Extraction

As a single guy, I carry within me an aversion to those items which may excite in me some semblance of happiness. I speak more specifically what might be more commonly known as “Hollywood Happiness,” that good feeling that is relentlessly served us on a silver platter. My aversion, of course, owes its existence to the comparative degrees that such happiness leaves behind. The aftertaste, so to speak, when the lights come back up and I realize with crushing finality that I am an entity quite divisible from the winning hero on his unlikely yet deserved wedding day. Whereas the watching of the film encourages the idea that his victories are my victories, that his hopes are my hopes, the reality of my plight is that when all is said and done, the character has nothing to do with me, and furthermore has not the ability to return the sympathy which I so freely lavish upon him. And the lights do go up. I suppose if we could entertain the idea of a never-ending movie reel, stretching on into the future as far as the “eye” can see, we might enjoy an endless fantasy from which we would never wake. But it is a ghostly filmstrip for ghostly prospects. In order for this fantasy world to exist, it would necessitate our compliance with the script—and though it might on occasion give us cause to feel, it could never offer us the cause to be. We would be nothing more than stifled animals, forced (by our own choice, no less) to relinquish what it is that makes us human and adopt a cookie-cutter cavalcade of a recipe for happiness, eradicating any claim to individuality, and thus any claim to a rightful existence. This, I am sure you can see, will not do. Thus, the aversion mentioned at my first timid scribbles.

The medium is not flawed in such a way that it affects all people the same—far from it. It is only the man who is in danger of succumbing to this fantasy, who vividly perceives it as real and good, who endangers himself. He who looks on mindlessly looks on with less a mind. As a single guy with a mind worn ever thinner, mindlessness becomes all too familiar, and it causes me to stumble.

I’m tired, exhausted, and frustrated with the world because it won’t do and be the things I want it to, and only rarely calling myself out for not doing anything about it.

We’re good people, aren’t we?