I was driving down this ancient country lane one summer evening, sometime around 1990, when I had this bizarre out-of-body experience. My head was floating above the wing mirrors in some kind of dreamlike effervescent trapezoid state. Ever since then, I’ve tried my hardest to get back into my body, but it just runs away from me screaming in terror. Could it have been aliens? Sure. But it could also have been something far closer to home. So that is what I am doing write now: righting – and just biding my time until I drop dead from an amount of alcohol.

Fuck this life. It leads us nowhere. We can do better than that. I met a man once and he passed me by with a large tractor, and as he did so, he sang a noise to me that was somehow impossible to hear. To this very day I haven’t heard it again since; or maybe, just maybe, I’m hearing it now – and you are, too, and you just don’t realise. Because we’re all just too fucking insignificant for me to care.

What, you’re a sprout? Don’t mind me, then; I’ll just be sitting here with my trowel and consequences, pondering your fate while the line bends. It’s not as though we had it, anyway. Too dreamlike, they said.

And all those days just ricochet around my head, and I am alone in my company, diminishing in warped stature and preceded by a rust of tinted fear. Can you hear the heart of time beat? Hear it. Hear it now. It’s ticking and tocking and humming to itself as it swivels in a desk-chair. But it still doesn’t make a sound. Because if you look a donkey in its eye, and try to see its pain as it hauls that load through the desert dust, through the market stalls of daybreak, through fog and wind and rain, you will find him. He will wait for you, and you will listen to what he has to say, and fucking ignore it – because of course you would; after all, you’re only in your mind.

Everlasting love is a pity-ridden fool’s fairytale held in the air by glass diamond. Pretty, yes; but then it shatters, because its strength is only on the surface level. You go further: and, when you find yourself in the deep end, you reach out for support that isn’t there, and I drift. I drift so slowly away to the deep. I sing to myself as I go. Just singing as the chasm unfolds. They echo and reverberate like some recycled intellect, so cast by that shadow that hangs by your doorway at night. So lost by the frown that haunts your smile. Don’t believe me? Ask the dishes.

That dress wasn’t gold or blue. The bloody thing was green, but we didn’t even pay attention to that, because we were all too busy looking for someone who wasn’t even in the room. Gorillas, man, I hate the bastards. They waltz in here thinking they own the place because they can blend into a basketball match – but the truth is, I’ve never even met a gorilla before. The things scare me – and perhaps they scare you a little, too. Perhaps you see, just as I do, that when you look in their eyes, there’s something else there: something tribal, trivial, trilled, and truncated. Swamped by a vast mass of time and I pull in deeper now. I can’t believe I have drifted so far in one metre per second, but the count holds me to the mark like a dagger against a breadbin. Feel that motherfucking felt, Rumpelstiltskin. Does it appease you now, you sick fuck?

Remorse. I suppose I felt remorse when I left home. Mostly because I didn’t ever say goodbye, and also because your father never took the path of teaspoon-dealing when that road split. I should’ve begged him to follow his heart and do what he’d always wanted. But now he’s alone in a study, with a pile of grass accompanying his footsteps, and he’s regurgitating on a whim the fallacies of birdsong and droning on about nothing in particular. I feel sorry for the man that could have been, but I look at the man I made and can’t pity him at all, lest I ever forgive myself. He knew what he was doing. He knew all too well, better than I ever could.

And so we come to the tumbleweed chapter. Here we are just a-blowin’ in the wind, trying to get from A to B in spite of all the fake Latin phrases blocking our path. I guide and you follow, but you are always in front, and I am always on my phone. It’s pretty fun that way, because I don’t ever have to do anything: I just have to look to the horizon, far away, distant, glowing – and I just think, “But would it really be that much different if I did hijack the vote?” Sometimes you don’t see just how blind you are. But that’s fine, because neither do I. We should’ve gone to that optician’s whose name I can’t mention. I can’t mention it because they didn’t pay me for product placement, and I’m not a shill – whatever that means. I read it somewhere in a book. You can, too, if you know which one I read it in.

Hot air balloon flight, October ’53. Water balloon fight, January. I’m sorry I don’t recall what year. But it was cold, and the air was icy crystal on the breath of tomorrow; and through yonder window breaks some reference to a faraway social standing. Imitation will not cut it.

No. Imitation will not cut – will not cut – not cu – imitation will not cut it … ? I don’t remember precisely how she said it, but it really inspired me. Someday, when I grow up, I want to be like her. A politician, ruining people’s lives for fun. Fuck the system, grab a shitload of marzipan, and put it in a sandwich. Facts don’t care about your facts, stupid liberal. I just rekt you with facts and logic, and there’s no way you can tell me to the contrary, because if you do, I simply won’t consider your point as valid, because I don’t have time for your bullshit, clever one. You think that, just because you have the entire nuclear arsenal on your side, you are strong? Rubbish. I was stronger with a musical band than I was with a rubber band. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will fucking mess up your psychological state for years on end, you little shit.

We’ve updated our privacy policy and baked some fresh new cookies. But don’t worry, because we’re $news_company, and we’re depressingly trustworthy. So trustworthy that even we have to keep smiling as the sky falls down, and it rises again in the East and the West and the house falls and kills her. Oh, that poor land. How far they lightly have fallen. We shall mourn them in last week’s papers.

Trust us. What have you got to lose anyway, little man? Your wife? Your son and kids? They don’t care about you; heck, they don’t even really exist. They’re only here to pacify you while we launch our new secret government drones to spy on them. We will hunt down those little nonexistent bastards. Our malicious glee provides them with purpose and belonging. West Virginia, Mountain Mama, all just names in places on a breath of fresh air. They don’t seek your virtues.

The world is on fire. Globe spins. The pips. News at 10, 11, 12, 14, 15; sweet, cue advert break. Must be funny. We’ll be back after the break with even less engaging content than before. Do drive safely. I wish I had. Or what’s left of me, anyway. Nothing but bones now, and they ain’t half crunchy. Cor, blimey, they taste like those times with me mates down at the local pub. All dead now, of course. Funny lot, they were; always eating each other. I suppose it was the beer.

Emperor Marion James IV always spiked our drinks, and sat down to watch as the results wobbled in. I remember he told me they loved me as he stuck that glass shard into my stomach. Spot of indigestion, best lie down. He got 10 years for that. Not long enough, I’d say – not with all those murders in the back catalogue. I suppose, however, that we must be fair to our Society Testers; for while they live, we grow stronger.

I got chickenpox from a neighbour once. He was a chicken. Bloody nice fellow, but he couldn’t keep his poxy pox to himself in the end. Died in 1769 from a heart overdose. What was it like for him, I wonder? When the only person you love is yourself, that’s a hell of a lot of mirrors needed to be surrounded by your loved ones.

Ah, the loved ones. They never see themselves in the eyes of others. But, I mean, how the fuck could they? They’d need to, like, rip out someone’s eyes or something, and there’s no way they’re sewing buttons into my eyes as a replacement. I will fight them on the beaches. The beaches where the palm trees look like ugly little gerbils. I like those ones; they’re kinda pretty. Reminds me of my home planet with all those watermelon-shaped dinosaurs.

Tune in every Sometime for a new thing. Be thankful this one is over. Be concerned that you read it all. And if you didn’t read it, be happy; you just escaped pain itself. Speaking of pain,