Bring on the Depression!
Warning: if you are planning on being offended, do not read this
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"Evil days are common in this world, and they always draw blood in one way or another – but there are some days that draw more blood than even a human tick or a pimping bankrupt eunuch from Sacramento can afford to loose.
It is like being caught in a bad surf and banged off the bottom so many times that after a while you start thinking you can actually breathe the salt water foam that you are thrashing around in when you finally erupt into what looks like real air."
Hunter S Thompson
Small things feed on energy bursts of annoyed users. Smaller things can draw more blood. Any jujitsu expert will tell you that it is better to inflict maximum pain on the smallest available area; this is more effective. This has become a norm in our society of latent losers who are taught from birth to take beatings and smile, for not smiling will throw you down to the pits of social ladder to a niche allocated to heroin addicts and political refugees.
Coming out of your house without wearing your smile is like walking round naked. If you don’t want armed response unit and court-ordered counselling you stay in the house until you recognise the error of your ways and become a healthy contributor to the common good. Before you set your foot through the door you better be damn sure you are ready to reach for your mobile when you spot someone looking unhappy. Even better, put 999 on the speed dial.
Wear a smile! A smile a day helps you [insert as appropriate, as long as it rhymes with ‘day’]. When you are told you are an absolute no-good piece of shit and the less you breathe the more oxygen there is for other people, smile! When given the news about a terminal cancer, smile! It will all be better then. When they tie you up at the gates and every whore spits in your face, it is for your own benefit, so smile. You know you will soon die a horrible death but why not a have a laugh while you can? It’s only a laugh, isn’t it?
It’s all a fucking laugh. But this piece is not intended to be some evil piss-take of human masks, watch cable TV if you want some of that. Behind the mask there is a human being, if you listen to humanists, or nothing at all according to Zen Buddhism. Ok, accepting both of these let’s talk about the air between the mask and the face. If at this point you are feeling some sort of uneasiness thinking, oh now he is getting a bit too deep then I am glad I’ve just wasted ten minutes of your precious time and fuck you very much, I have no regrets.
The air behind the mask holds tension. The stress of the world creates pressure from within, which you are free to vent by going to work in the morning or getting drunk. This is the steam, which makes the engine of the society move the heavy cogs. This has been the case since the dawn of industrial revolution. But even here you can still visit your local health centre where an old age yoga instructor recovering from third-stage cirrhosis who never spoke a word of Sanskrit in her life, will tell you to pay the money and assume a ‘fish posture’ and feel that smile appear on your face.
Later on that night why not pop down to your local pub, consume a gallon of flavoured Listerine, get a takeaway on your way back, throw up and spend the next day in a zombie state so you can tell your friends and colleagues how you had a good time in this ‘nice place where everyone was smiling’. Aaw!
This is so simple and effective that everyone can reply with one of those one-syllable expressions, aw – oh - oooh – ouch- hmm - wow. We are getting so good at them we do not need a crew member to raise a piece of board to the crowd at the right times any more. However, I side-track.
Some people smile more than others. When bad boys are about to be caned the notiest one laughs at others the loudest. Dickens was right. We are in a queue to receive duly our daily caning from each other and the only way to mask the fear and recognition of weakness is to put up that smile.
You live in a world revolving on the same orbit, you are in the washing cycle, which is not going to stop and the door will not open until … what? Well, that does not matter; no one of us is going to be there to find out. If you are really eager, you better believe in the afterlife or take Prozac.
When you want to ask questions like these you must realise that you are walking on a thin edge with the abyss of polite smiles on one side and clinical depression on the other. Most people think the two are as far from each other as the East is from the West, but then I do not speak for most of people. I speak for myself and that gap is almost non-existent to me. It is so thin that you cannot remain stationary. The only way to keep the balance is to move on.
This is hard, it is practically impossible to make your world fluid. The people who manage to achieve this stop to congratulate themselves. Some even publish books and hold events on coping with issues. A few realise that they have fallen off the edge they will try to go back to where everything started and indulge in the difficulty of doing it. Fewer still may carry on moving forward.
The easiest and maybe seemingly most practical way is to dive into the abyss of your choice head first, indulging in either happy-polite social life and no-way-out despair. Both may provide a sense of substance of living and some sort of quality in your life. Do not worry too much, there is nothing that a good night out or a bag of [insert drug according to taste] will not sort out.
Good things, after all is something that happens to other people. They are here to inspire us. There is always someone who knows exactly what you feel like and they will cook up a piece of advice for you and pull you over to the other side. And we all need a piece of advice, do we not?
It takes such a special kind of courage to recognise the simplicity of the nature of things that only a bunch of people will attempt it. As Don Juan said to Carlos Castaneda, people always try to complicate things because if we don’t the realisation of how simple everything is will drive us into madness. Maybe this is what pushes us off the fine line?
There are way too many question marks here. This is a weak article. It is intended to be such. The answers should be private to the reader.
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"Evil days are common in this world, and they always draw blood in one way or another – but there are some days that draw more blood than even a human tick or a pimping bankrupt eunuch from Sacramento can afford to loose.
It is like being caught in a bad surf and banged off the bottom so many times that after a while you start thinking you can actually breathe the salt water foam that you are thrashing around in when you finally erupt into what looks like real air."
Hunter S Thompson
The autocorrect mode of my MS Word is starting to annoy me more than I can handle. The wavy red understrokes are scratching against my retina stopping the fingers and forcing me to come back to the passage, try to make sense of it all and check the spelling. Maybe I should turn it off and leave the page half-filled with gibberish that even I will not understand ten minutes down the line. The ever-helpful Microsoft strategy is paving our roads with good intentions. There are roadworks and held up traffic anywhere you go. People happily smile as the onboard computers pop up a message asking for a confirmation before a safety bag inflates.
Small things feed on energy bursts of annoyed users. Smaller things can draw more blood. Any jujitsu expert will tell you that it is better to inflict maximum pain on the smallest available area; this is more effective. This has become a norm in our society of latent losers who are taught from birth to take beatings and smile, for not smiling will throw you down to the pits of social ladder to a niche allocated to heroin addicts and political refugees.
Coming out of your house without wearing your smile is like walking round naked. If you don’t want armed response unit and court-ordered counselling you stay in the house until you recognise the error of your ways and become a healthy contributor to the common good. Before you set your foot through the door you better be damn sure you are ready to reach for your mobile when you spot someone looking unhappy. Even better, put 999 on the speed dial.
Wear a smile! A smile a day helps you [insert as appropriate, as long as it rhymes with ‘day’]. When you are told you are an absolute no-good piece of shit and the less you breathe the more oxygen there is for other people, smile! When given the news about a terminal cancer, smile! It will all be better then. When they tie you up at the gates and every whore spits in your face, it is for your own benefit, so smile. You know you will soon die a horrible death but why not a have a laugh while you can? It’s only a laugh, isn’t it?
It’s all a fucking laugh. But this piece is not intended to be some evil piss-take of human masks, watch cable TV if you want some of that. Behind the mask there is a human being, if you listen to humanists, or nothing at all according to Zen Buddhism. Ok, accepting both of these let’s talk about the air between the mask and the face. If at this point you are feeling some sort of uneasiness thinking, oh now he is getting a bit too deep then I am glad I’ve just wasted ten minutes of your precious time and fuck you very much, I have no regrets.
The air behind the mask holds tension. The stress of the world creates pressure from within, which you are free to vent by going to work in the morning or getting drunk. This is the steam, which makes the engine of the society move the heavy cogs. This has been the case since the dawn of industrial revolution. But even here you can still visit your local health centre where an old age yoga instructor recovering from third-stage cirrhosis who never spoke a word of Sanskrit in her life, will tell you to pay the money and assume a ‘fish posture’ and feel that smile appear on your face.
Later on that night why not pop down to your local pub, consume a gallon of flavoured Listerine, get a takeaway on your way back, throw up and spend the next day in a zombie state so you can tell your friends and colleagues how you had a good time in this ‘nice place where everyone was smiling’. Aaw!
This is so simple and effective that everyone can reply with one of those one-syllable expressions, aw – oh - oooh – ouch- hmm - wow. We are getting so good at them we do not need a crew member to raise a piece of board to the crowd at the right times any more. However, I side-track.
Some people smile more than others. When bad boys are about to be caned the notiest one laughs at others the loudest. Dickens was right. We are in a queue to receive duly our daily caning from each other and the only way to mask the fear and recognition of weakness is to put up that smile.
You live in a world revolving on the same orbit, you are in the washing cycle, which is not going to stop and the door will not open until … what? Well, that does not matter; no one of us is going to be there to find out. If you are really eager, you better believe in the afterlife or take Prozac.
When you want to ask questions like these you must realise that you are walking on a thin edge with the abyss of polite smiles on one side and clinical depression on the other. Most people think the two are as far from each other as the East is from the West, but then I do not speak for most of people. I speak for myself and that gap is almost non-existent to me. It is so thin that you cannot remain stationary. The only way to keep the balance is to move on.
This is hard, it is practically impossible to make your world fluid. The people who manage to achieve this stop to congratulate themselves. Some even publish books and hold events on coping with issues. A few realise that they have fallen off the edge they will try to go back to where everything started and indulge in the difficulty of doing it. Fewer still may carry on moving forward.
The easiest and maybe seemingly most practical way is to dive into the abyss of your choice head first, indulging in either happy-polite social life and no-way-out despair. Both may provide a sense of substance of living and some sort of quality in your life. Do not worry too much, there is nothing that a good night out or a bag of [insert drug according to taste] will not sort out.
Good things, after all is something that happens to other people. They are here to inspire us. There is always someone who knows exactly what you feel like and they will cook up a piece of advice for you and pull you over to the other side. And we all need a piece of advice, do we not?
It takes such a special kind of courage to recognise the simplicity of the nature of things that only a bunch of people will attempt it. As Don Juan said to Carlos Castaneda, people always try to complicate things because if we don’t the realisation of how simple everything is will drive us into madness. Maybe this is what pushes us off the fine line?
There are way too many question marks here. This is a weak article. It is intended to be such. The answers should be private to the reader.
Labels: cope, depression, life, pain, stress
posted by Inthemist at 12:15 PM
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