Chapter 4
How to Make All Your Dreams Come True
Imagine this: it’s 2:00 a.m. and you’re still awake on the couch, staring
bleary-eyed and foggy-brained at the television. Why? You don’t know.
Inertia simply makes it easier to sit there and keep watching than to get up
and go to bed. So, you watch.
Perfect. This is how I get you: when you’re feeling apathetic and lost and
completely passive in the face of your fate. Nobody sits up staring at a TV at
2:00 a.m. if they have important shit to do the next day. Nobody struggles
with the will to move their ass off the couch for hours on end unless they’re
having some sort of inner crisis of hope. And it’s exactly this crisis that I want
to speak to.
I appear on your TV screen. I’m a whirlwind of energy. There are loud,
obnoxious colors, cheesy sound effects. I’m practically shouting. Yet,
somehow, my smile is easy and relaxed. I’m comforting. It’s as though I’m
making eye contact with you and only you:
“What if I told you that I could solve all your problems?” I say.
Pfft, puh-lease, you think. You don’t know the half of my problems, buddy.
“What if I told you I know how to make all your dreams come true?”
Riiiiight, and I’m the fucking tooth fairy.
“Look, I know how you feel,” I say.
Nobody knows how I feel, you reflexively tell yourself, surprised at how
automatic the response is.
“I, too, once felt lost,” I say. “I felt alone, isolated, hopeless. I, too, used to
lie awake at night for no particular reason, wondering if there was something
wrong with me, wondering what was this invisible force standing between
myself and my dreams. And I know that’s what you’re feeling, too. That
you’ve somehow lost something. You just don’t know what.”
In truth, I say these things because they are experienced by everybody.
They are a fact of the human condition. We all feel powerless to equalize with