Their Lives Are Terrible

I’ve been thinking about continuity lately.  Not that thing where you catch somebody in a movie switch their t-shirt in the middle of a scene, but the kind of continuity that gets used in those pseudo-philosophy fortune cookies.  The kind that shows up in self-help books, and pamphlets about new year’s resolutions.  The idea that every day when you wake up, you are someone different from who you were yesterday.  A lot of the time those books will tell you this means there is no good reason not to turn over a new leaf and be somebody better than yesterday.  Of course, it’s really more like that parable about Alexander the Great’s boat, where his favorite boat is patched and fixed so many times that it no longer has a single piece of the original boat, but it is incredibly difficult to label the exact point where it stopped being the old boat, and started being a new one.  In any case, I’m rambling.

Back to continuity.  I’m thinking about this, because I’m thinking about when I changed.  I’m not a baby, I’m not a toddler, I’m not a kid, and I’m not a teen.  I don’t like all of the same music I used to, I don’t believe much that I used to, and I don’t have anything resembling the same goals as I used too.  I wanted to be a paleontologist, or a poet, or a great lover.  Now, I’m just planning on going to grad school to make the world a better place in my own little way.  I don’t know where I stopped being the person who hated himself and wrote some seriously awful poetry on the internet.  I also don’t know when I can stop regretting things I’ve done in the past because they are things that were done by someone who straight up just isn’t me anymore.  There’s not a clear line, and as long as I keep mucking about in old e-mails and keeping boxes of letters that still smell like exes, I’m never going to be able to see when  I’ve crossed it.

So to wrap this up.  I bought this domain over a year ago, and I’ve yet to use it for good.  But it was too good to give up, because I had the perfect name.  The perfect header to put above everything I think or say.  Their lives are terrible.  It comes from this strip, in case you didn’t know.  It’s interesting that the title has held up through so many changes.  This website has always been the same site, even when it held bad rhymes and crappy sketches, when I tried to make it about old movie reviews, and when I thought about making it a professional portfolio.  I don’t think I could point to a time when it became better, unless of course this is it.  But I think about that strip, and I think about me, and I’m glad it still works.  See, I used to be the hater.  The green limned envious observer who knew, knew the truth about those who wore a smile.  Now I’d like to fancy I’ve grown a bit, although I can recognize I know shit all about life, and even though I’ve found my smile and can be productive, there is still the old me.  I know who I used to be, I don’t know where I’m going.  But I know their lives are terrible.