Hip Hip

As of ten twenty-fours ago, your humble narrator reached another notch on his trail — in particular, the one which allows near-guiltless debauchery at the wrong end of the Pacific. His current milestone, irrelevant though it is, grows more impressive by the hour. Physically, too, there's growth: his hair, rather like mine, has decorated itself with a few signifying wisps of white; his face, lacking last year's heavy bristles, has a certain frog about it; and his fingers, here entwined with my own, have lost a good deal of vitality. Suddenly, the excuses require even more invention.

The celebration (suppressed, of course) reminds me of my own, also around this time — give or take ten. Soon this leads me backwards towards what was nearly a year ago. Built too close to the fault-line, memories come flooding back: three parts syrup, two drops wit. Sun! Road! Rain! Temporarily shelved unease! Thank God That's Over With! Cruel me knows it's not even destined to be a footnote. In this respect, him and I are also twinney. Sometimes we even discuss it as if it were the same thing, and in kinder times we might say it's worth its weight in while. As for the rest, it's I Did What When? and assorted distaste, occasionally elevating to true, responsible so-rrow and accountability, fake or otherwise. So what's to celebrate?

As of some minutes ago, the above two narrators were fairly adamant about a lack of candles and hoo-hah, fairly adamant about the humble route.

Just Tears

Rather amusingly, an acquiescent friend of mine once bemoaned the state of affairs in the world today, noting that when you're yay high in suffering neighbours, you can never be truly content. Though its heart is vaguely in the right spot, this flawed logic overlooks the simple reality that an entirely sad world is even worse than a partially sad one. Next to everyone knows that whirl piece is fundamentally impossible at this stage in evolution; happiness conflicts, and there's always going to be an angry or half-dead neighbour regardless of policy. With his (or her) reasoning, we should thus be stripping the grins from our cheeks and dourly trudging the streets with crudely fashioned apocalyptic signs, occasionally stopping to cry on a newspaper or berate a happy person. Sure, it may not make the place any nicer, but we'll be true! And maybe our guilt will by halved, too.

Whinging, by its very nature, is unproductive — or, more rightly, counter-productive. I, for one, would rather a fiercely optimistic philanthropist abroad than a grousing cynic, slipping on his or her tears when there's work to be done. And I'm sure ill-lotted Afro-kids would rather be greeted with a warm, compassionate smile than a hopeless quiver of pity. Samples: How Can I Bring A Child Into This Horrible, Horrible World! How Can I Enjoy Not Bringing A Child Into This Horrible, Horrible World? How Can I Justify This Gold Watch? Oh, the woe! It doesn't matter how bad it is, either; there are ways to make it worse — ways only the most wet-eyed bawler knows.

Despite its overexposure, smelling flora once in a while is still sage advice. I'm sure even hell can be enjoyed in the right light.

Inside a Radical

Obviously, the first circumstantial words are breezy, if mildly uncomfortable, and the patient observer inside sometimes even hazards perspective with an encouraging You're Doing It!, but once these formalities run dry, the next step, highly mutual as it is, seems ridiculously out of reach, and, as the scatologist might say, the conversation stalls. The self censors anything interesting on the basis that its sensors are not nearly tuned enough to discern, to a safe degree, what the response could possibly be; outside the moment, it reasons, is a minefield too risky to navigate. The problem with such a philosophy, as all us non-afflicted can attest, is that it's rubbish.

The fairer, in all their down-trodden wisdom, can no doubt spot this error. There's Another One, they say behind hushed palms, pointing helpfully. My three exes, entirely as lewd as that makes them sound, knew this, but four, seven and two months too late, respectively. If their lewdness weren't so rewarding, perhaps I'd regret my misleadingly scintillating and ultimately peeling (if you dig) conversations. But the past's for forgetting, see, not regretting (yecch). On the other hand, you must admit that cloaking one's internal moaning in safe, cold distance is as much a manifestation of the problem as it is a symptom of it. Myself, I admit nothing but ignorance.