"Innocence and Experience" or "Me, Myself, and My Illness"

"Doctor, doctor, I have an illness."
"What is it, son? What's wrong?"
"I'm not sure."
"What?"
"I'm not sure what's wrong."
"Son, are you really sick?"
"Yes, sir."
"What exactly makes you say that you're sick?"
"It's this illness. I don't know what's going on."
"Can you please describe it? I can't tell you what it is if you don't let me know what it is."
"I don't how to describe it myself. It's like, I'm perfectly healthy, even psychologically. But I'm just not happy."
"Son, not many people are happy these days. That's not an illness."
"But what's wrong with me, then?"
"Come over here. Yes, out here. Look out that window, boy. You see that?"
"What?"
"All that."
"It's just people walking by."
"Yea. Those are people. That's what's wrong. We're all wrong. People are all sick the way you are. Nobody's happy in this world."
"Doctor, are you saying that everybody out there has the same problem as I do?"
"Not all of them know about it, but yes, I'd say so."
"Oh."
"Yea."
"I see. What should I do then? Is there no cure?"
"Son, maybe you don't understand. It's not an illness. It's not a disease. It's part of being a person. You think you can be happy because of this thing or that thing. You think that you can be happy because you get married, or because you win the lottery, or because you star in a movie. No.
No."
"But somebody somewhere must have been really happy at some point. Otherwise, how do know that we can be happy?"
"I don't know. Maybe we were made to be happy, but something just didn't go right. Maybe there's something missing inside."
"Dogs can be happy."
"Maybe. Have you ever been a dog?"
"...Well, no. But they sure seem that way."
"Well, don't people seem happy at times?"
"...Well, yes. So are you saying they're not?"
"Son, I'm just trying to tell you that I can't do anything for you. I'm just a doctor."
"I see. I'm sorry to have wasted your time, then."
"No. I'm sorry to have wasted yours. Good luck, boy."
"Er. Thanks."

Thoughtful quotes

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
- Tom Clancy

"If everything is under control, you are going too slow."
- Mario Andretti

"Men have become the tools of their tools."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, prepare to die."

Looking at a Dead Father on a Bookshelf

To drive through this casual dementia
is a fragile dizziness at 3am posed like a manikin before you.
Only the limbs grow cold and itchy in the air conditioning.
Oblique are both the whims and wants
of half-ambitions doused in sleep.

When you have exhausted the metaphors,
and everything sounds like an exhaust pipe,
there he is, high up on silent pinewood –
A framed face that cares little of the poor lighting,
(why frame his face and not his trousers?)
and that never looks you in the eye.

Could you have said that the light
slants no more than you do?
It is what it is,
and perhaps you are now
only what you are not.