You Can't Make Mistakes.

To the losers.

Hot on the heels of my last post, Tim Krieder, cartoonist and the brains behind “The Pain” comic series, posted this piece, which reflected my very strange dream quite a bit. The comic itself is not the important part of that link, however. Please make sure that you continue on a read the article below it.

This guy, Krieder, is an obvious cynic, and with any likelihood a total asshole—I don’t mean that as an insult, some of my best friends are assholes—but sometimes he writes things that touch me in a way that I am not expecting. I got a little choked up and teary reading this article, for instance. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a total sap. I cry while reading sci-fi, I give money to street kids and widows, I talk about love and friendship in a non-ironic way. Usually though, I am typically a realist—read: pessimist—with regard to government/political/social stuff. It seems now with all that has happened, I have fallen into the camp of sad, sappy, suckers—as I might have previously viewed them—who believe that everything is going to get better.

On this point particularly, I think that Krieder is spot-on when he says:

“that the last eight wretched years had occupied so large a chunk of our adulthoods that we’d forgotten that nothing lasts forever, we’d thought that this was just how the world was: mean-spirited shitheads would always win and we would always lose. It was hard to believe it was really over.” [Krieder, link]

It is hard to believe that it is over. It is hard to shift gears into thinking that things might work out. I’m not so naïve as to believe that everything will change overnight, or that President Obama will change the world single-handedly, but I do feel like I am rubbing the sleep out of my eyes after a really terrible dream. Not a nightmare, per se, but just a really bad dream where nothing works and nothing makes any sense.

Maybe that is what is happening. It does feel like everyone woke up all at once, not a little pissed-off, and took action. If that is so, then I raise a glass and a still-angry fist in toast and say again, “Here’s to you, and here’s to me, best of friends we’ll ever be. But, should we ever disagree…”

Well, you know the rest.