Wait For The Punch Line

Wait For The Punch Line

A surreal horror begins when, in the devil’s depths of depression, your mind begins planting insidious questions. “Am I losing my mind?” “Should a sane person ask that? Will an insane person answer?” “At what point does this fear become pointless?” 
…… “Am I broken?” 
Those questions have yet to sprout, and already you are ill from a fevered opinion of yourself. Already your mental landscape resembles a nuclear wasteland. Here, the remnants of the war waged in your brain pockmark the landscape, and the sun can’t be teased through a fallout fog. Here, your detoured, devious, mind begins by sowing seeds of destructive doubt. These seeds-on-steroids, gestate negative thoughts that end up spreading their anarchy like poison ivy across your fertile nightmare.
That last question –the “am I broken?” question– is arguably the worst; because the tone of the question suggests darker implications. You may ask, am I broken, but what you mean is, how broken am I? 
Taking mental inventory, you become the bull in a china shop. You’re too terrified to commit any serious investigation for the disruption it may cause. Instead, you opt to sit on your hands and judge the damage from afar. In a state of mind not fit for survey, you imagine every break as a heinous exaggeration. Each crack represents a chasm of dysfunction. 
If any truth is to be found in this experience, it will be buried beneath a landslide of doubt.

An absurd horror persists when, doggedly treading open water, the life-vest offered by many family and friends is to simply, “stop thinking that way”. As if, in this permeating funk of despair, all it takes is the flip of some epistemic switch to see the light of day and part the gray sea. 
Unavoidable bitterness belches up like heartburn whenever you try to swallow their kind naivety, and the salty slap and choke of a harsh mistress muzzle your need for a calmer sea. Oblivious, your loved ones throw pearls of wisdom that they gathered in their travels. These pearls that they see shine with a determined brilliance burn to your irritated eyes with the violence that reflects your turbulent waters. 
Knowing nothing else to extend, they’ll tell you that this is an illusion, that you should go outside and walk around in the sunshine, you should go see a comedy with kin, you should visit the shelter and rescue a furry friend. They’ll suggest to you all the things that make one happy – thinking, as if somehow, somewhere, you had forgotten the way.

Yes, this horror may persist, but you *will* persist longer.  
And then a comedy will erupt when you wink at the surreal and chuckle at the absurd. 

Remember, this is your movie; there’s a comedy to be found in the errors; 
and redemption is ready – for those who see it through to the punch line.  
               
  1/12/13
M. L. Michael

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