From Jester To King LIV

I visited my cells yesterday, I got right down to the cellular. But they kept telling me ‘mycelium’, the people in charge they kept on repeating it. Everything was ok as long as I looked after my mycelium. I didn’t know what they meant let alone the word. Was it a mushroom? Had I become one? Were we made of them? Was a fungus growing inside me, taking me over, did I have no more than minutes to say my goodbyes? I could hear them broadcasting mycelium mycelium mycelium all through my cells and I was starting to panic. Unrelenting mycelium. So I looked around but I couldn’t see anything. No evidence of mycelium. Why were they saying it? Then I thought about all the other people I knew, I thought about Sacha, yes Sacha Baron Cohen, and somehow I knew he didn’t have mycelium and then I thought about the fact that he was with Isla and though he didn’t have mycelium I’m sure having a lot of money and being famous helped then I second-guessed myself and realised she definitely didn’t just want him for his fame and his money but liked him for his personality, for being funny and warm, so in the end I wasn’t all that envious about his lack of mycelium but more envious that he had Isla. Mycelium was like a warning sign without knowing what you were being warned of without being sure that it had anything to do with you. And without being able to see any evidence of anything, when I woke up from the operation I found it hard to believe there was anything and that I hadn’t just dreamt it all up. But I knew I hadn’t. Mycelium I realised meant a host of things. It was a byword for death, dying, for decay, for pulse, life, synthesis, movement, mutation, breath, discharge, colony, plague, lymph, flow, and stimuli, and all these things I’d experienced, I’d seen them all and mycelium is the catch-all.