3 :

I am not what I own. I am not what I owe. I am not my books. My CD’s. My girlfriend. I am none of these things. But I try to pretend I am. I try to assemble my personality in parts. A record here. A book there. A haircut. These are the things that define me, because there is nothing within. Only that I am without.

I am none of these things. However, what I am, is a mystery to me. An artificial construct. I am an assemblege, a piecemeal of beliefs and tastes. A jigsaw puzzle of reality. I take what I think represents me, what may gain me acceptance and security, and these things become Me. Even though there is no me, no I, no actual personality, just merely a compilation of beliefs, knowledge, information, material that most reflects what I – whatever I am, if there is an I – am.

There are no original ideas. No original ideologies. Only a moral code defined by the information we receive. Everything is a sign. Everything means something. The records we buy. The books we read. The clothes we wear. Even if we don’t care about books, about music, about movies - this too means something.

It means that you don’t care. That there are other things, more important things that music, records, books, ideology. More important things than the real world. Some people don’t care about these things. Some people don’t care about politics. Some people just don’t care. As long as they’ve got the things they want : the girl, the boy, the car, the house, the pint and the packet of fags, some people just don’t care as long as they are comfortable.

Ignorance is bliss.

And so every day, the hour commute between the station and the office, the bus, the train, this moving cell, tightly packed to capacity with strangers, all serving our own eight hour a day sentence, our own job for life sentence, and we have no option but to participate.

And so, in this hour, we sit with eyes squeezed tight, trying to close out the world however we can. Copies of bland novels, sold en bulk at newsagents, She’s Gotta Have it, Girlfriend 44, The Girl With Jimmy Choo Shoes, all of them packed, printed, pulped attempts to escape reality, to run away from the outside world.

If I was a tree, I would be ashamed to die for a book like that. If I was a tree I’d want to die for a masterpiece : a book that changed the world, and not The Bible. A novel that opened people’s eyes : that changed the way people think : the way people act. That changed everything.

Moral judgements are easy to make about strangers. Sit opposite me, reading a copy of Finding Mr Right The Wrong Way or Former SAS General Excalibur Jones’ The Omega Project, and I make a judgement.

How many lives are wasted this way? How many hours a day, a week, a year,a lifetime? Moving from one place to another, like commuter cattle, their eyes inside an imaginary world, trying to escape, trying to pretend that this comfortable prison we are in does not even exist. Where the world is made of wizards and general and deep ops SAS nutters and gangsters call "HardFace" and "Nutter". You don’t want to think about the world. You don’t want to change the way things are. You just want a comfortable prison. You don’t want to think about big things.

And sometimes, it’s entirely right not to want to change the world. But most of time, escapism is not an escape. It’s the temporary haze of oblivion. It’s fiddling whilst Rome burns.

I am not the books I read. The clothes I wear. The music I listen to. I am some vague attempt at a personality by compiling all these things together and somehow hoping that there is a me at the end of it.

And yet without these things by which I define myself, I am nothing.

And this is all we are. Animals in shoes. You don’t see Insects worshipping a big stone insect with white flowing mandibles. If they had opposable claws the world would be very different. Humans would be battery farmed and stripped of fles by white coated animals. You could smell our shit as it collected at our feet on the killing floor. Somehow we try to rise above this : we try to pretend we are not made up of 98% Gorilla DNA. It’s that 2% that makes all the difference.

It only takes 2% Sarin, 2% Tabun, 2% Methylphosphonic Acid for us to leave this planet.

We are all just 2% away from being zoo fodder. 2% away from spending our lives behind glass as exhibits, hunted, skinned, eaten, and sold in the animal trade.

Should the 102% Human arrive, our days are numbered.

Twice as smart and half as dumb.

Some would say that our days already are. That in time everything becomes extinct. Even the universe itself, given enough billions of years, has its survival rate fall to zero. It extends and shrinks, and eventually the universe, having expanded as fast and as far as it can, contracts. Everything becomes sucked into itself.

We are in a time of boom. The human race is endlessly replicating, expanding, and racing towards Maximum Capacity. Critical Mass.

The time of bust is inevitable. It may be tomorrow, or a year from now, or a thousand years from now. In the end, in a few billion years, our lives, everything we say, everything we do, everywhere we go, will not even be history, but will have ceased to even be a memory. As if they never happened. The world will contract to the size of a football. And then it will expand again.

And we will never know that this will happen. The universe will shrink and dinosaurs, God, love, life, everything, the universe itself will be nothing. There will be no history, no memory, no things.

And what does it matter anyway then?