Zen and the Art of Smart-Assery: Laugh like you mean it
By: Christopher Laine
Tags: Fiction, Happiness, Humor, Philosophy, Opinion

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Before we get started, there’s this

Dude, what the hell is going on?

You know, the last couple years have been a sinkhole. A sinkhole in a sewage line set on fire with thermite. It’s been about as much fun as dancing barefoot outside the public toilets at a free reggae concert. It’s been a salmonella burrito and putrid cabbage salad kind of couple years. We’ve all felt it.

it’s been as messed-up as this ‘You got a purty mouth’ video game character

It’s been an uncanny valley computer game soccer player couple of years.

I’ve been watching a whole lot of miserable people getting more and more miserable on every day that wakes us up, and miserable as we drag ourselves to miserable bed.

Why? Shit, why not? Things are fucked. I mean, not to be “that guy”, but shit is bad. The world, people. She ain’t lookin’ so flash.

First, we got morons and tyrants everywhere(and in some cases an orange knockoff version) running the world. We all know they’re morons and tyrants. You wanna dress ’em up as the great white hope, or the whozits who’s gonna set shit straight, go for it, but you’re not blind. An autocrat dressed up in your favourite sports regalia is still a fucking douche who you’d avoid like a rat turd tasting contest. These rich scumbags are fucking all of us (and not the fun way) left, right and center, and laughing their way to our collective banks. They are ruling with an iron fist, and that fist is getting day on day.

Cat sound!

Next, look at the state of the planet. What the fuck, man. Who’s minding the goddamn store? Clearly not us. We had one job: Not fuck up our one house. Kill and maim each other all you want, but do NOT fuck up the house. Well, we went and fucked it up good, and we let the aforementioned tyrants and morons go on fucking it up all the faster. We keep guzzling cheap drinks and eating shit wrapped in plastic, and looking around going “What can we possibly do to fix this?” We made a toxic crap on our own lawn — like ALL over our own lawn — and now we gotta get around to cleaning it up.

Lil help? (the earth as viewed from flat earth space)

People are pissed off. No doubt on that front. You can’t fart out your own front window these days without someone getting offended, or sending death threats, or wanting to report you to the fart police (that’s a real thing. I totally looked into it on the Breitbart website. Those guys are LEGIT!). Everyone is enraged about something, and its usually being enraged at someone else for being enraged with them. I’m in this whole enragement thing with my neighbour. She’s furious at me for farting out my own window. Well, actually, it was INTO her window, but JEEZ!!!! I am SO mad at her!!! etc.

I’m irrelevant and everyone is to blame!

We have no fucking idea what is true and what is not anymore. Sure, I can trawl through endless wikipedia pages, which is funny and boring at the same time. I can read this or that website, and then stay in my own home waters, for fear of seeing something which disagrees with my viewpoint. Everyone who disagrees with my opinion, btw, is totally wrong, and nothing you say will ever change my opinion. Ever. Wrongies.

Our news media smells like a cross between a jockstrap in the compost, and glitter lube as used on PornHub. I am unsure if the glitter in the lube effects its smell, but you’d assume. Thing is, while we defend our news channels on the one hand, on the other, it all does kinda look like shock TV nowadays. Everything is shocking, or upsetting, or infuriating. I feel like I’m living through some version of Hell designed especially for Walter Cronkite, where real news has been relegated to a never-ending crossover episode of Hard Copy and When Animals Attack. Most of what we see and read in the news these days is, at best, op-ed pieces, and at worst, blatant sycophancy sucking the Presidential / Prime Ministerial pecker of the week.

What’s this shit-show?!

Yes, ladies and gentlefops, we are in a mess. White, black, brown, a weird Orange Julius colour, people all over are feeling it. Our planet is catching on fire while grinning Big Brother Heads (or in Russia’s case, weird shirtless potato heads) grin and nod all around us. Money has less value, and no matter how hard most of us try, we are just not seeing the love.

So, what now? Now that we have all that on the table (and trust me, I know there’s a lot more than just that. Cold and flu season approaching the Northern Hemisphere, my banana hammock just a bit TOO snug this summer season, to mention a few), we have to just sit a moment and say what we all are thinking. “Fuck”

This sucks, no doubt. I ain’t gonna sugar coat it. It does truly suck. So what to do?

Laugh.

How the Fuck is that gonna help?!

Glad you asked. It’s not. Well, not directly. Not per se. Not in any “it will actually change anything” sort of way. Not in any way that will make an immediate difference. I mean, not unless you have like a super laugh or something. You got one, call me. I totally have an idea for a sitcom.

Not helpful in any actual “this will fix anything” sort of way.

Laugh, because what the fuck else are you gonna do? You can sit there making sad face, crumbling into your coffee or tea, wishing for some other world, some other time in history where you could just stupidly sit back and grin about how awesome everything is. Yeah, cupcake, that shit is NOT gonna happen. Even back when “America was Great”, back when “Anyplace was great” it wasn’t great. It’s never great. And if right now is particularly not great, well that’s our lot. You can whinge about it, or you can suck it up and laugh.

You can be furious with Johnny or Jamie or your fart-hating neighbour, and all the goddamn good it’ll do you. Now you’re just more of a miserable fuck, and what has all your anger done? Got you one step closer to going postal? One more crease in your face so you’re getting dangerously close to Kellyanne Conway levels of wallet face. You can pinch up your face (not to mention your ass) in sanctimony and high-mindedness, or you can pull the plug and just let go. Laugh at it all. It’s all gonna end for each and every one of us anyway. What have you got to lose but your unhappiness?

All this? All this shit we’re facing? It’s the deal we’ve been dealt, and we have to accept our lot in history. Did we make this mess? Not all at once, and not in totality, but yeah, we’re all kinda culpable. Don’t deflect. You, me, that asshole over there, we all had something to do with it. And even if we think we didn’t, that does a fat lot of good to be up on a high horse while the boat is going down. Join into the weakness and stupidity of Monkeys Gone Civilized and play your part. Laugh, not because you don’t care,but before you can do something about it, you have to take a moment at laugh at how much you have to do. That time when you decided to clean out your garage or attic and walked into some zombie apocalypse movie made out of old floppy disks, broken luggage and fifty pantings done by your niece that suck but you can’t bring yourself to throw away, just in case she somehow gets famous? You know the garage and/or attic I’m talking about. You walked in, looked around at it all, and just lost it. What is all this shit?! you asked, then burst out laughing. Yeah, our planet, that’s this times a million. But we can do it. We just have to take a minute to see our stupid part in this burning clown car. Laugh that we have been so stupid and irresponsible that we couldn’t even do this one thing right. Laugh, and then be in it to win it.

Why laugh? Laughing is a shield. Laughing is an attack. Laughing says we can overcome (not come over. That’s what little kids do for sleepovers. But I digress), and we can handle our shit, no matter what dumptruck full of dumps have been backed up and dumped on our living room rug. Laughing is a self-defense mechanism built into the existential orangutans we are, a release valve to let us transform all the fucked-uppery around us into something that doesn’t seem quite as bad. That neighbour you’re fighting with doesn’t seem so repugnant (fart hater that she is). The world doesn’t seem so fucked up, and dealing with the sleazy shenanigans of our would-be masters seems a little less difficult to topple, disturbingly homo-erotic / orange liar though they might be.

Humour is the one thing I think all of us share. And I mean straight up humour. Laughing at something crazy, or ridiculous, or just flat out riotous. Not at somebody else’s expense (well, not most people. Some people got it coming), but more at the absolutely hysterical situation we all find ourselves in. Like how much worse can it get before this whole thing goes Road Warrior and shit? How much more like idiocracy can we swallow before we laugh-sneeze it out our nose at the family reunion?

I don’t really care if you take my advice, or believe a word I say (except the whole thing about the fart police). Just try tomorrow to see if you can’t find something funny. Something to crack your smile. Something you can do to make someone else laugh.

Laughter is infectious. Don’t believe me? Try it.

I’ll be here trying to figure out which of my neighbour’s windows will be open once I finish this five-alarm chili.