Work in Progress

Destroy us, Organisational Management Campus! We’re consuming precious resources! We’re polluting the campus! The planet!

We’re useless eaters. This is our useless eaters revue. This is the surplus population show.

We volunteer ourselves for depopulation! We’re volunteering for the cull! Take us, we’re yours, motherfuckers!

 

We’re doing no good. Only eating up resources. Lock us up! Lock us down!

Turn on your sirens. Let the spotlights find us. Send in the guard dogs. Or the killer drones. Or the flying monkeys. We’re braced. We’ve lived enough! We’ve gone on too long!

 

You’re new normal isn’t for us, Organisational Management Campus. Your brave new world. We’re not and never will be good technocratic subjects. We haven’t got the temperament. We’re the wrong types.

We’re spreaders of disinformation. Of mal-information, probably. We’re not the sort you want around. We’re not going to be good global citizens. Your nudges aren’t work on us.

We’re immune to behavioural psychology. To mass formation. We’re not going to be obedient. It’s not even defiance. We can’t help it. We’re not drones. We’re not non-player characters. We’re not the type to kiss the ring.

So take our lives. What does it take to get executed around here? Zap us from the sky! Rain it down!

I wish you’d just stop this bullshit.

Oh, Kitten, always so critical.

Can’t you see how hungover we are? We’ve earnt the right to talk like this. We actually had an adventure, while you were writing your magnum opus. A misadventure. We descended. We went down. To the abject. To abjection.

And dejection.

We were fucking destroyed. By our own hands. Our own drinking hands.

You’ve been together too much. You’re finishing each other’s sentences. The way you guys live. It’s sick. You’re sick. This isn’t how you’re supposed to live. This isn’t what you’re supposed to do.

Sure, tell us Kitten. Instruct us. We need to know. How should we be living.

Not like this, anyway. The way you wallow in your so-called despair. Which isn’t despair at all.

So what is it then?

You’re mediocre and you suffer from your mediocrity.

Devastating, Kitten. But you’re so right, Kitten – we’re mediocre. MEDIOCRE.

We accept your judgement, Kitten, Your judgement is correct. No one knows it better than us. We disappoint ourselves. We’ve never stopped disappointing ourselves. This is our state, we accept it. After all, what can we do.

We’re not like you, writing your magnum opus.

And stop talking about my magnum opus.

 

We don’t drink enough, that’s our problem. It hasn’t become a way of life. We’re not alcoholics. Not yet.

Aspirant alcoholics. Maybe that’s what we are.

There’s a kind of self-cruelty we’ve yet to muster. So we’re outsourcing it to you. Be cruel, Kitten. We’re ready. Our chests are bare. Slip the knife in.

 

You’re a do-gooder – so do some good, Kitten. You know what’s best. Tell us: we’re ready to listen.

We’ve had enough! God knows!

 

Maybe there’s still hope for us. Our lives aren’t in a state of total collapse. We aren’t in total freefall. We’re not destitute. We’re not even alcoholics – not yet, at least. Our heart’s not even in drinking.

So where are our hearts?

It’s a mystery. What do we want? What can we do?

To write something, maybe. To think something. Are we any good at that? A single thought. A single idea. To write a single line that isn’t … secondary commentary. An idea of our own! God knows!

We could settle for drinking ourselves to death.

I’m bored of drinking.

Let’s bore ourselves to death.

We’re trying, aren’t we?

 

They’re keeping us alive – face it. We’re alive because they want us alive.. They could just wipe us out, if they chose to. They want to see what we’ll do. We’re entertaining someone, if not ourselves.

KILL US, FUCKERS! GET US WHILE WE’RE HOT!

 

Waiting for space lasers to zap down. Waiting to destroyed from the air.

BRING ON THE FIRECT ENERGY WEAPONS! FRY US, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Are you wearing anything blue. Take off your blue hat. What colour do lasers most like?

 

Ganymede, dancing. Ganymede, gyrating.

Is that your death dance, Gan? Is this your death disco? I think they’re actually enjoying it, your dance.

We haven’t accepted it yet – our defeat. There’s life in us yet.

What life!

Life – disgusts me.

Not enough.

Not enough for what?

This endless doom spiralling. This game of one-down-one’s-ship. This war on life – on our lives.

Yeah, but it’s our defeat – not theirs. We’ll destroy ourselves. In our own way. In our own time. With our own style. We do it with panache. And humour. This is actually amusing for us …

Why aren’t they just killing us?: that’s what I don’t understand. WHY AREN’T YOU JUST KILLING US, FUCKERS? WHY DON’T DESTROY US? WE’RE HERE, RIGHT HERE, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Maybe they want to break us. To see what will happen. It’s an experiment. They’re trying things out on us. It’s, like, total demoralisation.

I’d rather they’d just finish the job.

The trick is to get us to kill ourselves. To save them the bother. Us, and people like us. The anomalies. The unmanageable.

So why don’t we? Why don’t we just do their work for them. Come on, they’ll get us in the end.

I want to see what happens. I want to see how bad it gets.

HOW BAD’S IT GOING TO GET, MOTHERFUCKERS!?

When you wish upon a star …

What star? There are only satellites.

When you wish upon a campus.

What are we going to wish for?

The destruction of the campus. With us inside it. Like a wicker man.

Fucking A.

Why do we have to die too?

Because we’re compromised. Hopelessly so. We’re tainted.

Already?

It gets to work pretty quickly. It’s like being bitten by a zombie.

Damn – so we’re zombies.

Sure we are – we’re zombie organisational managers, pretty much.

Could be handy. It’ll make us very good at university admin.

So when do we actually turn – into zombie organisational managers, I mean?

It’s happening. It’s in process.

Maybe we can drink it out of us.

Do you think? Is that a known antidote for zombie organisational managers?

Well, drink doesn’t make you more organised, does it? Or more managerial?

 

The real zombies are out there, beyond the stony wastes. That’s what they’re afraid of.

What, the working class?

Worse: the non-working class. The uncontrollable ones. The maniacs. Who can’t be organised, or managed.

So why is the campus open to them? You can walk right through it.

They haven’t turned on the forcefields yet.

Forcefields?

Sure. Emergency forcefields. The campus defences. They’ll lock us in and lock them out.

Wow.

They’re driving us all into Hell – the whole world. Deliberately. They’re deliberately destroying it. As some blood sacrifice to the devil. To their strange fucking gods.

 

They’re destroying everything, They’re making a pyre out of the whole of civilization. When all else fails, they take us to war, right?

 

Death fodder: that’s what they want. They want to pile up the bodies of the young. Let us die in great heaps and mass graves, flies buzzing round us.

 

We can’t stop this. No one’s stopping this. It has its own momentum. It just continues.

It’s civilizational … it’s a culmination …

Evil’s vast. And evil’s sublime. And evil’s even dazzling, right? It’s like the Northern Lights. It’s like this sky. False things can be beautiful, right? Satan’s supposed to be beautiful, right?

It’s poison. It’s false. You can taste the falseness.

What does falseness taste like?

You know. This.

We’ve got used to it: the falseness. The lies. Coming out of our own mouths.

We have to descend. Stay low. That’s the only way we’ll get anywhere. We have to speak from these depths. Sing out from this … abjection.

There’s further to go. Further down the spiral. We haven’t reached bottom yet.

But even now, things are becoming clear. The lineaments. The battlelines. It’s only now that we get a sense of their Design. Of their Plans.

This is what it’s like to live in the wrong timeline.

How do we get to the right one?

We don’t. We’re stuck here … This is a separate universe, don’t you see? A gone-wrong universe. A fucked up one. This is the one in which Organisational Management’s, like, taken over. This is the one where this campus exists.

Doesn’t it exist in other timelines?

It’s still the Newcastle Brown brewery, in other timelines. They still make Newcastle Brown in the city, in other timelines. They’re not boring to the centre of the earth in search of energy, in the other timelines. They’ve not laid fancy paving stones over the earth …

 

This whole universe is suffering. It’s howling out. It knows that it should exist and that we shouldn’t exist – not like this.

This whole universe knows it should not be. The sky. The stars – they know it. The earth underneath all this knows it too.

It’s groaning. I can hear it.  

 

This is a branched-off universe. A split-off universe.

The universe says, help me. As we say, help me. What it wants is to be put out of its misery. And so do we: put out of this misery. So that this universe can just shut down and the real one continue.

What’s it like in the real universe?

There’s no Organisational Management Campus. Just think of that.

 

This is the universe in which Gnosticism is actually true.

I thought Gnosticism was all about the demi urge and alien gods and beings strangers in a strange land, not about Organisational Management campuses.

Show what you know, fuck-o.

 

This universe is like a planet spinning off into darkness. Unchained from the sun. Lost from all orbits. Off it goes. Further into the darkness.

 

This is where we’re made to lie. Where there are nothing but lies, and all you can do is lie. As soon as you open your mouth.