You awaken, you open up a device, you see flashing and seething in the glowing rectangle hordes of unhinged, bellowing citizens, draped with automatic weapons and costumed like Mad Max rejects and you see the most powerful human being on Earth gibbering nonsense and lies about personal victimhood by an array of imagined enemies instead of leading the country out of an historic nightmare and your heart begins to churn and your brain to liquify and you glimpse out your window a small elfin creature, perhaps a man, perhaps a woman, perhaps something altogether different, an as-yet undiscovered bipedal anthropoid, with coiffed orange hair and curling shoes with bells and a great black hat, and this creature is digging holes in your garden, real holes, using a sort of queer wooden tool with a bifurated fitting at its lower end, that, upon the creature’s turning a small crank with its barnacled hand, spins and cuts into the Earth, and then you see this small elfin creature inserting its massive nose into each hole and, what in God’s name is it doing? …sniffing?…digging?…rooting? It’s hard to say, but it’s settled that the thing is searching for something that is yours, something on your own land, without your permission and you feel violated, so you shout at the creature to leave at once, or you’ll phone the authorities, throw rocks, thrash it to death, but it looks up and offers you, with its liver-colored eyes, such an amused, imperious expression that you know at that instant, with the certainty of a lightning bolt sizzling through your marrow, that you have lost.

That elfin, hole-digging, Earth-rooting creature is not some passing nuisance that will flee if you toss a stone at it. It is now a permanant resident of the garden of your life and it will never go away.

Then this song comes into your head.

An Inmate’s Lullaby
(Gentle Giant, 1973)

Lying down here in the afternoon
In my pretty cosy little cushioned room
I can talk to all my funny friends in here
I was told to rest why … I am not quite clear
Eating flowers growing in the garden where there are tasty
Tulips and I don’t care
If I wet my trousers there was no time
I had nowhere else to go nowhere else I could find

Staring up at the great big white light
That shines everyday and shines all through the night
Hearing voices of the silly friends of mine
Always lock the door nurses waiting outside all the time

Hurt myself this morning, Doctor gave me warning sent me
To my room and told me that I’m bad

I heard someone saying I think he’ll be staying maybe for a
Long time, Why does everybody else think that I’m mad
I heard someone saying I think he’ll be staying maybe for a
Long time and that I’m mad

Lying down here in the afternoon
In my pretty cosy little cushioned room
I can talk to all my funny friends in here
I was told to rest why … I am not quite clear