I try not to be corny too often, but I am. My heart is corny. So is yours. Stop being so clever. Who likes clever? What do you mean by it, all that cleverness? You want the rest of us with a crick in our necks, trying to get a look at you way up there, up there in the clever clouds?
(My grandmother will always introduce her best insults with, “I’ve got news for you,” which is what I want to write right now, but frankly it just does not pack the same punch on a screen.)
Anyway, I think I was going to say something about the only way to not be depressed is to bully yourself into gratitude for like, everything, at every second, in every direction, for all of time. I guess the summary is enough. I also wish the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal” did not embarrass me even when I am alone, tucked away in an apartment with just a dog and a cat, both of whom do not care to read much.
My favorite radio show host, for example, is always going wild over the fact of us walking on the moon. And when he does, I too am like holy fuck. We have walked on the fucking moon. There is a moon. That some one has walked on. There is gravity. Gravity is such a mindfuck. There are tides that have something to do with this moon that we’ve walked on by some mechanism I can’t quite bother to understand. The ocean is outer space. Et al, on and on.
Alternately:
It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential—there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.
- from Mark Twain’s
