Got caught in a rut the other night while trying to find my new girlfriend who is named Sleep. A heroic bitch she is and I don’t know if my love for her is worth the effort. For as we all know love is an effort. For example, how many kisses have you wasted on Sleep this day? That’s why, historically speaking, marriage is the way out. Or is it jumping off the edge? Yeah, jumping off the edge sounds better. At the least, since we live in a flat world, wouldn’t that be a better way out than trying to circumnavigate a round world where we invent marriage and toasters? But I digress. §As the rut deepened in my search for Fräulein Sleep the following thought crossed my mind: if the world was flat then I could jump off the edge and race my burdens to the bottom. Then again, when I hit that bottom will I have to (eventually) jump off another edge? There are surely Fraüleins on any new shelf we jumped to. Either that or I should focus on a way to get to Fr. Sleep through other means. But enough about me and my frivolous joys and tantrums. §Check out the article below. Of all the negativity that I live for, for all the pessimism that gives me joy, finding an article about a subject matter like this should rock my world. Rock me right into Fr. Sleep. But it doesn’t. And the reason it doesn’t has nothing to do with the fact that I’m only partly in the demographic that the article deals with. Indeed. So let’s go there. §There is an alarming increase in death rates of US white males between the age of 45 and 54. These days rates are attributable to substance abuse and suicide. Gee. When I read such stuff I giggle and smirk. The giggle is because I have an advantage above and beyond this demographic. For you see, dear worst-reader, at 52–about to turn 53–there is an obvious advantage to being only half white. I smirk at this article because, well, I saw it all coming thirty friggin’ years ago! No. Seriously. When I left the (your) Homeland so many years ago (before it was called Homeland; when it was still mostly a country), my departing words, shed with a few tears, were: I will miss you very much but I won’t miss the madness and the madhouse. Now look at you. Indeed. I left the madness and its house and I have been staring back at what I’ve done ever since. But it was the only way out–the only way to rid myself the flat world that raised me. So I went to its edge and I jumped. And guess where I landed. I landed on another flat plain where the edge doesn’t call for me as abruptly and the wine is better, the beer is better, the food is better–but the grass ain’t greener. Seriously. Am I the only one to have seen this coming? To have seen the madness of the madhouse take over the show with the sole purpose of widening the horizons of being mad. Death of my peers, my compatriots, my fellow Federalists, comrades. By the millions you die because you can’t see through the prick of your heroin needles, the gulp of another bottle of rye or the leap from the tall building you mistake as an edge. No one saw this coming. Except me. Death in a world made of nothingness has to be the consequence of nothingness and life run amok. Or? I suppose if one propels death to higher levels, i.e. putting a price on life (living standard) and make one live be the objects that kill (the war machine + economic conscription = the only way out of poverty) this is what must come. Especially now, or at least since 2007 AD (the great recession), since there is even less than nothingness to fall back on. And with that nonsense in mind, good luck suckers. Rant on. -tommi
Links that motivated this post:
worstwriter 