Copy of a Copy of a Copy

You realize you've lived your life perfectly, tying your shoes and brushing your teeth by the book, day in and day out with homework assignments and missed phone calls and television shoes. Sure, you've had your moments of individuality, your particularly distinctive traits, but you're just an impression of a copy of a collage of other personalities and characters and attitudes; your existence is like a smiling face trapped between two opposite mirrors, each toothy grin a cheaper and cheaper facsimile of the last. Copies of your friends, your neighbors, your heroes, your enemies, your egos, your pasts, your worst secret identities.

Except, your mistakes are also copies. Your mistakes aren't novel or interesting or particularly worthy of attention; you've erred like hundreds of generations of people before. You might not even know your own ancestors or bloodline or family tree. Not everyone does. But that doesn't matter, because you can be sure your life has already been lived; your existence is just another iteration of the world's most boring fractal.

You can scream or cry or hate or lie, you can toy with people until the ends of the world, but whatever prank you pull or heart you break, it's been done and broken before; humanity has had a long and dreadful history of ridiculous people with even more ridiculous ideas, and sadly the audacity to try them all out.

Each day feels like a childhood Saturday morning filled with cartoons; each morning like a commercial break. Only, you realize soon enough you're actually watching the same reruns as last week, a rehashed show, with superficially different changes. And then, you realize all the cartoons you watch are more or less rehashings of each other, and soon all the shows you watch are the same, acted out on plastic slides with ink and pen or computer screens or blue screens or sitcom sets. But you tear your eyes away from the television and realize that your life is just a less glamorous version of the same kind of shows you watching on television, the same problems with the same players and characters and troubles and worries, except you won't find your problems wrapped up in thirty minutes, twenty-three excluding cartoons, and you won't ever find a happy ending, because the ending of your show is the same as the ending of your mother's show and your father's show and every other person before you who has ever lived; canned laughter or not, your show ends when you die, and you won't die a happy death because you haven't lived a happy life.

Television brings the condensed fantasy of shrink-wrapped life, shiny and delicious on its packaging, it makes you wonder and think and dream and hope. But our generation was raised on television, disillusioned by sitcoms and family shows, corrupted by raunchy cartoons and comedies. You look around and realize each life you see, full of its problems and flawed characters and troubled souls, each is a different rewrite of the same show through a different director and cameraman and set of actors; but our entire planet is an enormous show, a terrestrial comedy for the eyes of what you can only hope isn't a sadistically humored God.

And so you continue living your life courageously, you think, abiding by the script you can't see and the cues you don't notice because you're lost so deeply within your own disillusionment that your world defines your life and your life makes a difference, but really, all the kind words and deeds you might perform won't ever add up to positive reviews because you're still scripting your life for a biased audience using plagiarized blocking and quotes and scenarios; your life isn't your own unique creation, it's like one of those sculptures made out of everyday trash. It might be a sculpture, it might be creative and interesting and absorbing to look at, but at the end of the day it's still a pile of trash, held together by music wire and superglue.