It’s July 23 and I haven’t written for a month. All motivation, gone. Wallowing in the why bother. Life is nasty, brutish, and actually seemingly quite long at this point. And the world is a disaster, a disappointment. People are disappointing. They never seem to do what you want or expect them to do. To do what is decent, in order to have done unto them, etc.
Take litter as an everyday example. Walking around my neighborhood, litter is a permanent resident, street address, everywhere. There are cans and plastic water bottles and cigarette butts among the blades of grass in such numbers that it might be said there are blades of grass among the cigarette butts.
After a heavy rain, water bottles will often collect in the metal slats of the sewer grate at the bottom of a nearby hill, some escaping and journeying to lakes and streams. Occasionally I find diapers in the parks, from babies who just don’t give a damn. Did they ever care, those babies? Who taught them this way of living, of unliving?
And this is just how people disappoint on the minor subject of litter, on a continuum that runs from roughly errant garbage to mass murder. The disappointment continuum.
And somewhere in there is love, and that’s really where people disappoint you.
People you love are always doing things you don’t want them to do, or doing things that you do want them to do, but doing them to someone else, which is even more disappointing.
And that’s why…
It poem time!*
Wallowing in the why bother (or ‘Optimism’)
So many of us wallow in the why bother
The what for and the doesn’t matter
The nothing I do makes a difference
It’s easier there among the who cares and the can’t be bothered
who know in their hearts that there’s no point
and it’s not worth the effort anyway.
And though the quit while you’re aheads offer something like hope expired
the why even trys, along with the I’m not good enoughs
might as well give up and join the accept defeats
who know that things will never change.
And now with all the FMLs and the IDGAFs…
Where do we even start?
Because you just know the NGLs are gonna L, eventually
Until all we have left in the end are the STFUs.
It’s just that life sometimes feels like a hole you’re digging while standing in
And death a growing pile roughly equal to the depth you’ve dug
To be pushed down upon you at the end of it all.
The truth is that it’s easy to slip into the disappointment continuum
And my only advice is that you have to get out more
Because eventually you’ll bump into a keep your chin up
Or a look on the bright side
An anything is possible
And you’ll come to see that while perhaps not every cloud has a silver lining
It doesn’t hurt to hangout more with the never give ups.
*I think this is my first and only poem of 2025. See: “I’m good for about one poem per year…” It’s not polished but I’m happy with it so far.
Leave a comment