Derek (DONE W/THIS SITE)

Few creatures could be more poorly designed for human life than human beings. We habituate to the glorious, we are magnetized to the vanities, we love desperately while too aware of our own dying, we step on and over one another, mad to be the first—first anywhere, and often to the cliff's edge. We veil our fears and failures lest they weaken our public standing, we miss people that can never be returned to us, we dream enormously with overwhelming minds that cannot be satisfied by the meager term and agency granted to our bodies.When we lay out our dead on a sheet on a table to open the seedcase of the skull—the seat of all our majesty—we find the pith strange and grey, alien and ugly. There is no beauty left, the magic is too long gone. The remaining staging ground is indecipherable.When I reach a functional hysteria at our capacity for loss, there is one thought that curbs it. I have a single consolation, one slim exit lane (lit as an airplane isle, with tiny white lights) past the cloverleaf of worry and of grief. A reasonable person cannot loose himself in lamenting human suffering without counting himself as a participant in the objectionable situation. It's like swearing at traffic—you are the problem. You do not contribute to it, you do not permit it you are it, by definition. In your car, red-faced with frustration as you listen to the radio promise delays all the way home, the reporter in the helicopter is describing you. To meditate excessively on human sorrow manufactures more of the same. It constitutes a failure to exercise what small influence you have. The margins of our happiness are quite slim, we suffer a great deal by virtue of our blueprint--we simply don't have room to allow morbidity, to dwell on the unfortunate aspects of our condition. The dying starts before we're born. The living, unless you force it, may never start at all. A committed existentialist is not sulking at the party, he's grinning at the gallows with a tip for the hangman, a rose for the prettiest girl in the mob, and tight fistful of whatever happiness he has managed to extract from a life in the mine.So Buck up, I say to me. Not as a dismissal of the heartache all around you, not as a palliative or a concession to the mindless council of the optimists, but because if you don't buck up, immediately, you are absolutely full of shit. If you were as angry as you pretend to be about the absurd excesses of human pain, you'd combat them anywhere you found them, even if they lay sleeping in the ringing hollows of your very own bones.