The Retort

Scraping the Barrel: The Final Death of Optimistic Nonsense

Wed November 11th, 2009 by Mike Schrage Of The Retort Staff

Note from Mike, or NFM: What do you get when you accidentally submit a half-completed article? The correct answer is last issue’s offering of soggy crap. For those of you who had to absorb 800 words that read like a sappy and self-indulgent Gilmore Girls plot line, you noticed that my intended “parody of real life” displayed a complete lack of any jokes or reputable sarcasm whatsoever. Although the final draft (which is still on my desktop) was funnier than being kicked in the face by a rabid mule.

To say I am embarrassed that piece of garbage inexplicably made print is a vast, vast understatement… to be completely honest, the fact that that article had my name on it made me more uncomfortable than a vegan who just experienced having a corn dog forcibly lodged in her windpipe. My bad.

Secondly, for the first time ever, I am offering an apology for a retrospectively cruel and totally unneeded comment I made. I have long operated from the plateau of joking about anything and everything and anyone who has know me for more than twenty minutes knows that nobody has more fun at my expense than yours truly. Even as Nebraska’s first fourth-grade card-carrying nihilist, I knew I had little respect for those who picked on others with little provocation, and as someone layered with various character and physical flaws (See: Mike’s comically sporadic patches of body hair), I am the last person to poke fun at anybody’s personal appearance, especially when I failed to frame it in a context that wouldn’t seem as an attack the average person.

That is not how I have ever done business, and to those I offended or made uncomfortable, please accept my apologies. Now, if I haven’t totally lost you, avert your eyes southward as I try to rebuild my shanty of dignity and integrity one poorly-crafted word at a time. Now quickly, Hand me the righteous spackle of redemption!

I have what I like to call my secret Archangel of Optimism; somebody who has the ability to ninja up from behind me for the explicit purpose of trying to cheer me up, and despite the fact that she knows that I hate this, still continues to try. Like somewhere deep within the recesses of my battered and bitter soul lies an orb of joy, waiting to spring forth in a happy rainbow of orange sherbet-flavored viscera from my pasty chest and pollinate the world in a veritable rainbow of kittens, balloons, and a rejuvenating dose of zippity-doo-da. I hate to disappoint you my dear, but that is simply not true. Sure, she grates upon my bah-humbug sensibilities and less-than buoyant outlook, but I have no excuse to as why I continue to schedule social activates in public with her, aside from the fact I obviously enjoy marinating in my own self-loathing. Also, my two primary default emotions happen to be anger and apathy, and most people cannot get past that.

I don’t always smile, or more accurately I don’t make a conscious effort not to. I just fail to see the good in being always chipper and cheery, light as a feather and sailing on the breezes of misguided giddiness like a cartoon frog in a Disney movie. Remember Charles Schulz’s iconic ‘Peanuts ‘comic strip? Go read it as an adult when you’re having a crappy day, and tell me it isn’t the most depressing thing on the planet. Charlie Brown was freaking miserable. His friends were dicks, he was ostracized by his classmates, his unrequited desire for the little red-headed made him miserable, he was a terrible athlete, and you know for a fact that for all his forced ironclad optimism, he ended up alone and unloved, with a serious drinking problem smoking unfiltered reservation cigarettes living in an apartment above a used furniture store. I challenge you to be happy after reading that last paragraph. Mike 1, Optimists 0.

To avoid mentioning that the childhoods of yours truly and good ol’ Chuck Brown didn’t share disturbing similarities would be doing a great disservice to the message I am trying to drive home with such subjective force. I too, was a social pariah who didn’t even rate high enough to play D&D with the Audio/Visual club, and I distinctly remember one encounter with a childhood bully. “If you don’t mind”, I squeaked. “Could you avoid hitting me in the face because we are having family pictures taken this evening.” Well, it turned out the bully did in fact mind at least several times, and let me just say a family portrait loses a great deal of nostalgic luster when your fat lip is immortalized for all eternity (or at least until your parents messy divorce when all family photos were destroyed). Also, take into account that I was generally socially awkward and uncoordinated led to me not having a date for prom, and then you tell me how I could have possibly emerged from the minefield of childhood twirling a shiny baton as I lead the optimist parade. I don’t blame my parents, though. Of their four children, three turned out to be successful, well adjusted and popular, placing their success rate at about 75%, which translates into a pretty respectable and average score. Yes, my parents got a ‘C’ in parenting, and if that’s good enough to graduate college, I suppose it’s good enough to spawn. Smartly done, parental figures!

For a sociology class recently, I had to list my personal references, perhaps to determine the value of my inner circle to society, because as the old adage goes, “A person is judged by the company he keeps…in bed” (Assume I got this assignment from a fortune cookie). But let’s talk for a moment, if you will, about my inner circle of friends; namely those close to me and those who have incriminating photographic evidence that could very well doom my chances of me ever being elected to public office. I am not somebody who promotes an aura of infectious optimism, so understandably my social circle does not have what one could call a “broad circumference”. Inside these narrow confines of old friends and confidants stands a veritable rouge’s gallery of misfits, mongoloids, alcoholics, arrogant intellectuals and single parents who refuse to hug their children. After several stiff drinks, I have just now officially determined that my social circle is for utter shit.

Some people call me a grouch, but I disagree. If I am anything, I’m a realist. Sometimes situations just flat out suck, and there is nothing that can be done about that. I hate when people try to cheer me up; if I wanted to hop, skip, and laugh I would ingest any form of mood altering Altoid-sized medication by the handful and everything would be peachy. In fact, I think that anyo-ne who automatically proposes an omnipotent silver lining or a divine will in any crappy situation is someone weak in inner strength. I for one am not from Thailand, Burma, or Arkansonian trailer parks, but I imagine it is difficult to find the silver lining in tsunamis, genocide, or tornados…or living in Arkansas. But at least Sylvester Stallone is there to lecture us about the human condition by lopping off some Asian dude’s head with a homemade machete. Thanks, Rambo! (NFM: You’d have to have seen the latest Rambo to get that joke. Is it too much to ask that you meet me halfway?) Now somebody get me a Zoloft and a chicken burrito because I just now remembered Katrina turning the ninth ward into beachfront property a few years back.

To close out this article, (and I had to wait until the end, else I’d exhaust my allotted column space in rapid fashion) I have highlighted a list of things that darken my outlook: Flat-brimmed ball caps, any mug that holds more than forty ounces of fluid, churches asking me for money, forwarded emails, karaoke, mechanical pencils, pro-life fanatics, pay-per-view hotel porn, crappy bands who make good music, people who drink coffee through straws, corsages, AAA batteries, “Reverend” Fred Phelps and his congregation of hate-mongers, Texas, my cousin and her brood of ill-behaved brats, Napster, cancer, the number two, anyone under the age of 68 with a “Family Circus” cartoon stuck to their refrigerator with a dumb novelty magnet, motocross, the mullet, guys who celebrate the entire Abercrombie and Fitch catalog on a a daily basis, Pol Pot, bumper stickers, roller blades, the Euro, sleeveless t-shirts, parents who blame results of their crappy parenting on Grand Theft Auto, Lee Greenwood and that ridiculous freaking novelty song, algebra, Golden Corral restaurants, personalized license plates, parents with pictures of their children on any article of clothing, mesh trucker hats, soda machines that charge more than .55 for a can of Fresca, the fact that Jeff Foxworthy’s “Redneck pride” phenomena hasn’t yet had its final death rattle, bicentennials, people who ask if I’m from Wisconsin, celebrities telling you that it’s your obligation as an American to vote, Laundromats, MMA apparel, and the TV show “That’s so Raven!” And on that note, if little Rudy from the Cosby Show has a problem with that, I ain’t hard to find.*