Date: Tuesday, June 18, 1996 10:24PM

Subject: bright-eyed and bushy-tailed

I just wanted to tell you to kill yourself. I'm not kidding. Kill yourself. Dead. Please, for your own good. I didn't come to this opinion easily and without forethought. Everyone should kill themselves. There is no reason for us to exist on this planet. Look at yourself. Look real hard and deep within your soul. You should see a dark black hole where once a heart resided. But no longer. I don't blame you for your lack of a soul, I blame society.

We live in a world where the only important person is ourselves. No longer is it the day of friendship and love. Everyone is a back-stabbing, two-timing, two-faced, conceited, self-centered, egocentric, narcissistic twit with an agenda. Myself included, of course. But it's true. It is all true. Gone are the days of old friends hanging out, having a good time, living to the fullest. We are all so concerned with ourselves that we have forgotten everyone else. Sure we have our friends, but are they really our friends? Yes, we hang out. Yes, we have good times. Yes, we even pretend to care but that is where the problems arise. We pretend. How many times have we totally blown off our dearest companions to be with someone else they don't know as well. All the time. All the damn time. I blow you off, you blow me off; and we live on in this twisted little circle of deceit. We truly are alone in this world. Not by choice or design, but by our own childish, petty actions.

Not only are we not friends, but we don't really have any true friends in society anymore. I consider all of you to be my friends, but maybe only two of you do I consider to be true friends. And we blow each other off whenever a pretty girl walks by, or we are out of beer, or whatever. What makes someone a friend? Hard times spent together, happy moments on Kodak, playing together; all of these things used to make us friends, but what about now? Friends are people that we have to see fairly often and would prefer to be on better terms with than not. Friends are people who wind up at the same place frequently. Friends are non-existent.

Why did we lose friendship? The seething megalopolis society that we live in certainly does not promote trust amongst the citizens. We don't trust, we don't care. Why should we care when we are all out there trying to make a buck? It's this rat race that we are trapped in that is slowly decaying away at morals we use to guide us in everyday life. When we only think of ourselves and our advantages we lose sight of the one thing that makes us human: each other. It wasn't until we evolved socially to the point of community that we gained an insight into our inter-personal relationships. We depended upon them to help us survive a bleak winter. They defended us when a neighboring community got aggressive. The held us together when we could see no future. Now that we have a super-society that goes well beyond what anyone thought we could evolve to, we have lost our sense of community. Do you know your neighbors? Do you ever participate in any community based function? Do you even know the names of the people that you talk to almost every night? Probably not.

Do we even know each other? No, we don't. Sure we spend a lot of time together, but do any of you really know me? Maybe one of you. Do I know any of you? No, not really. I know you enough to have a good time and a few laughs with each of you, but not really enough to claim that I know you. Don't get me wrong, I like all of you and consider you to be some of my best friends, but who are you? Why won't you let me in? Probably for the same reason that I don't let you in. I don't know you well enough.

In this world of distrust, angst, aggression, over-population, cheap romance by the alarm clock light, self-loathing, confusion, and coercion we can never know anyone enough to truly let them in. We can't take the chance of being taken. We have to know what we won't share ourselves before we can advance to the next level of friendship. Since, by no fault of our own, we can't do this, our soul has slowly been eroded away by our mistrust. Can we stop this? Probably, but we won't put forth the effort. How can anyone live out their lives, once realizing that we are alone, and will remain that way for the remainder of our meager existences? I don't know, but I know it is painful and probably not worth it; else we would have done something by now.

Maybe after we are long gone and a few generations have grown up in the wasteland we left as our legacy, someone will raise a fist to the heavens and cry out 'No More!'. But until that happens, we shall trudge along our lonely lives with our heads hung low in shame. We should just kill ourselves.