The tyrant rules the universe. He always has. Some say he is mad. I say he is ruthless and patient. He also seems jealous and vengeful.
I do not have much time.
He says the life I have was stolen from him. He wants it back. I hear he is most unhappy. He wants to punish me.
He has spies everywhere. Spies who would sell their own mothers for a favor from the tyrant. They are looking for me. They will try to grab me and deliver me to the tyrant for my punishment and to get their reward.
I will be caught. No one escapes the tyrant. It is just a matter of time.
And when the tyrant catches me, the penalty is torture followed by death. There is no appeal. There is no trial, only judgment. Final and irrevocable.
The tyrant laughs at excuses. Your words are wasted on him. Beg for mercy, the tyrant couldn’t care less. He might even beat you harder. Cry out for God to save you, the tyrant rules even God. He rules everything in the universe. He does what he does because that’s the way he is.
There is no hope.
How do I know this? I know all this because the tyrant caught me as a child. I still bear the scars from my encounter. As I was laying on the torture table under his vengeful knife, he told me what I had done. My life had actually been stolen from him and he wanted it back. And then he said that I had further insulted him by claiming that the stolen life I possessed was mine. “What arrogance you have,” he told me, “to think that life was yours.” He glared down on me as I lay strapped to the table. “Surely you realized it must be the property of some very powerful god and that he might want it back. What gall.”
The tyrant doesn’t like thieves, but he likes liars and frauds even less. Then he told me that before he killed me, he was going to reduce me to a quivering, pitiful excuse for a being, that I would cower in fear and supplication before his immensity and omnipotence. He was going to make me do the most stupid and meaningless acts he could think of just to show me I hadn’t even the foggiest notion of what life was about or how to use it, live it. I had stolen life and I didn’t even know what it was for.
Finally after listening for hours to his endless babbling, he leaned over and whispered to me that before he was through he was going to make me hate my stolen life and that in the end I would beg him to take back what had been stolen from him, that I would regret ever having lived. He said that it would give him great pleasure to hear me say that.
Then he winked at me. And I saw in his eyes that he was stark raving mad. Perhaps the weight of being the ruler of the universe was just too great for his mind and that for some inexplicable reason he decided that the theft of life from one of his dusty dungeons was some kind of personal insult requiring his personal attention and involvement. The minds of tyrants work like that.

For seven years I lay on that torture table while he carved his initials in my flesh. I would lie there while the cold razor‘s edge of his scalpel traced its excruciating path over my body. The tyrant with his cold, gleaming, relentless eyes would whistle while he watched me squirm.
Then one day he didn’t come. I was so conditioned to his torture that I lay there remembering the pain as if it were real, as if the tyrant were really there gleefully carving away on me.
Finally after seven days of absence, the tyrant returned. He told me to get up and get out. He told me that anytime during the last week I could have escaped, but I was too stupid to realize it. Instead of getting the hell out, I had just laid there.
Then he rolled his eyes and yelled, “Get out. Get out., you worthless thieving scum.” And he told me I had one week to live, then he was coming to get me and when he caught me it wouldn’t be a scalpel, it would be a chainsaw and it wouldn’t be flesh, it would be limbs.
I got the hell out of there.
That’s how I got to know the truth. And now I’m telling you.
The tyrant is relentless. He is bored. He is crazy. His omnipotent power means he will not be denied. There is no time to waste.

Didn’t you always wonder just where you got your life and why it seemed to come without explanation or cost? Well now you know. It didn’t cost you anything because it was stolen. But ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the tyrant. So you must pay. Your life is now forfeit. You are condemned at the hands of an omnipotent madman to be tortured and die for a crime you are as assuredly guilty of as you are alive.
It doesn’t matter what you have done or how you have lived your life: saint or sinner, good or bad. He doesn’t care. He only wants his stolen property back. He will track you down, every one of you, one by one. And he will exact some personal painful penalty as payment for his mental anguish and imagined insult. And then he will casually cast you aside and take back the life that was stolen from him.
Frankly I think he’s a little too zealous about vengeance and suffering. I think the tyrant may actually enjoy the pain and agony he inflicts more than he really cares about recovering his stolen property
. No matter the truth, the tyrant’s motivation will remain forever obscured however the deadly results are visible to all. All life in time must die.
And there is nothing you can do about it, absolutely nothing.
It’s time you knew the truth. The tyrant is no different than you or I, except for the fact that he is the ruler of the universe and that he has been driven mad by his own awesomeness and the awesomeness of his responsibility. To be the ruler of the universe would drive anyone insane. And he has been the absolute ruler of everything for untold eons.
So now he only concerns himself with what concerns him. And all he does he does with a lustful abandon and joy that seems to contradict the petty selfish focus of whatever his current selfish petty concern is.
The tyrant has long hidden behind a curtain of uncertainty and a fog of speculation so that very few people know about him, about his interests, his concerns, his desires, even his existence. Nevertheless, he is a fact, a reality, without a doubt. His anonymity allows him to do as his twisted insane desires push him. He can escape many of the consequences of his actions. In this way he can have all the power of the universe without having to accept the responsibility of making everything work out, of being accountable.

Among his other qualities the tyrant is lazy and vain. He has spread all kinds of false stories about benevolence in his kingdom, telling everyone of the heaven of eternal happiness, boasting of a universe of compassion, of the reward of sacrifice but mostly he works at convincing everyone that everything is great and if it isn’t it will be soon. Lies for the gullible. Anyone with half a brain can see the conflicted workings of this hysterical madman ravaging the universe in his monstrous selfish pursuits. He hasn’t done a damn thing to make the universe better. He has turned a blind eye to the cruelest atrocities and the most unforgivable sins. Tell me it isn’t so. Madness most mindless. He truly is the terrible tyrant of totality. To think otherwise is delusion and fantasy in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
So what are you going to do with your stolen life now that you know you are condemned and are destined to pay the ultimate price? Even now he is imagining the cruel torture he will inflict on you before he takes back his, his now precious life. A life that he kept locked up, that was lost and forgotten in some dusty dungeon in his eternal palace, until it was stolen. And once stolen, life somehow became more valuable to him in his bored, greedy, confused heart. So now he wants it back, payment in full plus penalties for unlawful withdrawal.
And he will repossess your life, his life and that will be it for you. Because this universe is the universe of the tyrant and you are nothing but an annoyance to him. To him you are no more than some pesky insect that he thoughtlessly squashes because he feels like it.
Ask yourself, has it been worth it? Will the stolen moments of your life be worth the pain and suffering you’re going to endure when the tyrant blasts you with his senseless, sadistic, insufferable violence? Will your life have been worth the anguish he will put you through as he makes you wait while he decides when and how to kill you?
Have you gotten what you want from life?
Because you’re going to pay. The tyrant will see to it. He is not be denied. It is his pleasure. It is his current obsession.
Do you think it won’t happen to you? Or do you think he will never find you? Or that he will forgive you? Do you think that you can elude him? Maybe you think that if you don’t think about it that you can prevent his inevitable arrival and your certain death.

Maybe you think I’m wrong, that I don’t know what I am talking about. After all, the great leaders have always spoken of God, the protecting father, the All Mighty, talking of his infinite wisdom, of his all pervasive love. How nice. How reassuring. How foolish. How stupid to think that.
The tyrant is the ruler of the universe. The tyrant is the only explanation for the craziness that surrounds us. Look around, see my sense of his insane senselessness and know in your heart, in your soul, I am right.
Give up all your illusions of how you would wish things would be. You’ll feel a great sense of relief. The relief that comes when you no longer have to lie to yourself. Accept what is. Then you can deal with reality as it is, not as what you are told it is, or what you think it should be. And when you do, you will understand that I am right and you will know why things are the way they are.
Time is running out. I can feel it.

So what are you going to do now? He hasn’t got you, yet. You’re still free. How much time do you think you have left? You know there can be no escape. What are you going to do? Will he come tonight, tomorrow? How many moments do you have left? How many of those moments, your moments, your stolen moments, your precious stolen moments are left to you till he comes and takes back what is rightfully his? What are you going to do?
Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.
First, I’m going to quit punishing myself. The tyrant I’m sure will do a very thorough job when he gets me. I hardly need add my own self inflicted punishment to the already overgenerous portions of pain and torture that he has in mind for me.
As for the tyrant‘s minions of fear and doubt, I am going to show them only indifference and disdain. I will ignore their attempts to torture me. My time will be filled with new adventures. I have no time for regrets, no time to waste on stagnant, pitiful, sorry emotions.
And I’m going to do some living. Real living. Not the sugar coated, be good and then you’ll get a prize in heaven living. Not the timid, I don’t know what’s the right thing to do, kind of living being constantly paralyzed by confusion, doubt and fear. And not the ladder of success, purposeful kind of life based on a meaningless game of accumulation and consumption. That kind of living is one of the tyrant’s cruelest tortures. I’m told that after following a life like that he rips your spleen out and makes you eat it.
Since the tyrant has mandated that I should die, why not really live. After all I am going to be punished anyway for living why not do the things I really want to do. From what I’ve seen, the tyrant certainly doesn’t seem to care what anybody does.
And when the tyrant has me in his grasp and he is keeping me alive just to inflict the worst kind of sadistic agony, I will feel its intensity as a sublime experience, a part of being alive. I will not surrender to his hate, his suffering, his pain. I will feel what I want to feel.
And he will see that I don’t care what he does to me, that in fact what he does doesn’t matter to me at all, that in fact, he doesn’t matter to me in the least. Then just to show my utter contempt for his selfish disregard for all but his own concerns, I will thank him for taking the time to share himself with me.
And before he can kill me, I will die.