THERE'S A GNAT IN MY BREAD BIN, WHAT AM I GONNA DO?
Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you
To the best of my knowledge I’ve never been subject to an assassination attempt, but I can definitely relate to those who have, because only the other day a small insect flew deep inside my right earhole. It panicked, and fluttered wildly. I likewise panicked and fluttered. The minuscule beast refused to leave, so I resorted to pouring castor oil down my lughole until it drowned and died. At least, I assume it died. It’s possible that it simply crawled further inside my head and even as I write, is laying its gross little maggots inside my brain. It’s even possible, I suppose, that a legion of tiny gossamer-winged gnats have installed themselves in what was once my grey matter, and that it is they who are writing this newsletter, and what appear to be words are in fact merely the randomly patterned ejaculations of a parasitical mind hive. (It would explain a lot.)
I suspect that in many ways this ear violation was far more traumatising than having actual bullets shot at my face. For one thing, I do not have a retinue of highly skilled secret service officers ready to leap in front of my ears and bat away any winged invaders before they can nestle inside my acoustic organ. And for another thing, an assassination-attempt victim would not have to field questions from my sister about whether they did enough to save their attacker’s life.
For yes, when I told my sister about the distressing incident, she was really only concerned with whether I’d managed to save the pesky creature from dying in my ear canal. She would have been happy, I think, if I’d managed to knock the thing free and give it medical assistance, a counselling session, and a few drops of my blood before sending it on its way. The fact that I may well now have actual brain maggots is something she dismisses with an airy wave of her hands.
Now that the event has passed, and the sense of horror has begun to recede, I find myself wondering if it happened at all. Could an insect really have got stuck in my ear? Was it, perhaps, a strange case of ear palpitations? Am I just paranoid?
I’ve always had difficulties with reality. What even is it? I have often wondered. But for the last decade or so, everyone seems to be having a problem with reality. I think it’s because there’s a reality for everyone now. You can literally have your own. And no one’s allowed to tell you it’s a lot of nonsense because you can just say, hey man, that’s my truth. If I identify as someone who is actually a human-shaped swarm of gnats and gnat-maggotry, then that’s my lived experience and you do not have the right to invalidate me by poking my arm and witnessing me not dissolving into a billion tiny bugs.
It’s all well and good respecting people’s individual beliefs. But respecting everyone’s individual reality makes things like assassination attempts tricky to discuss. In the late 1900s people used to ask, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” But that world, where people lived in the same reality most of the time, has gone now. Imagine asking someone where they were when they heard Trump had been shot at. You wouldn’t do it, of course, unless for some reason you enjoy triggering people into long deranged rants detailing the ins and outs of their favourite conspiracy theories and political obsessions. But even if you did, they wouldn’t be able to answer the question anyway, because they don’t know. They were probably just on their phone, like they always are. You might as well ask people where they were when a gnat flew into Georgina Bruce’s bread bin. They don’t know, man! No one knows anything anymore.
Of course, I shouldn’t discount the possibility that the gnat flying into my ear was in itself an assassination attempt (by a presumably somewhat ambitious and/or overly optimistic assassin. Or perhaps one that had simply made a colossal miscalculation of scale, as in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where an entire alien invasion is swallowed by a small dog.) I’d like to think it’s mere menopausal anxiety on my part, but I can sense those gross little brain maggots wriggling away. Or am I just being paranoid?
It's hard to get a deep rooted sense of truth and reality when people are always quantum-leaping into their own parallel universes where not even the rules of physics can be counted on to apply. Then again, when you shrug your shoulders and accept other people's truths, you can end up living with a lot of uncomfortable lies.
Because it’s not their truth, is it, really? And it’s not my truth, either. It’s the truth that matters. Yes, I used the definite article, like some kind of psycho who doesn’t accept we’re living in a post-truth world now. Post nothing. It’s the truth; there’s only one.
I am deeply and unfashionably certain that the truth is a sacred inner resource that fuels the workings of the universe. I am sure that to lie is to abandon yourself, and that to collude in another’s lie is a personal moral disaster. Sorry about that. I know it’s embarrassing to admit to that sort of religious faith. But there it is: the truth is why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. Well, that, and the fame, sex, and money.
I may not always know what the truth is, mind you. I will at times be completely, utterly, and dead wrong about what it is. But I’m sure that it exists - and I’m sure that every writer is supposed to dig for it. But many writers can’t do that now, because they’ve gone all postmodern and their shovel keeps turning into an angry flamingo.
Personally, I long for the days when writers would have an honest-to-goodness duel with swords in order to settle their differences. Or even a decades-long exchange of nasty book reviews in the national newspapers, in an attempt to kill one another in a fit of apoplectic rage. These days when other writers fall out with you, it’s all a bit anaemic and silly. Whisper campaigns and rumour-mongering, and tiny little gnat attacks. Not like the good old days when writers were literally prepared to die on whatever hill they’d climbed up. No one could accuse Pushkin of being a cry-bully, could they? Even Proust got out of bed to shoot a gun at his critics.
Then again, I could be mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t an assassination attempt after all, but simply a case of ear palpitations. Or maybe that's just what the brain maggots want me to think.
Never google for images of brain maggots. Because you will find them.
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What about the gnat's truth? All it wanted to do was whisper something romantic in your ear and you drowned it in oil.
I loved that one. Post modernism has to go. It's tiresome, self-absorbed and fundamentally unserious. That's what Substack's for.
Great post. Loved it.