How not to be an optimist
How not to be an optimist:
Step in dogshit. Step in new dogshit, the fresh, chunky peanut butter textured kind that wraps around the sole of your shoe. Catch every red light when you’re right on the border of being late to work. Find hair in your food. Not from the head hair, from the body. Fall out of love. Paper cuts on the baby-soft skin under your fingernail. Diarrhea yourself. If you’re still smiling after all of that, you’re not an optimist. You’re a liar and mostly the bane of my existence.
I don’t mind optimism. Alright. I don’t mind a certain type of optimism. Undaunted optimism — I mind. Enough smiling. When it stops improving the situation, your optimism is rendered useless. You’re no longer being positive for anyone’s well being. You’ve become an aggravating factor, a foxtail in the sock, peanut-butter dogshit, placed by God exactly in your natural stride length. It could have been four inches to the left, four inches to the right, but no. God wants to make you shitty. Stop grinning, idiot.
There’s a point where optimism becomes a lampshade for reality. It tones down urgency and necessity for change. It’s blinders on the jockey instead of the horse. The universe is fucking you for a reason. It wants to change the course. It wants you to open your gleefully squinted eyes and notice the train tracks upon which you dance. When optimism impedes that process— it’s a problem.
Cry a little. Enough with the “everything happens for a reason” philosophy. That reason is you. It’s your stupid off-white smile. It’s your failure to comply with warning sign after warning sign. It’s dogshit hidden behind your handheld device. It’s harsh reality, disguised with makeup to look pretty.
Happy isn’t all the time. Pretending it is only sinks you further into the shit-puddle that is your life. You’re chest deep and cheering for the stink team. Kick your legs, stupid — tread shit. Disillusionment is sometimes the answer. There are lessons in heartbreak and bone break and check engine lights. Padding your walls isn’t a remedy for the crazy. It protects it. Keeps the crazy safe, pins it in, gives it a cozy place to sleep. That’s what you’re doing with overboard optimism.
Anger can be good. Dick-shriveling fear and anxiety can be good. They shake things up. They pop bubbles of illusion. They’re windex on the panes of our dirty souls. Flowers die. They’re pretty and then they die and stink. It’s not all St. Valentine and potpourri. Tulips sent on mother’s day aren’t the same as tulips sent for mother’s funeral. Wipe that smirk off your face, and watch Rhode Island sized meteors whiz past earth. Watch the lady bug implode against thewindshield. Realize that butterflies have a one-month lifespan before they’re spider food. Don’t be spider food.
Life’s too short to pretend to be happy all the time. If you can’t cry where you are, get in the shower and cry. Everything that sucks doesn’t have to be accepted. Gross optimism is built on laziness. Change. Run into the wind. Kill yourself swimming upstream like a boulder beaten salmon. Sacrifice some of that phony happiness for a heroic dose of reality.
If you’re using optimism to get yourself through a shit-storm, that fine. On day three in a row of stepping in dog shit — yes, you should laugh about it. But on day one and two, I fully expect you to motherfuck the heavens and all her beautiful children. I expect you to take that Chuck Taylor off your foot and throw it like a Doug Flutie hail mary. I expect you to find your neighbor and his dog and strangle them both with that fucking leash. You don’t even have to commit murder, but at the very least, I expect you to consider it.
That’s why it’s not okay to be a full-time optimist. It’s not okay to be anything full-time. Not pessimism, not optimism, not realism. Anger is good. Elation is good. Imagination is good. Optimism, as a miracle drug, has a long list of side effects. People forget to mention that because they’re too busy clicking their shit-stained heels together.