If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

Depression means expending all your energy to avoid having to expend energy. I wish someone would invent a pill that would give me the motivation to go pick up my Lexapro refill.

America is, after all, full of dirt-cheap comforts. My T-shirts are five bucks at Walmart. The most amazing fast food costs less than what you’d pay to make it yourself. A good coffeemaker will beat anything you get in a fancy café. Cheap alcohol gets you drunk faster than the expensive stuff. So you can chill in a lawn chair on a nice autumn day with a beverage in your hand and say, “This isn’t so bad.” But if one of us gets a toothache or breaks our glasses or, god forbid, both? Well, now our whole world is threatening to come apart.

Coiffure’s posture was that of a man who knew the situation was insanity and was so pissed off by it that he was determined to find the cause and shoot it until the world returned to normal, even if it meant taking a break halfway through to go buy more bullets.

I thought about how it’s weird that we have different rooms for doing different things and how the fancier your house is, the more rooms and walls it has. I wondered who invented walls and what he was ashamed of. Probably began with a guy hanging curtains up around his corner of the tent, like, “I don’t want you to see what I’m doing over here.” Soon, everything was walls and shame, in our houses, in our minds. The guy was probably just jerking off. What, like he’s the only one? Now everybody else is ashamed to do it, because walls and shame isolate us, make us think we’re unique in our vices. Thanks, wall guy.

“There was a point, not too long ago,” continued Bas, “when I thought, ‘I don’t really wanna do this,’ but then I thought, ‘Well, I’ve come this far, might as well.’ Like I was only doing it because I was doing it, you know? And now, I think when you get old, it’s just that, over and over. You’re a thousand miles down some path you set way back when. So the thought of going back is crazy to you, even if the path you’re on is the craziest possible bullshit in the universe.