Hello my limited, yet much beloved fanbase. After a long hiatus I’m back in the saddle again and ready to pick at the scabs of society; and it feels fantastic. I’ve had some time to think as I’ve been away, had some time to watch, had some time to let the world get under my skin enough that I want to drag it out into the street by its hair a teach it a few lessons. Compton style, be-yotch.
So let’s talk about something called happiness. Happiness is a talent. Regardless of what your kindergarten teacher told you it’s not something that can be taught, it’s not something that can be learned, and it sure as hell isn’t something that can be picked up by singing along with Mr. Rodgers. It’s something that takes a natural tendency on a fundamental level to be able to achieve it. And to achieve happiness it takes work; that natural tendency needs to be nurtured, it needs to be strengthened, it needs to be fed for it to be worth a damn. And these days that seems like a tall order. Working hard for something isn’t really this culture’s style. It’s 2012 and unless something has an app we don’t really give a collective shit about it. Happiness is a dying art, one that been hastily replaced with bitterness and cynicism by unskilled hands.
Now, I know, it might seem like I’m part of the problem. Cynicism is sort of what I do best. But I said “unskilled hands” so let me get to my point. Happiness, like I said, takes some effort. But instead of putting forth that effort a lot of people would rather fall back and complain about their lives, so they try to be cynical, they try to be hard, and they try to act too cool to feel anything real. They’re a bunch of frauds and I’m sick of hearing it. Just like happiness is a talent, so is misery. If you don’t have the raw natural ability for it you can’t pull it off with any class or style. I go to the store, I sit in a restaurant, I log on to facebook and there are people trying to be miserable because they think it’s the hip thing to do. But all those people, they haven’t earned the right to be miserable. And because they haven’t earned it they have no idea how to use it. Those people wave cynicism around like a kid that found his dad’s gun. They’ll attack anything for any reason; tear it down because they want people to think they’ve got an edge.
Those people, the faux-cynics, they make me sick. They’re a putrid mess that stinks of ungenuineness. They’re a sham, they’re a counterfeit, and it’s so obvious to everyone around but nobody says a thing about it. These people don’t know what misery is, they don’t have the balls to sit in a cheap tavern between a trailer-trash white-boy in a wife-beater and two shady-looking Mexican guys in cheap suits while you all listen to a lonely, crippled black guy in crutches sing karaoke to Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” as you desperately avoid asking yourself how you ended up there. Cynicism has rules, it has limits, and someone who is just jumping on the bandwagon hasn’t mastered the discipline.
If someone is truly miserable, they do everything in their power to change that. Misery is a disease and it can’t be faked. Anyone that truly is a cynic, they understand the power it has. They know how to wield it properly and maybe even on occasion and under rare circumstances they might even be able to do some good with it. So, please, stop being a cynic if you don’t have a reason for it. It’s not cool, it’s not fun, and it sure as hell isn’t easy. If you have any chance at happiness at all you grab on with both hands and ride that thing bareback into the sunset. Leave the cynicism to the ones who know what they’re doing and just enjoy the show.
