14 :

Friday.

Train station. Race to an obscure part of the platform to secure a seat so that I may work on the way in. This reduces my chances of being late at work and increases my perceived per-hour productivity at work. Achievements come in small steps. So small you don’t even know what you are doing.

You always start at the bottom when you start anew. Slowly but surely you become like all the rest. Inevitably you think of buying a house.. well, it’s cheaper than renting, isn’t it? And the most rebellious thing in your life is your CD collection.

But in my sleepless state, all this in an endurance course. A never ending stream of bullshit I have to wade through, in order to be able to go and do it again.

Waiting for the train I imagine her naked and on all fours. My eyes scan the other commuters and I mentally tick off those to whom I would fuck if I had the chance. It’s more than you’d think. When the dick is hard, the mind is soft.

I did this every day, like a mouse on a treadmill, a rat in a cage, an experiment made flesh.

Insomnia is my curse.

The train has seven stops and takes 34 minutes to reach the city. I am gently rocked to sleep by the cheap, hardbacked seats and the thin blanket of exhaustion. But sleep never comes. I have to count the minutes and the stops so that I can change for the tube.

I can’t relax. Even in my sleep, I can’t switch off. I’m a broken record in a world made of MP3’s.

After I change, work is thankfully only 238 yards walk. Good pedestrianisation of the walkways and a lack of congestion means I can do that in 4 minutes. Pedestrian congestion is the next epidemic to gridlock the city.

I am able to clear the station in 52 seconds, though my personal best was 40 – that was when there was a bomb scare. Could Inspector Sands please report to the Information Desk? The PA asked, its monotone, dull and pre-recorded, talking in the code of evacuation. Those forty beautiful seconds, escorted straight from the train to the crowded street outside, the flurry of yellow helmets and fire engines, uniformed officers and frantic, fearful commuters, all of us, in a veiled sense of quiet panic.

Normally, people who can’t walk straight, tourists, the old, the sick, the lame, screaming idiot children add those twelve seconds to my life. Or, in event of emergency, cost me my life. There are too many people, this human virus, and I am just a cancerous cell in the world.

Then it’s 4 minutes to the office, assuming I am not distracted by tourists, beggars, or girls. I love the summertime. All the pretty young things wear skirts and flimsy material and open toed shoes. There can be no greater glory God made than her skin.

Sloth and lust are sins. God made these sins for us to share and enjoy.

I’m just a man. Nothing less, and nothing more. I’ve been shackled to an idiot all my life, and I can never cut myself apart from my cock. I wonder what life would be like, no longer crawling and following the black demon of the flesh. And often it puts the strangest, stupidest thoughts in my head. I’m sat there, minding my own business, content to think about something and then all of a sudden – there’s nothing I want to do more than fuck the living daylights out of something, anything, someone, anyone.

That was the life of a frustrated singleton. That was my life. No man is an island and I was lost at sea. There was little respite from things. Akin to the way of pre-historic man, life felt like a constant battle. We’d just changed what we were fighting for : no longer was it survival and existence. It was a fight for seating. And expresso.

There’s a fight for seat. I stand at the end of the platform, where there are less people. I wear headphone, so that I can eavesdrop conversations of listen to music. I read my book, whatever book it is. Sometimes I read reports, newspapers over peoples shoulders, stare out of the window, try to steal an extra few seconds of sleep, something, anything. And this is another slice of our lives.

And sometimes I stand. I pay over one hundred pounds a month and I can’t even get a seat. I stand like cattle, shunted form A to B and back again. And that is my life. Shunted to my slow, spiritual death.

Cannibals are a theory you are what you eat. I am a mutated, battery-farmed chicken bred for profit.

Every morning I arrive, if I am on time, at 7.56am. I am at the mercy of the Franchise Holder for the rail network. And sometimes I am late, the type of late that could get me a warning in a less-relaxed office. The type of late that I am hopelessly irresponsible for. I am hostage to the ineffiency of the modern nation.

Normally I share the lift with Catherine who works on the fourth floor. I think she takes the same train as me, but I have never seen her on it. We breed familiar faces, our alien community, recognising faces on platforms that we never speak to, and sometimes it feels odd to be there and not see these people.

Rumour has it that she fucked the guy who works in the office next door to mine, but I can neither confirm or deny these rumours. Little things. Tiny minds.

Every morning it is like this. A production line. A conveyor belt of wage-slaves. I haven’t sold out. I bought in. I want this. I want the rewards. I want the house, the wife, the dog, a decent TV, and some comfort. But the rewards seem disproportionate to the investment I make.

I’m going to get to the end of it and tot up my victories : a failed marriage, a mortgage, maybe children, a car, and 2.4 pets. That’s not a victory. It’s a lament.

A minimum of 37 hours per week, and just to maintain this fucking charade. Just to buy more food to get more sleep to get up to go to work to do it again. I am a fucking treadmill office rat. I don’t know how someone could design a life like this. A big machine built on bullshit.

It’s a fucking lie. Life lied to me. At school. At work. At the altar. They lied to me. They fucked me so they could treat me like a puppet, pull my fucking strings. Get me to do whatever they wanted. Trust is the most dangerous weapon of all. I wanted to believe.

We are all taking order, we just don’t know it sometimes. Sometimes we think that the ideas are our own. The greatest temptation of them all.

The numbers crawl up, 9,10,11,12, and a ping, and the doors open and the lift arrives at my floor, and I enter the cocoon bubble of employment. I am sucked back into the black hole of slavery. A flicker of recognition passes over her eyes, our faces, as we recognise, as we daily do, each other, we do not know each other, we know of each other, our eyes meet, a flutter of chemistry, and then it is gone. Catherine is, until tomorrow or eyes meeting in corridors, a memory. And what is a memory but a moment that can never return?

One day I will be a memory. You will be a memory. We all will be a memory, then we will be forgotten, history, nothing but some distant ancestor, some ancient relative.

For all this will one day be wiped away. Not just you, or I, not just our lives, our loves, our hopes, our fears, all the things that we thought mattered, but don’t – its beyond the ego, the identity. All of it will be wiped away. Everyone’s hopes. Everyone’s fears. Every single moment of love, every dream, every fear, every hope, everything.

All gone. Not even dust, but wiped clean from the records like a footprint in the sand. As if it never existed.

Everyone who reads this will be dead one day. You could even say this book is cursed. All of us are cursed. Life is a fatal condition. No one gets out of here alive.