I suppose it should have started in some dark woods or on a misty dockside, really. Things never happen how they should, so this story started, insofar as any story can be said to start, in a room. Every day the room started the same, open the curtains on the world and see the sunshine, and by the end the darkness closes in and no one can se anything. That’s the way that things went for too long to remember, days mixed together with nothing to split them. That’s not to say that nothing happened in the days. On the contrary, insights and deeply philosophical understandings were had, but the problem is that on each and every day the self same insights were had at the same time. But each time they cleared areas of the brain were lit with the new knowledge, only to be left to dim and darkness each evening as the monotony of the situation hemmed in thought until the only thought that could be heard was the thought that no thought was worth thinking. It would be fair to say that I was pretty depressed, I think. I must have been, because that’s the only way I can explain how nothing meant anything more than scenery in a world that was not made for me. It was as if, for many days, I was standing on the outside of a snowglobe, watching the snowflakes fall on a tiny church and a winter cottage. That sounds bad, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s not as if I resented the people who were inside the world. They all seemed happy enough, but to me it looked like a mask of happiness. But maybe it was only me who could see that it was mask, and to themselves, to each and every last person in the place I was watching, they were happy to be alive and their smiles were real.

Anyway, this isn’t really important, what I want to tell you about is what happened afterwards. After the world. After the people. After, when all the shit had hit the fan and the world was a burning charred wreck of what it had once been. That’s what I want to tell you about. See? That’s how messed up my brain is. There was no apocalypse. How could there have been, since you are reading this? I don’t really wish for Armageddon, because I don’t want everyone else in the world to die. Why would I? They probably do good things. Sell vegetables in Red Square, paint road lines in Seattle, and fix fences in the safari parks. So I don’t want everyone to die. I’ve got nothing against everyone, but I do have a nasty feeling that if I knew everyone then apocalypse would be fine. I don’t think that I have a habit of seeing the worst in people. In fact, I have known some sparkling people who seemed to me to be things beyond the normal level of greyness. People who made the world a bright place for the rest of us. At least me, and at least for a little while. But you’ve got to agree that people in general, present company accepted, are dumb sheep in the thrall of the herd. It’s not a bad thing. Well, it is, but only for me. So the thing is, I don’t want everyone to die. Or me. Death isn’t really appealing, because it’s all quite terminal. I’d like to be somewhere else and somewhen else, I think.