Djelloul Marbrook

I don’t know how many people suffer from something-must-happenness, but I suspect it’s a fairly large number. It’s a feeling that someone or something just around the next corner is going to change your life. For the better, of course. It takes a lot out of the life you’re living, because it makes it seem cobbled together.

Something-must-happenness imposes intolerable burdens on everyone you meet and everything that happens. They can’t just happen; they have to be fraught with consequence. Eventually you just break down under the weight of all this anticipation, and this is probably just as well, because you’ve become pretty intolerable yourself.

I wouldn’t write a thing about this malady, which has been one of my greater follies, except that it occurs to me that the Internet has exacerbated it. The Internet is so rich it just naturally prompts us to try to mine diamonds and rubies and emeralds from it. Hour after hour, our fingers numbing and vision blurring, we search for that one thing that’s going to change everything.

Maybe even our terminal celebrity worship stems from the same illness. We think those beautiful, marvelous people, all of them living fabulous lives, are going to change ours. And they do, for an hour or two, but we expect much more, which is why the paparazzi beseige celebrities. In our behalf. We want to consume them like pills. We’re hooked on them.

It doesn’t occur to us that we’re beautiful, marvelous people. If we are, why aren’t we celebrated? Why aren’t we rich and famous, quadruply divorced, knighted? No, we’re just benighted. We think nothing’s happening, but with a little bit of luck something will happen: we’ll win the lottery, marry somebody rich, inherit a fortune from an unknown uncle, find the one true love who will make everything better.

And the Internet is there to help us, at least until the greedy bastards snatch it from us and put it in their pockets, as they’re trying to do in Washington right now.

We don’t have social skills to begin with, or we wouldn’t be killing each other with such discouraging regularity, and the instantaneity of the Internet is not helping us develop any. We don’t have to petition it, we don’t have to say please and excuse me; we just break in and loot it. I’m not sure this augurs well, but the Internet is like certain unforgettable faces: once you’ve seen them the entire balance of the cosmos seems to depend on them. For all we know, maybe it does. After all, one of the benefits of the Internet is to remind us how much we don’t know, and that always helps us get our heads into our T-shirts.

I’ve thought a great deal about how I contracted the something-must-happen virus. I’m sure it was in the womb. Things could have been worse: I could have been nursed on cocaine and weaned on heroin. As it is, I was born hooked on soap opera. My theory is that I spent nine months listening to the messy lovers’ triangle in which I was unhappily conceived. I probably said to myself, Listen, whatever your name is, you’re not going to like these people, but something better will come along. It did. Hook or crook, I got a life. But it took me most of this one. If there’s going to be another one, I hope I smarten up faster.