Life is always hard, and now times are hard. Great. Now life is harder. That can be a real bummer, putting a vexing crimp in our plans. Not that any of us are formulating such grandiose visions these days, but that third meal a day on a regular basis seems to be a little problematic ever since the bankers and the real estate geniuses blew all the dough. So, we do our best, keep on keeping on, and hoping things get better soon. No sense getting all huffy about it, since everybody’s in the same boat. No one is in this life alone, and there’s plenty of pain and disappointment to go around. So take heart, think of the love you give and receive, the many cool things in your life and all the great people you have the privilege to know. And always remember, it could be worse. How, you say? Here’s how:
You could be a banker or a real estate genius. These days, they’re making lawyers and accountants seem like a fun bunch.
You could be an illiterate Cambodian farmer, who’s own government got him stinking drunk, ordered him to put his thumb print on a piece of paper, then stole his land and gave it to some megagiantjumbocolossal rubber corporation that proceeded to bulldoze his hovel and evict him and the lovely wife and kids along with granny, all his neighbors and everybody he ever knew. That’s a pretty nasty turn of events.
You could be Lindsay Lohan’s publicist. After a while you run out of synonyms for “spirited” and “fun loving” to explain away drunken arrests.
You could be Glen Beck. Count your blessings.
You could be the guy who invented Twitter, the only internet phenomenon not making its owners mega money. With 52 employees, it is expected to make a paltry 400,000 bucks for the third quarter of this year, sneaker money for the boy billionaires who invented YouTube, FaceBook, eBay, Amazon and so on and so on. The company “projects” revenues of a billion and a half by 2013 on a service that allows people to text each other a couple of sentences at a time for free. How they plan to do that is a mystery since they communicate only in 140-character messages.
You could be one of the people who invested $63 million in Twitter, trying to decipher a series of those incoherent 140 character messages explaining when they’ll see a return on their dough.
You could be a rapper named C Murder who just got convicted of a real murder. With that name, did the jury need to hear any testimony to make up their minds? This untoward occurrence has fellow rappers MC Manslaughter and Depraved Indifference thinking seriously of a name change.
You could be some naive, ignorant young jackass that never got laid who lets himself get talked into wearing a bomb overcoat and blowing himself and anyone near him to smithereens so he can have 72 virgins in Paradise. 73, if you count him. You have to wonder if any of these guys really think this through, being that their penises are the first things to fly off to who-knows-where when the bomb goes off.
You could be the guy who walks the late Leona Helmsley’s dog Trouble, who inherited 12 million dollars and lives in a mansion, for 8 bucks an hour, a cot in the tool shed and a hot plate.
You could be the guy who has to explain to the King of Dubai that your brainstorm of building a 206 story building in the middle of an inhospitable desert and a bunch of palm-shaped islands out of sand in the stormy Persian Gulf so rich Eurotrash can live there that the worldwide financial collapse has made all these fairyland creations ghost towns. KIngs don’t normally shrug off losing a few trillion dollars, usually looking for a whole bunch of heads to roll when these things happen.
You could be Rush Limbaugh’s new maid and your duties include obtaining wheelbarrows of powerful narcotic pills for the boss.
You could be John Moyer, the guy convicted of groping Minnie Mouse in Disney World. Picture another inmate asking him “What are you in for?”
You could be some guy on the French Riviera who stakes out a spot on the beach to check out the beautiful bikini babes and wind up on the next blanket from the “Burquini lady” in a head to toe Islam-friendly swimsuit.
Finally, you could be one of the 36,000 people who die every day from starvation while the whole world goes on red alert over a relatively mild strain of the flu that would take 30 years to kill 36,000 people. That would really frost you, no? Providing of course, you could muster up the strength to have any last words. Count our blessings and work for a better tomorrow.