Ugh, Can We Stop Talking About 'DSM' Already?

I don’t know what you did from Friday to Sunday, but I spent the weekend putting together the proposal for the book I have so long refused countless entreaties to write. Boo Hoo Hoo I’m Sad: A History Of Why I Suck is pitched as a memoir — because, really, that’s the only way to sell anything these days; unless it happened to you (or, you know, “happened” to you) apparently it does not appeal to the only prurient interests that remain susceptible enough to manipulation in our post-literate society to entice the purchase of a piece of print carrying no perfume samples within its covers — but is less a recounting of all the terrible tragedy I’ve experienced in my life than it is an examination of why I feel everything so much more strongly than the rest of society, most of whose members seem perfectly capable of conducting the quotidian activities of existence blissfully unaware of the rampant anguish that comes at them from every corner. Why is it possible that almost everyone else needs not contend with the staggering wave of sorrow under which a simple stroll down the street submerges me? It can’t simply be because my emotions are more finely calibrated or my empathy levels are much more attuned to the manifest misery humanity wears on its sleeve. I mean, yes, that’s part of it, but it can’t just be that; in the absence of some kind of higher power who has designated me as the back upon which the suffering of the world must be borne (although how much easier would things be if I could just blame God for everything? A lot! A lot easier!) an alternate explanation, probably involving my superior intelligence and considerably more powerful capacity for compassion, needs to be found. So the book will be an attempt to understand how it is that I am seemingly the only one who sees the sadness while the rest of you continue with your callous indifference and insensitivity to the agony all around. Again, this is not the work I wanted to write, but more and more it is clearly the work I have to write, particularly now that the new edition of The Big Book of Crazy is causing so much controversy. I mean, if we can piggyback off that I can totally retire and be sad from the comfort of some tropical island. Email me if you’re interested.