THERE COMES A TIME in life when you realize everything isn’t what you once thought it was; when the warmth of childhood evaporates to reveal life for what it really is and human beings for what they really are. There comes a time in life, when you realize you’ve been conned.
This doesn’t happen to everyone. I’m sure the gangbangers on the other side of town have always known that people are basically garbage. It probably just happens to kids lucky enough to come from a good home; kids whose parents raised them with just enough emotional shelter for them to become ungrateful brats, dissatisfied with real life. Brats like me.
This awakening didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t just wake up one day, pissed off at humanity. It was a slow process. It began with a nagging suspicion that something wasn’t quite right with the world. It took a couple more years for me to fully realize that civilization just doesn’t function in the way that I’d been raised to believe it did - the way that it’s supposed to.
You could call the whole experience growing up. If you’re a patronizing asshole, that is. Life without the Tooth Fairy. But for me, it was more than that. Much more. Because if the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus were just make-believe, then the odds were that God was just an adult version of the same, desperate fantasy.
It wasn’t easy to get my head around, but once I realized that things like heaven, hell, miracles and Britney Spears were just the fixings in society’s cauldron of bullshit, I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d been suckered so hard, or for so long.
It’s a major pisser though, because if there’s no God, then there’s no heaven to look forward to and my Muslim neighbors just got screwed out of their seventy-two virgins.
It also means that all the jerks in this world will never get what’s coming to them - and that bothered the fuck out of me. In fact, more than anything else, I think the thought of life’s scum getting away scot free is what bothered me the most.
There’s another a serious downside to this awakening. Once you realize you got swindled on the whole baby-Jesus-in-a-manger thing, the world is never quite the same again. It changes your destiny. When Santa turns out to be just your dad, drunk and in drag, life is still salvageable because there’s still God to fall back on, but take Sky Daddy out of the equation and you’re sort of on your own, which sucks ass. I mean I can almost understand people lining up to be suckered if being alone on this planet is the only alternative.
Call me a gullible fucker but I’ve actually been suckered five times already and I’m not even eighteen yet. I got suckered in this order: 1) Cookie Monster, 2) Tooth Fairy, 3) Santa Claus, 4) Head-On (I applied it directly to my forehead), 5) Baby Jesus. Turns out it was all good training in the end because I’d never have escaped the God Con if I hadn’t graduated those other minor schools first. Because at the end of the day, the truth is that even though life’s a bitch, it’s not okay to run around believing in all kinds of religious crap, just to make yourself feel better.
Some people believe in karma, like somehow everyone gets what they deserve in the end, but that’s just hippy horse shit. Punishment doesn’t just happen to people by itself. Not if there’s no God. How can it? Somebody has to make it happen.
I probably sound pretty cynical for a teenager, but that’s just the way I see it. All I’m saying is, it’s a fucked up world. I guess either you agree with me or you don’t.
My parents call me an “incurable pessimist” but that’s just because they’re insufferable optimists. They come from the “glass half-full” school of thought. They rarely confront the harder questions in life, which is why they’ll never know that the only reason their glass isn’t completely full, is because some asshole at the bar downed the rest of it while their backs were turned.
I’m getting sidetracked again. That still happens to me a lot. Not staying “focused” as my shrink puts it. He doesn’t know what happened when I was out in Chicago last Christmas, but he thinks my elevator’s stuck between floors all the same. If you met him, you’d see he needed a microscope up his own filthy butt hole. First of all, it takes him fifteen minutes just to find my file whenever we meet because he has so much crap on his desk. Fifteen fucking minutes. Then he starts asking me a bunch of pointless questions about nothing in particular, and it doesn’t matter how I reply, he always responds by asking me how I feel about it.
That’s what shrinks do, if you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting one. They sit there, tilt their heads and ask “So how do you feel about that?” Call me high maintenance, but I think you have the right to expect something more sophisticated than that from someone who’s spent half their life in school.
He’s probably a fraud. If he really knew what he was talking about, he’d just tell me what was wrong with me, instead of always asking me how I feel about the fact that I develop homicidal tendencies whenever I see him. How I feel is, I feel like wringing his scrawny neck. I told him so last time we met. He gave me a super-fake, condescending laugh and said I needed to work on my “anger management.” Like I’d need to be angry to throttle someone like that. I could be in a perfectly good mood and still throttle that prick.
His name was “Chip.” I ask you, what kind of dumb-fuck name is that?