You Know What's Terrible? Everything.

I tend of late to take less joy in almost everything I encounter. Even the things that would have brought me great satisfaction only recently now provide me no pleasure and are often occasions to reflect on how empty and worthless so much of what steadily surrounds us truly turns out to be.

Part of this is surely a function of aging and its concomitant inability to pretend that you haven’t seen it all before and don’t know how it’s all going to end up (I don’t want to ruin it for you if you are yourself a young person, but let me just give you this hint: No one walks out of it particularly pleased with anything. The good news is none of it matters anyway, but that is a lesson which does not offer a great deal of comfort. And that’s as good as it gets, news-wise. Sorry, young person.).

Some of it may be a symptom of this profound and perpetual winter under which we have suffered seemingly forever. But the biggest block of it must be the sheer quantity and volume of mental noise blasted at all of us without end in our age of Everything All The Time. There is no quiet moment in which to pause and reflect, or even to just pause, fuck reflecting. It’s always on and always shouting and it has shaken the very ways in which our perception of time itself was once understood.

Consider this: Christmas was two months ago. How many horrible lives have you lived in the nine weeks since Christmas? And yet what have you done with all that time? If you had planned something as simple as spending an evening in to read a magazine no sooner would you have turned the first couple of pages over to find that it was somehow nearly midnight and the lids of your eyes were growing heavy and insistent that you draw down the shades on the day. But at eight you had gotten yourself all settled in on your couch, fully prepared to devote all your attention to the issue at hand. What happened? How did you get distracted?

Asked to account for your time in a court of law or before some other organ of judgment the best you could do would be to mutter under your breath about keeping up with the cultural conversation but you yourself would not even know nor could you accurately account for those hours. This relentless onslaught has reversed our very experience of life’s passing, in that we now live in a world where the days go by so quickly but the years take forever. It’s why I have to laugh when well-intentioned people tell me that life is short and I should savor every minute of it. Really? In what world? May is two months from now, and we will all die a thousand deaths between now and then and it probably won’t even get all that much warmer.

Brevity is as illusory as the idea that there might ever be some respite from the chronic cacophony that floods through every crack and crevice of our existence. It’s always on and it is never quiet and it never lets you forget just how terrible everything is and how much worse it is all getting.

And now they’re trying to tell me that, when the time comes where I finally approach my eternal reward, they might prolong my agony by sticking my head on a whole other body? What kind of nightmare world do we live in that would force multiple bodies to have to put up with my horrible head? Anyway, give all of that a good think before you tell me to cheer up again. Asshole.