Happiness is fleeting.
One minute, you can be riding high in April, the next minute, you could be shot down in May (if you haven’t guessed, the reason this is is because you probably suffer from a degenerative brain disease and have lost the best part of a month) and before you know it, you’re wallowing like a swallow in Wallowing Swallows’ Hollow in a mire, a pit, indeed a chasm of self-pity, self-loathing, depression, and just about any other thing that isn’t the feeling of happiness. If the preceding sentence implies that you could be unhappy because you are wallowing in a chasm of pasta, and if you think that’s a stupid idea, I urge you to catch the repeat of “Half Ton Dad” on More4. If you watch it and decide to do anything other than get off the couch and perform two hundred jumping jacks purely out of fear, I will be very surprised.
But on top of this, happiness is fleeting for different reasons; For some, it’s the pursuit of the elusive emotion itself – kind of like trying to win the stuffed Count Duckula in a claw machine at an arcade, only less costly and more potentially insanity-inducing. Though not by much, once you’ve seen the little plush toy lift about a quarter of an inch into the air only to be dropped down next to a shitty Beanie Baby for the millionth time .
For others, it’s the fact that what they define as happiness changes endlessly, leaving them wondering just how happy they are supposed to be when they don’t know what will make them happy. For still more, happiness is fleeting because the sum total of horrible, depressing, mind-numbingly awful events taking place in the world crush that happiness to a thin veneer of solace. A cynic might say that the only truly happy people in the world are the ones actually committing all these horrific atrocities and generally terrible things we hear about, since those people are doing what they want.
None of these things are objectively correct, if you ask me. Different things make different people happy. That some of these things should be punished, either by imprisonment, violence, or taking the “Half Ton Dad” diet (they covered his groin with a pink V-neck shirt, despite the fact he had about sixteen Free Willy-metres of fat on each thigh doing the job for him. Pointlessly hilarious) is, however, objective, and should be enforced as such.
But that’s not my point. My point is discussing the thing that makes me happy. Not in a Dublin-Spire-in-my-underwear way as such (not a metaphor, girls, wink-wink), but in the same way some people get when they say nice things to their loved ones, or write out humourous signs for their shop windows, or use charming abbreviations of things that don’t need abbreviating on social networking sites, or write acoustic pop songs, or electronic pop songs that sound the same and have no sentiment or even any passion and wear deely-boppers because it says how eighties-retr0-hip you are fawning over a tiramisu sandwich with watercress or…
Fuck off. Every one of them fuck off. As a matter of fact, don’t bother fucking off. I’ll just fuck off. It won’t take as long and it’ll be better for both of us, because none of these things are going to fuck off. In fact none of the irritating, trivial and mawkishly howlingly bullshittingly feces-cringe-ingly annoying little niggles of the world are going to do anything other than just continue to annoy me for no good reason other than that’s what they do. Yes, that’s a long-winded way of saying annoying things are annoying. That’s what I do when I’m annoyed. It’s annoying.
I won’t address them all, because I don’t want to die typing a rant in my own waste with the leg of the chair, but…just…well… FFFFFFFUUUUUUUCCKKK OOOOOFFFFFFF!!!!!
For instance, apostrophes. I get that they are a difficult thing to place in a word, and they can get mixed up. I also get that it’s now some sort of cultural signifier to put them in words THAT DON’T FUCKING NEED THEM! But what I don’t get, what I find so impenetrable that if I were Superman, I wouldn’t bother trying to see through it but would just punch it till it died then take a space-leak on it, is how you can get it wrong four times out of five and then NOT GET IT WRONG ONCE in the SAME SENTENCE!
What kind of shitty fucking rule is that? I saw a sign the other day for HMV’s sale. In it “CD’s” were on sale as were “DVD’s” and “Blu Ray’s”. Then down the bottom of the sign I also saw that there were “Games” on sale. Excuse me? They get them ALL WRONG except one. It’s one thing to make a mistake, it’s even another to make a consistent mistake. But where is the logic in this fuck-wittery? How do you get something so wrong and then just…not? The mistake has become the rule. The thing that’s right now looks wrong because people can’t even make their mistakes correctly. Did I just enter the Upside-Fucking-Down Idiot Dimension or something?
And saying nice things to loved ones. Why? Is it not enough to love your loved ones, you now have to say it all the time? And it’s the “all the time” bit that bugs me most. I mean…CUNT.
I love, platonically or otherwise, very few people. Whether this is the norm or not, I know not. What I do know is that I don’t feel the need to obsessively tell people that I love them at every opportunity like some kind of fairway attraction robot, only instead of saying “roll-up roll-up, come see The Naked Bearded Lady With Two Legs For Arms, Feet For Hands And A Perfectly Normal Head For A Vagina, HANDSTANDREA!!!” it says something sentimental, contrite, clichè and boring. Something now so limp and useless you could call it a politician. Doesn’t matter what it is, what platitude, or even how meant it is. Phrases of love have been so abused and bludgeoned and robbed of anything but the most superficial power they just plain don’t work anymore, and the people who so repeatedly use them sound desperate, fake and monotonous until…well, CUNT.
You want to show someone you love them? Buy them something for no reason. Fuck the social contract bullshit and just get them something they’d like. Be nice to them. But don’t extol their emotional virtues in the middle of a dinner party just because it’s demanded of you. It’s cheap. And coming from a man who has rubber pockets in his trousers for stealing soup, if I say it’s cheap it must be really fucking cheap. Believe it or not, showing someone you care does actually mean buying them shit. That might be just my personal opinion, but the alternative is CUNT, so…
Movie posters. Remember when posters used to mean art? When you could look at something, gauge the story and tone of the film from it? Remember when there was detail and in-jokes and stark imagery in equal measure? Now we get endlessly Photoshopped (and I mean endlessly; I swear I saw a dude outside my local cinema using the Magic Wand Tool on the poster for Banal Will Ferrell Mugging Stupidly And Talking Loudly Film after it was already on the wall) conglomerations of computer images, and wide-angle compositions of actors so tinted that they look like they’ve got some kind of incipient rainbow jaundice or some bloody thing. If real people looked like actors on movie posters…well they wouldn’t. Now I love Photoshop or whatever program they use, but someone seriously needs to take the Bollocks Movie Poster Filter off and just take some fucking good pictures. Or draw them. Or ANYTHING.
I could write, and have written, entire blogs full of useless rants at the ever on-rushing THING that is life and it’s effect on the progress of the known universe. The inevitable slide from one hideous form of bum-wankery to another. And I’ll continue to write them. I’ll rant in print about how the Internet has gone from people physically degrading themselves to just socially degrading themselves in the bitter hope that a webcam and a YouTube account will show people the kind of deities they are. In tandem, I’ll rant about the heartless trolls who feed these peoples’ fragile, underdeveloped egos until they become a kind of fucked up parody of peoples’ desire for celebrity and acceptance, and how, in a small way, I am one of these heartless trolls.
I’ll witter on about the placement of full stops, the continuing spiral into one-letter communication that is netspeak – how long till all conversation worldwide will be done by using the letter A and an end-bracket? – and the dumbing down of television until the hit reality TV shows are “Celebrity Fox-Fisting” and “Live Custody Proceedings and Civil Arbitration Brother” and the most popular sitcom programme is “Couples Say Awkward Things Then Make Innuendous Jokes And Probably Someone Does Heroin Because It’s Edgy And Documentary Style, Innit?” ( or “CSATTMIJAPSDHBIEADS,I?” for what passes for short nowadays). I’ll continue to put serious horrific issues next to dick jokes and moral conundrums with….more dick jokes.
Because the world annoys me. And it makes me happy to be annoyed with an annoying world. Try group hug me and I swear to fuck I’ll stab someone emotionally close to you.
That’s the end.
