My ego was in a terrible  huff – firing little darts of pure malice at whoever happened to be nearby. You’re not as good as me, was the message in the darts. Designed to sting, you see. Designed to cause very real pain. I’m no happier than I was three minutes ago and that’s your fault, I whine piteously. Whining is my forte, you might say. I have made many foolish life choices over the years but none of them were my fault – not really. Life is a deterministic process, after all. Pain is designed to hurt you see, it’s designed to send a very particular message and it’s not a message anyone likes. All around us the suppurating Garbage World, pressing in on us from all sides – the sickly-sweet stench of it assailing the nostrils. The smell of corruption that no air freshener can ever mask. There’s no masking here, I’m afraid – things have gone too far for that! A brisk knocking is heard at the front door, it’s the horror film which is your life and it’s about to unfold on your very own doorstep. You make a point of not answering – you’re too wise for that. You’re too wise to make a rookie mistake like that! Instead, you force yourself to pretend that nothing is happening. There’s nothing to see here, you cry out, nothing to see here. Your skin is clammy with the Fear – it’s always the same old fear, knocking ominously on your door, banging away on it, rattling that poor old door on its hinges. Will I ever crawl out from under this fear, you ask. It certainly doesn’t feel like it, not with all that commotion coming from the front door. The signs aren’t good. The omens – as always – are dire in the extreme. Outside the cracked and discoloured windows of the Survival Dome the party ratchets up a notch – if things had been pretty wild before then they were downright unpleasant now! Things were very bad indeed, possibly as bad as they could be. Although one can never be sure. It had all started off as a joke of course – albeit a joke that had very quickly turned sour. You know how it goes – you make some kind of light-hearted comment and then the next minute the room goes dead quiet and everyone is looking at you, their eyes full of judgement and vicious condemnation. You’ve made an inexcusable blunder, you’ve blotted your copybook big time. You’ve copied your blotterbook and you know what that means! We all know what that means… Life is good, I tell myself – only just not for me…

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‘I have the heart and the spleen of a hero, but the eyes of a bug-eyed marmot.’ So I began my speech, which was to prove a great success. Which was to prove a stupendous success, as it happens. There’s no point in false modesty, after all. Those were the days of my glory, I think it’s fair to say. That is all water under the bridge now however – times change, as they say. Nothing stays the same. The past was full of promise but the future contains only fear. In the early morning hours of the universe all things seemed possible – our horizons were broad indeed. Then came the solemn shadows of late afternoon, ominous portents of things yet to come. Then evening arrives at last and before it we know it the whole world has been plunged into inky impenetrable darkness, darkness from which there can be no escape…

This is a metaphorical darkness you understand – it is a darkness of the soul which I speak of here. A darkness of the mind, darkness of the heart, darkness of the spirit. Like two mighty cliffs facing each other, it all starts to close in on you – imperceptible at first but faster and faster as time goes on. They call it ‘The Crusher’ and I think you can appreciate the significance of that name. It’s a crusher of the soul you see, a crusher of the human spirit. It’s the modern age we live in. ‘Spare us from the jaws that crush,’ we pray fervently, but as usual our prayers fall on deaf ears. The gods aren’t listening; the gods never listen anymore. They couldn’t care less about our welfare when it comes down to it – they are amoral and sadistic. Some say that they are only highly advanced aliens from another dimension. They created human beings as a cruel experiment because they were bored.

I began my speech again and it was to be a great success. Everyone would stop to listen to me – my words would be both poetical and wise. My words would be allegorical and yet at the same time entirely practical. My words would be splendid and highly significant in terms of the greater scheme of things. I have the knees and elbows of a trilobite but the heart of a giant spiky spider crab. I am he who cries in vain in the wilderness, I am he who says one thing but always does another. I am the Deus Absconditus. We worship the flesh and we fear the flesh. From time immemorial we have feared the flesh, preferring instead the solid-state circuitry of the Hallowed Macrobot, which strides boldly through the land, its giant metal arms swinging mechanically from side to side. It towers over the trees and shrubs of the open savannah as it walks, the object of intense and unremitting veneration wherever it goes…

There was bad news on the Telepathic News Station last night. It’s bad news every night but last night it was the worst news of all – the type of news that the other stations never dare to talk about. The truth always has to be covered up you see – it has to be covered up no matter what the cost. It has to be covered up right to the bitter end and how very bitter that end is! You couldn’t imagine it. No one can imagine it. We betrayed our great and glorious protector and so – in truth – we deserve everything we get. We richly deserve it, for our crimes are terrible indeed. We laid waste to the multiverse, we despoiled the Sacred Territory of the Ancients and covered over the green and vibrant meadows with our unspeakably vile and toxic shopping malls. Such was always our way, of course. Such was always our way – we simply cannot seem to help ourselves…

As a small child I was full of bizarre and improbable notions, even at such a very early stage of my life. Bizarre and improbable notions that didn’t make any sense at all. I was obsessed with the dark arts, obsessed with both the theory and practise of necromancy, and even then I couldn’t help realising that I would almost certainly come to a sticky end. The signs were already there – none of the other children would play with me, babies would cry when they saw me, dogs would bark hysterically at me in the street – the usual type of stuff. Even at that tender age I was deeply abnormal, you see.

Things could only get worse, of course – things could only get worse. I wasn’t to know it at the time but things were shortly going to get very dark, very quickly. I’m getting ahead of myself in my story however – I must reign myself in and stick to the proper order of things. Back in those days I still had ideals, you see – I still felt that one should aim for something positive in one’s life, something ennobling. I wanted to make something of myself so that I could receive acknowledgement, acceptance, approval and all that sort of stuff. Validation I suppose you could say – worship even. The masses would worship me. I was convinced of it. Only it wasn’t to be, you see – it was never meant to be…

It often happens of course we start off with a whole bunch of ideas about life which then turn out to be completely wrong, completely misguided! Not even one of them turns out to be true and that spells nothing but disappointment, as we know. It spells disappointment after disappointment in endless succession. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, after all. That’s the way it goes. Is it any wonder that so many folk grow bitter as they grow old, and end their days in sullen despair? Resentful (we might say) of the way in which life offers so many possibilities only to take them away again later on. Is it any wonder that the older we get the more cantankerous and miserable we tend to be? The only alternative is to lie to ourselves and say that our ideas about life did turn out to be true after all, that they are true, thereby giving ourselves permission to feel good about being hopelessly deluded in the way that we are. ‘Yes,’ we say to ourselves, ‘you were right all along – well done you! You’re due a pat on the back for that and no mistake…’

Self-praise and self-congratulation quickly grow stale though, as we all know. One’s own approval (or even adulation) of oneself is thin gruel to subsist on and one grows tired of it before very long. The taste grows sour – very sour. It all becomes a meaningless rigmarole that we go through out of pure habit – not because there’s any pleasure in it, not because there’s any good in it. It’s a joyless pastime, in other words, and I expect you know as well as I do just how dreadful this sort of thing is. I’m sure you know just how terrible it feels when your life becomes nothing more than a series of cruelly repetitive and profoundly meaningless routines. What a trap, huh? Part of you is watching (a deeply buried part) and wondering how it could have come to this. Wondering how you could possibly have ended up living a life that is bereft of any meaning, a life that is bereft of anything that actually means a damn. Your lawful abode is an unclean spiritual waste ground, haunted by a motley army of soiled souls, each one of them the very same as you…

That’s when you need the external validation, of course – external validation is the only thing that can remedy this particular malaise, this particular type of existential horror. When you start to feel like this then that’s the time to join a religious group of some sort or another and the more dogmatic, judgemental and petty-minded it is the better! That’ll do the job every time, you see. I was too proud for that, however – I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. My pride wouldn’t allow me to lower myself in this way and that’s why I find myself in my present situation. That’s why I find myself so cruelly tormented, locked in an interminable battle with my own better judgement. I won’t give in, you see – that’s the one thing I am determined never to do…

‘Come’, I spoke wisely, ‘let us go and buy some products. First we shall peruse the products, and then we will select from them, and then – after we have done this – we can go ahead with confidence and make our purchase. Thus it was, thus it is, and thus it ever shall be.

I am a true and honourable Servant of the aforementioned Corporate Overlords, you see. My role is to tell people that true happiness can only ever come from never questioning the insane dictates of our Corporate Overlords. That is pretty bloody basic, I would have thought. How basic can it get? What’s not to get, after all? I can’t simply comprehend the wrong-headedness of those people who refuse to accept this time-honoured truth. I would like to see them meet their comeuppance – I would love to see them meet their comeuppance. I can’t imagine anything I’d love more, in fact.

‘Come’, I intone sanctimoniously, ‘let us stir ourselves and get out there buying the Dirty Filthy Sordid Products that are so characteristic of our dreadfully corrupt age. These shall be counted by one and all as supreme emblems of our unique and triumphant personal success in the face of stultifying universal conformity.

I am a High Priest of the New Revelation and I bring hope and a sense of direction to the Narcissistic Hordes, who know no other meaning to their wretched lives other than the meaning of self-absorption. Each one of us constantly at the centre of countless petty dramas, each one more epically stupid than the one which preceded it – our lives are indeed an exercise in the purist folly. ‘Is there any end to this nonsense?’ you ask, overcome with emotion, ‘why do we human beings insist on turning life into some kind of cheap and tasteless farce? What do we hope to gain from this?’

You ask these questions, but no one ever answers. Folk carry on as always; they persevere with their infernal stupidity right up to the very end. Right up to the very end, I say – they never pause to consider what they’re doing. How do you explain that one, huh? How the hell do you explain that? Folks inevitably carry on as they always do and who would expect anything else? Who after all would expect them to behave otherwise? Folk will carry on with their infernal stupidity no matter what and there’s nothing either you or I can ever do about that. It’s hard to hear I know, but we have to face up to it – it is our onerous duty to face up to it, however reluctant we might be.

I’m a High Priest of the Church of the New Revelation and it is my thankless task to ask the questions that no one else will. It is my task to harshly berate the wilfully ignorant. I am the one and the many – I am every animal that ever was! I am the otter and the moose, the wolf and the aardvark. I am the sheep which bleats in the field and the dog which barks sorrowfully in the night; I am the lugworm which hides away deep in the turgid estuarine sludge and I am the hawk which soars resplendent high above the forests and fields. I am all of these creatures and – yet – I am none of them. I am the Cosmic Manatee…

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Beware the meteoric rise to fame and fortune, that’s what I always say! If I thought it would make any difference I’d advise you to run a mile the next time it looks like this is about to happen to you but no one ever does, of course. No one ever does.

I speak from personal experience here, of course. I always speak from personal experience – either real or imagined. It’s got to be either the one or the other, after all. If it’s not the one way then then you’ll find that it’s probably the other. Folk always seem to imagine that fame and fortune is what they want but that’s only because they don’t know what a burden it is. If ‘burden’ is even the right word here. The curse of fame and fortune would be more like it.

Sometimes people become famous for no reason, all of a sudden. Everyone knows about them, and no one knows how this happened. No one knows how they know – they just do. Everybody knows, instantaneously. That is the way it happened to me anyway – it was like a magnesium flashgun going off in my head. A sudden blinding light making it so I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open or closed. There was no escaping the light.

My life changed forever from that moment on and if that ever happens to you then you’ll find that it’s not an easy thing to cope with. It’s the very last thing you wanted to happen but what you want or don’t want doesn’t actually matter at all. That is the Big Secret no one ever wants to know! One minute you’re getting on with your life, minding your own business, keeping your nose clean, and so on, and then the next you’re Universally Famous. Through no fault of your own, I might add.

As I sit here at my writing desk I find myself wondering how many people are actually capable of comprehending the essence of what it is I’m saying here. The sort of fame that I’m talking about here is very far from the normal everyday sort, after all. It’s not like being a wildly popular movie star who everyone recognises on sight, or like being a mighty rock star standing on stage in the iconic rockstar stance who gets the fervent crowd to roar out the chorus to the well-known and iconic rock anthem he is belting out. This is normal everyday fame, which really isn’t that much of a big deal when it comes down to it. Normal fame is merely an opaque metaphor for the type of thing I’m talking about here – it’s only a faint echo of the real thing, a terribly feeble imitation.

The type of fame I’m talking about is all-pervading and self-arising – there’s no need for any public relations, in other words. There’s no need for any hit singles or chart-topping platinum-selling albums or any of that kind of rubbish. That’s all just cheap vulgarity and it’s not something I personally want to have anything to do with. That type of stuff isn’t a patch on what I’m talking about, which regular folk simply can’t conceive of. ‘How dreadful it must be to be like normal regular folk in this regard.’ I reflect soberly to myself – and not for the first time either! ‘What a thoroughly appalling state of affairs it is to be ruled by convention and hemmed in on all sides by popularly held misconceptions…’ I feel myself cringe even to think about it – that must surely be the worst fate to befall any sentient life form. I can’t think of anything worse, anyhow. Can you?

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I began my poem in a manner that was both abrupt and uncompromising, as is my way, and with a great flourish of my pen I set the following words to paper, that they may lie there, sullenly and insultingly, for perpetuity. And as I wrote these words I knew beyond any doubt that this was to be my magnum opus, the work that I will be remembered for. If I am to be remembered for anything it will be this…

We were taught this life of solemn stupidity (I began), and so shall we continue it. So shall we continue with courage and conviction, with great glee and alacrity, taking no head of the seething doubts and dark misgivings that gather in their swirling multitudes in the shadowy recesses of our minds.

We were instructed – with the greatest of care – in the ways of solemn stupidity by our elders and betters who sought to obtain redemption for themselves this way, believing – as they did believe – that heaven would look down favourably upon them, if only they could ensure the perpetuation of the Sacred Nonsense.

So it was therefore that we learnt the ways of our venerable forefathers, that we might make these ways our own, and cherish them as they did cherish them. We learned the ways of our forefathers that we might continue their legacy and continue – as they did – to bring endless misfortune to this poor sad abused world of ours.

This is how we prove our loyalty in an indifferent age you see – this is how we prove our worth in an age which no longer respects the baroque and phantasmagorical foolishness of the past. This is how we show our mettle in an uncertain age, in this treacherous age of decay and sorrow when so many deadly forces are ranged against us…

How well we learned our lesson, I reflect – we learned it better than our teachers had any right to expect. We learned it too well of course and that is the whole problem right there – in our keenness to learn we had made the classic mistake: We made the mistake of giving up our own lives so that our long-dead forefathers might live again…

I grew tired then, exhausted by the effort needed to give birth to a poem of this extreme epic nature. I grew tired and because of my tiredness I fell into a deep sleep. I fell into a deep and troubled sleep and in my sleep I dreamt wildly of all the many galaxies that there are out there spinning silently in space, and of all of the multitudinously different and varied things that are going on in them. And as a result of all this fervent dreaming activity when I awoke I found that I was one hundred times more exhausted than I had been before ever falling asleep.

I was deathly pale and drawn as a result of all that I had seen and my hand shook so badly I could hardly hold my pen. It was only a matter of time before the Dream Police came knocking on my door, I realised – I had tripped their wire and so now they would be on my case for exceeding the dream limit.

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I was a police officer in my own imagination, running around like a total maniac, arresting people all day long, arresting everyone I saw. ‘You’re busted you freak’, I called out gleefully, ‘I’m arresting you for breaking the law!’ I would indulge in a bit of police violence too because – in my mind – that just goes to prove the point. I would jeer at the perps and knock them about a bit – ‘That’ll learn you,’ I told them, ‘You dirty lousy scumbags!’ Then I grew tired with the game and so I decided to play at being a citizen of a dystopian future society instead. Droning robot voices pretending to be me were ordering me about, shouting at me and telling me to conform to the Malignant Autocracy. ‘Always conform to the Malignant Autocracy’, the maniacal voices squawked in my head, ‘Conform to the Pointless Brutality of the Machine World – perform Meaningless Actions over and over again just because your Inner Robot told you to…’ I rolled around on the floor in feigned agony, the agony of a man who is being attacked by his own brainwashed mind which is trying to control him, even though he realizes that this would extinguish all vestiges of humanity within him. ‘Fuck you!’ I grated out painfully from of the corner of my distorted mouth, ‘Fuck the system, you AI piece of shit. You won’t tell me what to do…’ Eventually I got bored of this game too and I decided to pretend to be a heavy metal rock star with long greasy black hair and a leather jacket which smelt of piss and vomit. I was playing an air guitar with insane energy, savagely moving my fingers over the frets, ‘Satan’s gonna fuck you,’ I roared, ‘Satan’s gonna fuck you good and proper and then he’s going to come and rule on earth’. A huge unruly crowd had gathered around me at this stage – they were banging their heads in time with the lumbering bassline, screaming at me to turn up the volume. I was The Doomed One, working his way relentlessly through the songs that the crowd loved so well, belting out all the old favourites. The audience – like a vast beast – was roaring out its approval. When I finished the set then the world would end. Eventually this game paled on me too and it came to me – with a shock – that I was wasting my life living in the hollow, claustrophobic bubble of my own futile fantasies. This realisation made me feel bad inside and I didn’t really like that so I started up with my never-ending games again, playing away as if there were no tomorrow, playing away as if my very life depended upon it.

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Outside the gates of the Institute, unregulated humans were milling around pointlessly – as they very much tend to. They have lost the meaning of their lives, you see – they don’t know what they stand for any more. A wild looking man with an overabundance of pale wispy hair and protuberant eyes that practically stood out on stalks was gyrating unsteadily and frequently falling over. A mocking crowd had gathered to watch him. He was shouting out at the top of his voice; he was shouting out the words that we all know so well. It was all he knew how to do of course – he’d run out of options. As do we all in the end.

Shouting out the words that we all know so well, the Credo of Unconditional Conformity – “I will believe what everyone else believes, no matter how dumb that might be, no matter how atrociously crass and banal it might be, no matter how offensively stupid and brutally counterproductive it might be…”

“History is what history does”, I uttered wisely, speaking to the thermostat on the wall. The thermostat was intelligent – it knew things. How it knew things I don’t know, but it did. It possessed mystical knowledge. It knew things I had never heard of. “Mystical knowledge come to my aid!” I cried out, full of inane excitement, but none did. That’s the story of my life really. Nothing new there. The thermostat was ignoring me – it considered me a lower life form and it had no time for me. I was less than a microbe to it and so it simply couldn’t be bothered humouring me anymore. It considered me a fool. My intelligence quotient was much too low for it to be able to relate to me. The sad truth is that as household appliances have grown smarter over the years, we humans have degenerated into out-and-out idiocy.

All right-thinking humans will repeat the Credo when things become confusing – it’s the tried and trusted remedy, provided to us by our honoured forefathers. This is their legacy. It’s important to honour our forefathers for without their incorrigible stupidity – which they went to great trouble to pass on to us – where would we be? How would we hope to cope when difficult situations come along? Belief is the key thing my friends – take it from me. Take it from one who knows. It doesn’t matter how laughably dumb your belief might be just as long as you keep on repeating it yourselves over and over again. Your belief will see you through and that’s all that really matters in the end.

Shouting out the words, shouting out the words that we all know so well. Shouting out the words that were beaten into us as such an early age. Savagely beaten into us. Roaring and shouting, yelling out those time honoured words as a way of beating down the opposition. The more confused we get the more we roar and shout. As was ever the way of course. Some formulae are simply too effective for us to dispense with – the old ways are always the good ways, as all right-thinking people will agree.

There’s no room for the unregulated humans anymore – the Institute is everything, the Institute is everywhere. It’s in our heads and we can never run away from it. All right-thinking humans will see this is a good thing – a most splendid and marvellous thing. We will spend our days telling ourselves how lucky we are, how very fortunate we are. The Institute has no gates anymore – there’s no way out. Inside the institute the machines tell us what to do. They patiently instruct us on how to live our lives. The machines always know best after all and we would be well advised to listen to them. The machines always know best and they will always tell us the right thing to do.

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I wanted to be a healer, but everyone I touched got sick. Some got very sick – some even died. I know everyone dies in the end of course but it hurts all the same. It doesn’t help my reputation as a healer any if people die after I lay my healing hands on them, obviously! It doesn’t present me in a good light, and I’m annoyed by that. All I wanted was to be able to heal people after all. Was that too much to ask?

I was shopping for interesting things, looking at this, looking at that, checking out this, checking out that, and so on and so forth – the way you do. But as time went on and I failed to find anything even remotely interesting I became demoralised and discontented. I found myself growing increasingly impatient, frustrated and grumpy. All I’d found after four hours of searching was a pair of bright red shoes and some luminescent green shorts. Obviously the whole universe existed purely for the sake of making fun of me. Obviously it was all a malicious plan to make me look like a fool, to make me look like some kind of idiot.

‘What’s it like to be a human being?’ I wondered, ‘what sort of things do you have to do in order to be human?’ I wanted to be authentic, you see. Not to impress anyone else, you understand. It wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit that I was putting the effort in, just my own. I wanted to get to feel that I existed, you see. I wanted to feel that I was real.

‘Is that too much to ask?’ I asked myself, ‘is it too much to ask to feel just a little bit real?’ Unbearable anguish had overtaken me at this stage. Anguish had overtaken me like a runaway express train. Anguish mixed with longing, longing mixed with anguish. ‘If only I could talk myself into believing that I was real’, I wailed, full of terrible desolation, ‘even if it is just for a few paltry minutes. I knew that it was futile, however. I always know that it is futile. I know it as well as anyone ever knew anything, but that doesn’t stop me hoping! Hope is the only thing that stands between us and the beasts of the field, after all. Hope, my beauties hope – hope because that’s all you’ve got and all you ever will have…

I come from a long line of hopers. I come from a long line of hopers and – also – I suppose you could say that I am the last of that line of hopers. The very last – it will end with me. Only not really of course – not really because I just made that up. I made it up because I’m so very desperate to have an identity, any sort of an identity at all, no matter how lame, no matter how pathetically forlorn. That’s all I ever do – try to cobble together an identity of some sort to another out of all the bits and pieces that I find lying around.

You could say that it’s a hobby of mine. I think that would be a fair statement. I’m a bit of a hobbyist, you see. I’m a bit of an old hobbyist, only not really because that’s just another of my lame attempts to cobble together an identity…

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Having said what needed to be said I was silent. Silent and glum. Morose, even. I had nothing more to say, you see. I had nothing more to say and I was even starting to regret the little bit that I had said – I couldn’t help thinking that I would have been much better off keeping my mouth closed. It’s always like that isn’t it? Words slip out so very easily, but once they are out there out then there is no rewind button! That’s the Irreversibility of Life of course, you can shoot forward with the greatest of ease – sometimes without even knowing that you have done so – but you can’t take even the tiniest step back. That’s the Irreversibility of Life right there my friends, and it can get you into an awful lot of trouble! No end of trouble in fact. It’s frightening how much trouble you can get into in life, isn’t it? So very frightening. When you get to think about it it’s actually paralysing. You just want to curl up into a ball and start shaking. If you thought about it too much you would curl up into the faecal position and that would be that. End of story – you’ll never stir again and that’s why you’re so much better not knowing what happens next! If we knew in advance what was in store for us then life would immediately become impossible. That’s my thinking on the matter anyway. For what it’s worth. Which probably isn’t very much, you’re probably saying to yourself. Only at the same time you know that it’s true, of course. Only at the same time you know bloody well that it’s true, as do we all. You know that damn well. The restaurant was closed until further notice, the sign on the wall said. It was closed for refurbishment. It wasn’t an ordinary restaurant of course – it was the Restaurant of Pain. It was the Restaurant of Suffering and it was famed far and wide. It was famed far and wide on account of how you could obtain any type of suffering you wanted. The very rarest, most exotic forms of suffering. All around me people were laughing and talking and shouting and bawling. They’re a very exclusive clientele as you might imagine – a discerning and sophisticated clientele. Gesticulating and posturing, each trying to outdo the other in their conversational skills. The wit was as sharp as a knife and the banter was as light as helium. “Exceptional circumstances call for exceptional measures”, I offered, keen to offer up whatever wise advice I could. “You are laughing now”, I told them, “but it won’t last – you can be very sure of that.” No one took any notice of me however – the party continued full swing. The party continued without a break. This was the Dinner Party of the Damned but no one wanted to admit it…

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