Book excerpt: In this anecdotal memoir an unknown narrator combines philosophical musings with dark humor to alleviate his reoccurring existential crises and mundane day-to-day missteps. To retain his sanity the narrator reflects on parables and absurd punch lines. Our narrator is consumed by doomed relationships, painful nostalgia, a vicious cycle of poverty, incompetent superiors, and ridiculous decrees from a Dictator-President with a violent police force. These situations are so hopeless they can turn humorous, and therefore, undermine the power that crippling depression, anxiety, and obsession can wreak on an individual living in “modernity.” In the end, the reader is left with more questions than answers: “Are these intellectually rigorous musings the signs of mental illness, or an elaborate trick at our expense?” and “Who has a skewed perception of reality: the narrator, his society, or our own selves?”