A Funeral for Nobody

I must’ve smoked the wrong cigarette. It’s bad enough that I was in a funk the whole morning, so I thought I’d take my medicine to make it feel better. I’m not depressed, per say, just indifferent to a point where I don’t care about anything. Up until today I believed that medical marijuana was this wonderful, magic plant that cures all ailments, but that’s bullshit. Most people who use it just wanna get high, they don’t wanna do anything to alleviate their misery. Once the high wears off and the pink elephants stop marching, the funk comes back and they smoke another bowl, sit on the couch, and eat more garbage food.

For me, the doctors recommended a dose that would make me happy, just fire up a blunt and it’ll be all better. Lately the weather is always shitty, grey and rainy to a point where the sunshine is never there. Typically, any normal person can feel the funk of the gloomy weather, but some morons claim to be triggered by it, calling it Seasonal Affective Disorder. What do you do about it? Smoke more weed, pop pills, drink, watch the shit on TV, and put up the damn Christmas lights until April. That’s what society wants you to do when you're down and in a funk, but after I gave all that up I tried some real alternatives like exercising, but people look at me like I’m crazy. They’d rather be miserable and have every fucking excuse under the sun to stay miserable.

Here’s what got me to stop taking my meds and stop being miserable;

I was out walking down Paradise Street, fresh out of work at the thrift store and feeling like shit. I took out a prescription blunt, fired it up, and let the green fairy do her magic. As usual, it was grey, cloudy, and on the verge of rain, although it only drizzled here and there. Paradise Street was just block after block of housing projects, but in the old days it was what the name implied; a suburban paradise where you could take a walk and not be depressed, people talked to you like a normal human being and the only drugs anybody ever did was a case of beer on the weekend and maybe a blunt or two got passed around. Nowadays, the aesthetic pleasure of the past has been erased and a bleak ghetto of tower-blocks stands, all falling apart and coated with decades worth of graffiti.

Seeing this did nothing to get me out of the funk, and the stuff I smoked made me more aware of my surroundings. All around, the fugue of police sirens and the rats and pigeons filled my ears, making a dreary soundtrack. Out of this shroud of noise, I heard the faint sound of an electric organ in the distance, echoing from an open window facing the alley between two tower-blocks. Following this, I climbed the fire-escape and crawled into the window, and found the source of the music. There was an old Hammond organ in the corner, playing itself and swaying side to the rhythm of the dirge it was playing, and all around there were people dressed in black. Some of the people where crying in one another’s arms while others just played with their phones, indifferent to their surroundings. I looked to the front of the room, where I expected a coffin or some kind of memorial, but there was nothing. Just a bare room.

I asked who died, but nobody would answer, they would either cry or look back at their phones like I wasn’t there. Finally, a priest came in, chain-smoking and looking like he hated his job. Nobody paid him any attention, so I sat down next to him.

“Who’s funeral is this?” I asked.

The priest looked at me with a surly manner, lit up another cigarette and said. “Nobody’s.”

“Who’s Nobody?”

“I don’t know, never met him!”

“You mean to tell me nobody died?”

“Exactly, everyone’s here to mourn nobody!”

“Sound’s like a waste of time.”

“You’re telling me, boy.”

With that, he got up, stood in the middle of the room and began to say a mass to a crowd that didn’t listen. The organ kept playing itself and the mourners continued to weep. The phone gawkers are the one’s who paid the least attention, and nobody responded to the priest’s calls to prayer, it was like he was used to giving mass to an empty chapel.

That’s when it dawned on me; these people aren’t mourning nobody, they were just looking for an excuse to feel sorry for themselves. This apparently wasn’t the first time they held a funeral for nobody, it was just a big circle-jerk of misery for the sake of it, and when it was over, the mourners would all go back to their apartments and live life to the fullest. By their definition of living, they would go their office jobs, sit in traffic for hours on end, smoke weed, take pills, eat like pigs, watch TV, drink beer, go shopping, bang every tom, dick and harry at the club and the cycle repeats itself.

Once the high wears off, they do nothing to fix the cycle of misery, and the only thing they would do about it was to go back to the chapel on the fifth floor and have a Funeral for Nobody. The women loved these occasions, especially. The men hated it, but the guys that didn’t hate it were by far the biggest pussies I ever met in my life. The mourners would congregate, cry like babies, take communion (by communion, I mean their SOMA rations), and go back to their miserable lives.

For me, just seeing one Funeral for Nobody, that’s when I decided enough was enough. I sold the last of my prescription blunts to my junkie roommate, told my doctor to shove it, quit my lousy job and moved out of Paradise Street. Over time, I lost weight, started making real money digging ditches, and stopped being around miserable people in general. People still tell me I have no direction in life, not going anywhere digging ditches, but these people ought to look in the mirror. But if they could, they’d see the monster of their own creation. I was making more money than they could make in a month, and I wasn’t spending it on shit that breaks in a month. I didn’t need any medicine to fix my problems, just a change of scenery, a job that doesn’t suck and plenty of exercise.

And these mourners of the Funeral for Nobody are the ones calling me crazy! They’re the ones in an asylum with nobody running it but themselves. To them, somebody who isn’t miserable is an escaped lunatic, but nothing’s dragging me back kicking and screaming. There’s no orderly or mad doctor looking for me, nobody can drag me back and put me on the electroshock table. I tried to hold up a mirror and show them their hypocrisy, but it was no better than talking to a wall. These people wanted to be miserable and die that way.

Fine with me, fuck ‘em! It’s a free country. Fortunately for them, there’s no law against being miserable. They can stay on Paradise Street all they want, just don’t expect me to come back. I guess I really did smoke the wrong cigarette, and one’s enough to show me light outside the cave.