Prompt 1: An instance of someone doing me wrong eh? I am a very forgetful person see, so I’m not exactly certain what I might seek redress for or feel a sense of wrongness having been done unto me. Perhaps something to do with that stiff upper lip and societal norms surrounding masculinity? No, that’s too simple. Instead, I much think of the notion of wrongdoing and the ethical implications of how I perceive my actions, sometimes regardless of what others may actually think. But, as Dostoevsky put it in The Brothers Karamazov, no one has any proper conception of what one thinks or feels and so I can only think of things I did wrong or other assorted missteps rather than anything people did that was wrong unless it is so brazen I cannot ignore it.

Prompt 2: I do not EVER want to go back to any previous iteration of myself. Instead, I wish to go forward and get to a version of myself I can truly call free rather than the previous versions of myself that I can coherently state have the commonality of being helpless of constrained by material conditions rather than intellectual constraints. Once I reach that ideal future self, I believe I can truly start to live, unencumbered by present norms and diktats that tell me how I should live, think, and exist. The past is something I have expended lots of time and energy to ignore and forget and so I reiterate, no past version of me is a better one to be in because of the lack of freedom, one of my most valued notions, that which gives me hope and fuels me. If that wasn’t there, I might wallow excessively and be treated with pity, one thing I absolutely despise, without question, without any sort of prompting because it in a way dehumanises me and I cannot bear that for it erases my existence in society as a human rather than a pitiable cretin.

Prompt 3: I wish I knew about my ancestry; all I know are my family, a whole bunch of lunatics who have certain faults and personality traits that I don’t even necessarily know well. Everyone else has some sort of badness they have done or inflicted that I am acutely aware of so that I don’t really want to know or associate with them, especially as I never got to know them as a child due to long distance calls being expensive and this being the era before WhatsApp and other assorted internet based apps and expanded wireless coverage in Ecuador. If anything, I might want to get to know my lineage and what exactly I am because from the way I am and look compared to the relatives I know, I am very much an outlier and my genetic composition and ancestry might shed light on what exactly I am because I don’t know. I want to have the clarity from that, but I cannot state any sort of individual in my ancestry that I might wish to get to know; I’m too abstract for that.

Prompt 4: I am not in tune with any sort of local events and so I cannot give any example of such a thing as I take local to be in my geographic neighbourhood and event being something that takes people of a certain locality or group and has them engage in some kind of activity. I am a relatively uninvolved person; I prefer the privacy of my own house and mind; it’s also the same reason I have no social media accounts of any kind.

Prompt 5: In terms of emotionally moving me, I can’t say I have had any experience in that department; I have that covered by a certain experience in my life that is painfully lodged inside of me that I do not wish to discuss with people, but that has provided me with my current more positive outlook on life compared to the person I was in my more youthful youth. But in terms of aesthetic feeling that one feels from art, I am beholden to say as a part of the unofficial Yes fan club that my choice is the song Close to the Edge, from the eponymous album, what I would argue is the greatest album they ever produced. The reasoning behind that is because I usually feel a sort of movement and goosebumps whenever I hear the song progress and gets to the final suite, Seasons of Man which reprises all of the previous material, it feels almost ethereal, something like a genuine emotion I haven’t truly felt for years and don’t feel I can.

And please don’t patronise me because as I stated before, I resent that and people who coddle or talk down to me.

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