I am a conundrum wrapped in a mystery, stuffed into an oxymoron, then slow roasted in a imponderable sauce before being lightly dusted with powdered paradox and finished with a bold illusionberry sauce.

Anyone else getting hungry?

Let’s try this again. I am a cipher that translates into an irrelevant message in a forgotten language written on a random cliff wall in a misbegotten canyon down a faint and dusty road from bloodstained rock where, a long time ago, a worthless explorer died a cruel and pointless death.

That got dark at the end.

One more try. I am a digital file folder of worthless documents written in an obscure format only readable by an obsolete operating system using a file system so clunky and obscure that modern data retrieval wouldn’t even recognize it as information.

The computer itself is a barebones, jury-rigged, unrecognizable circuit board lying two inches from the ceiling on the top shelf of the back row of a forgotten storage room in the lowest sub-basement of an abandoned facility located in an ugly and ill kept indutrial park in some shabby subdivision far away from the highway, near the airport, in a neighborhood so run down and depressed that even the stray dogs avoid it,.

If any satellite could be bothered to take a picture of the area, it would look like a crime scene, with large buildings sprawled like corpses whose arms and legs were made of cheap, ugly, depressing prefab housing filled with people who stopped trying so long ago that they would not even recognize the meaning of the term.

People who go through the motions of life doing whatever it seems like they are supposed to do like ghosts putting on a play. People whose main skill in life is avoiding thinking about anything bigger than the next party or event because they all, to a one of them, know that outside their carefully constructed and maintained lives lies nothing but absolutely annihilation of the soul.

People who go through life like sleepwalkers who know that the worst possible thing to happen to them would be for them to wake up.

I really do paint a picture with words, don’t I?

My point, before I went off on that fascinating artistic tangent, is that I have been an enigmatic person all my life. And I am damned good at it. So good, in fact, that most people have no idea that I am mysterious and obscure because I put on such a good show of being open and honest and willing to tell anyone anything.

I do such a good job of that, in fact, that I often fool myself as well.

That is, as it were, the point. When you get right down to it.

But if some omniscient observer were to read all the transcripts of my life, they might just pick up the pattern. They could figure out that a lot of the time, I give evasive and noncommittal answers to questions about myself.

I get away with it because people are swept up in the show. Plus I use my highly advanced powers of self-expression to deflect, evade, obscure, or dodge questions I don’t like, and I do it so deftly and with such great skill that people feel like I have answered their questions even when I haven’t.

After all, there is no point to being evasive if people know you’re being evasive. That would attract the very attention I seem to be trying to avoid. The only truly secure secret is one that nobody knows exists in the first place.

But why? Why must I evade? And I truly have no choice. It’s the product of instincts that run deep into the very core of my psyche. Hard wires that lead all the way down into my mammalian brain, where the scared little animal at my core resides.

On that deep dark level, my instincts tell me that the only safety comes from hiding all my problems and projecting the image of a happy, healthy, independent person who is always just fine and doesn’t need anything so you can go away and go back to your life now and leave me the hell alone.

It’s a rather complex form of camoflage, and requires my rather extraordinary kind of brain to maintain, I would imagine.

But it works for me.

Well, not really. What it really does is keep me from getting the sort of help I need. That image I project keeps people away. That’s the whole point. And that means I do not get close to others and they do not get close to me.

Nobody touches me. Ever. Not really. Deep down I am safe in my hermetically sealed vault where nobody can ever get to me again.

But of course, I am starving and smothering in there. Human beings cannot survive without the closeness of others and that means that on some level, you have to let people in. It’s not enough to simply be near them and soak up the residual warmth of their nearness without ever actually letting them in.

The healing I so desperately need can only come from convincing that scared little animal that it is safe to finally open that door and lets itself be touched – truly touched – by another for the first time in a very, very long time.

EVerything else – the games, the distractions, the colorful illusions, the simulated proximities, the artificial love songs, the poetry of the obscurist soul, all of it – is nothing more than morbid masturbation of the soul if it doesn’t lead to true openness and the final liberation of that terrified infant inside.

Nobody knows the real me. Not my shrink. Not my friends. Not my family. Not even the people I play pretend with every day online, where in theory I can be exactly who I want to be and have no reason to hide.

Nope,. Nobody knows real me. Nobody can.

That’s because there is no real me. The masks conceal nothing, the walking armor is empty, the son et lumiere is all there is.

In fact, I am not even really here.

Show’s over. Dim the house lights. Everyone go home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.