January 26th, 2987

Weather: fine

Mood: existential

Music: Telstar - The Tornados

Dear diary,

Sometimes I don't understand Bonnie. I know she doesn't understand me. She's obsessed with, like, pretending to be human. I knew humans. No big deal. But why waste time, I mean? Pretending to be something that you're not. She's like, basically her own thing, right? She came from the mother gum.

So she invited me to this party at the little elephant woman's place last night. There were a couple of princesses there, some candy people; standard fare, really. The boys were there, playing a little concert with their robot dingus, and Finn was singing in his computer voice. It was nice. But something happened there, something that makes me a little scared when I really think about it.

When I was ten or eleven, dad told me a story. He knew some depressed, stuffy old scholar dude from somewhere called Doichland, who was into some really, like, existential mess-he was really depressed about, like, life, the universe and everything. The dude tells my dad that there was nothing on Earth (I guess it was before the war, yeah. Earth, Ooo, same biz), that could make him say "I wish this moment would last forever." He said that there was no moment perfect enough.

So dad made a bet with him, like dad does; If the scholar ever wanted that to happen, dad got to take his soul to the Nightosphere. And then dad used some black magic to trick the scholar: he made him fall in love with some chick, and he turned his life around and got happy, and eventually the dude even said, like, "I want this moment to last forever."

Dad didn't take his soul, for some reason. If it was like, the one nice dad ever did, I'd believe it, but all dad would ever say was "the look on his face when I jumped out of the closet was totally worth it." I can still hear dad saying that...

But dad, he said it was a cautionary tale. If you want a single moment to last for the rest of your life, because you're so happy in that moment, then your happiness is dependent on things. You're not moving forward if you want to stay in one moment.

Well, Finn was singing, Bonnie was dancing with some random princess, and for a moment, I caught her eye from across the yard. We made eye contact for less than a second. But it wasn't tense, like it always is with Bonnie. I think she smiled at me. The music was groovy, this cool breeze was blowing, and I guess everything was just alright in Marceline-land for a few seconds.

I swear, if my dad had jumped out in the next second and dragged me to the Nightosphere for good, it wouldn't have tarnished that moment.

So here's the big damn question: Is happiness just some random junk that happens in your head because of things that happen, or is it a state of mind that I can reach if I try hard enough? I get so worried. And you know what else worries me? Simon is the happiest, most consistently happy person I even know. Just, like, try to wrap your head around that biz. Simon-that-lives-in-an-ice-cave, Simon.

So I'm determined not to let it get to me. I kind of want to try seeing Bonnie seriously again, so there's that. Nah, she's not gonna be into me again after last time.

January 30th, 2987

Weather: foggy

Mood: weird

Music: Amberian Dawn - Cold Kiss

Dear Diary,

While I was lying in bed this morning, I remembered this thing that happened about three hundred years ago:

I was off the reservation completely, because I went about a month without any red. I was about to suck out this little forest animal dude's blood, and he said "please, I have a family to feed" and he went on groveling for like, forever. But I wasn't listening, because I had slipped even further into a wacked-out feeding frenzy. I left him alone after that, and I went off in some random direction, sucking every hue of red out of my surroundings that I could find. There's still a little mutant town where there's splotches of grey on all the buildings from me sucking on them.

When I came to, I was all bloated up from eating too much red. I was lying in the gutter in that little town, with a bunch of glass beer bottles for a pillow. They'd actually thrown trash on top of me. I understood what they were saying to me. I wasn't the weirdest thing in that village, and I guess they were calling me typical trash. Luckily, my parasol was in there with me or I might have been stuck.

I realized I'd been acting like typical trash.

I guess I've been acting that way now, too.

Grod, am I going to be a glob-damn teenager forever? Is it just fucking hard-wired into this mess called Marcy?

So I got up out of the gutter, and I looked around. I saw everything like I was seeing it for the first time. The buildings were pre-war, some of them, ones that used to be diners and a gas-station, with the pumps all busted down for parts. The town hall, I shit you not, had been a MacDougal's Fry Shop. But the houses and some of the shops were new, built out of good, solid mutant timber, like little story-book cottages and all that. I'd been through town a couple of times, but I noticed something new, that time.

As my head cleared and I hummed that old song about being an astronaut and leaving your wife, I noticed that all the buildings had different proportions. Some had doors that were twice as tall as they were wide, and some had doors that were three times as tall. And it was like that with the windows, and the roofs, and the height between stories. And it hit me that each little house was built for the person that lived there. Some mutants be tall, some don't be.

The sun was going down between two pine trees that stood alone at the end of the main street, and I was kicking myself for never noticing things like that before. Was I going through life like a kid, just seeing everything as a big mess of colours and shapes? I hoped not.

So, Marceline of three hundred years ago, I hate to break it to you, but not much has changed. I'm still a damn teenager. More observant, but does that even matter?

So I'm going on some kinda journey. Like, a quest. I've been on quests before.

But this is what dad would call a "quest of self-discovery." I'll write about it when I get back.