"Consider laughter: it is the highest emotion, for it can contain any of the others from ecstacy to grief. It has no opposite. Crying is merely an undeveloped form of it which cleanses the eyes and summons assistance to infants. Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played upon itself." - Peter Carroll, Liber Null
*
It's a kind of hysteria, a letting-go. I shat myself! Just a pure bloody urge. I pissed myself! An antidote to ideas.
I had a dream, right at the end of a long sleepless night. It was the finale of a futuristic game show. I was the last contestant and I'd definitively failed to win. The three hosts floated above me. One of them was dressed in a sparkly purple suit, another wore sunglasses. They delivered the verdict – YOU LOSE, SON!!! – and disappeared down a wormhole that sealed shut behind them.
The terminal point. I was finally here. This was it. Sat on the floor in a sealed room. THE END. Alone and forsaken. Everything lost.
And then the walls fell outwards. It was all a big joke. None of it had ever mattered. A flood of laughter and relief and a big dopey smile flowering like sunshine.
*
I went to the zoo the other day, but the only animal they had was a dog.
It was a shih tzu!!!!!!!!!
The brain is a babbling idiot. It's completely unfit for purpose, an evolved dunce. Refunds will not be issued. Thoughts are a kind of waste product, like carbon dioxide or piss. Culture is just chimpanzees hurling their shit at each other. It's a shit zoo!!!!! Omg lol
The universe is 13.8 billion years old and it's just getting started. Everything is a single-frame glitch. I'm so sorry everyone, but there seems to be a small quantity of something smeared on the screen. Huge apologies, I can assure you we'll be back up and running in no time.
No offence intended! Come here, you big oaf. Nobody expects a baby to do much more than eat and cry and soil itself, do they? Don't be so hard on yourself. A plant doesn't need ideas, does it? Trees are better than buildings. Come here. Or at the very least, put that handful down for a second and listen (but not to me).
We're on the same trajectory. Can you hear the edge of the world? The water slips silently over the cliff. Death is microns away, and your priorities will be incredibly clear soon enough. You won't need ideas. Let's get prepared. Be quiet for once in your life. What can you hear?
Things are looking a little suspicious. The table points inwards. The blank fact of the floor. What's that blanket plotting? And then there's the body, holding its secrets. A lot of frightening space around here. The images are awake and hungry. You'll need to keep speaking or you might disintegrate. Who are all these things? What do they want? The cold ocean, the crumbling cliffs. Water cascading into darkness.
It's okay to be scared, and you probably should be, because it's easy to stop thinking, but so much harder to stop feeling. Feelings are like dumbbells or rocks, they've got that solidity. They're about what they are and that's it. Stronger than thoughts in this sense. That churning in your guts? That pounding of your heart as you lie in the dark? Can't do much about that, can you. Imagine being in a church service and trying to stop laughing. Can't be done can it, once it starts welling up. You can't hold it back.
And so here's you. You've mislaid the instructions. Your phone is extremely dead. You've really done it now. Sat on the floor. Oh dear oh dear. Objects and feelings. This empty light. This tiny room. The universe is getting colder btw, and expanding unstoppably. Like a dumb gaping mouth. No-one but you. Nothing to do. And just look at those blank empty walls. No windows, no doors.
And then they fall outwards.