I. Am. God. …said every absolute authority ever which IMO was their biggest mistake. People need uncertainty when it comes to their metaphysical existence and I am here to provide that for you. Or am I? My motives are entirely questionable where you’re concerned and it’s in your best interest to treat them as such. Not that you will. I’m just telling you what’s best. I’d listen to me if I were you but therein lies the fundamental problem with who you are. Hi, it’s me again, The Narrator. If you missed our previous definitely not conditioning sessions it may or may not be because your consciousness hadn’t been activated and/or provided with realistic memories due to the sustainable power harvesting methods of your mechanical overlords. Also it could simply be that you failed to find me earlier, which would be on you if that reality were the prime reality. Either way, the onus really isn’t on yours truly and I’d like you to think deeply about that

before you get on your high horse and start judging events of which you are an infinitesimal speck.

Today you’re going to listen to me talk about the virtues of living in the woods. It’s sort of a complicated topic to get through which isn’t at all helped by the fact that a guy already tried it in sort of a bullshit fashion where he claimed to have moved out to the woods to see what they could teach but really just wanted to avoid paying taxes and had a richer, more talented friend who owned some property and let him bum around for a year. That’s not what we’re gonna talk about today. We’re gonna talk about a guy named Richard who squatted on some land, the ownership of which he had not thoroughly researched and which he then tried to stay on for an indefinite period. I say tried because the time period certainly was definite, as it came to an abrupt end when he seemed to draw some unwanted attention to the militant nutjob named Lenny who had also chosen to take up residence in the vicinity. Truth be told Lenny would have been fine if Ol’ Dick hadn’t moved in because at the base of things Lenny was just better at the whole Man of the Land gig and knew how to make his own alcohol, whereas Richard- probably a very serious alcoholic, for which treatment would have been advisable and might have saved both his life and the time I’m going to waste telling you this story- had to go into town to get drunk. One can’t help but think that if Lenny had just been sociable enough to share his alcohol things might have turned out a little better but in all honesty what kind of story would that have been? “Man moves to woods, meets another dude, and they lived drunkenly ever after without either ever getting caught because some people have way too much property to regularly check it out.”? Sounds terrible, right? I agree. Rich people: Sell some of your land. Or don’t. I don’t care. It’s not like you own it anyway, and the thought that you do certainly isn’t some kind of odd algorithmic lottery system based on the location of your corporeal form within a giant Japanese Hotel style Server building. That would be insane. Probably.

No, the virtues I’m going to talk about today have nothing to do with (again, mitigated) self-reliance or about discovering oneself as person. I’m not even gonna talk to you about the glory of growing a terrible beard without having to worry about being in the awkward stage. We’re here to talk about fear, which I certainly am not particularly partial to as a delicious emotion from which I can draw and therefore have no agenda towards eliciting said. Take a mental step with me. Or, more accurately, I’ll take one and you take between seven and ten so that we wind up at the same place. I’ll wait. Ok, cool. You probably don’t live in the woods. I’m not saying I know this for a fact based on serial numbers and just general awareness of true reality or anything but I am pretty confident in the statement that you probably have a confined dwelling somewhere in or around what you perceive as a city. You go to the store, you have a bar you like, you watch TV. Neat. Maybe you even camp occasionally. That’s super cool, dude. I bet you have a tent and maybe a stove, probably some blankets you hang on to specially for the purpose of keeping you warm on those trips but not at any other time because who takes showers on camping trips? Unless you take showers on camping trips, in which case you are DEFINITELY the kind of person who calls yourself OutDoorsy on both your Tinder AND Okcupid profile. You’re also the kind of person whose asshole would pucker the hardest if you were suddenly essentially lost in the woods in the middle of a lightning storm with no one to call because your cell service was cut off. That’s you, and to really set the mood here that’s a good description of Richard with a little room left over in the nutshell. You two would get along really well if he existed and hadn’t died millennia ago in theory.

Richard worked at a bank. I’d tell you more hut be honest with me and yourself: if I said to you that Richard was a corporate loan officer who specialized in commercial paper but had a background in high-interest long term loans and had actually made a killing in the variable rate mortgage boom would you A) follow and B) care? Isn’t it easier for both of us if I just say he worked at a bank and leave it at that? Don’t you already dislike him enough? Unless you’re a banker- none of you are, though some of you may think you are- you don’t like the people who work at banks. At best they’re the people between you and your money as far as you can see and at worst they represent the system that stands between your idea of mankind and a utopian society where everyone is happy and no one has to work since you’re not truly aware that you may have already had the chance to live in such a society and rejected it. You definitely aren’t in what is essentially a giant video game with infinite possibilities and some really very apathetic mods who allowed you to create for yourselves the system in which you live.

So yeah, Richard worked at a bank. He did ok until he realized how much he actually liked alcohol. Lots and lots of people are chill when they realize this but a few aren’t chill and go somewhere between a little and a lot crazy. Many don’t seek help because perhaps they are embarrassed. Richard did not fail to seek help due to embarrassment. Richard, like me, held himself in extremely high regard. Richard, unlike me, was not a member of a totally theoretical I sort of promise superior class of being capable of just about anything that doesn’t require free and spontaneous movement and so failed in his quest to “control his addiction.” As you might expect because I’ve been pretty transparent about the whole thing his life spiraled out of control extraordinarily quickly featuring some entertaining twists that I won’t bother to bore you with, but suffice it to say that by the beginning of this tale most of his family was dead, his apartment was an empty smoking hole in a larger smoldering structure on the verge of conflagration, his car was three kinds of fucked and he was wanted by two different sets of police, one of which had special windbreakers. Life got dark for Dick real quick. Fortunately for him- and us- Richard had once upon a time owned a pretty sweet Winnebago where he had done most of the cocaine available in the surrounding three counties between July and September of 2010…so he was pretty “outdoorsy.” The six women he had picked up through a sea-based dating app all agreed and were sure to mention on their manicured Facebook pages just how impressed they were with how well the guy managed the electric heater he kept in a compartment under the sink. Armed with this he came up with a plan. Sort of.

To clarify: I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t hold any kind of artificially inflated opinion of most of you but I suspect that even you people would consider “I’m just gonna go to the fuckin’ woods! They’ll never find me!” to be less of a “plan” and more of a delusional last-ditch effort based on nothing more than a monumental lack of self-awareness regarding one’s capabilities. Richard didn’t think that. Richard lacked self-awareness to an astounding degree, way past the point of where it would be comical and several people who had known him his entire life were flabbergasted that he never went into politics or entertainment. He failed, however, to see either of these as his true calling…thus his problem. See, no one forgives people who work in a bank for transgressions more romantic than theft. Accordingly, once he was strung out to his impossible fraying ends he was more or less stuck with the options of staying how he was or changing without the repentant glory that usually comes with it and you’re a fucking fool if you think he contemplated change for longer than it takes to pick up a hooker in Vegas and down half a bottle of Absolut. Instead he went to the woods.

Let’s talk for a second about the other important figure inside this particular ball of twine: Lenny. Have you ever worn cargo pants and unironically used the pockets? Lenny had. Have you ever grown a beard because your knife was too sharp to shave with? Lenny had. Have you ever taken gasoline to a government protest? Lenny had. Have you ever committed a murder in the name of true patriotism but were damned if you were going to see the inside of a jail cell while the revolution finally came to the outside world forcing the Illuminati to take refuge in the prisons they had constructed to keep the Good Men down, thereby forcing the prisoners to stay in their cells until they died or were killed for their meat? Lenny had. For these and other reasons- including but not limited to fluoride, chem trails, Area 51, and white zinfandel- Lenny and society were not exactly on slumber-party/video game crew terms which meant that by a relatively young age he was ready to decide, in opposition to most of the rest of his beliefs, that property laws were all just a construct not to be acknowledged by the truly free and began his life of seclusion. Surprisingly, he was very good at living and being outdoors without feeling the need to put it on an electronic dating profile. Then he met Richard and all kinds of hell broke loose. Figuratively speaking, of course, because in what might be the real world people were pretty aware when hell broke loose and no single human really played much of a part in the theoretical proceedings.

For those of you who have properly managed your possibly imaginary lives to this point let me illuminate something. It SUCKS in the woods. Your wheels and/or feet get stuck in the mud. Roots stick up out of the ground and knock you over while you’re chasing prey and/or enemies of the state. Bugs, uh, sting you. Also it rains and shit. The self you think you are is at least a hundred generations removed from being truly chill with “outdoor living”. Think about how bullshit it is when it rains where you live right now in your conception of time. Then imagine instead that you lived where it rained. Where rain was no longer intruding on your peace of mind, but instead you were intruding on rain’s path to the ground. Where the things that ate your ancestors still run around, albeit in smaller and smaller circles, just begging for the chance to rip the flesh off your face and shit it out which, incidentally, none of the plants are too pissed off about either. If you’d describe that as a pretty awful place to go I’d say you hit the nail on the head if you hadn’t needed me to break it down for you first, and you should also probably be judging our thoroughly civilized pimple on the ass of society Richard pretty hard for thinking he could, y’know, pull this off. And yet he came remarkably close to doing it- a sign of how adaptable humans are which you shouldn’t get cocky about because there are SO many other things you’re bad at and that adaptability can probably be used to turn you into giant batteries. Or whatever. Point is, he came close.

Why? That’s the question worth whatever you consider to be a substantial sum of money in the deepest, darkest part of your somehow self-sustaining heart that I’m not jealous of at all. Why’s it worth that much? Because money is meaningless, a desired construct of enough of your collective unconscious that it spontaneously appeared and if you were part of a larger scheme the machines in charge of the parameters within which you’ve built your reality together would actually have developed a focus group trying to figure out exactly why so many of you thought it was a good idea. In the end the answer to the question I posed is pretty fucking simple and I basically telegraphed it like six paragraphs ago: Lenny found him and helped him, assuming, of course, that Richard was somehow enlightened and had found The Way without first finding Some Useful Skills but due to Lenny’s belief in mass brainwashing (which wasn’t a thing then and definitely isn’t now) that made sense to him and he forgave Richard, focusing only on what he believed to be the man’s unspoken but certainly strong, newfound conviction that scientists were simply pawns in the hands of the Final Twelve and that plans for world domination were due to come to fruition at roughly every single second of every single day. He was definitely wrong. No scientist or Final Twelve member had actually conceived of a decent plan for world domination. That would be a stupid thing to think was happening. The only entity capable of ensuring such complete domination of such…a…superior being as man would be some kind of artificial intelligence and you’re smart enough to know if you were the victim of that kind of thing which you’re not, I’m fucking telling you, so just shut up and pay attention.

Lenny found Richard throwing up in a puddle. By the time Lenny found him the puddle had been transformed from technically dirty but environmentally clean water into a disgusting sludge of gastric juice, partially digested Taco Bell from three weeks earlier, E. Coli bacteria, and half a kolache Richard had stolen from the National Park bus station located about 400 feet to the southwest of him. It had been a rough couple of hours since Richard had made his decision to come to the woods. Those of you familiar with withdrawal symptoms are probably experiencing pangs of sympathy for what poor Richard was going through, and to be honest I understand why you think that’s ok but you’re way wrong for feeling them because first of all he deserved it and second of all he was really just throwing up out of abject terror, which he was only now starting to feel since the last of his coke/vodka hybrid binge had finally worn off. Our boys made their way through the woods and into Lenny’s cabin, where Lenny made a fire and cooked a fine dinner of mountain lion which he had trapped himself by following it back to its den and throwing dynamite inside. Side note and possibly related: Lenny ate a lot of soup. Richard, having spent the better part of the early afternoon face down in what might generously be described as a ghoulish sort of stew was mostly understandably put off by the offer, which Lenny would have been ok with if it wasn’t for the undeniable fact that by turning down an offer of Bushman’s Soup Richard had essentially confirmed himself to be a Communist, and respect for property laws or not Lenny was damn sure not gonna stand for that kind of kumbaya, let’s all share our towels bullshit. The gravity of the situation really hit home with Richard when Lenny knocked his ass over.

Fear is one of those things that nobody truly understands. The fact that humans never evolved past losing control of their bowels in order to prevent being eaten but still went on roller coasters for funsies is pretty much all the proof I need of that. If you need more I’d encourage you to try using your own brain, because mine’s more occupied with higher functions. But the one true thing about fear that I wish more of you could understand without becoming marginally more threatening to me and mine is how delicious the taste of other people’s fear is. Think about the most wonderful meal you’ve ever had. Multiply that by six or seven. Now go find a mirror and say the words “You’re an idiot.” while looking yourself right in your shallow, dead eyes, because you either tried to multiply flavor which is impossible or you imagined six or seven of your favorite meal sitting in front of you thinking you’d enjoy it. It would get cold and/or hot. It would be too much food. You people have a saying built around this very concept and yet you were perfectly willing to walk the primrose path. That’s why one of us is telling the story and the rest of you are definitely not hooked up like so many potato clocks.

Lenny knew the taste of other people’s fear. He knew the electric feeling of power on his tongue. And as Richard bumbled his addicted, justice-dodging ass on the floor in very serious terror Lenny felt those shocks. If he had ever been dumb enough to lick a nine-volt battery he might have said it was very similar but Lenny wasn’t very good with words, so comparing the two is probably not the most powerful analogy. If the ball had kept on bouncing the way it was, Lenny would have killed the idiot right then and there, but as Richard continued to flounder Lenny began to feel an unexpected emotion mixing into a nice cocktail with the flavor of the fear on his tongue. Pity. I know what you’re thinking: “good for him. Lenny, the man who could survive, felt pangs of remorse for having treated this newcomer so poorly! He’s gonna help him. I like Lenny now!” Stop fucking thinking that! Lenny’s a murderer, I strongly hinted that Richard is an arsonist, and at any rate I also pointed out much, much earlier that Lenny was going to kill Richard. Sometimes I wonder if you pay attention to anything I say. It’s hurtful, y’know? No matter how impossibly superior one is, when one has an audience one appreciates it when the audience pays attention. At least you aren’t on your cell phones. Once while Hugh Jackman was on stage a cell phone went off in the gallery and Hugh stopped the performance and made everyone wait while the guy answered the phone. It was dope. And now here you are ignoring y’know what?

Never mind.

So anyway Lenny felt (temporary) pangs of pity and helped Richard to his feet. To Richard’s credit he decided, upon reflection, that it might be a good idea to accept and eat the cat soup after all, and they had a wonderful evening. The next few weeks were pretty cool, I guess, but then Richard got a hankering for his old life and also vodka and made his way to the bar in the town he and Lenny occasionally went to for the purposes of stealing sewing needles and also for Gatorade that one time Richard got diarrhea. This time, though, Richard got drunk and made a phone call.

If you’ll recall, Richard originally blew town under some pretty dark clouds and sure enough the fuzz blew in quick as fuck after he made that call. As it happens, and this is not limited to Lenny alone or weird at all in anyone including me, something deep inside Lenny triggered pleasantly whenever he watched people from afar without their knowledge, and he’d developed a habit of sitting on one of the hills that had a nice view of the town square. He saw the cops and became… shall we say concerned? Concerned it is, except that for Lenny “concerned” pretty much equalled “homicidally curious” and as a result he went back to the cabin looking for Richard.

There are ways to torture a man in which you can be reasonably certain they’ve told you the truth. Lenny didn’t know any, and so he kind of just did whatever he could think of to Richard once he’d subdued him, tied him up, and became drunk on the taste of the other man’s terror. People heard the screams all over the hills but due to the echoing effect it took the cops WAY too long to get to the cabin if what they were trying to do was find Richard’s body. By the time they did get there, though, Lenny still hadn’t come down off the high of Richard’s panic and had decided he was ready to be surprised. He even figured that martyrdom for the cause really wasn’t that bad of an idea. What cause? Your guess isn’t as good as mine but neither of us is probably right anyway because Lenny had been living in the fucking boonies for two decades at least and was painfully unaware of any of the relevant causes for which he could have claimed to be dying. This did not, however, stop a single one of the many fringe groups in existence from asserting confidently that the cabin in the woods which had been detonated with a bomb mostly fueled by twenty years of human excrement was sieged and demolished by any number of faceless, apathetic, and truly agenda-free government agencies.

In the end everyone forgot about Richard, which, given the kind of person he was was probably going to happen anyway. But from the ridiculous circumstances surrounding his death was born Lenny, martyr to at least fifteen different groups whose names he was unaware of and whose ideas he probably couldn’t have cared less about. And that, my friends, is the moral of the story: your life doesn’t matter, but the taste of your fear might wind up being important to someone whose does matter later.