the audacity of despair

Steps_of_despair

When I was a little boy in my hometown of Hopeless, Arkansas, my daddy once said to me, “If you ever feel like giving up, remember that it’s the easy way out, and, in the majority of instances, makes the most rational sense on a strictly cost-benefit basis.” His words echo in my mind whenever I encounter a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, such as a rack with six consonants to kick off a game of Scrabulous. I’ve since committed them to a poster that hangs over the crib of my son, Eeyore, although, given the state of education and the hegemony of visual media, he’ll probably never learn to read sentences with clauses.

The next president faces a host of critical challenges; he must listen to all viewpoints, carefully weigh his choices, then decisively curl into a fetal position once he realizes that eventually we all die alone anyway, so what’s the point?

We’re all tired of reading about the violence in Iraq over our morning cocktail of an increasingly-ineffective-SSRI-and-vodka. I have formulated the only sensible approach: stop writing about the violence in Iraq.

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