It’s a shame how it all got a bit boring. Life.

You don’t realise how mundane existence becomes until you’ve been mundane for longer than you can remember. Once, when I was young, I’d play games and smoke pot and fuck girls and drive and sing and live and all that bullshit that we pretend we didn’t do, after we come to accept that the spontaneous fun we experienced was merely a construct of our juvenile delinquency and lack of forethought. Then, we get jobs, girlfriends – rather than simply girls – we make arrangements, we sit in, we work and we mature, like cheese. The maturing part, anyway. Like cheese.

You get a bit tired of being like cheese. Well, you don’t. You become complacent with being like cheese. I did, anyway, until it all becomes apparent that I’d spent way too long aging into a fine cheddar when being a newly drained ricotta was far more enjoyable, but cheese can’t go half-way back to milk. Cheese is cheese until it’s mouldy and green and furry, and is no longer a tasty addition to crackers but an unholy monster lurking somewhere in the pantry, waiting, stinking; a vile, deathly creature that isn’t what it wanted to be.

That was a bit off-topic, but that’s OK. Any philosopher will tell you that we don’t think in straight lines. I certainly don’t, anyhow.

If anything, I think in hypertext. A self-contained but almost infinitely sprawling, inter-woven system of linking moments and ideas that exists only ethereally, petering delicately but brazenly on the edge of a great abyss of forgotten thoughts and lost consciousness, where everything we’ve pledged to follow through but failed to complete plunges into nothing and dies. So much of what passes through our heads falls down. Dies.

Eventually – for some of us this may take centuries or millennia – we all fall down too.

That’s why I’m doing this. In the brief few months I have, I’m making a mockery of the abyss. I’m diving into its depths and pulling up the drowning and drowned things and taking them back here, my autobiography. My impenetrable, unshakable sanctuary for everything I want to protect. When something is here; a memory, a joke, a picture, the letter ‘a’; it’s here, permanently stored on hard drives the world over, nigh-indestructable. And all it really is is data. But data is all we need these days.

World, internet (Is there a difference?), this is my life.

Let’s start at the end.