"As If Personality Disorder" and "Invisibility Neurosis"

cover first edition, The Metamorphosis

You don’t have to be paranoid to believe someone is following and you don’t have to be suffering from the exotic cocktail of “as if personality disorder" and "invisibility neurosis" to feel you’re as unimportant as a bot. But what lies at the heart of this feeling of being a total excrescence whose every endeavor pales in importance compared to literally anything including worms, who crawl imperviously along the ground, with nary a care or thought, worms which display all the insouciance of an Edwardian dandy and who're truly slick and shiny in comparison to your nervous trembling self? Waiting for the other shoe to drop barely captures the existence of the all-knowing pessimist for whom life is a self-fulfilling prophecy and in this regard a perpetual embarrassment. Let’s take the hero of The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, a nice Jewish kid who gets turned into an insect. It's a wonderful conceit and metaphor for entrapment. However, first and foremost it describes a whole sub species of mankind who in fact regard themselves as more lowly than rodents. Rodents at the very least are full of guile and often hard to trick. "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly; I don’t know why she swallowed the fly—I guess she’ll die,” goes the limerick. Termites, water bugs, the brilliant ant, bees and their hive minds! How can a lumbering mass of bones and flesh, as heavy handed as it is heavy-headed with so-called consciousness, compete?