Epistle to the Lost

Perhaps you are, as I am, one who sweats each day the psychic toll of coming up half a slug short; being one favor shy of just enough influence; receiving of the cost of the doubt while the benefit goes elsewhere; possessed of not quite enough of whatever it would take today. If you are one of these the least of our brethren, then you are as I am, much aware at times how long, long, and wearing is the journey, always leaning into fortune's wind. How sweet and easy sometimes seems that release which would come with simply giving up, tipping it all over into the black lagoon of despair and attraction to an end.

My advice to you is, "Don't let go. Pick something out and hate it as hard as you can."

But don't hate people. Excoriate the evil that men do; hate the Goddamned government, Big Capital, Lutheran Reformation, Japanese whaling. Hate what have you. Don't hate people.

And of course this advice is pittance. Not enough. But what if I could say I have the answer, all of it? If I could say come all of you misbegotten, down-trodden, mediocre, debt-ridden, shy, destitute, halt, sinful, dystonic, embarrassed, stupid, decrepit, dishonest, heartsick, poverty-ridden, lame, tired, unfortunate, elderly, beaten, slipshod, lost, challenged in endless variety, outcast, blind, abandoned, hopeless, dyspeptic, all you wards of the state, come all you poor, loveless, fucking, addicted, discouraged, expelled, lonesome, inchoate, needy, mute, hungry, neurotic, failed, lazy, inglorious, footsore, incompetent, all you who live in rented places; come, I have the answer, just what we need. How the world would ring with our footsteps, the boom of our crutches and canes! The wind of our scurrying could blow this planet straight.

But what I have is only this: "Don't give up. Hate something as hard as you can, but don't hate people".