Maybe it’s a strange time to get into all of this, but since you asked: When I try to envision the future it just looks like more of the same, but shittier. Maybe it’s a failure of imagination on my part, I don’t know, but it does tend to make a person mean. It’s like, this is a metaphor, every hill gets steeper and steeper, or like every meal you’re ever going to eat will be worse than the shitty one you just ate. It makes you want to give up on eating, or kill the cook.
         My first girlfriend, she left me because I didn’t have a direction in life. So I picked a direction. My second girlfriend left me because I didn’t make enough money. So I made more money. My next girlfriend left me because she said I wasn’t a good person. Now that was a stumper. I’m still working on that one.
         I know it’s not what you asked, but you shared so much about yourself, I felt I should explain my position a little. I had a great childhood, I loved my parents and my brother and sisters, and they loved me. Then one by one, they died: mom cancer, dad a car accident, one sis two sis, dead sis flu sis. That wasn’t a very clear sort of joke, sorry: I mean that Emily killed herself and Jenny died of covid. My brother, I’m not proud of this, I killed myself.
         Plus you lose friendships, and relationships, and you get older and your body starts to screw up. You wake up one morning with a stiff shoulder and maybe it goes away in an hour or maybe it’s something you live with now for the rest of your life. Your favorite new TV show gets canceled after one season, you try to re-read a favorite book from your childhood and discover it sucks.
         Just a couple examples off the top of my head. It’s everything big or small, shittier and shittier every day, fractally shittier. You go on the Internet, you see that this country is getting worse all the time. Country, hell, the whole world, with climate change and all. Plus people are just getting meaner and meaner, so it tempts you to be meaner and meaner too, and that can actually be good in certain circumstances, as you know, but it wears you down after a while. At first you’re cruel because it gets you something, then you’re cruel because you like it, and you end up being cruel because it’s the easiest thing to do.
         Sure, I have good memories, but every day that goes by they get covered with more and more bad ones. Do you know what I did last week? Well, sure you do, but maybe you can imagine how that makes a person feel. Of course you can. So I’m asking you: How do you keep going after all that? I’m genuinely curious. Some people say, you got to keep up hope, but I don’t understand hope, man. People keep having kids of their own to try to fix the mistakes their own parents made raising them, but people have been doing that since the dawn of time and if it was going to work I think it’d’ve probably worked by now. You think about it, a kid’s really nothing but a fuck-trophy.
         Some people make jokes to cover it all up, but you’re a pretty serious-minded individual, I can see that. You must have some sort of secret.
         But you’re right, we probably shouldn’t waste any more time. So where were we?
💀