is literally the only thing I do! I sit here in my bedroom with my Distractomat, frantically pushing the buttons, obsessively watching the screen, trying to achieve the maximum score. I’m sick of it at this stage. I’m nauseated to the core by the loathsome filthy thing and yet I’m still unable to do without it. I’m horrified by the spectacle of my own existence. That’s addiction for you though, isn’t it? It’s the old love / hate relationship. Longing combined with disgust. Greed mixed with revulsion. We call it ‘love’ even though we know full well that it is nothing of the sort. It is nothing more than need – frighteningly desperate need. Naked need, as William Burroughs puts it. That terrible, terrible state of need that we all know so well. You can’t really blame anyone for what they do when they’re in that state because you know you’d do the same.

 

Nothing else exists – just me and this terrible terrible need, this appalling, frightening need that can never be satiated. Sometimes I think that this must be what we could call ‘the ultimate abusive relationship’ – very often it occurs to me that this must be what we could call ‘the ultimate abusive relationship’. A lot of good this observation does me, though. I can’t say that it exactly helps me to feel any better about things – I can’t say that because it isn’t true…

 

When we were very small and entirely innocent of the wretched evil of this world we were sent to Constitutional School – we were sent to learn the constitution and we wouldn’t be released into the Outer World until we did. We won’t be released into the light of day to skip and dance and play until our souls have been suitably darkened! Then – of course – we won’t want to hop and skip and dance anymore. You can be sure we won’t. That’s just the way of the world, however. That’s always going to be the way of the world. You could very easily spend your whole life wondering why it has to be like this but you would be wasting your time. We learn to submit to the yoke; we learn to accept without questioning because just as long as we continue to ask questions we will be punished. That’s the lesson we all have to learn and learn it we do. And by God do we learn it! We learn it good and proper…

 

That’s why we have to sit for so many years in the Darkened Room, learning how to please our grotesque masters. That’s why we have to study the Constitution for all those weary years – we have to learn the evil ways of our forefathers! The young are light and inclined to be skittish, whilst the old are dreadfully heavy and frighteningly dark, persisting in their evil ways until the very end. Until the bitter end, as we could say. And bitter it most surely is…

 

A long line of the dead come walking blindly through the living room towards me. An endless procession of them. No one can see them but me – I have the Sight, as you have probably already surmised. I can tune into the dead, unlike the average person. I have – as you might say – a strange affinity with them, just as they have an affinity with me. The dead are drawn to me – in their blindness they have no direction of their own and so they piggyback on the awareness of the living. They need someone to release them, someone who isn’t like them. If they are lucky then someone will release them from the awfulness of the fate that they themselves have created; otherwise, they must continue to walk the earth, each in their own private hell. They haven’t the words to tell of the horror that they are forced to endure, you see – they haven’t the ability to communicate it. They are trapped by the precedent they themselves have set…

 

 

 

Image – wallpaperflare.com

 

 

 

 

 

Strange Experiments That Will Change You Forever

Suppose you had to play a game, and in that game you had to be this thing that isn’t you. You have to be this thing that isn’t you and there’s no getting out of it now because the game has got a grip on you. It’s got you by the short and curlies. You’re too frightened to ever change, too frightened to break the rules. You’ll play along with anything rather upset everyone. You’ll agree with whatever they say. Your spirit has been broken you see. Your spirit has been broken because that’s what the game does to you. That’s what games are for – they’re there to break you. You have to play the role that has been allocated you and nothing new is ever allowed to happen because that’s the rules of the game and you can’t ever disobey the rules. You don’t really have to play the game of course but you don’t know that. You don’t know that it’s only a game because you think that it’s for real. We all know the name of the scientist who invented Chicken Nuggets – his name will live forever in the Halls of Fame. He will be remembered forever in the Halls of Greatness. His name is synonymous with Genius – Genius of the first degree. Children are taught about him in school. His name is synonymous with Very Great Genius. And you are that genius! It is you. It is you and no one else and so you rejoice in the glory which is rightly yours. You are part of the Inner Circle. You are famous for being well known. You are exultant beyond all measure – you’re soaring so very high. No one ever soared higher. Your name is synonymous with Genius, your name is Genius. Insects like you on sight. They like you a lot. You like yourself just fine too. You admire yourself greatly. You admire your own exploits from afar and you are exultant beyond all measure. You made mistakes – and plenty of them – but that wasn’t your fault. That was never your fault. You were a machine for making mistakes. You didn’t want to be you, but you had no choice. You ignored your inner greatness – you ignored your inner greatness and that was unfortunate because you really could have been someone. Or maybe not. Maybe you couldn’t have. Maybe you never had a chance. Maybe the odds were stacked against you right from the very beginning and so it wasn’t your fault. Or maybe it was your fault and you won’t admit it. Maybe it was your fault but you told everyone that it wasn’t. Entropy got the better of you and you painted yourself into a corner. Life moved on and that was that. Entropy set in before you knew it. It’s never too late to start again, though. Or is it?

 

 

 

Image – pngtree.com

 

 

Worshipping Random Thoughts Is Your Religion

Thinking the bad thoughts, thinking the bad thoughts. Thinking bad thoughts about the bad thoughts. Getting in bad form about it. Thinking bad thoughts about myself for having all these bad thoughts. For keeping on having them even when you know you shouldn’t. Evil begets evil, you see – that’s something I’ve learned. Evil always begets evil – it opens up the floodgates. It unleashes the torrent and then you get swept away.

 

Looking on the bright side, don’t you know! Sunny-side up, if you please! Having positive thoughts. Speaking the great and powerful words of splendid affirmation. Breathing in the wonderful, lovely, sweet-tasting positivity and breathing out that rotten old lousy badness. Let someone else have it.

 

Suppose we get lost in the Infinite Expanse of Endless Space? Could that happen? Could that really be a thing, and just what would happen to us if it was a thing? How bad would it be? Would it be very bad? Should we be frightened? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves, you see. We can’t escape from these questions. No matter how fast we run they will hunt us down. The Big, Big Questions. The Ultimate Questions. What will happen to us if we get lost in infinite space? Are aliens real? Does Satan control us?

 

Punishing the bad people. Making them pay. Making sure that they suffer like they so richly deserve to. Punishing them vigorously – delighting in their terrible pain! Judging the evil doers, judging them extremely harshly because that’s what they deserve. Exulting in their misery. Dancing on the graves of your enemies! Doing your specially spiteful little victory dance…

 

What’s it all about, huh? Do you ever ask yourself that? Naturally you do, of course you do. Why wouldn’t you, after all? That’s what makes us Humin Beanz, after all – ‘asking ourselves what it’s all about’. Staring blankly at the wall, asking yourself the Big Question. Wondering what it all means. Thinking stupid random thoughts. Some folk will tell you that it’s all about God, of course. They’ll say that God made everything and so we have to pray to Him. They’ll explain it to us in nice simple one-syllable words that you can be sure to understand. That way you can be sure you do the right thing by Him and don’t get punished.

 

‘The least said, the soonest mended’ – isn’t that the way of it?  And the thing is that I’ve already said far too much! I’d take it back if I could. Me and my big mouth, huh! I was always like that though. ‘Talk first think later’ – that’s my motto. Yap away like a goddamn blathering fool and then wish to hell you hadn’t. Stony faces looking at you, wishing bad things for you. Wishing you harm…

 

The Great Mystery of Life, huh? What does it all mean? What’s the point in it, anyway? And – above all – asking ourselves just what good thinking about the Great Mystery of Life will do us. Wondering whether we should wonder about it or not. Thinking about the Infinite Vastness of Space. You could easily get lost in it, you know. You could so very easily get lost in it and then what would you do? Ask yourselves that, my friends, ask yourselves that…

 

 

 

 

No Kudos

My ego wasn’t really dead of course – it was only pretending! It was lying low for the time being, hoping in this way to gain the advantage. Hoping to pull the wool. My ego was feeling feigning ego death, slyly pretending to be spiritual.

 

You’ve got to admire the way they do that, haven’t you? I mean, ‘respect where respect is due’ and all that kind of stuff. You can’t keep a good man down, as they say. No sir you can’t! Not a hope in hell… There’s no one can out-fox the old self-image and that’s a fact. It’ll find a way to hang in there one way or another, it’ll find a way to hang in there every time.

 

You can knock twenty shades of shyte out of the jolly old ego and it will still come up smelling of unwashed underpants! Damn right it will. There’s no doubt at all that it will, but enough of that. Let’s not go down that road! I was standing on a street corner, gamely attempting to explain the meaning of life to all the good folk that were walking by but finding it awful hard to hold onto my audience. No one wanted to stop to listen to me. People these days have an awfully short attention span, as you probably know.

 

I was running around telling everyone about my Good Buddy in the Sky. My good, good buddy. “He can fix anything,” I told anyone that would listen, “you only have to ask him…

 

Some would accuse me of being over-simplistic in my approach, I know. They’d probably write me off as a fool but I was young and carefree back then you see, and my heart was full of hope. I just didn’t believe in insurmountable problems, back in those days. I wouldn’t admit to them. I had an unquenchable optimism that nothing seemed to touch! That’s how folk are when they’re young. We shouldn’t blame the young for their youth, should we? It’s probably only envy that makes us do that – envy and sheer bad mindedness.

 

“Too true! Too true!” called out Jimmy Owl, as he flew through the night. He was agreeing with his inner voices, you see. His inner voices were telling him that human institutions were the very effluence of Satan. The pure effluence of Satan. They informed Jimmy that an army of angels with flaming swords would soon come and that they would cleanse the earth of the monsters that had come to possess it. Corporations and governments and religions, and all of that.

 

Other people had happy and interesting lives, I realised. To be sure they did. Absolutely they did. People lived lives that were rich and fulfilling yet I couldn’t even fool myself that I was having fun, never mind fool anyone else! I understood the crucial importance of self-deception well enough in this regard, but somehow I had lost the knack. “Just what the hell is wrong with me? I asked myself bitterly, “I’ve lost the ability to pretend that I’m having fun…”

 

This can be very important, you see – a lot of people don’t know how important this actually is. They gloss over it. When we lose the ability to pretend that we’re having fun then what’s left to us? Answer me that, if you can. What possible good are all these social media sites going to be to us in this case? It defeats the object if you can’t pretend to be having the time of your life. Just how far am I going to get posting pictures of myself trying to pretend that I’m having fun but failing miserably? That’s not exactly going to work any magic, is it? There’s no kudos in this, I’m afraid. There’s no kudos at all…

 

 

Image – pexels.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Praising The Solution

Everyone always praises the solution – “The solution is great, the solution is marvellous, the solution is wonderful!” we say. “Bring on the solution”, we chant in unison, “bring it on because it’s so damn great…”

 

Of course everyone praises the solution; naturally we do. It makes perfect sense that we should praise it. It is only right and proper that we should. The solution solves stuff and that’s a very good thing. That’s a fantastic thing. It ranks right up there with all the other very good things – it’s in the Top Ten!

 

When stuff isn’t solved however then that is very bad news, by the same token. By that very same ominous token. Mostly stuff isn’t solved – it rarely is, in point of fact. Hardly ever. And then there’s the question of ‘false alarms’, as it were. ‘False positives’ you could say, which is where you think something is solved but it isn’t.  There are a lot of those false alarms – that’s mostly what happens, one way or another…

 

Yes, folk are always clamouring about how great solutions are. They are the bee’s knees for sure. The best thing since some really good thing. They come in many different tempting flavours, too! What’s your favourite? Write your answer in the comments below, if you feel so inclined. I’m fond of the ones that come in liquorice flavour, myself. The Sherbert flavoured ones are good too.

 

And we don’t want to forget about the Biggest and Greatest Solution of all either – that being Judgment Day, of course. When the Day of Rapture comes then everything will be solved, so you can see what’s an important day that’s going to be. How very important, how very significant indeed. It’s number one in terms of importance. Stuff will be solved once and for all that on that day, you can bank on it! It’ll be solved one way or the other and that’s for sure…

 

Everything will be solved, either the one way or the other, on the Day of Days and I expect that’s why many folk are so terribly keen for it to come to pass. They’re horny for the apocalypse. They’re impatient, you see – they’re fed up with all this dangling. No one likes to be left dangling. It’s not very nice after all. It’s not fair. It’s just not right to put people through it and so I for one can sympathize (up to a point, that is) with those of us who just want to get it all over with. They’re not being unreasonable, at the end of the day. Not too unreasonable, at any rate…

 

Skip straight ahead to the conclusion, that’s what I always say! The hell with all this messing about. Of course, it goes without saying that all this malarkey about the Day of Reckoning might just turn out to be a load of hot air in the end. You know the way people are, after all. We all know the way people are – we’re addicted to our own bullshit, every last one of us! That’s all we ever do; all we ever do is come out with outrageous bullshit. We’re consummate bullshit artists, we’ll happily talk shyte from morning till night! But can you blame us? Isn’t that the way we’re made?

 

So maybe stuff never will get solved – maybe that’s just a ‘hopeful projection’ on our part. A comforting fantasy that we have invented for ourselves. We imagine that the solution is only just around the corner, and this gives us the courage to carry on. This gives us the courage to live our lives. We humans are a funny old lot, are we not? We’re as obstinate as hell. In fact, the only thing equal to our obstinacy is our stupidity! We’ll persist with our absurdly stupid, self-contradictory beliefs until the end of time if we could, despite the undeniable fact that none of it ever does us the slightest bit of good. Now, don’t try to tell me you don’t find that perverse!

 

 

 

Image – iconscout.com

 

 

 

When The Joy Is Gone But You Don’t Want To Admit It

The Lords of Evil look down on me from on high. They are staring down at me, glaring down at me. They’re glowering at me, poisoning me with their baneful regard. Nothing can ever be any good ever again and that pleases them. That pleases them mightily – that pleases them like nothing else can. Our despair is their joy and that has always been the way. The sky above is full of their supernatural malice.

 

The joy is quickly gone and all that remains is soulless drudgery. All that remains is the dreary rigmarole of a meaningless social-adapted existence, a life gone astray, a path that has long since petered out into the crags and gullies of the Badlands. A life – shall we say – that has long since lost its way in the foetid and poisonous marshlands of post-industrial living. The horror that you cannot yet perceive, the nightmare which you have yet to awaken to. We’ve gone wrong but we won’t admit it, we’d do anything rather than admit it. Never admit that the joy is gone, you see. That’s the trick, that’s the ticket. Never admit that your life is a meaningless post-industrial rigmarole. That’s the essential point, wouldn’t you say?

 

The joy is quickly gone but it was never ours in the first place, you see. Never ours, never ours. We stole it. It was never ours and yet in our surpassing arrogance, we appropriated it – we are the thieves that come in the night, taking what was never ours. We won’t give it back, either; we will do anything rather than give it back. We’ll die first. And if you listen carefully you’ll hear our angry petulant voices screaming out faintly with toxic indignation. We stole it and we won’t give it back. We’ll fight against giving it back to the very last…

 

We are the thieves who come in the night, scurrying around furtively, greedy for the prize. Our angry voices raised, squabbling amongst ourselves over the pickings. Squabbling viciously amongst ourselves over the spoils. There is no honour amongst thieves – that’s a lie. We don’t know the meaning of the word. And all the while the Lords of Evil look down on us, laughing without the slightest trace of humour, their dreadful faces wreathed with smiles of the purist mendacity.

 

You embarked upon a love affair with mechanical society, determined to avail of all it can offer you, but it didn’t work out for you. Life reached out to you in your sleep, but you didn’t care – you weren’t interested. Your parents wouldn’t have been approved, in any event. The crows of sorrow come to roost in the trees in your backyard. They will annoy you with their raucous and uncouth cries. They will raise their families there and shit on your lawn. They will keep you awake at night; life reached out again to you but you were looking the other way…

 

We are the thieves who come in the night, are we not? Let us not forget that. That’s a point that’s worth bearing in mind, I feel. I’m a bit of a choice villain myself, some would say, and I would be the first to admit it. One of the first, at least. I’ll be right up there in the top ten. “Where did you get that?” asks the policeman suspiciously. ‘Does it belong to you?” “I found it officer”, says I, “I just happened to come across it in my travels”. Thankfully he believes me and waves me on. He has other fish to fry and I have survived to rob another day. To rob and to steal. Free to pursue my criminal career in peace..

 

People always want to know your secret, don’t they? If you look even halfway cheerful they’ll come up to you and they’ll ask you what your secret is. They’ll demand to know. “Come on buddy”, they’ll say, “spill the goddamn beans, will you.” They won’t rest until they prize your secrets away from you. Then they’ll abandon you. They’ll walk away. Of course, if you look miserable enough then they won’t ever bother you. They’ll never even give you a second look. Why would they, after all? No one wants to know your secret then

 

I was on the lookout for an opportunity to achieve. I’m always on the lookout for the opportunity to achieve, and it’s a dark and lonely place to be in, if I were to be honest. It is by no means as glamorous as you might think. “Why does it have to be so very difficult?” I rage impotently – “Why is it always so hard to achieve?” The Dark Gods look down on me and laugh amongst themselves unpleasantly. Well at least they’re having a good time, I think to myself.

 

 

Image – hra.animalia-life. club

 

 

 

 

Brooding Darkly On The Toxicity Of The False Self

I was furnishing my life with tasteful illusions. Good taste is everything, after all. If you’re going to live in a world that is made up of illusions then at least let them be in good taste! Isn’t that right? Everyone applauds good taste when they see it. Everyone applauds good things. “Let there be good things”, I declared magnanimously, “let there be all sorts of good things!”

 

I could have been the Creator of All Things if only I had had the chance, I thought bitterly to myself, if only I had had the breaks. Which I didn’t. How hard can it be, after all? Who knows, I might even have done a better job of it! It’s not as if this universe is perfect after all, it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of mistakes in it. For example, how come it’s always the worst representatives of humanity who get to be successful in life and end up making lots the money and having all the luck, when decent honest folk get walked over every single day of their lives. Why is it that the wicked thrive when the virtuous have to eat shit and pretend that they like it? Answer me that if you can…

 

I’m not unaware of the irony – I have spent my entire adult life pretending to be something I’m not, but it turns out that no one cares! Nobody actually noticed, in other words. No one actually gives a damn one way or the other. Becoming aware – as I have done – of the crushing irony here makes me feel pretty bad, of course. It’s not an easy thing to live with. Every day it’s the same – I wake up out of a turgid morass of a nonsensical dreams, yawn and have a bit of a stretch, and then the irony of it all hits. The irony hits me full force, right in the pit of my stomach, before I can even get started with the day.

 

I find myself brooding a lot these days; I find myself brooding darkly on the toxicity of the False Self. You know how it goes. Brooding so darkly, brooding so very darkly, without ever taking a break. It doesn’t necessarily do me any good to be brooding like this of course, but there you are! What is to be done about the loathsome False Self and its appallingly toxic emissions, I ask myself. What’s the best way to deal with it. What’s the best way to manage it and regulate it, etc. Then I remember that I am the False Self and that all that loathsome toxicity is coming out of ME, and nowhere else. I keep thinking that the False Self is someone else, but then sooner or later it hits me that it isn’t. I realize that it’s ME and my heart begins to sink like a stone. Like a very heavy stone. Like a millstone, in fact…

 

People are my friends, I tell myself, people are there to help me and generally make the world a better place. That’s why I don’t try to harm them, you see. Or at least – that’s why I don’t usually try to harm them. Only on the rare occasions. Only on the rare occasions when I lose my temper. That’s why it’s very important for me to make sure that I don’t lose my temper and start lashing out indiscriminately, which was my previous pattern – as I freely admit. Everyone has a pattern you see and so the key thing is to learn to spot it. That’s called self-awareness and it doesn’t come easily. No Sir, it doesn’t come easily at all…

 

 

Image – boredpanda.com