We need stories. All of us. Like water, like breath. They help us understand the chaos, or at least pretend we do. We don’t always care if they’re true. We care if they feel good, if they make sense in that quiet part of the mind where reason takes a back seat.
Credimus quod dolemus.we believe what hurts us
Heaven ships free; Hell is £1.99 a month (and it renews automatically, which is the single most accurate detail in the entire enterprise). The Son of God is a loss leader. The Adversary is the upsell. You begin in the light, where it costs nothing, and you pay only to go down.
Daniel Goleman says we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. I put the feeling one in a cardboard box for twenty years and delivered the script. The maintenance mind is the half a machine can already do. The other half is the only part of me that cannot be subscribed to.
Why do Western governments make decisions that seem actively suicidal? Why do they start wars they can't win, tank their own economies, sell out their industrial base, behave with a schizophrenia that makes no strategic sense?
You were still warm, but your heart was no longer beating. I was longing to make you hear my gratitude for the life you gave me. I stood there, staring at you, thinking how beautiful you looked, even in dying bed. You could have been everyone's star, but you were mine.
Competition is the poison we drink whilst toasting to our health. So I play a dark game. I starve my neighbour. I become a black hole of mediocrity so he levels up to nothing. I save my best for the ones who deserve it. The rest get the silence. I am accelerating our extinction by refusing to play.
You are a collection of impeccable, elaborate masks, in orbit of a stunted heart; it rattles inside your chest like a dried pea in an empty tin can. I knock on your ribs and nobody answers; it is just a hollow room with the lights left on to trick the neighbours.