How do you know... when it has fled? When the healthy mind has disintegrated enough, so that appearances may be kept up when absolutely necessary, but only just... not even a veneer... more like a mask of thinnest delicate glass, painted with lifelike tones and fixed into place by means of a cunning hinge of brass wire, so that movement presents itself when appropriate? The... slightest tap, and the whole thing shatters into invisible razor splinters that work their way into the feet long after the first, second, and third sweepings of the floor.
Dissecting the psyche is fine for some... a passtime, an expensive hobby... the basis of a career. It is fashionable to be neurotic, and the mechanical pills that are the first resort of the modern worried well lend to most a superior functioning of the type that is rewarded by society. The difference in the hipness of remedies! "I'm on Zoloft" sounds so much more slick and modern than "I've had electroconvulsive therapy," doesn't it? Truly, what an age. What an age.
But there is no finer dope, I think, than the seeping fluids of the natural mind... from whence come requiems, sonnets, and bastard rhyme. Or is there? I certainly don't know, because I seem to be stuck with a Victorian brain: fragile, sensitive, subject to ill-humors and the fainting twitches. I have a most unfashionable brain.
I seek to cram artificial pleasure into an anhedonic skull. Results are predictable: loss of self-satisfaction, absence of trust, misanthropy, addiction and sterility. And fruit flies. Can't forget them: breeding in the sink drains which remain uncleaned for too long due to general malaise and amotivational tendencies.
There! Did you see that, there, just then? I mean, fruit flies. That's the sort of thing that's right up there with precious bodily fluids and other fractured nonsense.
No matter, no mind, read about it all in the papers soon enough, or, not even, because the papers are passé, are they not? Read the pixels, instead: MAN FREES CIRCUS ELEPHANTS, SHOOTS ACROBATS, CLOWN, SELF. It'll be a five-minute splash of life!
