BLACK HUMOR | MENTAL HEALTH

The Lonely Planet Guide To 2021

Or A Writers Dive into Depression

You’ve got the walk of a fat man whose inner thighs are chaffing you raw. Your pants have begun to ride up the crack of your arse. People can smell the desperation that excretes from every pore. It’s a Lynx-style vapor trail that screams toxicity as fast as your eroding masculinity.

You’ve had your heyday. You’re now old news. Nobody alive can recall that moment in Spring when you managed to train a Chanukah bear into card tricks for the mentally ill. That same bear went mental after an inmate stole its mackerel sandwich. You managed to pass off that debacle to youthful vigor. Everybody knows what bears are like after several cans of lager. It wasn’t as if they weren’t pre-warned.

No more will youth be your excuse. You cry late into the night depressed at the passing of time. Loved ones have gone. Your ill-fated Fart Anniversary was doomed from the start. Stuffing your woman full of legumes and other gaseous edibles was no way to win a heart. It was a luncheon that failed to hold any surprises. We all knew she would toot, but the follow-through was too much for you. To unexpected. Too human.

And now you’re alone. Blobbing out on your sofa. A dietary warning to the slow-movement of high carbs and endless treats. You wear cardigans the way a man should wear cardigans. Worn…not by choice. That’s become the motto of your sordid life. Each choice inflicting a new path into desperation. The marriage was worn…not by choice. The impish children that mock your movements were bred…not by choice. The promotion was handled badly as you burnt bridges with a Richard III swath of scathing vindictiveness. Promoted…not by choice.

Your life has become an endless reboot. You’re in a coma machine hooked up to the IT gurus. They’ve instructed you to turn the machine off…then on again…but it’s no good. Your comatose body isn’t coming back to life. Your male patterned baldness glowers from the hospital window. Each sun-speck ray glistening off a once fully-mopped head of hair.

You’re a forty-year-old man whose success has now passed you by. You’re turning toxic. You’re getting angry. This isn’t the life you had planned. You're deep in debt and the parents have cut you out of the will. There’s no future in tortoiseshell onesies. You’ve bottomed out.

The only saving grace that makes you the least bit interesting is your addictions. Alcoholism has wreaked your liver. Porn addiction has jerked your manhood into a death-grip of insufficient highs. The medication no longer helps you to sleep. Hours and hours are spent flicking through a screen of depravity. What’s normality? The hits have to be bigger. The self-destruct more destructive. The annihilation must be nuclear.

Nothing makes sense anymore.

Welcome to 2021.