My overall panache consists of an ornamental plumage made of dead chickens, partridges, quails, foxes, and rabbits -- latter two are clearly not avian, but who gives a toss?

And today I start wondering to myself: Has there ever truly been a good reason to smile?

Little reasons, probably, to aid in the slow death march onwards. The clock unticks for no one. There was a little happiness on the side, some cold cherry on the way, and whine for breakfast. The last one is almost always the worst. There is very little to suggest things are going to change, and it would have been great or so if things had not been so monumentally hard to carry. I can only take so much for so long until my back starts to sore, and then when that selfsame burden unravels into all the reckoning and vindication and punishment for one, it will be hallelujah for the masses, glasses clinking at a wedding, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.

So the smile is theoretically not impossible. Every now and then my facial muscles twitch into shape at a minor event or two. Even at work, believe you me. But the thing that makes man bite dog is that yesterday I have opined to myself while daydreaming that I would have this feeling no other way, this blanket misery, an overture to clinical depression, I suppose. I need it for the same reason I needed to relive 2021 in my head all over again. Just like watching an old film praying for things to change this time around. All this is the motive of a greater purpose, and if not purpose, truth. I am not that important to partition myself into the collective hivemind of lifestream. Just another neither here nor there. So in order for me to lessen the load I must submit myself openly to the retribution, and that is the next challenge I must now endure, which is somewhat ironic since all this time I have been pushing against from the contrary. I must not act so brave, embrace the tremble.

Now the fear is not lost on me. It is still a challenging foray to surrender, to give in, and an even longer time still to accept that I will waste the little time I have left on absolute emptiness. But must I really submit to an honorary charade? By that, I meant the continuance. It is no different from a hermitage of the modern age. Get a wife, a child, two, sing and dance to Mariah Carey once a year, torture myself with the rest of it. The cards rewrite themselves into a state of disrepair every single time. No más. I do ask myself from time to time if this selfsame defeat is a surrender into pussification or out of it. Hard to say with nobody to bounce off ideas with. All me, all day, every day.

One of these days this habit too shall pass, and myself included, and there is nothing I can do to change the outcome of that. Every single one of us succumbs to finitude. Please allow me some semblance of aether to preserve my ideas of what if in an alternate universe where I met my progeny.