As a connoisseur of disappointment, I've often wondered what it would be like to disengage my expectations from the world of people and redirect them toward targets more predictable in nature, maybe selections from the animal kingdom or even plants or, better still, lifeless objects both natural (smooth rocks within reach, at most a few inches below the surface of the water) and manmade (toaster ovens, brand new or very recently wiped down with a damp cloth, with an easily emptied crumb tray). Not just any objects but particularly reliable ones, with few if any moving parts or other potential sources of chagrin. I'm thinking blocks of cheese here, or well-made notebooks, or maybe quality lumber. I could work in a lumberyard and bring cheese for lunch, without friends or loved ones. Another approach would be to adjust my expectations, to learn to accept people as they are. The problem is that to avoid an unattractive pessimism you must always believe there are better people just around the corner, so why accept people as they are? Really the core issue here is time, time ruins everything by creating a future that you have to then think about and imagine yourself into and measure against the present and the past even though it hasn't happened yet, being the future and all. The imagined future can wreck everything and never has to answer for these shenanigans, it's the present that pays for the future's destructive pranks and poisonous influence. Our brains can't help but think into the future, to conceive of many possible futures, and civilization would be impossible without this cruel capacity, but surely there are reasonable limits nature could impose if it cared at all, which it most certainly doesn't. Nature, being pitiless, allows our brains to think whatever it can think whenever it wants to. When has unconstrained freedom not resulted in catastrophe? I know nature can do more, just look at sleep for instance. When you're asleep the brain is for the most part not allowed to make you get up and run around the neighborhood or get some soldering done or make expensive international calls just to chat with people who are mere acquaintances at best or other hazardous or foolish activities; nature protects you from yourself, or tries to anyway (many people sleepwalk or turn homosexual while fast asleep). Why can't a version of that protective brain-disabling operate while we're awake too? Like a conscience but with the awesome paralyzing power of the sleeping mind? When people are awake they are far more dangerous to themselves than when they're asleep. When I'm awake I am liable to think about my future and to act on these conjectures and wild imaginings, thereby completely ruining my present. The only possibility for happiness lies in the present, the present must be fiercely protected from baleful influences such as the future, yet I always let the malicious future get under the present's skin, leaving it irritable and despondent and maybe a little red and swollen and painful to the touch. One solution is to attack the root of the problem and destroy the future and therefore its power to harm me, but that seems kind of drastic. Maybe I could at least gain a little satisfaction by destroying someone else's future instead.