I’m a cynical kinda guy. I’ve been this way since I was born. Yep. I actually remember popping out of my mum, looking up at the doctor’s shadow obfuscating the bright light above and thinking, ‘Gee. What the fuck is this place? It’s horrible. I should’ve just stayed in there, as a non-thing, as some non-thing. Bleh! Whoops.’

Cynical is what I am.

Nevertheless, deep down I reckon that the world is absolutely fine. Beautiful, in fact.

Yep. There are wars being waged underneath our noses every hour of every day for no other reason than we are a fearful sort of species that is, alas, subservient to its paranoid delusions and primordial desire to dominate and control and manipulate the world around it so that it can feel safe and engineer at least the illusion of certainty at the expense of anything and everything else. But yes, the world is fine.

Women are still being raped all over the world and powerful conservative men clad in blue ties and crew cuts are screaming from their public soapboxes that rapes are in some cases justifiable especially if the victim is in some way or other ‘asking for it’ and also that insentient cellular matter is more valuable than its human host because all life is precious even if it is not yet life and that a woman’s right to her body shouldn’t trump a single cell’s right to the life it never had and was never really entitled to because what is life anyway? But yeah – the world is fine.

Animals are being slaughtered in the millions in industrialised farms and when they’re not being slaughtered for our consumption they’re being shoved into cramped zoos for our entertainment and when they’re not being suffocated by contrived dull enclosures they’re turned into circus animals reared in even narrower confines for our entertainment because we forever need to be entertained to distract ourselves from ourselves. But, you guessed it, everything is just dandy.

Children are starving and drowning in putrid waters and when they are fleeing war-torn homes and abject poverty they are being dubbed illegal immigrants by powerful world leaders, pests, usually conservative men clad in blue ties and crew cuts, who want to convince the non-leaders, their servants, their People, us, that these peripatetic aliens are the reason why jobs are scarce and why petrol prices are high – even though the boundaries we have drawn are hollow abstractions of no tangible weight or bearing, even though we are all aliens, even though we white folk were the first aliens, the genocidal aliens, the aliens whose most revered vocabulary can be caged appropriately in one sentence: ‘This is mine’. Yet, I still reckon everything is, indeed, splendid.

There’s a war on drugs running rampant in our streets being fuelled by those bloody men clad in blue suits and crew cuts and this war is being lost because it was never a war to begin with, it was merely a way for Those Men to control minds because the substances They want eradicated are liberating and freeing and gateways not to more dangerous or harmful or addictive drugs but gateways to alternative ways of living and thinking and feeling, conduits to the Truth that certain drugs, the ones that we are encouraged guzzle down on the weekends, keep us dumb – and that certain other drugs, the ones that are discouraged and that will take us to prison, wake us up. But yeah. Fine.

No. I’m not being facetious, cute, sarcastic, flippant – nor am I being any other adjective that might suggest I am, as we Aussies like to say, taking the piss.

The world is, my friends, absolutely splendid. For we, the humans, the ones that have really fucked our world, the human world, up – we are not the centre of this earth, of this universe. We’re just here for the ride.

This life is, as Bill Hicks once said, just a ride. It goes up and down, it goes round and round. It seems to start at one point and finish at another giving us a point A and a point B in which we think we can accomplish stuff – but you can’t bottle infinity; it is all just happening now, unfolding now, dancing now. It will happen and unfold and dance with or without us. It is bigger than us. It is indifferent to us.

We are merely a fleck of dust on a floating rock lost in some desolate part of infinity and some people think that that’s depressing but not me. I’m cynical, but I’m not that cynical.

I think it’s beautiful.

I think that despite all the bad and evil and wicked and demented shit we’ve played a hand in, the utter indifference of the universe, the total meaningless of it all – it is inspiring.

Because you see, we’ve been told that the world is wrong, that it needs fixing, that we need to make it better. We are told, each and every single day, that we need to protect this planet, that we need to make amends, that we need to do what’s right.

And so what do we do? We spend our days staring into the deep void of all we consider bad. In trying to do right we write scathing articles and point fingers and scream and yell and cry and focus on everything we think is bad and wrong and in need of remedy. Standing on one side or other we stare deep into this perceived mess that they’ve collectively made, that they’ve collectively made – that We’ve collectively made – wondering how we can fix it, wondering when They’ll let us fix it, wondering when They’ll let us fix it. It’s always the others versus the others and never a collective we even though that’s all there ever was.

We’ve spent so damned long looking down on this mess we think is that we’ve forgotten that if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you. The abyss has become us and so now it’s all we can see for we see only ourselves our reflections and ourselves our reflections are a mess.

We are what we see that is true and what we see is a dichotomised portrait of blacks and whites and goods and bads and saints and sinners. But beyond this veil there sits patiently and wide-eyed under the pagoda tree a greater truth: the truth that everything just is. Fine. Everything is just fine. It really is. If you open up your eyes and look outside your own personal abyss – you’ll see it too.