Sometimes, in the morning, you stumble onto a morning kids’ show you’ve never seen before and will never see again, something on some cable network called VooVoo or NickNack, something about incredibly non-iconic chickens or squirrels or human babies or something, and they’re barely doing anything, they’re literally just hanging out, not chasing anything or blowing anything up or making huge mistakes stemming from over-the-top flaws, they’re just helping each other buy a popsicle or find a bike or something. And you think, that anthropomorphized but non-stylized chicken or rabbit in a diaper, that’s me. And the barely invested artist that drew it, that wanted to save his good idea for later, that’s God. And this show, this inoffensive, direct-to-syndication Canadian produced public television show, which is probably in its eleventh or sixteenth season, and has probably won nineteen different awards you’ve never heard of, from Alliances of Educators or Councils for Cognitive Pediatric Media, this is my life. Not just now, but since birth, this is the space I have occupied, this is what I have been doing. And you don’t even know what you mean by that, which only underlines the point, which is that you never have been and never will be magnificent, profound or even contemptible, which is why the feeling you’re getting now, instead of being some cool feeling with a French name, your feeling doesn’t have a name, it’s not a feeling, it’s an odorless, colorless vapor, it’s the Dan Harmon of feelings. And then you think, why can’t you get this sensation from a real cloud or a real ant hill or a real conversation with a real friend, why, if you’re going to have ennui, must you arrive at it through fifteen seconds of Dora the Dog or Chicken Field Trip or whatever this is. Why are you like this, why can’t you touch anyone, why is your brain a box with a picture of your face on it that everyone has to watch, not because you’re worth it but because
you need it, because, like a weaponless Predator in a permanent state of invisibility, you’re just barely visible when you stand in front of things people are already looking at, and you only exist to the extent that they react. And why is your explanation for this problem another reference to another late eighties B movie, if you’re going to have ennui shouldn’t you, at some point, read a book, or, at the very least, watch your Revolutionary Road screener. But then you thumb it into your Tumblr, and it’s gone, because instead of feeling it, you wiped it on everyone else. And that makes your life worthwhile, your ability to smear it on as many other people as possible. So you feel better, even though your description of feeling better has to be dry and cynical, and you wonder what that was all about. Sometimes that happens. Weirdly, at the same time each year, which you are now able to recognize, because the real, external calendar now contains actual, memorable links to your internal emotional calendar, thanks to things like having to go to the sound mix of your second annual Valentine’s Episode. Excelsior?