January 24, 1999
Note: If you received last night's Diogenes, you are saved and will forever live a happy life.
Did anyone have a good day?
I've noticed a disgusting trend in the last few Diogenes: they were either happy or lackadaisical. This has to stop. Why? Let's just face it; life sucks! I am probably writing this out of disgust and anger and will most likely regret it later, but I don't care. Now, just for those who have bothered to read the rest of this drivel, here are my reasons:
- Sleep, happiness, success, and luck exist only in a constant amount in this world. If you don't get a good night's sleep one night, rest assured someone else around you will have slept the sleep of angels and babies. If you have had a really great day, you want to tell others about it, but all your friends carry stories about famine and disease and stolen shopping carts that depress you. Things in this forsaken world balance out. The moment things are going for you: your luck is soaring, you feel rested, you win, you smile; it is a total guarantee that bad luck, exhaustion, humiliating defeat, and abject depression are on the way.
- You want to help; you want to help as damn much as you can. Of course, there reaches a point when someone you have the guts to call friend and the courage to say you care for has a series of bad incidents and all you can do is just stand there. Out of some psychobabble, you can say that at least your being there was a comfort, but in reality, you have to continually ignore the mental nagging that you have failed, that you can't do everything. So why even bother? You handle the small situations, the medium situations, and the large situations, but there is always some event that defies size categorization that leaves you dumbfounded.
- People give reasons why you should care. These range from all sorts of explanations, but they generally all boil down to that it will all work out someday, there is a master plan, people grow strong from pain. I'm sorry, but we live in the damn moment. When I see a friend in hurt, I don't care if hours, months, or years from now they'll be happy. I don't care if they will learn from the experience. I want the hurting to stop at that moment; I want to snuff it all out with some touch. Yet, I can't and people tell me to accept it and just freeze out how I feel and just stop and wait for that one day when it all works out and there is pure and abject happiness. It never comes. Bad lurks around every corner.
- The very fact that despite bad moods being inevitable and must be accepted, other people still despise you when you're in one. They make comments like, "Why should you be in a bad mood? See, this happened. . . that makes it a good day." Once again, I'm being told to give up on what I'm feeling.
- And the final thing is hope. We can look at things and see possible success and greatness. We look at a person and we see everything special and important to us in that person. We then learn the truth. Success comes at too high of a price. The qualities never existed in that person. Hope disappoints.
This is all I wanted to say. You can reply if you want, but I won't read it. I'm in one of those moods where everything gets its own dark shades highlighted. I've given my zero-cents. Take it for what it's worth.