What you are listening to was digitally recorded by the last unhappy man on Earth. I am 106 years old, my name? Well, my name is not important just know that I am who I say I am.

Hopefully someone someday will hear this and maybe somewhere deep inside their soul understand why I am who I am. Perhaps I am just an insane old man babbling meaningless garbage; I ponder that question in my mind every day. …Perhaps I am. They bring people to look at me every day, well almost every day, the last sad, dejected, and miserable person on the planet. In a way I have become rather a celebrity.  I’ve been studied by the brightest minds in the world, People have written long articles in magazines about me, I was even interviewed on a TV talk show once although my “handlers” were close by just in case I started to say something too “controversial.” Ha! It makes me laugh to think anything I say would be controversial. I am just a sad old man and the last of my kind… although I heard rumor of a tribe in west Africa… no, no matter, if they exist or not if doesn’t change anything. I am locked up in this institute so they can study me. Like a dangerous caged animal in a zoo or a freak at a side show but what I really am to them is a living fossil of the world before the… the… I’ll just call it the “change.”

Oh my handlers are very nice. That is precisely the problem everyone is very nice. But I am rambling again; a curse of an aging mind…where was I? Oh yes happiness, it is the blight that has hit this world. Ah, happiness a blight? I hear you scream. Unlike you out there listening, if anyone is listening, I remember a world without total and absolute happiness. It was a world with many lonely, sad and depressed people. How many? Millions. I would venture to say most people were not happy most of the time and certainly no one was happy all the time. I hear you laugh the talk of a crazy man you say but it was true . Now get ready for this, there was even an industry put together by doctors call psychiatrists to help unhappy people get happy. I was one of those people, not the psychiatrist but a person who went to see them. Yes, I wanted to be happy all the time. I wanted to find a happy pill and change my life. Surprised? Me, of all people, wanted to be happy. Fate has a way of playing cruel tricks. Oh there were lots of drugs out there promised to make you happy many legal and many more illegal. Some, mostly the illegal ones made you happy for a few minutes then you became very unhappy. The legal ones were supposed to “take the edge off” your sadness, not make you happy but make you less unhappy. None it worked for me. I was miserable most of the time.

Then came that fateful day, A doctor, I forget his name but I’m sure they have some big statue of him somewhere, announced that he had created the long desired “happy pill” bensa..suta..something. It was said to have no side effects at all. The person taking it would still keep all his mental sharpness, no drowsiness, no sexual side effects, and best of all once taken the effects last for life! Ah, a true miracle… I know, I am already telling you things you learned in grade school but please have patience with me; I am coming to my point. You see, it soon was tested, approved by the FDA and put on the market. My doctor subscribed it to me the very first day it came out to market. I was so excited, if it lived up to all the hype it was well worth the huge about of money it was to cost me, or so I thought at the time. How young and naive I was.

I remember driving down the street toward the pharmacy when traffic came to an abrupt halt. About a mile down the road I could see what looked like smoke. There must be a fire ahead I thought to myself so I turned on the radio to listen to the news. What I heard was astonishing; there was a riot in front of the pharmacy, my pharmacy, in my little town hundreds of people clamoring for the magic pill to make them happy. Soon there were reports all over the news about massive riots, mostly started by the poor who could not afford the pill. I turned around the car and headed for home when I realized something strange, throughout the reports of the riots the reporter sounded rather chipper; I mean he seemed not too concerned when he reported three dead in riots in Queens or the thirty-nine dead in Baltimore. And then amid the carnage he interviewed in a very cavalier manner two women who had just taken the drug. Both laughed and giggled while they expressed their concern about the day’s events. Arriving at home I stuffed the prescription in my wallet and went inside.

I recall my wife was home watching the TV, coast to coast coverage of the riots. She was glad to see me home safe. She asked if I got my pill. I told her I didn’t want to chance it. I sat in my lazyboy recliner and stared at the tube. Then the president came on TV, I think it was either Clinton or Spears, I can’t rightly remember it was so long ago. She said that the drug was going to be given away free to the public to stop the riots and since it was so safe it was given out to everyone who wanted it. Lookin’ back now I personally would have preferred the riots.

I didn’t go down to the pickup point outside of Wal-Mart for mine but my wife did it for me and while she was there she picked up some for herself and our teenage son. She must have taken hers on the ride home because when she got back she was the happiest I had ever seen her. She handed my hermetically sealed package to me. I can hear her now “here honey, take it! It’s great”. I remember looking down at my hand at the shinny foil package. I was holding true happiness in the palm of my hand. Something wasn’t right about it in my gut. I didn’t earn the happiness it would give me. What gives me the right to be happy for no reason? But on the other had it is happiness, does it matter where it comes from? I took the package and put it in my pocket. I needed to talk to my shrink, oh, that’s another word for psychiatrist, remember I told you about them before… anyway I needed to talk to him about why I feel strange about taking the pill.

The next morning I went to my shrink’s office. Walking down the hall I got more “hellos”, “good mornings” and “how are you today” then I normally did. The waiting room was unusually empty and the cute girl at the desk was surprised to see me. As I entered the office the doctor looked up at me with a wide smile. I told him my concerns about the drug. He response was I shouldn’t worry, he took it and he feels better than he ever had in his life. On the way home I took the pill, I remember I downed it with a can of Dr. Pepper. In a couple minutes I felt a wave of euphoria come over me. Everything was clearer my life problems were so small they were non-existent.  I was truly happy!

As you know soon most of the world had taken the pill and since crime and violence dropped to almost nothing where the pill was taken most, it was made a law that you must have the medication. They began giving it to children and even babies before there first suckle are given a liquid form of it. Truly I and the whole world along with me were on the happy pill.

How then did I become what you hear now; A sad and lonely old man? Fate, as I said before, has a way of playing cruel tricks. When my son was 23 he was involved in a car accident and was killed. Now in the days before the “change” people had funerals. I know you are confused, let me try to explain, at a funeral people would get together and weep, morn and remember the passing of a loved one then they would take the body and bury it with a memorial at a place called a cemetery. After the “change” funerals were replace by celebrations of the dead persons life with happy stories of the time he was on earth. What happens to the dead bodies today I really don’t want to know, recycled in some way I hear and all the graves were replaced with new homes for the living since no one was visiting them anymore, why have a place to morn if no one morns anymore. But when I was told by a smiling police man that my son had just died something inside me snapped. My wife’s reaction was thanking the officer for his time to tell us and them something about making arrangements for the life celebration and then went to make lunch as she whistled an old Beatles tune. I just stood there with a smile on my face, then something very amazing happen. I stopped smiling and started crying. My wife seeing me cry picked up the phone and called 911. I was rushed to the hospital. How could this be? They drew blood to test to see if I had the drug in my system. The police even arrived since it was illegal not to take the drug. The test came back positive, the happy pill was still in my system yet there I was morning the death of my son. They gave me the drug intravenously in a dose ten times what it should take, yet I was no happier than I was before. My body had rejected the happiness and no amount of medication could cure me. 

They let me leave the hospital and go home to attended my sons life celebration but with my eyes now opened I could see how wrong the world had become. I feel so sorry for your kind, for you have never known sorrow. As my son laid there and I weep I could hear the happy chat and talk of the…participants of my son’s “celebration” and it was then I realized I was the only true person there. I was alone in my grief but at least I had grief. The others were slaves, slaves to there happiness. Serving a master they have no way of escaping for who can escape what they desire?

Since the years I was serving the same master what a place the world had become. No more wars, the world had united as one and since people didn’t fear death anymore there was no more religion; who needs a God when you have heaven on earth? Churches either went to decay or were turned into community centers or low income housing. Heaven on earth eh? But I have seen how much like hell the world has become.

The Arts also suffered; great literary tragedies like Hamlet were replaced on the bookshelf and on the stage by warm fuzzy plays like “The Worlds A Great Big Happy Place” a “feel good” play with no conflict, and absolutely no plot. Painting masterpieces like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” tossed away in a dumpster were replaced by a happy portrait of a “Care Bear” drawn by a blind seven year old girl. “Oh how nice”. Music and poetry all suffered the same fate.

The world my friend, if you are still listening, has lost its soul. I may be the last say and lonely man on earth but I am also the last really happy man on earth. Because when I am happy, which is very rare indeed, but when I am happy, I know that I am happy. Can you have happiness without knowing sadness? How can you know you are happy if you have nothing to compare it to?