Having The Last Laugh*

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,

 till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, 

for you are dust, and to dust you shall return-- Genesis 3:9

Our revels now are ended. These our actors were all spirits, 
and are melted into air, into thin air, and like the baseless 
fabric of this vision, the cloud-cappd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, 
yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant 
faded leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on; 
and our little life is rounded with a sleep 

--The Tempest Act lV Scene I, William Shakespeare.

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night--- Margo Channing

THE DIRGE OF HEAVEN ON EARTH

In this life you may have a loved one murdered. The murderer, you will learn, murdered for fun. You may be raped. Your heart will be broken. You will not recover. All your plans are destined to fail. You will have children you do not want. You will want children you can not have. You will be fired. You will see a reflection in the mirror you were born with; if you are lucky you will be happy with what you see. Some of you will have children that die before you. Others will have children disappear and life will never be the same. You will do what's right and be ridiculed and punished.

You will crave love and never get it. You will be sodomized by strangers or perhaps someone you know. Your brand new car, with brand new car payments, will get totaled a week after you have possession and you will still have to pay. You bought the car to get to work. Your husband or wife, after years of commitment, may dump you leaving you in the middle of nowhere.

You will get cancer, your teeth may fall out. You will hear what you don't wish to hear. You will see what you don't wish to see. You will go to bed hungry through no fault of your own. You will drive while drunk and kill someone. You will be grossly maimed by a drunk driver. You will be called names beginning with fat and stupid and continuing on with kyke and nigger, spic and gook. You will have all your success taken away. You will dream of a success that will never come.

You will never receive a chance to do anything; you'll never get ahead. You will make choices you will live to regret. People will steal from you. Some will steal your prized possessions. You will be a declared a promise to the world and before you begin you will develop mental illness.

You will live in rubble while bombs fall all around your head. You will scream and gnash your teeth. You will be illiterate. You will follow all the rules you were told to follow and you will be a big failure in every ones eyes. You may get a disease that causes everyone to shun you. You will have tragedy strike and you will learn that those you considered friends don't care one bit about you or your plight.

People will yell at you, some will spit on you. People will leave bruises on you or blacken an eye. Disappointment will soak your bones. You will work fervently hard all your life and have nothing to show for it. You will be sexually harassed. You will be bullied by your boss, your husband, your wife, your brother, your sister, your children or a stranger. You may be single and have your sexual identity questioned. You may be married with children and have your birth control methods scrutinized by strangers. You may be called a faggot or a dyke and be neither. You will be a specimen of physical perfection and be lonely beyond belief knowing everyone just wishes to sleep with you for the night. You will be fat shamed, slut shamed and ridiculed for your political beliefs. You will never know that things could have been better.You will be betrayed and the pain will be devastating.

You will never get anything right.

You will feel the sensation of suffocation; something unbearably heavy on your chest. You will cry so deeply the snot from your nose will choke you. You will get no sleep. You will be too `tired to care. Your pets will die in your arms or just never come back. Your best friend will sleep with the one you loved the most. You will become addicted to drugs wasting years and years which you will never get back. You will see everything you love and care for die. You will be a desperate immigrant working like a dog, like a slave, being ridiculed day and night and all you will want is to die in the land of your birth.

You will have a moment, when you do not have another one left in you. You will feel frozen by fear, angry enough to murder, frustrated to the point of wanting to strike out and hit. You will say words that cause another to cringe. You will not be able to take the words back. You will hear words that will make you wince and you will feel as though you are hemorrhaging inside. You will not be able to un-hear the words and you will play them over and over again in your head. Some people you will make you say the same thing over and over again and it will not be because they are hard of hearing. You will find yourself in crowds and feeling never more isolated and sad. You will graduate from college all bright eyed and bushy tailed and learn you are not employable. You will have co-workers that will actively hate you for the next thirty years of your life. You will have no choice but to go to work each day behaving as a professional. You will go home and drink heavily. You will buy a gun for protection and your sweet child will take a bullet to the face by accident instead. You will exercise, control your diet, eat organic and still die a miserable death.

Everything that you put your faith into and trusted will turn out to be a lie. Your father will rape you as a little girl and impregnate you and at the birth of your child, fathered by him, you will learn he infected you both with HIV. What should be the most glorious and happy moments of your life you will learn something that will leave you bleeding in a corner. You will never win the lottery. You might never win anything. You will get diseases just when you were getting started or when you finally understood something important about life. The parish priest will stick his blessed dick in your kids mouth rendering your kid stuck between heaven and hell. The priest will go on giving mass and your kid will sit in a pew horrified and ashamed. And each Sunday he'll have to open his gob wide again to receive communion from the fucker who gives him a little wink from behind a chalice. You will read the news each day and hear things worse than anything I've written.

You will be legally underage and have to bide your time until such time that you can leave the home of the awful parents you were given. When you finally come of age you will reel out of the house too vandalized and impaired to appreciate your liberty. You will hear all your life that you should love your parents because people refuse to believe that the parents you had are really, truly, pieces of shit. They think they are encouraging you towards spiritual release. You will feel alone. You will envy all those people that claim to have loving wonderful parents that they love. You will eventually learn they were lying like rugs and full of shit. You will swear that you will never be like your parents but you are more like them than not.

You will be given a sexual identity you don't want. You might have secrets you believe are too terrible to speak of out loud. You will carry burdens you can't bare. Suddenly out of the blue your beautiful face will be coated with acid and all the rest of your days you will be considered a pariah. The life you lead will cause you to warp and twist in ways difficult to untangle. If you are courageous and strong or noble and kind it will never be pointed out to you because people are riddled with envy; praise feels like a currency they can't afford to part with. You will have only one moment in your whole life when someone was kind to you. It will involve being handed a tissue by a stranger as you wept. You will go to your appointment for your abortion alone. You will be blamed for shit you never did, and you'll get away with murder. You will be born on the wrong side of the tracks and the stink will follow you for life. You will have the misfortune of being born where ethnic cleansing is all the rage and your ethnicity is being raged against. You will have to walk hundreds of miles across a desert, drinking your own piss along the way for survival, and then in a civilized society you will die in a mugging.

You will live by the ten commandments, (or some other list of instructions for decency), and you will realize everyone else is reading off another list. You will doubt yourself. You will be temporarily or permanently linked to people who want you to doubt yourself.

You will do everything you can imagine to be happy and still feel a gaping hole filled to the brim with misery. You will be ignored and ridiculed. You will read thousands of self-help books and never realized you are the book that needs to be written. You will learn all your lessons too late. You will have dreams of traveling and you will be stuck right where you are until you die. You will pine over the one that got away and you will waste too many years doing so. The pined upon never gave you a second thought. You will be swindled, conned, berated and lied to. People will say they will call and they never will.

Men will whisper in your ear and take from you all that you hold dear. You will be robbed of your dignity, your virginity, your money and your equilibrium. Women will sidle up next to you and seduce you. They will trap you into a lifelong relationship by having a child with you that neither of you wants. You will be told to be yourself and you will rarely find a situation where that proves to be true. You will be so depressed that you attempt suicide and fuck that up so royally that instead you spend the rest of your life a paraplegic unable to get it right the second time around without the assistance that no one will give. The only power you think you have is in your vagina and dick; you never learned how to influence people with any other body part. The only charm you think you have is in your wallet and you buy peoples' affections never sure if they like you or your money. The only power you have is your rage and behind your back you are known as a passive-aggressive fuck head. You will never know how to do anything other than use these powers as you've learned to do so.

You will be so neurotic that you will never hear anything anyone is really saying because your neurosis is doing the translation. You will lose your courage by 40.

Someone will take your feelings and recklessly stab them with a rusty knife and once they know you're bleeding nice and warmly, they will stab you again.  For some you are just sport. You will be used, taken advantage of and be left gasping for breath. You will lose dear friends simply because you grew apart. You will miss them. You will love people you can't be intimate with and be intimate with people who don't care about you. You will wonder over and over again: what is the point of all this? You will contemplate suicide. People will tell you suicides are selfish because they don't consider those they left behind. All those that are left behind are contributing, in their own special way to the madness you've had enough of.

Nothing will work or go as planned. Everything you decide was the wrong choice. Too many people will be eager to say: I told you so. Your hurt will be indescribable, your tears will never cease, your rage will know no end, your sense of shame will eat you alive. If you're lucky you will get a second chance. If you're really lucky you'll get the second chance with someone you thought you hated. You'll be a big shot and die with an irony you'll never know.

You will succeed with your suicide. You will no longer gnash your teeth. You will be forced to depend upon people who despise you. You will be given endless bullshit to dodge when all you want is to twirl in a lovely breeze. Endless hurt. Situations of unlimited audacity and pain. As you ripen nothing better will come of it that anyone notices. You will know things others don't and they will make a point of making you seem like an idiot. You will marry people who the moment you get sick they will abandon you. You will keep the decomposing bodies of your parents in your house because you are the only one left and you can't bare to be alone and they are better company than solitude. You learn to get over the stink.


PART TWO

Over here, or there. Left or right. Up or down, Right or wrong. You will be given endless choices; most of them you will not remember or catch as such. It may just appear as a rat race. A maze. A fucking set-up and a trap. You will be sure things are out to get you.You will be tempted all too often by the shinier object. You're going to get paranoid. You will puff yourself out like a peacock, smug and warm, looking nothing like the idiot everyone knows you to be. You will notice that the furrows around your mouth and between your brows are beginning to make you look sour and angry. You will mutter to yourself: The river has run and this is me. You will not know how to reshape the shoreline of your face, your emotions, your life. You will have long forgotten that the lifelines you clenched in your fist at birth have always been there as a map to guide you. You will be endlessly told of instant fixes. You will be promised nothing will hurt. Cutting things off your body will seem like a good idea. You will be promised you will look rested; you will actually look sad. Sad and pathetic. The choice to age gracefully terrifies you. You think you will age like your rat bastard parents. You have the choice to age like your hero.

You don't know how to be alone. You don't know how to weed out the riff-raff. You can't remember being loved. Orgasms seem like a waste of time. Actually you hate sex because you've never had an orgasm. Rather than explore yourself, you roll your eyes. You've bought into stuff that doesn't matter. Your fat doesn't matter, nor your halitosis, your race doesn't matter  (you will be loved because of your race and someone, regardless of your race, will fuck you over); nothing matters in the long run. You will read great literature and fail to make the connection that by reading you had the chance to be your own heroine. You will collect art, precious, beautiful art - art that brings tears to the eyes- and you will walk through life squelching beauty over here, over there, left and right, up and down, be it right or be it wrong. At one time you stared at your reflection in the mirror swearing you had answers. Now you don't even bother; you think you know what's there. You feel lucky your significant other looks good. You like having your friends declare: Hubba Bubba. You keep forgetting you have nothing in common with your significant other and this is why you are seeing someone else.

You've finally reached the point where you declare: What's the point? You call in sick and don't bother to go out for some fun. You're tuckered out. The phrase, 'social construction' means nothing to you.

You convert. You join a religion that is strict because you feel out of control. You meditate but are the least relaxed person anyone knows. You do service thinking service leads to enlightenment. You fast, you pray, you go on retreats, you travel to faraway places to spend weeks with people who tell you enlightenment comes from swallowing rope, hauling it out your rear and standing on your head. You think certain people from specific countries are innately superior to you. It never occurs to you that your significant other is sick of you too. You'd rather see them dead than happy without you. You plot revenge towards anyone that can go on without you; towards people with a mind of their own. You hold grudges that poison your face with lines that are deep with lachrymosity and wretchedness.

PART TWO A:

You never ever trust yourself. Never. Not even when you are thinking you are smothered in joy. When you laugh it sounds hollow; like its hard for you to bother.

PART THREE:

You have this crazy idea everything bad that ever happens to you is someone else's fault.  If it weren't for the people you keep meeting everything would be sublime. You beat people because they make you do so. You got fired because your boss was an asshole. You cheat on your wife because she is fat. You cheat on the hubby because his retrieval of bacon is skimpy. You visit prostitutes because you need a blow job. The reality is that you are just miserable, lonely and haven't a clue how to be different.

You don't ask questions because you never want an answer. You never want to know. Asking means you will learn a truth and it may be about you. Asking usually means you will be asked in return. You hold your head so high no one can see how full of shit you are. You haven't a clue how to ask for what you want. The concept of getting what you desire is beyond your grasp. You engage in bondage and claim it's sexually gratifying. A spike through your nipple, in our eyes, looks painful, pitiable and sad.

You are the constant. The lovers, the bosses, they all change. Or they remain the same because you keep choosing the same. You got it slightly wrong… All that matters is you but not at the detriment to the rest of us. All good choices, all the best decisions never hurt anyone else beyond (possibly) someone else's feelings. What is right for you is never bad for anyone else. (A secret): You will be told to follow your heart and when you do be prepared to be strung out to dry. No one really wants you to follow your heart. Following your heart sounds easy; what you are really doing is following your instinct and your instinct is the most primal, unfaltering, truest thing you possess. It will never lie to you, cheat you, or take you where you don't belong. When did you get rid of Max Ehrmann's 1927 prose poem Desiderata. When did you decide it was too kitsch? 

PART FOUR

Your job is here on earth. Here is heaven and here is hell. Life is going to do nothing but offer up the shittiest scenarios possible. Think of it like a game show. Your duty is to accept what is behind door number one --a barrel of monkeys-- like you won the car and home behind door number three. Your job is to try again and again until you see just how funny a barrel of monkey's, taken home on the bus, with looks abounding, would actually be in your studio apartment.  No matter how horrible it is, it can always be worse. Find the jokes wherever and whenever you can. The jokes are the strings that hoist us back to standing when we can't go on. Make fun of the awful. 

After your death there will be no cocktails with Jesus. No hanging out on cloud 9 with Miles and Einstein. No virgins. No gates.  The light and the dearly departed reaching out to greet you, that is all an organic biological manifestation to make the transition easier for you. You will simply be compost soon for other things to grow and come to life off of. Your friends will miss you and this fact makes true the phrase: The world will never be the same without you. It won't be, but it will march on. There will never be another you, and there will never be another chance once you are gone. Get it right, now. You have to find your heaven, it's not waiting for your death, it's in the palm of your hands.

* All events guaranteed to have happened, or about to, to someone.