802.11me

Sad Pete

Today, I'm going to throw my hat back into the positive mental attitude ring, and teach you all a little trick to help make you feel better when you're down.

Once, when I was 8 years old, I told Grandpa Costolo about a particularly bad day I was having - I don't recall what the problem was now - perhaps I hadn't been picked for some baseball team, perhaps glenn washburn had hit me in the face with his lunchbox again. Anyway, Grandpa Costolo swung me up on his lap, took one last long draw off the houka pipe that lay in the center of his living room, and told me something that's helped me to this day. He said, "when i was your age, I once had a very bad day indeed, and so to help myself feel better, I invented an imaginary friend who'd had a REALLY bad day. Because no matter what people tell you or say about depression, nothing cheers us up like talking to somebody that's got it a lot worse."

Grandpa Costolo proceeded to tell me about his imaginary friend, Kim Wah, a Malaysian boy of 9 years who'd been sold into slavery to a Japanese railroad tycoon who was building a choir of Oriental Castrati. (nb: you'll excuse my grandfather's use of the term Oriental. This was the 70's and, trust me, for him, Oriental was a giant step in the right direction). Anyhoo, whenever Grandpa had a bad day, he'd pretend to talk to Kim Wah, who would have experienced an infinitely worse day. This all sounded like a great idea to me, and Grandpa Costolo even suggested that my imaginary friend, whom I would name "pete", should be an 8 year old boy from Russia, where things were unimaginably bad.

I used Pete to great effect through my adolescence and college years. If I did poorly on a test, no matter - Pete had been exposed to low levels of radiation in his factory outside Leningrad and his hands were now shrunken and green. Then, when my first real girlfriend Chris dumped me, an event that might have sent me spinning into a three week funk, I was fortunate enough to hear from Pete. He had wanted to enter the Russian Cosmonaut program and so had joined a group of other boys on a tour of the Leningrad Space Launch facilities. Apparently, two cosmonauts asked him if he wanted a private tour of the mock launch room, and Pete excitedly agreed. The cosmonauts were both wearing their space helmets with the visors down so Pete couldn't actually see them, a detail that seemed exciting at first but that would prove tragic in hindsight. Well, sure enough, you're probably already ahead of the story here, the private launch room wasn't REALLY a launch room, and the two men weren't REALLY cosmonauts, and once they got him in this room, they started saying things like "it's very cold in outer space, so cosmonauts touch each other like this to keep warm". Anyhow, I won't spare you the unfortunate details, but let's just say Pete didn't so much want to be a cosmonaut after that.

So, here is my advice to the forlorn and depressed. Throw out all your self-help tapes and cheese moving books, and invent a friend; somebody living in horrific squalor or under the iron fist of a tyrant. Remember to only talk to this person when you're feeling sorry for yourself! Do NOT talk to this imaginary friend when you are feeling sympathetic or sorry for other people. This can lead to unspeakable tragedy and possible time in a "group home". Ciao for now, Dick.