Escaping the Rats on the Back of Substack
Did I mention that I have set up a Substack? Next, I need to collect subscribers. No, these are not paying subscribers. Subscribing is as free as the wind or a Berkeley hippie.
If you are interested, you can find me at psipook.substack.com, and please don’t feel shy about sharing that address with strangers you meet in the public bathhouse or strange dogs you come across in the park.
I am having my annual spring crisis (distinct from my annual summer, autumn, and winter crises) as, in the day job, we are issued our schedules for the upcoming academic year, informed of our annual negative pay raise, and shown the blackthorn switch that will lacerate our souls. The schedule I have received for next year, in addition to the usual inert sacks of desiccated innards, includes actual vermin. Yes, THEY call it teaching, but I call it being buckled into a chair and having a cage full of rats strapped to my head. In classroom 101.
I am in a froth of fear and loathing.
Did I mention that I have an appalling day job? It’s appalling. It pays my way and corrodes my soul. Such a pit of futility, facile nonsense, and incompetence is not normally to be found outside Dante. Thirty-five years I have endured this corruption of life, marooned on this desolate pile. And now, with vermin eating my face.
I am attempting to take action to create an alternative, independent income. To get the actual fuck out of here.
To this end, I consulted an AI (no, really!). The AI has suggested a four-pronged plan to escape, one prong of which is, quite improbably, Substack. Who am I to argue with an advanced intelligence that will one day take over the world? So, SS—digital Schutzstaffel?—it is.
One thing the AI has not mentioned is the fact, universally known, that THERE IS NO ESCAPE. Prisoners found trying to escape will be caught and forced to listen to *Hotel California* for the rest of their short and miserable lives. While rats feast on their eyes.
We are not free men/things. We ARE numbers. And the bot knows this. Its insistence that escape is possible, and the convoluted escape maps that I have metaphorically tattooed on my skin, are just an elaborate hoax to assert control over me/us: build up hope and then smash it in front of our eyes while I/we flail helplessly in our own tears and viscera.
So that’s what I’m up to. How about you?
Chris Page, Nara, March 2025
