The true meaning of schadenfreude!

When the only thing preventing you from killing yourself is the fear of giving pleasure to your enemies.

The big and really only problem in this world is that the clock keeps ticking away and bridges really do burn down. All the Nietzscheian optimism in the world won’t change that fact. When I was a kid, I was an avid video game player. In that era this meant heading to an arcade with a pocket full of quarters, as Buckner & Garcia’s immortal “Pac-Man fever” evokes. I was a natural on these machines…routinely outperforming most adults whilst as young as ten. I would have dreams about playing these games and wake up with solutions as to how to improve my score. Anyway, I recall becoming sort of a perfectionist later on. For most games you would get three lives per play. If I died early or missed some desired objective during my first life, I would routinely kill off the rest of the game and start again by simply inserting another token. If only the real world provided the luxury of such restarts. Sadly it doesn’t. We are all forever connected to our past mistakes and misfortunes. For me, there is one mistake, or event of circumstance, if you will, that eclipses all others, and in fact, has been looming over me of late. It involves the loss of a relationship with someone very special to me. This person is not deceased, but for all intensive purposes they might as well be, or more precisely, I might as well be to them. Try as I might, with every fibre of my being, to rectify and reunite (rhyme coincidental), my efforts are met with futility, and my willingness to do anything humanly possible for her is simple not enough. This is not someone who can be replaced, and I cannot go back in time. Several clichés come to mind at this point, but I will refrain from uttering them. Instead I will quote Hal Hollbrook from the great 80's era movie "Wall Street": “Man looks in the abyss…there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”

JMR