Partly Cloudy, 64°
The leaves' rhythmic rustle under my feet on a windswept November day. A saxophone's mellow tones calling sweetly through the bustle of the city evening. A child's careless smile as she tosses a coin into the little stone fountain. It's the simple things like these that turn my soul into a slobbering swamp of disgust.
You can keep your drifting smells of coffee shops, your spry youthful energy, your moss on the silent stones of the cemetery. You can keep your first bite of dark chocolate. Give me instead the politico-economic situation in Tunisia. Give me the temporal dynamics of neural activity in the cerebellum. Give me the United States tax code. Hell, even something as marginally complicated as IKEA furniture would do if it meant I was never again subjected to the dulcet chirrups of songbirds heralding the first morning light.
And don't you ever speak to me of joy, that very most mundane, that stupidest of emotions. Joy fills me with rage, the mere thought of it. I prefer the more refined temperaments. Regret. Ennui. I'll take creeping Oedipal guilt over joy any day of the week. Except Thursday, for reasons too subtle to go into right now.
How I yearn for a more complicated time! When a man gazing out at a ship on the horizon saw not the shimmering image of hope. When he saw instead the manifold environmental consequences of industrial pollution, the intricacies of international trade laws!
I live slowly, cautiously. For every two steps forward, I take one step back. For every two steps back, I take three steps to the left. Every nine total steps, I turn a full 180, and every time someone interrupts my intricate choreography to ask me if I'm okay, I push them savagely to the ground.
Never do I stop to smell the roses. I stop to meticulously catalog the roses and write down my observations in a field notebook. Eventually I will bind my findings in great leather volumes entitled "On the Various Non-Olfactory Features of Roses That I Have Encountered."
I wish only for a complicated life. I want someday to move into the corrupted heart of the city and live in an extravagant palace-labyrinth with my wife, extended family, a few of my friends, coworkers, ex-girlfriends, random acquaintances whose names I shall no longer be sure of and my five children, whom I shall love so dearly for their unpronounceable names. We shall always be in debt, someone shall always be suing us and invariably the prevailing mood in my household shall be one of byzantine tribulation.
Then just when it seems that things cannot get any more complicated, I will pass away. Surrounded by my palace-mates, my army of lawyers and my dozens of televisions and radios all shrieking at full volume, I will die a writhing and tormented death caused, I can but hope, by only the most intractable health complications.
