9: I

I walk among them and they do not know me. I hold them in my hands and sculpt their fears and tease out random details of their witless lives, and all without them ever even noticing I am there.

How I hate them for their ignorance. How I hate their dull insistence on their own separateness, their individuality. What kind of catastrophic failure of the imagination leads them to think they exist at all? What can they be, if not my creations?

Who do they think they are?

Do they picture themselves as random collections of molecules? The products of millions of years of grinding evolution? Do they conjure up hackneyed bearded sky-gods to explain their own pointlessness?

Who cares what they think?

I know who they are. How can I fail to know, when I make them up? They are mine, every last detail of them. I can make them feel lust or confusion or sheer visceral terror at my idlest whim. They live by my will, and die by it. If I wish to torment them, they are tormented. If I choose to soothe their pain, they are soothed.

I never choose to soothe.

Who am I, then? Who do I think I am?

Do I picture myself as a random collection of molecules? The product of millions of years of grinding evolution? Do I conjure up hackneyed bearded sky-gods to explain my own pointlessness?

Do I fuck as like.

I know who I am and where I stand. I, unlike those worthless wretches I invent and reinvent and tease and torture, have a sense of proportion. A sense of what matters.

Oh yes, I know what matters in this world. My world. Oh yes.

I know what matters.
Posted by matt at November 9, 2004 11:53 PM