People That You Like Want To See You Suffer I want people to suffer. I don't like people because they're human beings and human beings are annoying. And most of them want to see me suffering, in one way or another. There's never been an instant where I didn't want to feel pain, and a long time where I wasn't enjoying myself, and a lot of times where I felt pain because of my own stupidity. At the same time, most of the time when people want me to suffer, I can't imagine why they would like to see that. I don't know how they would get any satisfaction from watching me wither away and die or what kind of entertainment they would get from me being miserable. I haven't done anything to you that you're going to say, "Oh, you had a hard childhood and that explains everything." I don't see any connection there. I mean, I am a miserable child, but I also liked a lot of things about my childhood that the public couldn't have possibly know about because I made them up for myself. Sometimes the public's just a little too keen on making sure that other people know that the world is terrible. I don't know why that is. It seems to me like nobody can really tell what would make somebody feel good, what would make them feel comfortable, what would make them feel happy. They just keep thinking somebody should know about their suffering. And when I see people having a great time doing things that don't make them hurt too much, I want to take them to school. I want to say, "You're lying. You're having too good a time." I think the most satisfying thing for me would be to try to get other people to be miserable the way I am, to make their lives as bad as mine and say, "Well, that's what it's like." I want everybody to suffer so bad that they wish they didn't exist. And you know, as soon as you do that, you don't have to worry about me or your children or anybody else. People are always asking me how I got to be this way, and I tell them, "I'm a human being. People didn't create me. They gave me life. They didn't do it to be cruel." In the public eye, I'm pretty much the worst thing in the world. If you were going to make a list of all the people in the world who have caused suffering, I'd be somewhere near the top, I imagine. And it is the same for most people who have no reason to worry about being successful. Being successful in the public eye is very annoying. It's hard to see how someone could be successful and not give a shit about everybody else and not have a very big agenda in life. And it's hard to see how people who are rich don't feel guilty for what they're doing to the rest of us. Or rich people who just got so many material things they forgot what the rest of us were doing. Just forget it. The last thing you should be doing is thinking about people. You should have forgotten the moment you had all those material things. That's the most annoying thing in the world. I also hate the idea of being famous because it's an unfair way to have fame, because it seems like if you are famous, nobody can ignore you. You can't hide. And I get irritated with that because what happens is you start worrying about what other people are thinking about you and what kind of an image of you other people have in their mind. And how you can be yourself and how you can have privacy. Sometimes I wish I was a more popular person. I don't know why that would be, because that's something I would have to work to do and I never worked for anything in my life. I work to be a cartoonist. That's what I do, and it's really frustrating that somebody like me has made it very far with it. And if I have a big audience, it's like saying, "Yes, I'm more popular than you are, and I hope you don't like me. I hope you die." I don't feel very close to many people. I don't have very close friends. And I don't understand why. It's because I never gave a damn about what other people felt. If somebody felt like not talking to me, that was fine. Because you know, I don't even know what a friend is. If I was hanging out with somebody and they just didn't want to be there, I didn't want to hang out anymore. So I don't have very many friends that way. If there was something I was looking for in friendship, it would be somebody who's very comfortable with himself. Somebody who doesn't have to fight with a lot of people and wouldn't have any reason to think that I was doing something to them that they would hate. Somebody who I would love to be with, that's all. I have friends, but they're very different from me in their approach. They're people that don't come off as miserable. They're not people that can't think of what they'd like to do with their life and how much they like themselves. I think they like themselves a little too much, too. It's like you don't have to work at being popular. It just flows out of your system. It's something you're born with. And I'm not that. I wasn't born like that, because if I had been, it would have been a different person with a different approach. I don't know how to approach things. I think I'm at a bad time in my life where I'd like to have a lot of money and be thought of as somebody who doesn't give a shit about anybody. Because when people are talking about you, they're always thinking about something that's wrong. So, I think the whole idealized public hero image is a big fucking sham. It would be a good idea for people to see you and say, "Well, shit, this person isn't like what I thought he would be." I know, I know. What would people like you to be? That's what you wanted to hear. Okay, now go and go home and put on some clothes. That's what I have to do. # CHAPTER FIVE # DIGNITY I hate most people, but that doesn't mean I don't love anybody. That means I don't see the point of most people. You would have to be really stupid to think I like you, because nobody likes anybody. But that doesn't mean that I don't think people should be loved. That's an awful lot of bullshit. Being a public person means you're going to have a lot of people who want to see you as miserable. I've made my peace with that, and I know a lot of people who haven't. They get real angry about it, and they don't want to talk to me anymore, and they want me to apologize to them. And the ones that are closest to me are probably really miserable. Because I'm not always very pleasant to be around. My idea of being a friend is I want to be around if you're in trouble and you're needy, you know, if you just need somebody to tell you that you're in great shape and you shouldn't be such a pessimist, you know, because I think that's the worst feeling in the world. "Fuck, nothing good ever happens to me. Nothing good happens to anybody." So many things in the world can't be changed, and to think that there's no way that's going to happen is the most annoying thing in the world. But it's more embarrassing, because you see yourself saying it and you realize it's something that you wouldn't say to anybody else. It seems like, when people ask you how you think about life and what you think about the future, there's no good answer. "Well, you're kind of a pessimist, but you're probably not all that realistic about the world. If you think about the world, that's what you're going to get. That's just the way the world is, so that's kind of a bummer." No, you're not an optimist, you're not a pessimist, you're a realist. You're just going to do what you do and not think about anything. You just have to think of a way to put some fun into the rest of your life. I don't believe in religion, because it's a great way to give other people reasons for being unhappy with life. And I don't feel that I need it because I have my own way of