This is training run 82. You have hybrid theories. You suffer from arrested development. You once booked a three-month stay in Argentina but didn’t go. You tried to get a refund on your flight and accommodation by claiming that your sister had died. (Six weeks later: ‘our cancellation policy does not cover the death of a sibling’). You like the idea of photography but take very few photographs. You don’t believe in the curative power of conversation. You grew up in Springfield. For the most part, you will do as you are told. You think ‘photograph’ sounds like an old-fashioned word and you like it, just as you like when painters talk about ‘making pictures’. You make a distinction between you (singular) and you (plural). You are happy enough to go gently into good and bad nights. You consider some possibilities: obsessional realism, hypnofiction, l’effacement, anaesthesics. To your knowledge, you haven’t participated in a randomised control trial. You remember the ninth commandment: thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house. Under skills and experiences, you write: not applicable. You sit at the back of church services with your headphones in and listen to Unknown Pleasures. You’re not Cinderella the Second. You don’t tidy up personal transcripts. You tend not to go looking in dark corners. You don’t have refined tastes. You have a few friends and an unknown nemesis. You know that anything can go anywhere. You are co-dependent. It does your head in when people say, ‘I think it was Goethe who said…’ You are a friend to the lizard. You have had provisional dealings with effective altruists. You’re not convinced that with awareness comes choice. As a child, you were once bundled into the back of a van by two men in a supermarket car park in Leeds; when you woke up outside the post office, it was pitch black. On bad days, you think something like: there’s nothing inside me but a trace of a chill. You do not take creatine. You once spent two hours talking about the Qur’an with a beautiful woman wearing dolphin earrings in a mosque in Istanbul, but resisted the urge to convert to Islam. You are on the cusp of becoming friends with your symptoms. You don’t put your back into it. You suspect all intelligence is artificial. Your brother checks his bank account more than necessary. You do not know what makes a classic. You aren’t tempted to eat liquid washing capsules. You get round paywalls. You don’t read or quote Henry James. You are sceptical of negative theologies. You have dormant subscriptions. You once saw David Beckham in Blockbuster with his youngest son and wondered why you weren’t his son, or his wife, or his dog. You are a loser. As a kid you probably watched Hey Arthur on repeat and liked to sing: ‘Having fun isn’t hard – when you’ve got a library card!’ You did not eat the body of Christ. You played football with the kids who were bad so you could feel good. You don’t have a Tesco Clubcard, even though you buy a meal deal there every day. You remember once wanting to be obliterated, to eat everything and be eaten by everything. You wear socks at the wrong times. In many ways you are deformed. When someone says: we really need to have a conversation about this, you think: we? You are compelled to take walks through the corridor of uncertainty. You have implicit values which will remain implicit. You remember the eighth crack commandment: never keep no weight on you. Your rap name would me M. F. Whom? You would not be picked out from an audience. One day, you’ll disappear into the mist. You hear puns but not sentences. You panic at discos. You have been in something like analysis. With enough hard work and dedication, you will contribute nothing. You recall Polonius: to thine own self be true. And then Pessoa: I feel as if I’m always on the verge of waking up. You remember nothing. You set another alarm. You’re happy to repeat yourself. You suspect the analogy between the brain and a processor is mistaken but don’t want to get into it. You once found yourself in a cinema in the gothic quarter in Paris, thinking very seriously about whether you could find a way to live there, or at least not to die there. You don’t fire bullets through silkscreens. A game can only begin if a second player responds. You remember Andre 3000: that’s as far as I got. This training run is complete.
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