Isn't it strange how you can be going through hell, I mean psychic hell, uncertainties mounting, head hurting, dark tunnels without an end, and at the same time, be writing jokes, thinking up puns, writing them all out on Internet forums, exchanging quips with co-workers at the water cooler. Schizophrenia and "tears of a clown when there's no one around"?
The Age of Irony, someone called our times. We tend to respond to everything with irony. To relieve our ever present anxieties with verbal absurdities. At least on the outside. But then there is this story. A man deep in debt, his wife's private medical clinic failing, took her and the children for a ride in the hills a couple of weeks ago, stopped the car, pulled a gun and shot them before killing himself. His neighbours later said he was his usual cheerful self the day of the incident.
One benefit that comes from reading newspaper celebrity gossip columns, as I have been doing lately on the afternoon train back home, is the life affirming implicit assurance they carry that the rich and famous, with all their money, mansions and leisure time, are, at times, as miserable, heartbroken, and sad as the rest of us. The gossip, which is, I suspect, written with just that in mind, gives us hope to continue going through our private hells. Of course, while the regular, plain folks readers of such columns understand all this subconsciously, we the overundereducated must first interpret such phenomena theoretically before we can stoop down, go slumming and read such tabloid trash.
"This country is not free by the pen but by the back, brains, and bullets, of a soldier."
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