Solutions and Other Problems

by Allie Brosh

This is not what I’d been trying to accomplish. I didn’t even realize it was possible. That’s the scary thing about decisions: you don’t know what they are when you’re making them.

The only thing worse than getting trapped in the same bucket nineteen times is surrender.

For the sake of trust building, the third chapter will follow the second. But then we will jump directly to chapter five, do you understand? No chapter four. Why? Because sometimes things don’t go like they should. This is an inescapable property of reality, which we all must learn to accept. There just isn’t enough power in the universe for everybody to have all of it.

I could have made these chapters be any number I wanted. I could have invented a totally unrecognizable number system based on snake pictures. Shit, I could’ve called them all chapter 2 and refused to acknowledge that I did that.

It must’ve come off like being haunted by a defective but well-meaning ghost. The connection should have been obvious. But, when faced with a mystery like, “Where did my remote control go? Why is there a piece of paper with a child’s handwriting on it hiding in the VCR? And how do these rocks keep getting in here?” almost no rational adult would jump to the conclusion “because a child has been sneaking in through my cat door and leaving these for me to discover.” Not even with clues. I don’t know what theory Richard came up with to explain it, but it almost certainly wasn’t that one.

Similarly, when faced with a mystery like “Why does our child keep disappearing? And why has our child been ‘hanging out’ with our 40-year-old neighbor?” almost no rational adult would jump to the conclusion “because our child has become obsessed with our 40-year-old neighbor, and ‘hanging out’ is a loose term to describe the activity of spying.”

I don’t know if they put the pieces together immediately, or processed them individually as they came up—“First of all, there’s a cat in this drawer; how about that. Next up: there appear to be a considerable number of objects under the cat. This one is a shoe. This one is a piece of bread. This one is a credit card bill. Huh… it’s addressed to ‘Richard the Neighbor…’ ”—inching closer to the truth with every clue until the ultimate answer to “What does ‘hanging out with Richard’ mean?” was revealed. There was more than enough evidence to answer the question. That’s got to be a strange moment for a parent. There’s this omnipresent fear of predators and monsters, and you just… you never quite expect to find out the monster is your kid.

That’s not something the books prepare you for. There’s no chapter on what to do if you suspect your child is a predator. There’s no Hallmark card for “Sorry we accused you of being a molester; we didn’t realize our kid was sneaking into your house and stealing your spoons and animals and watching you while you sleep. We’re really, really sorry.”

This isn’t the kind of situation where you want to set a precedent for caving under pressure. I mean, what’s gonna happen? I go look at her room and then she leaves me alone forever?

Is this how negging works? I act like this kid’s room is no big deal, and she becomes singularly obsessed with proving her room’s value?

But this kid’s a one-way friendship train with no brakes. I can’t risk encouraging her. The second she senses weakness, she’ll be crawling in through my windows.

Saying no to a socially considerate adult is hard enough. If saying no to a socially considerate adult is like fighting a serpent, this would be like fighting a serpent, but you can’t use your arms or legs, and you can’t touch the serpent or hurt the serpent’s feelings. Also, the serpent doesn’t understand the words “no” or “sorry.”

That was a weird 10 seconds for me. It would’ve been a weird 10 seconds for anybody, probably. Now imagine that you are defenseless and totally incapable of caring for yourself. But it’s okay because there’s this big pink creature that looks like a weird pig or maybe a kangaroo. For some reason, the kangaroo pig feeds you and takes you outside so you can poop. You don’t know why it does this, but you trust it has its reasons. Then one day the kangaroo pig comes home smelling like chemicals and its legs don’t work. You think, It can barely walk… what if it can’t take care of us? What if we never get to poop again? The kangaroo pig turns on its picture-sound box and sits down.

Being a dog—and a below-average one at that—you don’t understand that this is just something that can happen when you collide with a chair, and chairs—which lack a nervous system—cannot attack you. It truly seems like the chair is doing this on purpose. You are now permanently afraid of the chair, which, for some reason, is never punished or restrained in any way. But you can’t question the decision. You can’t ask the kangaroo pig why it would allow such a violent object to live in the house after it saw what it did. Your only option is to stand by helplessly and hope the chair situation doesn’t get any worse.

Fortunately, animals are the psychological equivalent of tractors. It’s honestly amazing how durable they are. We can do pretty much whatever we want to them, and they’ll be like, Okay, we will try it. Thank you for interacting with us.

Animals get stuff like face biting and chasing each other. They get that. Chase each other, bite each other’s faces. Easy and simple.

Not sure if this image will appear in my notes (probably not), but it's incredible.

"Your mortal form falls away like a loose banana peel[.]"

"What now, Power Ranger?"

Anger is not a graceful emotion. I’ve never gotten mad and been like, I’m glad I behaved like that! I feel weird about it every time. Usually, knowing how weird I’m going to feel is enough to restrain me. But sometimes there’s just so much of it, and it isn’t going away, and you’re tired, and you start to think, Hey… maybe this isn’t such a bad thing… maybe I WANT this… And then you get to see what the worst part of you looks like.

I’m not sure where it started. There wasn’t an identifiable origin point. It began in 47 different places over the course of 9 years. But it crescendoed in the produce section of the Newport Avenue Market in Bend, Oregon.

Chili was the only thing on the menu at the lodge that day, so instead of eating lunch, we decide to go home. However, in order to do that, we need to go in the car, which is risky because there’s a long-standing feud about the car and whether it’s better to drive it like an old piece of lettuce or a NASCAR death-pilot. Normally, I might’ve been able to restrain myself from going there, but we’re driving in the snow, and I grew up in northern Idaho, so therefore I am a snow expert. It’s just a qualification I get to have for the rest of my life, no matter what. Duncan grew up in Seattle, so he’s seen snow before. Therefore, he is also an expert and not afraid of dying at all.

Duncan being confrontational at all should have been like a smoke alarm—a smoke alarm that says “Excuse me, but something extraordinary is happening… maybe we should be cautious while we still can… ”

I said, “Could you please get some bananas,” but not with the nice please—with the shitty one that means “Here, take this please that you don’t deserve and use it to get some goddamn bananas.”

This is a reasonable point. And when you’re in full-on rage-ejection mode, there is nothing more infuriating than a reasonable point. You’re so mad, your brain starts malfunctioning. You can barely form thoughts, but you do somehow manage to form a sentence! It’s childish, needlessly inflammatory, and borderline nonsensical. You might as well throw sand at the person because saying this is going to have the same effect.

I’m not sure what I was trying to do here. Hold on, before we find out what the next part is, I’d like to give you an opportunity to guess… go ahead—guess anything you want, guy. What do you think it’ll be? My six least favorite numbers? Moon facts? A poem about a ghost?

We realized at exactly the same time that we are both stupid, serious, mad little animals who desperately want to stop each other from buying bananas, but can’t.

If you keep going, you’ll eventually realize that the one true answer to all your questions is: Of course it doesn’t make sense—what business do you have expecting things to make sense?

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t. Not fully, at least. Not if you keep poking it. And poking harder doesn’t do anything. In fact, the harder you poke it, the less sense it makes. And once you start to notice this, it rips through you like a Tasmanian tornado octopus, rending your stupid little sense of meaning apart with its flailing power arms.

It’s a confusing type of sadness. Real, yet undeniably ridiculous. The same kind of sadness you’d feel after finding out that your mom is a sock puppet.

When you can explain things to people who are willing to listen to you explain them, it is extremely difficult to resist fully and brutally explaining them. It feels good to explain them—like maybe you’re getting somewhere. Like maybe, if you can just… really explain them, the experiences will realize you’re catching on and stop bothering you.

I tried to keep it together so nobody would notice, and I wanted to explain how difficult it was, and how forcefully the sadness exited my body when I finally broke down during the closing ceremonies.

From there, I wanted to go on to express how unfair the world is, and how many mistakes it’s possible to make even when you’re trying as hard as you can, and why I made the ones I did, and what they all were.

Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.

I want to explain that music is not supposed to be mandatory. It is a fun activity. I do not need it for anything. There are no serious injuries that can happen as a result of not listening to music. I want to explain that. But I don’t know how to put it in terms a stereo can understand, so I either have to listen to music or endure the consequences.

The human brain isn’t accustomed to navigating a world where it’s hard to tell the difference between objects and animals. For almost all of human history, that has been easy: if it’s trying to interact with you, that’s an animal. End of story. Maybe there was a tiny bit of a gray area around plants, but it’s not like rocks were jumping out from behind trees to tell cavemen what kind of crackers are on sale at CrazyLand. Rocks can’t do that. I don’t know if they’d want to, but it doesn’t matter, because they can’t.

You can’t do the same nonsensical thing every single day for three weeks and then just stop. It doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to do in the first place, but at least it was consistent. At least it still seemed possible to figure out why it was happening. There has to be an explanation somewhere. You can’t just pick an object at random, ritualistically place it in someone’s yard every day with no explanation, and then stop doing it also with no explanation. You can, though. You can also start doing it again three months later, when it makes the absolute least sense to start doing it again. There are so many things you can do. Like one time, put a grapefruit instead. Just once. Then go back to sticks forever. I don’t know if hammer guy learned anything from this. It would have been pretty impossible to make a connection between the punishment and the crime.

This wasn’t about teaching hammer guy a lesson, though. It was for me. I can’t force the things that happen to be fair. I can’t make them happen for only good reasons that I understand and agree with. But I can do my own things. And I can do them for equally pointless and equally nonsensical reasons. Which is sort of like fairness.

Such is the danger of optimism. If you think you can do it, you’ll try. And you might keep trying. If it works, great—you did it. You don’t need blankets anymore. Good job. That was really hard, which is amazing when you consider how much you didn’t need to do it. If it doesn’t work, you’ll keep trying anyway. There’s always the dangling carrot of what you could be if you maxed out.

Sensing the pressure to lead, my first instinct was to give up. If I’d been ready to die, this would’ve worked and nobody would have had to be the leader. But there was a tiny part of me that wasn’t ready. Just the faintest whisper of survival instinct. The survival equivalent of a piece of rice.

I tried to get to the options, but some weird number riddle was in the way. Because when you’re fucked up enough, technology doesn’t make sense. Dig a hole? Sure. Catch a fish? Okay. Pee on a rock? Why not. How about: enter a 4-digit passcode on a tappy-tap screen to unlock this glowing surface full of symbols? Under these conditions, a phone seems like a light-up rectangle puzzle from an alternate dimension.

This might be hard to believe, but the reason this happened is because I was trying to be a good person. I do not know what I am doing at all, but I’m trying REALLY hard. And trying really hard when you don’t know what you’re doing just happens to be the exact recipe for acting like a fuckin’ weirdo.

This is a home video from the ’80s. Compared to the resolutions available in modern times, the quality is like standing behind a wall and guessing what’s on the other side. And I’m mangling the poor fish so badly that even at this ridiculous resolution, you can see pieces of its body rubbing off on my mittens.

We aren’t good at explaining things to children. Especially not hard things like how nothing is fair or means anything but, you know, keep trying anyway.

Why is anything the worst anything. It is in our nature to compare things. We should not feel bad about this, but we should also be aware of how silly it is to look at a frog and think we know where it ranks on the Best Frogs of All Time scale. Why do we even have that scale? They’re frogs. Let them be.

You’ve heard stories before, so right now, you’re probably thinking, Yeah, but that’s just where the frog starts. Surely the rest of the story is about the frog’s journey to success. No. That is not where the story is going. First of all, there is no such thing as a successful frog. Oh, I’m sorry—does the frog have to be beautiful and successful before we can talk about it? Is that how the world works? We only get to talk about frogs who are amazing? Guess what, children—this isn’t even a real story. It’s just a ruse to teach you a lesson about life. I’m glad you asked, children. As far as we can tell, life does not have a point. There is no need to be frightened. Yes, an invisible stranger just told you that life is pointless, but, much like this story, life doesn’t need a point. I mean, it can have one if you want. Go ahead—pick one. Whatever you want. Count all the rocks. Get faster at singing. Be as nice as possible. Grow 500 pumpkins and put them in a pile. But there’s nothing that requires life to have a point.

Hello again, children. Once upon a time, there was an ugly frog. And the world isn’t fair, so it didn’t grow up to be pretty or successful—it just stayed how it was. Then one foggy Christmas Eve, the frog realized that everything is equally ridiculous. And it went sledding because why not.

You might be thinking, Why, though? Why is the person who does that somebody’s best friend? Because that’s intimacy, Buckaroos. Somebody who understands exactly how weird you are, and you understand exactly how weird they are, and you’re in a sort of mutually beneficial hostage situation.

So, for the first time in ten years, there was nothing around but me. I thought that’s what I wanted. But when the relief wore off, it was actually a little weird not having anything around that wanted to interact with me. This was confusing, but in a way, I kind of missed it. I think what I’m trying to describe is loneliness. I felt pretty offended by it. I mean, what am I—some clueless animal who needs love and companionship?

Experiencing real loneliness for the first time is like realizing the only thing you’ve ever loved is your home planet after migrating to the moon.

Spider solitaire did not turn out to be an adequate substitute. I became very sad. Unless somebody did something about my emotional needs, it seemed likely to continue. I didn’t want to ask for help, though… It didn’t seem like I deserved it. I also wasn’t necessarily ready to admit to an obvious sign of weakness like emotional needs. Under the circumstances, the most practical solution genuinely seemed like it might be to befriend myself. The idea wasn’t my favorite I’ve ever had. I mean, what the fuck kind of warp-speed loser tries to be their own friend? How would that even work? Ask myself personal questions and pretend I don’t know the answers already?