The Cynical Child

Overly positive people scare me, a tad. I can't help but wonder why or how one can just be excited about everything all of the time, without immediately thinking they must be on something, or have buried issues. I realize some prefer to smile through the muck and convince themselves everything is fine until it becomes so. Others accept the BS, without candy-coating anything. This is not an attack on how we, as individuals choose to handle the unpleasantries life gives us...just to make sure that's clear. In other words, I probably also scare the overly positive people. Maybe life actually is one giant exclamation point for some (if so, right on!!), but I will always be the one to question this kind of behavior, just as some people may feel I hide behind comedy and cameras. I'm OK with being "the cynical one," because I figure we just balance each other out. Would we ever laugh if everything was just AWESOME all of the time? I'd fall asleep. I embrace the positive and the negative, perhaps more so the negative - only because I can almost always find humor in it. Humor, to me, is positive. Therefore, many of my negatives are also my positives.

Life, to me, is exactly like this moment I had last week in the car. I was driving across the Triboro, and the sky was just fucking beautiful...this piercing shade of blue with huge silvery clouds that fell perfectly above the Manhattan skyline...birds flew gracefully overhead in careful flocks...Rufus Wainwright's cover of "Hallelujah" played in the background. Yes, I was having....a moment. Like, I smiled as my eyes welled up with tears just thinking, "The world is so beautiful...everything is beautiful...I have a warm, gooey heart...deep sigh". That was EXACTLY when I was almost side-swiped by a taxi, hit the horn, swerved to the side, and cursed loudly...Rufus just sang on. That's life to me, and if that isn't hilarious, I don't know what is....we have these moments of complete beauty. Complete bliss, interrupted by...well...life. Or does it realistically happen the other way around? Maybe life is often horse shit, interrupted by moments of complete AWESOME, and it's those outstanding moments that keep us going - that make it all worth it. All I'm saying is that it's OK if that is the realistic pattern. We're allowed to cut ourselves some slack in order to be genuine. After all, if my moment on the Triboro had just ended in, "Everything is beautiful...deep sigh", would you have read this til the end?