It's here and it's awake and breeding. I don't want to move for fear that this evil may consume me whole, like a snake over a buffalo, the ribs around me, the venom burning the hairs of my arm and onto the thin layers of skin left from the wasting and hunger of the years before. It still continues, this noose of awareness, through what we recognise as normality. Nothing can be normal or abnormal anymore, only what is common and rare. This is how we will define the social future, by what we may or may not commit. To go against the grain will be to die from alien interaction.

Now, when you are convinced that the standard rules do not apply, when you are tested against these standards and found to be deemed defective, then the rules of importance and attitude inevitably change. We deform decorum to appropriate off-centre behaviour. This is labelled as insanity, and I am sure of my infliction.

So when we wake up after the debauched runnings of a half-lost night, and then she asks me to tell her about myself, I pause, neither for dramatic effect or lack of voice, but because this is a question I'll rather not answer. Exactly what am I to say? Where I was born, the demographic details of my nuclear family unit, the hobbies, the interests, the fact that I'm a recovering depressive who had a near nervous collapse over a year ago and that she should be greatful that I'm even coherent enough to spend the night with her and not cry or slice or hide while she pours her heart out into my already over-filled glass of suffering and despair. That I have an absolute irrational fear that she will be pregnant even though we used protection, but somehow, somehow, it crept out, got on my fingers and then into her and in a week it will grow like the cancer that is undoubtedly riddled throughout my body, deep in my torso, crawling through, deep down, maybe even in my colon of all places; what a delicious resting place and breeding ground that would be.

But hey, okay, it isn't really that bad I guess. So I am no longer the angry young man, striving to rise to a different dimension than the street rats and fat cats. The problem is I don't fit into preconceived definitions that people exert in order to pigeonhole, identify and understand. But you see, that's a roadblock to our understanding. How can you reach a level of acceptance and willingness towards something or someone if you are forever seeking to kill off the individuality of aforementioned entity? We pride ourselves in practicing conformity while all moving in the same direction, drifting towards (and drifting is truly the right word to use here, as we are being blown on by winds of deep rooted insecurity, not stepping forwards to reach a goal or two) what we think is a union, a lattice, a connection with fellow spirits. We merge, we dilute our experience, and then we part, feeling slightly the better for it. And yet, whatever problems you have remain because you have not solved, you have merely diverted: committed a temporary diversion of souls and forced another few hours of entertainment down already stuffed throats.

Where is your solution, your golden path to realised dreams and inner fulfillment? We tread a road of lies and illusions just so at the end of the day society can feel accredited for peace and rest. All the while, inside the mind of the beast, we stir and cry, turn continually away in a dream from what really keeps us awake, the fear, the fear of abandonment, of failure, of death and most of all, of the truth. The truth that one day we will be revealed for what we truly are. A monster of chaos and panic, rumbling through the undercurrents of existence in order to reach the end of the day and the morning of the next.

What have we concluded? The expressed importance of the individual tempered against the dread of being alone, coupled with the want or need, or, depending or your outlook, the horror of being left alone. Be brave and cry, be strong and shed blood, bend with the damaging wind but never move with their breeze. Never explain, never apologise, and never give in to the fight. One need not kick, bite and scream. There can be calm during anarchy, so accept the peace in little pleasures and quite possibly, the more you come to know about life, the more you might just know how to live it.

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