In a Dream, I am Really Famous

do not walk in teeming Africa. I don't pass through the bus stations of East Asia or South America. I don't shop in the marketplaces of China. I don't queue in the supermarkets of commuter-belt suburbia, in middle America, provincial Britain, or anywhere else. 

You will not find me in any of those places, even although I thrive on the attention of the people there. 

Mass migration and death upset me, so I try not to linger on them. I don't think much about the dereliction of the post-industrial age, the crumbling Arctic ice, the tar sands, or the rafts of plastic drifting in the Pacific. I fly, high, over all that. It's not that I don't care about it, but thinking about it serves no useful purpose, and it's important for me to stay positive. 

Social media enable me to keep in touch with so many different kinds of people and share my concern for the world to a degree that I'm comfortable with and can accomodate within my schedule. 

Here's a photo of me in metallic swimwear. 

I live in beautiful properties in different locations around the world, each maintained by the best housekeepers and landscape gardeners available. Everything is very tasteful. I don't tolerate naffness.

The daily views, Facebook likes, click-throughs and retweets of my followers, wherever they live: all sustain me. I make sure that I acknowledge the personal realities of my followers in the posts and comments made by my assistant, on my behalf. These gestures are my way of showing that I am no different to my viewers and listeners, likers and retweeters. That's why they relate to me so much. 

My relationship status is somewhere between "single" and "it's complicated". My followers love to share about that, and it's no accident that they have enough information to be able to do so. 

My thoughts are not "joined up", except in the sense that they come one after the other. I read that somewhere. 

Although I am really famous, hardly anyone knows of my private delights. Hardly anyone knows about the special services arranged for me when I'm in London, or the unique establishment in Singapore. Hardly anyone knows about the thing in the safe in my New York apartment (every visit, I go straight to it). 

Telling more about those things would serve no useful purpose. Not in the way that my comments on the thrills and disappointments of MY ART serve a purpose; or my thoughts about other famous people, or about the tragedy of poor, sick children...

 ...and just as the narrative threatens to become an amalgam of every cynical social commentary I ever heard or saw, the dream is over, and I wake up. Soon I'm slurping real orange juice from somewhere or other and getting online, posting a beautiful photograph of some soup I had yesterday. I hope you Liked it.