deeplyshallow // what sucks is life

what sucks is life

What sucks is walking through a parking lot, feeling good, wind in your hair, sun on your back, gazing around at your surroundings and really feeling as if you’re somewhere near the top of the world… and then your gaze falls on your own reflection in the windows of the building you’re approaching, and how you look a little bit like a smushed dinner roll walking around on two long drinking straws. Usually it takes a moment like this to remind me why I refrain from wearing shorts in public. My ex-wife used to tell me that I had chicken legs. It was one of the few things she was right about. And unfortunately some things never change no matter how much weight you’ve lost (thirty-five pounds, btw).

What sucks is when the bookstore has sixty copies of The Devil Wears Prada and not a single copy of The Last of the Mohicans. I wandered into two very different stores today — Barnes & Noble, and the local bookstore-slash-wedding chapel — and neither had Mohicans, which I thought I had better read since I scored a victory by convincing the girl to let me name our future son Hawkeye. (The name’s more M*A*S*H-related than James Fennimore Cooper-related, but since the former’s name was inspired by the latter, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to back up my decision with a literary classic.)

What sucks are literary classics. Seriously, I’m surprised reading ever really took off in this country, what with the crap that got churned out in those old days of yore. So about two months ago I kept coming across all of these references online to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. You know how you’ll hear of something for the first time, and then suddenly you hear about it everywhere? Like that. So I ordered the book, and it finally showed up, and I finally read it. I’m pretty sure that there was no way the book could not be a disappointment, after all of the hype I’d read about it being an important novel that changes lives, etc., but my god this book was useless. What a letdown.

What sucks is the perception in this town of every potential house-buyer as a big fat dripping sucker. Remember the almost perfect house I wrote about a few days back? Well, we found out that the new buyer — sucker — is considering leasing the place long-term. They want $2300/month, which made me snort. That’s the most retarded number I’ve ever heard, considering that two streets over there’s a two-story house with double the space and ten times the view going for $1600/month, which seems to be the high-water mark for rentals around here. People in this town are drooling morons sometimes.

What sucks is spending a month doing some of the best design work you’ve ever done, and suddenly realizing that you can’t tell anybody about it.

What sucks is waiting for happiness.

What sucks is having a stack of DVDs to watch — like season two of Carnivale — and knowing that you ought to wait to watch them with Susan, since you shot yourself in the foot by getting her hooked on the show in the first place. When this kind of thing happens, I usually end up buying more DVDs to get me over the waiting; so today I bought both available seasons of Rescue Me, and a couple more movies, and ballooned my collection a little further.

What sucks is buying movies and unwrapping them, even those brittle-adhesive top-of-the-case stickers that suck so much, and then remembering that you’ve already consumed your available shelf space, and that you’ll just have to stack these movies off to the side, unalphabetized.