This is a story about reptiles. Actually it’s a story about reptiles and dancing, or rather dancing with reptiles. Yes, dancing with reptiles.

David Icke is right; there are reptiles everywhere. Reptiles of fear standing ten feet tall with a tail half as long again; insidious, invisible reptiles riding a black Cerberus across our shoulders while they whisper a siren song into our ear; thousands of reptiles looking just like us as they pass by on the street, sneering with conservative disgust; friendly reptiles celebrating mediocrity and handing another bottle of self destruct. There are reptiles everywhere, with endless different guises, all with an identical desire to keep a boot on the throat of life. If you don’t stand too tall, if you stay in your box, no rage against the dying of light, no kicking against the pricks they’ll let you be. Anything else, dare to dare, and they will smite you down with scaly green anger and a terrible, tail wielding fury.

But who wants to stay in a box? That way lays existential bad faith, chained by conformity to Plato’s cave.

You can rise up and fight, but it would be foolhardy to face them in all out assault. You might well win the fight, but there are so many of them you’ll have to pour everything into it just to survive; and then you’re not even going to have the energy to stand in victory, foot atop your pile of reptile carcasses with bicep flexed. No, there’s more to the game than the defeat of reptiles. It’s about succeeding in whatever they’re trying to stop you doing, avoiding the boot and breathing life. Escape and evade, subterfuge and subtlety, think of Odysseus not Heracles. Lull them, trick them, misdirect them; this is the dance. Pirouette away or hold them close and waltz them out of your present. Like a reptilian manifestation of McGoohan’s ball, they will always be there but they don’t always have to be here!

It’s the Kobayashi Maru; you win by cheating the game to suit your reality. Enjoy the ensemble piece; playing their game by your rules. Embrace the solo, this is your time to shine and break out of the cave screaming your incandescent insights. You don’t win by fighting until they concede, you win by pointing them in one direction while you run off in the other and do whatever the hell you want. You run the race, you write the book, you carve your reality into this life.

Don’t let the slimy bastards grind you down.