Life is not all it's cracked up to be. God closes one door, opens another and then, savagely, slams it on your fingers. Lookit: it's the human condition, blah, blah, blah, frittering away time with busy work, just like this column, as if anything at all mattered. Even "tragedy" is mundane when viewed through the lens of indifference that's borne of commonality. I'll give you a personal example.
I was officially divorced on October 15. This was the culmination of two years of pure torture from, wait for it, my crazy ex-wife, who is either an OSCAR(tm)-winning class performer or really is suffering from BPD. I, and my psychiatrist, believe the latter to be true. Okay, so she's a nut. I get no satisfaction from that, in fact, I am doing everyhting I can in my last thirty days in what's now "her" house, though it was bought with entirely my money, to stay far, far away. The tragedy in this is that she is either unwilling or unable to see how unneccesary this all was. My kid has suffered from this and will continue to as my ex sees my daughter as property. This is a tragedy. From the reader's point of view, it's more like, "So what? You don't have cancer." Yes, that's true, I don't. Would my having cancer qualify me for a high enough TQ* (*Tragedy Quotient?) If so, maybe the fact that I owned a business that used highly-carconigenic plastics for 22 years, am a smoker and spend too much time in the sun will tip the scales for you.
"It's all in how you look at it," say my doctor as she deftly cashes my check. That's true, too, but how I look at it is that I have no house, no child, no where to live, no one to be close to, not much of a career future, no family and, at the moment, a limp penis. Hey, you'd have one, too, if you were in this notch in the patent-leather belt of time.
"Snap out of it," quoted my special friend lo these many years ago, now, when I was totally beside myself with anxiety and stupidity. Wait, wait - there's the real tragedy: I brought this all on myself.
What an idiot! I should have figured this out before just now, huh? If I screwed it up, I should be able to unscrew it, right? Maybe, maybe it's possible after all . . .
POSTSCRIPT: I know I'm off my game, not having written anything for more than a month, but I tried to abandon my muse and that was clearly a mistake. All-in-all, I am a fool. But, I'm not dead. So. That's a start.
