THE NOT SO GREAT DEPRESSION
The alarm was set to go off at seven in the morning, a reasonable time to wake up. That is, reasonable for someone with full use of their faculties. So, as Harry’s apartment filled with morning light, the clock radio chirped to life.
“Hello folks, it’s a gray miserable day without even a ray of hope, so drag your miserable butts out of bed for yet another day of your pointless existence. I don’t know why I even come here every day to entertain you bunch of stupid ingrates, there was supposed to be so much more to life, but it was an utter lie just like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. Now I’m going to play more stupid pap to bore and irritate you. I quit!
Harry sighed, rolled over in bed and turned it off. A mature student at a local university, he was glad he had not succumbed to the plague of suicidal depression that was afflicting close to half the world’s population. He lived from day to day, and tried to cope with the problems the depression caused him and the rest of the mentally healthy population.
Even the car ride to class was fraught with unpredictable dangers like people trying to kill themselves with their cars. It was the epitome of the American dream; they wanted to bring their cars with them. People hurling themselves in front of trucks were causing traffic jams. Sometimes they hurled themselves from great heights.
As he pulled into the campus parking lot, he heard shots ringing out from the clock tower.
He knew he would have to take a circuitous route to the lecture hall to avoid being hit by any stray bullets. Sometimes he would come across fellow students curled in a fetal crouch on the untended lawns sobbing, or staring straight ahead with hollow sunken eyes and muttering to themselves.
Eventually he entered the ivy- covered halls, climbed some stairs and found himself a seat in the virtually empty lecture hall. Professor James paced franticly before his tiny audience, his hair was messy and unwashed, his eyes bloodshot. He appeared to have spent days without sleep. Finally he stopped, buried his long face in his hands for a moment, and started to speak.
“ Mankind is at a crossroad,” he began, “ we have reached the limit of what our puny limited intellects can possibly grasp. It would be sheer conceit to consider ourselves as anything more than stupid, smelly, selfish sacks of shit that are teeming over the face of the earth like a case of the clap.
“Instead of graciously stepping aside and going extinct like all the other maladapted freaks of nature that have gone before us, we want to travel to the stars and screw up the rest of the universe. Eventually we will run out of garbage to shovel down our filthy mouths, and forget how to use the technology we created to do things we were too lazy to do for ourselves. We’ll just sit hip- deep in all the shit we’ve created, picking our noses like a bunch of inbred, brain-dead misanthropes!”
He seemed to become more composed, more resolute, and closed his talk with, “That is the theory of devolution.” He paused for a moment to be sure what he had said had sunk in, even though he was teaching Basic Marketing, and pulled out a revolver.
He trained it on his temple. With a shout of “Class dismissed!” he pulled the trigger.
The scene was a familiar one to anybody who had seen a cheap horror movie, a mess of blood and brains that was more disgusting in real life than anything one could imagine. Those in seats near to the front ran screaming, covered with gore, into the campus to join the sullen despairing masses. The rest shuffled out wearily
On the drive home, with the day’s events playing in his mind like a skipping record from his misspent youth, he felt himself growing emotionally numb. The madness in the streets no long had any effect on him. It was like watching a late movie while falling slowly asleep. None of it mattered to him anymore. Someone, somewhere, would have to find a miracle cure and save humanity, but not him. He felt like crawling into a hole and dying. Death seemed to him like an old friend he would be meeting again soon.
He returned to his apartment in the early afternoon. He pulled the blinds tight against the accursed light and crawled into bed fully dressed. He didn’t sleep, he just lay there, too tired to move, thinking of his dead father and listening as anarchy exploded across the city. The red light of many fires flickered against his blinds and horrible despairing screams seemed to keep time.
“Maybe tomorrow.” He muttered to himself as he fell sound asleep.
“Hello folks, it’s a gray miserable day without even a ray of hope, so drag your miserable butts out of bed for yet another day of your pointless existence. I don’t know why I even come here every day to entertain you bunch of stupid ingrates, there was supposed to be so much more to life, but it was an utter lie just like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. Now I’m going to play more stupid pap to bore and irritate you. I quit!
Harry sighed, rolled over in bed and turned it off. A mature student at a local university, he was glad he had not succumbed to the plague of suicidal depression that was afflicting close to half the world’s population. He lived from day to day, and tried to cope with the problems the depression caused him and the rest of the mentally healthy population.
Even the car ride to class was fraught with unpredictable dangers like people trying to kill themselves with their cars. It was the epitome of the American dream; they wanted to bring their cars with them. People hurling themselves in front of trucks were causing traffic jams. Sometimes they hurled themselves from great heights.
As he pulled into the campus parking lot, he heard shots ringing out from the clock tower.
He knew he would have to take a circuitous route to the lecture hall to avoid being hit by any stray bullets. Sometimes he would come across fellow students curled in a fetal crouch on the untended lawns sobbing, or staring straight ahead with hollow sunken eyes and muttering to themselves.
Eventually he entered the ivy- covered halls, climbed some stairs and found himself a seat in the virtually empty lecture hall. Professor James paced franticly before his tiny audience, his hair was messy and unwashed, his eyes bloodshot. He appeared to have spent days without sleep. Finally he stopped, buried his long face in his hands for a moment, and started to speak.
“ Mankind is at a crossroad,” he began, “ we have reached the limit of what our puny limited intellects can possibly grasp. It would be sheer conceit to consider ourselves as anything more than stupid, smelly, selfish sacks of shit that are teeming over the face of the earth like a case of the clap.
“Instead of graciously stepping aside and going extinct like all the other maladapted freaks of nature that have gone before us, we want to travel to the stars and screw up the rest of the universe. Eventually we will run out of garbage to shovel down our filthy mouths, and forget how to use the technology we created to do things we were too lazy to do for ourselves. We’ll just sit hip- deep in all the shit we’ve created, picking our noses like a bunch of inbred, brain-dead misanthropes!”
He seemed to become more composed, more resolute, and closed his talk with, “That is the theory of devolution.” He paused for a moment to be sure what he had said had sunk in, even though he was teaching Basic Marketing, and pulled out a revolver.
He trained it on his temple. With a shout of “Class dismissed!” he pulled the trigger.
The scene was a familiar one to anybody who had seen a cheap horror movie, a mess of blood and brains that was more disgusting in real life than anything one could imagine. Those in seats near to the front ran screaming, covered with gore, into the campus to join the sullen despairing masses. The rest shuffled out wearily
On the drive home, with the day’s events playing in his mind like a skipping record from his misspent youth, he felt himself growing emotionally numb. The madness in the streets no long had any effect on him. It was like watching a late movie while falling slowly asleep. None of it mattered to him anymore. Someone, somewhere, would have to find a miracle cure and save humanity, but not him. He felt like crawling into a hole and dying. Death seemed to him like an old friend he would be meeting again soon.
He returned to his apartment in the early afternoon. He pulled the blinds tight against the accursed light and crawled into bed fully dressed. He didn’t sleep, he just lay there, too tired to move, thinking of his dead father and listening as anarchy exploded across the city. The red light of many fires flickered against his blinds and horrible despairing screams seemed to keep time.
“Maybe tomorrow.” He muttered to himself as he fell sound asleep.
posted by jdwelland at 7:33 AM
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