Here we are now, entertain us.

Tagged as: depression, friends

I don’t know what Kurt Cobain intend­ed and frankly don’t real­ly care. I tend to be irra­tional­ly biased against some­one who takes a shot­gun to their head and leaves their tod­dler father­less, no mat­ter how tor­ment­ed they might be. However, the line does hold some sig­nif­i­cance for me. It sug­gests a more press­ing demand: “You say this is the most fab­u­lous din­ner par­ty in town, so here we are now, enter­tain us, show us what you’ve got, what all the fuss is about, the hoopla, the brag­ging and hype, the rea­son we had to leave every­thing else and come here.”

All dressed up with nowhere to go.

It’s what some­one post depres­sion might ask in a nut­shell. “Now that the scales have fall­en from my eyes, allow me to try on those rose-col­ored glass­es you seem to love so much.” Well there were no scales, and those rose col­ored glass­es are just that: shades mask­ing a grey and indif­fer­ent real­i­ty.

There is no objec­tive world out there wait­ing for us to see it for what it tru­ly is. Those of us who are hap­py tend to advise and cau­tion the rest who are not, while fail­ing to real­ize or maybe even choos­ing to ignore the fact that mere con­tente­ment does not qual­i­fy any­one to be a life coach. Nor does pri­or expe­ri­ence because it assumes that the men­tor some­how man­aged to side­step (or fall into but sur­vive) the same pot­holes in which the pupil is now entrenched. When a phi­los­o­phy is adopt­ed whole­sale, it becomes a dog­ma, just as when reli­gion is embraced with total aban­don, it becomes fanati­cism.

Here we are now, enter­tain us. If life is one big din­ner par­ty, I nev­er make my choic­es à la carte. The options may be less appeal­ing and the effort more demand­ing, but I always go for the buf­fet.