Or past you being molested by future you in some horrifying diliation station incident. While it turns into the hentai you jacked yourself off to when your sister died.
When she died, I was sitting in the living room unsupervised, watching John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in the TV-cut version of Face/Off.
My sister had gone down to California for her leukemia treatment, and she was over a thousand miles away. I didn't even get to say goodbye.
My dad got the phone call that she'd coded in the ICU. I watched him as he stumbled upstairs in silence, his eyes hazy.
When he got to the top, he screamed. He screamed like a woman. I will never forget that scream, that howl that reverberated through my bones. I'd never heard anything like it from him before or since.
Do you ever get the feeling that the human condition is kind of a pointless struggle? We live, just so we can suffer one indignity and disease after another. Just so we can watch our parents die, maybe even watch our children or our siblings or our friends die.
Just when it seems like we can finally stand on our own two feet, life sends us tumbling down a slippery slope of misery, regret, and failure.
Politics are pointless. Candidates don't mater. Voting is useless. Nothing ever seems to change. Technology stagnates in befuddlement. Treasure turns to debt. Statues dissolve into sand.
We call ourselves moral paragons, and yet, we are always bombing someone. We are always making some unlucky bastard out there and his family homeless and cold and hungry and afraid.
Thomas Ligotti was right. This, all of this, is just horror and madness.
So, why not laugh?
