A Parade

Life is a succession of bad days, they progress past you like a parade of the damned, one day blurring into the next because bad days can be blurry. In fact, bad days need to be blurry, all the booze you consumed to make up for having a bad day, is supposed to wipe the memory of the day from your mind. That is one of the many, useful purposes of alcohol.  But, after so many bad days, after the parade gets to be so lengthy that you wonder if you can remember any GOOD days squeezed into your life, alcohol ceases to help.

That certainly does not stop you from trying to get alcohol to help, the truth is you probably just increase the dosage in the hopes that more alcohol makes up for more bad days. Sadly, for you, happily for your bartender(s) it doesn't. They live well off the slightly extravagant tips you, in your daze, leave them, but you well, you know that even if you manage to sleep tonight, another bad day is waiting outside your window when you wake up tomorrow.  And you have to wake up eventually, and face the day, whether you want to or not. The day will wait for you, it has nothing else to do, it's a day, that what days do. Wait for you so they can start falling to shit.

The biggest problem with this parade of bad days is that you begin to expect them, you lie there in your bed trying to avoid opening your eyes on the disaster that is your life, and ponder what the fuck went wrong while  you were asleep. Because bad days will wait for you to realize they are bad, but there is nothing in the rule book (trust me, I've looked) that says they have to wait for you to start being bad. They can become the kind of day that ends in tears while you are snoring away the last bad day. And the sad part is that, as far as you can tell, there is fuck all you can do about it. Ever been told to "have a nice day?" Sure you have, but the truth of the matter is that the day is the one picking the music, and you are the one dancing the jig.  I doubt many of us have tottered off to work, school, church, or the strip club with the express intent on having a bad day. Personally, I have started off a few of my days with the intent of making someone else's day bad, but that just because I am an asshole.

And maybe this parade of bad days that I am seeing slide by me week to week is sweet revenge. Maybe there is some medicine man in some far off tent, chanting my name over some fire placing a curse on me for my douche bag behaviour. If that were true then I wouldn't feel so morose about these days that continue to go to hell in a hand basket. For then at least, I would know the source, and the reason of this bad day parade. Instead I am left to sit on ponder rock, surrounded by an ever increasing number of empty beer bottles, and try to sort out what exactly I did to deserve this many bad days in a row.

It can, on occasion, devolve into a pity party, but not usually. I am a fully grown man, and I deserve little, if any pity. I don't deserve, and I certainly don't want it. After all pity is just going to make a bad worse. It might give off the impression that the bad day is somehow winning our little war, and I don't want to let the day know that, now do I?  After all bad days can sense weakness, and they do not come as single scouts, but in battalions. Wave after wave of them will assault you as they try to batter down your resistance, and make you spirit break. The only spirit you have any time for comes in a bottle, and gets you ploughed so you can face what is already, and you are still in bed, another bad day. Perhaps it is time to invest in one of your own, hopefully better, medicine men before you find out to your dismay on your deathbed, that your life when it flashes in front of you is nothing but a VERY long parade of bad days. 


This post is dedicated to someone who had a bad day Friday. It was his last bad day, and hopefully, if the people that are celebrating today's date are correct, that person is in a better place. Here's also hoping that his flashback was not a parade of bad days, but was a happy, if all too brief, parade of good days. They made a few of my days less bad, and they will be missed, both the good days, and the person.