What if I'm not cynical? What if I think it's too exhausting to be cynical? What if I'm cynical about being cynical? Is that ironic or just convoluted and nonsensical? Is that question itself ironic? Do you see how stupid that sounds?
Ask yourself: at what point does your hyperawareness climax in some kind of psychic overload and even basic human awareness is no longer possible because your brain was never meant (this doesn't invoke Fatalism or God) to be contorted in such reflexive shapes? Can you think yourself into becoming a sociopath?
I think irony is just a flimsy shield you overuse to deflect the most basic blows delivered to anyone who bothers to attempt to live.
Weltschmerz isn't my favorite German word. It's kind of pathetic that it's yours.
You killed my bird and my heart (don't laugh at that sentiment - I mean it more than you've ever meant anything, probably) that night.
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I guess on a basic level, if I set my inquiry into your indecipherable motivations aside, I shouldn't really be surprised. After all, there's something sadly ironic and even appropriate (given your fixation on irony) about the fact that the first man I considered becoming intimate with in four years murdered the only substitute for intimacy I've had for the last four years. I'm talking about you, Rex, killing my bird, by the way.
You walked in without knocking or ringing. You know I'm a very jumpy person, so why'd you do that? I almost cut my finger off since I was in the middle of dicing onions. As I recovered from my shock, you fed me a quotation from Wittgenstein which I've since attempted to track down without success. Did you make it up? If you did fabricate it, does that make it even more Wittgensteinian? I hate the way your thinking has affected mine and I fear that I'll never be able to expunge (I can write like I've read a thesaurus, too, Rex and it doesn't make either of us into a great writer) the detritus you've spewed onto my frontal lobe.
I can't believe we almost made love. I wasn't thinking. Thank God you killed my bird. I just wanted to make contact with you - to feel you feel me - something about how careless you seem to be made me want to try to pull you out of your comfortable manner of hip-ennui and dismissal and actually feel something for me. I wanted you to love me - to love me without commenting on your love for me or commenting on your commenting of your love for me - to wake up in the morning and not want to get out of bed - not because the enormity of your anxiety paralyzed you, but because you were exactly where you wanted to be - can you imagine what that feels like? I think I can.
Listen, Rex, I'm lonely. There's nothing ironic about my loneliness. You may disagree and say there's something ironic about the fact that my oppressive father owns a company that makes baby food and that his various machinations have arrested my development such that in many ways I have the emotional maturity of an infant, but listen...
I'm lonely. I've always been lonely. I'm not sure if I've ever met anyone who made me feel less lonely. Maybe Rick. Probably not. I've met people who've made me laugh, or cry, or offered me companionship on some level, but even then I've still woken up in the morning and usually cried before getting out of bed. I don't know why. Neither does Dr. Jay. Often, I feel sick and stuck inside myself - I can't speak and I can barely breathe and I shut my eyes and just listen to myself barely breathe and there are moments where it seems like I won't be able to draw another breath or let another out - that my entire respiratory system is suspended in some thick, sticky liquid that I may not overcome unless I shut my eyes tighter. Are you listening?
I want you to listen because I want you to understand that this loneliness hasn't made me a cynic or an ironist - that it doesn't have to work that way - that when you feel lonely or shameful, or shameful about your loneliness - that you can internalize it without letting it deaden you - that you could feel the shame and respond by doing your best to never shame someone else - that you could become an altruist instead of a cynic.
Case and point: you drive a DeLorean, because you like to think of the car as some kind of essential, but overlooked symbol of your generation, encapsulating the promises of technological advances and optimism which were completely unfounded and on some level you feel ashamed for having believed you'd ever get to ride a hoverboard or get rich from a sports almanac, or kiss your mom when she was 18, but you allowed that pain to make you into a cynic. You drive the DeLorean as an iconoclast. Really - it's just a shitty car from an even shittier movie trilogy that's part of the cultural landscape of your generation; you had no business taking its depiction of the possibilities of time travel seriously. Perversely, you especially like to make love to women who confuse their attraction to your DeLorean as a piece of their lost childhood (lost, by the way, because too many men like you have lied to them and made them insecure about themselves so they desperately search for access to a time when they were more secure and naive: childhood) with an attraction for the man who is driving it. If you want irony, consider the fact that you're using a childhood association in order to perform a very adult act. Is that irony? Or is that just disgusting?
I'm so glad you killed my bird. I can see this alternate dimension so clearly where we're lying in bed together and I've actually convinced myself that our intimacy means the same thing to you as it means to me. Would you ever admit to being lonely? I'll bet you've made your wife very lonely.
Just so you know, I don't romanticize this pain. I've actually come to realize that being lonely is better than being in the company of a doting cynic/ironist.
In case it's lost on you, know that this whole piece is a testament to the fact that the hyperawareness of cognition and expression that you seem to value above any sentiment is not restricted to the application of irony, cynicism, or cryptic verbosity. It can be used to expose sentiment - to risk sounding naive and stupid - I think if you actually appreciated this fact, your facade would come crashing down and you might finally experience some approximation of who you really are - if it makes sense to even speak in such terms to you.
I can't believe I almost made love to you.
