Good Afternoon,
I am writing today in the hopes that you will understand my plight. I have lately been ruminating on the very meaning of life itself and have subsequently come to some startling conclusions about the state of the world and my place in it. You see, when I was a child, I voraciously consumed the writings of Nietzsche and Sartre, to the point where I found them cliché by the age of six. I then moved onto the harder stuff: cocaine. It was through many sour bumps and sleepless nights that I surrendered, eventually, to the gnawing terror that was eating away at my soul from all angles. I was a latter-day Prometheus, enduring the wholesale feast of my own insides only to see them sprout again anew in time for the next round of maltreatment. If I tried to escape, I feared I would be met at the gate by the mangy Cerberus in all his multitudinous glory. I had no recourse but to retreat deeper and deeper into the dark underbelly of my mind and its severe depression until I no longer resembled the person I used to be. I became a shadow of a shadow, a reflection of a world unknown and unknowable to human senses with no ascertainable means of survey or orientation. It was at this point that I stood face to face with Shakespeare’s fell sergeant himself: Death. I greeted him as one would an old friend or distant lover, and he in kind presented me with the greatest gift I could have imagined: certainty. As I stood facing this omnipotent entity at once dreamed of and repudiated by humankind I felt awash with a kind of compassion I can only imagine Tibetan monks know as they first shear the hair from their undeserving heads. In this, the thinnest sliver of moments, that we face-swapped. Indeed, like Face/Off. I had no clue that the closest and most indispensable ally to the prince of darkness, and indeed the galaxy that holds the whole of human anxiety and suffering was a Cage fan. But he was. In hindsight, I should’ve known from the shades. Upon completion of our suddenly appointed physiognomic transition, my path was cleared back towards the light of existence in the physical realm, in which I had entirely forgotten how to function. I was but a newborn babe, suckling impotently at the teat of an arresting idea of the future, clothed only in the ominous swaddling of destruction. The sun burned hot and mighty upon my fragile figure as I burst back into its glow, whereupon I was met by a crowd of incensed townsfolk who, upon alighting their gaze upon my new, dreadful apparatus, inclined themselves so as to render my subsequent fate unlivable upon their terra firma. The chase was short, yet eventful; my pride eventually succumbed to their bloodlust in the most savage display of psychosis I have seen in form corporeal or eternal. What was an orgy of reconciliation for one side was, for the other side, a surefire declaration of an inability to further exist as constituted then or thereafter. So there, and with the grace of God, went I, supremely confident in the knowledge that that same I, or rather, not I, but a villainous nebulosity masquerading as some heinously inadequate and delirious identity of self, had forfeited forever my ability to tread either realm, with gods or men, upon penalty of the only possible human fate worse than the entity whose countenance had betrimmed my darkest hour: heresy.
It is with this in mind, and with a heavy heart, that I must announce my resignation from this company effective immediately. All duties will heretofore be transferred to Jerry, to whom you will all answer and give proper, though wholly undeserved, honor and respect. It has been a pleasure serving you all, and making all of that money, but the time has come to spread my wings and fly where eagles do, on the mountain high. Farewell, my minions, and may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
April Fools!
-The Chairman
PS- Should anyone identify with any of the above, we will have mental health counselors on call during this difficult day of attempted humor.
The Chairman of the Bored 