dead_battery, I feel you. I was once and generally still fight a deeply rooted sense of societal nihilism, especially with my fellow Americans. You got to dive into the world and enjoy the show, cultivating an almost spiritual (i.e. transcendental) sense of humor about things. Like in African folk tales, funny traits about animals are the butt of most jokes and laughs and are a colloquial way of saying, "Life is what it is.", the moral being we have to be able to laugh at ourselves more often than we don't. I think that in means we have to be able to laugh at everybody else too. I think you might enjoy this very short novel, its one of my all-time favorites by one of my all-time favorite authors. Its a very short read, a introspective reflection on self-destructive inward nihilism but expressed in brutally polite and congenial forms on the outside.
