There comes a time in life when we realize everything isn’t what we once thought it was. When the comforts of our childhood dissolve to reveal life and other people for what they really are. They call it growing up. Life without the Tooth Fairy.
I call it bullshit.
Of course, this awakening doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t get out of bed one day pissed off with the world. It’s more of a gradual dissatisfaction: a realization that something’s not quite right; a feeling that you’ve somehow been conned.
The main thing about it though, is that once you’ve achieved this sort of consciousness, the world is never really the same again.
My guess is that not everyone experiences this. Poor kids that grow up in the streets probably have no idea what I’m talking about because they’ve always known that the human race is basically garbage. It probably only happens to kids like me, kids who are fortunate enough to have had a middle class upbringing; kids whose parents were able to provide a shelter from the real world, if only for the first decade and a half of their lives.
I probably sound pretty cynical for a seventeen year old, but it’s just the way I see it. I’m not saying everyone’s a scumbag, I’m just saying humans stink as a breed. For one thing, we can’t even save our own planet. For another, we’re a bunch of hypocrites. Because if I’m old enough to join the military and take it up the ass on some Iraqi sand dune for Uncle Sam, then I ought to be old enough to have a beer with the prick if I ever make it home again.
I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I do know that if there isn’t, then it stands to reason that the jerks of this world will never get what’s coming to them. And the few decent people out there won’t get what they deserve either - even if they’ve lived a saint’s life.
Some people believe in karma, like somehow everyone gets what they deserve in the end. I used to believe in that BS when I was a kid, but not anymore. Religion’s just a bunch of hippy horse shit if you ask me. Karma’s doesn’t just happen to people by itself. Not if there’s no god. How can it? Somebody has to make it happen. My parents call me an “incurable pessimist” which only goes to prove they’re the ones living in la-la land.
Look, it’s a fucked up world. I guess either you agree with me or you don’t.
But I’m getting sidetracked again. That still happens to me quite a lot. Not being able to stay “focused” as my shrink puts it. He doesn’t know what happened in Chicago last Christmas, but he thinks my elevator’s stuck between floors anyway. 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 what my response is, 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 from someone who’s spent half their life at 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 get homicidal whenever I have to see him. How I feel is, I feel like wringing his scrawny neck. I told him so too. He gave me this fake, condescending laugh and said I needed to work on my “anger management.” Like you needed to be angry to throttle someone like that. I could be in a perfectly good mood and still throttle that jerk.