Rule: Don’t whine.
This rule is probably the cornerstone to being a cool person. If the chips are down, you goddam had better smile. If your ass hurts, don’t tell anybody about it. And apparently, if you’re Jesus, and somebody slaps You upside Your head, You’re supposed to turn the other cheek. I can dig this approach. Keep the vibe positive. Keep everything chill, no matter how close to the top of your life’s toilet rim the water is rising. Make sure to remain as mellow at all times as Cheech was in the van after he smoked the giant doobie of Labrador with Chong.
Obviously, the reason to refrain from whining is everybody’s life is a disaster in one way or another, and if we’re all complaining at once, what’s to stop humanity from finally realizing life is a pain in the wazoo and consequently forming into mass lemming/Jonestown/Heaven’s Gate groups and vacating the planet on one designated sunny Sunday afternoon? The Happy Person you’ve read about in magazines and in self-help books? Total myth. Being human means you’re miserable. Me, I’m as miserable as shit. I’m getting old, my body hurts everywhere, my teeth are falling out of my head, my eyesight and hearing are dimming, I don’t have any money, I hate what I’m supposed to do for a living, almost everybody in my profession drives me crazy, and nobody cares about me! Fuck! Now, what’s your reaction to that kind of talk? You have either clicked away from Mag’s Sentence and returned to the porno page from whence you came or you have returned to clicking LIKE on everybody’s Facebook bullshit. Side note: You don’t really LIKE that your friend Martha is making a frozen pizza for lunch and is going to Target after that. In any case, you don’t want to hear my troubles. You want me to say something like, “I’m going to work at my desk for most of the day and I feel blessed about that, and when I’m done writing, I’m going to go for an excellent bike ride, and when I get home from biking, I’m going to eat homemade pasta and watch Julia & Julia with my dog….”
Oh well. My resolution for today: I’m not going to whine about a goddam thing.
Um, maybe I can just take this one minute at a time?
Great post Mag. I sure hope that 2010 is a better year for all of us. Maybe we wont have to whine undercover and instead we can celebrate something! Happy New Year Mike!
ReplyDeleteHey Mike. Do you know this poem of Pablo Neruda?
ReplyDeleteBest to you..... John Sutton in VT
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
From this poetic image of total despair, one can only look upward:
“Walking Around”
It so happens I’m tired of being a man.
It so happens I enter clothes shops and theaters,
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing the water of ashes and origins.
The smell of a hairdresser’s has me crying and wailing.
I only want release from being stone or wool.
I only want not to see gardens and businesses,
merchandise, spectacles, lifts.
It so happens I’m tired of my feet and toenails,
my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I’m tired of being a man.
Still it would be a pleasure
to scare a lawyer with a severed lily
or deal death to a nun with a poke in the ear.
It would be good
to go through the streets with an emerald knife
and shout out till I died of cold.
I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows,
vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,
down in the damp bowels of earth,
absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day.
I don’t want to be so much misfortune,
I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,
a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death,
frozen, dying in pain.
This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,
when it sees me arrive with my prison features,
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.
And it drives me to certain street corners, certain damp houses,
towards hospitals where skeletons leap from the window,
to certain cobbler’s shops stinking of vinegar,
to alleyways awful as abysses.
There are sulphur-coloured birds and repulsive intestines,
hanging from doorways of houses I hate,
there are lost dentures in coffee pots
there are mirrors
that ought to have cried out from horror and shame,
there are umbrellas everywhere, poisons and navels.
I pass by calmly, with eyes and shoes,
with anger, oblivion,
pass by, cross through offices, orthopedic stores,
and yards where clothes hang down from wires:
underpants, towels and shirts weeping
slow guilty tears.
my life is a gigantic fucking nest of a mess.
ReplyDeletehayrider, aka, jason 420wear bike racer and mad blogger