Every day for nearly three years, I’ve been going to bed spattered with someone’s blood from head to toe. After another sleepless night, I’m mooning around, thinking that the world is full of murderers, rapists, stranglers, and other degenerates capable of the most horrible abominations.
Although my world looks the way I left it yesterday, everything seems more and more suspicious, taken out of context, as if it was only a scenery of a play starring me. Every hole in the ground seems to be someone’s grave or a secret passage to the beyond or an alternative reality, where I can go (or get dragged) when I least expect it.
At every turn, I see the worst in people – a good-natured old man seems to be a ruthless paedophile, a shop assistant – a prostitute, a neighbour – a starving heroin addict, a policeman – a corrupted sociopath; I’m even afraid of my daughter’s boyfriend, because his good manners are suspicious and may only be a cover for his secret deviations and murderous tendencies. I even examine carefully friends of my little son, wondering if the stains on their clothes are only gooseberry jelly or perhaps organic discharge of alien beasts they could fought to the death only the day before. I cover my laptop camera. And my TV camera, too. I also avoid mobile phones in fear of the watchful eye and ear of foreign intelligence, who are after my privacy and peace of mind.
So I go on, paranoid, waiting for the Armageddon, which will wipe me out together with this dirt, plague and arrogance. And I’m sick and tired of this paranoia, but the more afraid I am, the faster I press OK on my remote control to watch the news again. It’s high time to turn off Netflix.
