Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

This, of course, applies specially to the “Black Label”. However, only those who know what I’m talking about can possibly know what I’m talking about!

You look at human history, and almost every time there has been a war or oppression or genocide, it has had its roots in religion, in one way or the other. But, you might object, religion has brought happiness and peace of mind to billions. Well, while the extent of the happiness and the number of people affected by it is debatable, it can’t be denied that religious beliefs have been beneficial to many. But so has been the cartoons made by Disney! Have they not brought joy and happiness to hundreds of millions or perhaps billions, too? And there hasn’t been any wars or mass murders or tortures caused by a Walt Disney film. We must start analyzing the benefit/harm ratio of religions rationally.

So for some reason, among all the works of fiction it has been religion and religious materials that have gained special attention and have been given special status. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they have had more time with our collective brains to turn them into mush and turn us into brainless zombies. Maybe if you think about religion in terms of the theory of memes, it will become apparent that everything about a religion, specially the more widespread ones, is evolved with one most important purpose: to let it survive. That usually means spreading to as many people as possible. That means bringing people in and keeping them hooked up and destroying its rivals, be they other religions or science or whatnot. And we humans, have been the tools to be controlled by these vicious, dangerous and single-minded memes to ensure their survival.

If you think the purpose of any long lasting and popular religion is human happiness, you should think again. The purpose of any religion is its own survival and dominance. A few million people here and there doesn’t make much difference as long as the long-term success of that meme is guaranteed.

To those of you who still think, in this day and age, that any idea like religion should be enforced or even be allowed to be advertised or be a part of any government or ruling body, I can only say to look at history. Look at your own lives! Look at our own lives and the lives of those like us!

For those libertarians and agnostics among you, I have to say that I don’t think religion is something to be ignored and always categorized as a personal choice. Religion is harmful and dangerous. It’s not only publicly recognized dangerous religions and ideologies like Nazism that are dangerous, but the idea of any mass of humans controlled by any religion. We cannot afford to remain agnostic any more. People are entitled to their own beliefs of course, but those beliefs should never ever be the basis for special treatment or ever be let to come to power anywhere at any time.

P.S. I’m finally back in Tehran after a three-hour-plus flight delay.

In other news, I finally got my hands on the God of War Collection trailer. For those rare GoW-challenged people among my audience, the Collection is a remastered version of the first two God of War games for the PS3 (they where released for the PS2 originally.) It seems that, as they had promised, SONY has not changed anything in the games, and just packed some higher resolution textures and (maybe) animations, which is a wise move. The first two GoWs deserve to be preserve at the masterpiece of gameplay they are. This will be release this month.
Obviously, the above means I have to get my own PS3. As soon as I figure out a robust solution to get both video and audio out of the PS3 and into my 1080p-capable but HDMI-incapable monitor and my speakers, I’m taking the trip to the Toopkhuneh(!) square and getting me a 120GiB PS3 Slim.

In yet other news, late last month (a day before my own birthday in fact) the twelfth book in the amazing and fantastic fantasy series The Wheel of Time has been released. It was supposed to be in November too IIRC, which makes the release a nice surprise. I’m already a fourth into the book and I’m liking it! May Robert Jordan rest in pieces… oops!… rest in peace.
I have one thing to say to anyone who likes high fantasy at all: GO READ THE BOOKS. The whole 12000-13000 pages of pure immersion and greatness. Doesn’t matter what other people say. I have read enough fantasy series to know which one is great! Go read it. Read the first book if you feel you don’t have the time. Do yourself a favor.

It’s that damn Gates’ birthday again.

First, we all should know that new and delete are C++ operators, with all their facilities (and shortcomings, of course.) But not exactly like other operators, you can override them at a global level for every type that does not provide its own type-specific such operators. These global operators are provided as part of the C++ runtime library and are easily overridden. Their declarations are:

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// The single-object versions
void * operator new (size_t mem_size);
void operator delete (void * mem_block);
 
// The array versions
void * operator new[] (size_t mem_size);
void operator delete[] (void * mem_block);

What new does is allocate a block of memory, and then call the constructor for the type with the address of the newly allocated block passed in as the this pointer. A delete call does the reverse; calling the destructor and then de-allocating the memory. The difference between the single-object versions and the array versions is only in the number of c’tor/d’tors they call. It amazes me how many C++ programmers don’t know and don’t care about details such as this (if you are programming in C++, these kind of details can and will bite you in the places you don’t want to be bitten!) If you fail to match them correctly, they allocate and de-allocate the correct amount of memory for the array or the single object, they just might not call constructors and destructors for all the objects being allocated or freed. That’s it.

Also, there is that small detail about exception-handling handling (yeah, two “handling”s!) The new operators may only throw an object of a sub-type of std::bad_alloc and only in the event that the requested amount of memory cannot be allocated. delete operators should never throw any exceptions (just like destructors. Remember that!) So, the correcter declaration for these operators would be:

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// The single-object versions
void * operator new (size_t mem_size) throw (std::bad_alloc);
void operator delete (void * mem_block) throw ();
 
// The array versions
void * operator new[] (size_t mem_size) throw (std::bad_alloc);
void operator delete[] (void * mem_block) throw ();

Again, it is amazing how many programmers either don’t know about function exception specification and exception safety or just don’t use them (that includes me.) Of course, compiler providers are at least a little to blame here too. For example, Microsoft C++ compiler only distinguishes the empty exception list after a function declaration (meaning it doesn’t throw anything.) Anything else put there, just is taken to mean the default behavior is used (i.e. this function does throw something sometimes.)
In the meantime, the relationship between C++ programmers and exception handling remains in the love/hate/ignorance/hate/apathy/hate stage.

Later on, I’m going to talk abut overloading these global operators for fun and profit. Stay tuned!

Obviously, a related problem to memory management is calling the c’tor and d’tor for an object directly. Uses for this may not be immediately apparent, but as a few examples I could name implementing good smart pointers, memory pools, memory managers, garbage collectors, generic object containers (e.g. std::vector) and such.
You probably already know how to call the destructor on an instance directly. If you have a pointer x to an object of type T, you can call its d’tor like this: x->~T() (note that you should not generally call the d’tor in this way, unless you yourself have called the c’tor directly on that instance as well.) Calling the constructor is a bit trickier though (not really; I’m just being foreboding!)

What you should realize is that you can overload new and delete with different signatures that the ones above. You can add arguments and of different types. There are a few other signatures for these two provided by the standard C++ library (yeah, there are others!) The less interesting of them are:

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void * operator new (size_t mem_size, std::nothrow_t const & please_dont) throw ();
void operator delete (void * mem_block, std::nothrow_t const & please_dont) throw();
 
void * operator new[] (size_t mem_size, const std::nothrow_t & please_dont) throw ();
void operator delete[] (void * mem_block, std::nothrow_t const & please_dont) throw();

Forget about the deletes for a minute. The additional parameters to the new calls above are actually not used inside of the functions. Any object of type std::nothrow_t will suffice as the second parameter; it will be there just to signal the compiler to use this particular overload of the operator, which doesn’t throw any exceptions whatsoever. I just need to emphasize again that the regular new never returns a NULL pointer. It just throws an exception. But this one returns a 0 pointer upon failure and never throws anything, being it rocks, shoes or exceptions. The syntax for calling them, as you might suspect, is peculiar:

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#include <new>  // for std::nothrow
//...
T * p = new (std::nothrow) T (/* usual constructor parameters */);
// The line above calls a particular "new" overload with two
// parameters: a size_t and a std::nothrow_t.
// Oh, and std::nothrow is just an object of type std::nothrow_t.
//... 
delete p;

Notice that I didn’t call the delete with any extra parameters or anything. In fact, there is no syntax in C++ for calling delete with any parameters! Besides, delete is already a non-throwing function. So what gives?! Why is there a paired delete for every frakking new when there is no frakking way of calling them?! You should keep your cool. I may explain them (if you don’t already know,) or we can leave the subject as an exercise. I would just say that the paired delete is called by the code generated by the compiler in a very specific situation.

Note that anything other than the straightforward, unary new and delete is called a “placement new/delete“. However, I’ve heard the term be used for a specific overload, which is more interesting and looks like this:

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void * operator new (size_t mem_size, void * mem_ptr) throw ();
void operator delete (void * mem_block, void * mem_ptr) throw ();
 
void * operator new[] (size_t mem_size, void * mem_ptr) throw ();
void operator delete[] (void * mem_block, void * mem_ptr) throw ();

The implementations for the above operators are really simple. Here’s a complete listing:

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void * operator new (size_t mem_size, void * mem_ptr) throw ()
{
    return mem_ptr;
}
 
void operator delete (void * mem_block, void * mem_ptr) throw ()
{
}
 
void * operator new[] (size_t mem_size, void * mem_ptr) throw ()
{
    return mem_ptr;
}
 
void operator delete[] (void * mem_block, void * mem_ptr) throw ()
{
}

Note that although I haven’t written it, the constructor and destructor calls happen outside of my control. These versions of new and delete are used when we don’t want to allocate or free any memory, and just want the constructors and destructors to be called. For new, we just pass in a pointer to another sufficiently-sized memory location and ask the compiler to generate the code to call the c’tor upon that area of memory. That’s how we call a c’tor directly. We procure some memory area from somewhere and use that, like this:

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T * x = (T *)malloc (10 * sizeof(T));
for (unsigned i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
    x[i] = new (x + i) T (/*usual c'tor params. */);

These standard placement operators cannot be hidden or overridden in user code, but there is still a ton of fun to be had.

You can very easily replace the old, simple and default operators with an implementation of yours, a la:

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void * operator new (size_t mem_size)
{
    void * ret = malloc (mem_size);
    if (0 == ret)
        throw std::bad_alloc ();
    return ret;
}
 
void delete (void * mem_block)
{
    free (mem_block);
}
 
// the array versions are exactly the same

As I have stated earlier, the c’tor/d’tor calls are generated automatically for you by the compiler. So now you are free to write your own memory manager!

The way that memory manager/debugger/helper/whatevers usually work under the hood is that they allocate more memory than you have requested, and put their own junk right before and/or right after the area that gets passed back to the user (that’s a bad way to do memory management, but that one is a long story.) Some of the stuff that are usually kept there include a pointer to the next and/or previous allocated block of memory (so all the blocks form a linked list,) sentinel values right before and right after the user area to detect buffer overruns (e.g. 0xdeadbabe,) the size of the memory block, the code file/line/function/module that allocated this particular block and so on and so forth. Actually, your default memory manager in the CRT is doing this right now. Just new two large-enough blocks of memory and compare their address differences with the size of the first block. The runtime accompanying some compilers (like VC++) even exposes their internal data structures and means to work with the memory manager (although rather passively.)

You need to keep in mind though, that what I have discussed so far barely scratches the surface of writing memory managers. These are just practicalities and implementation details; the state of the art on the theory of the matter and memory allocation algorithms, policies and mechanisms can fill several books. Even on the implementation side, there are really serious issues with performance, cache-friendliness, thread-safety, multiple thread support, etc. need taking care of.
Besides, much (if not most) of the memory (de)allocation going on in a C++ program these days go through C or operation system API, shared object files (DLLs,) through third part code or through STL, all of which bypass the basic technique discussed above. So, if you really are serious, you should investigate the existing memory debuggers or memory leak detectors or memory managers. There are several open source ones out there, with various degrees of sophistication and complexity. Have fun! (But for what it’s worth, I should mention that we have used a memory leak detector using nothing but this technique in Garshasp and a similar project before, and in both projects it has been a great help.)

Try reading the following with a picture of Darth Vader in front of you, his voice booming in your head, and preferably with a red-blade Light Saber replica on your mantelpiece (sorry folks, I really do have one of these!)

You are sure [...]?

…Leave him alone.

We want you to use her blood.

Who is that man?!

My own son…

Inject my IV with an air bubble. I will have another heart attack and no one will know. [...] You were trying to put a gun in his hand and point it at my head. The gun is now in your hand. That is a practical difference, not a moral one.

In my world there are dangers and bloodshed and death, and that makes you a man. And men make choices.

I just finished watching this 3rd episode of season 6 and it was a good one.

P.S. OK, that’s no way to come back and post to my blog after a few months, but give me a break; I’m trying to ease in (you know, 2x³-3x² style!)

If you thought that was the rant, you’re sourly mistaken. Here it is.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Nothing real, just a wild and fantastical fantasy. Suppose you are standing on the edge of a rooftop, contemplating jumping down. As long as you haven’t jumped, the choice is always yours. You can jump, stay on the edge or move back. It’s not like you can’t jump two seconds or two hours later. If the situation changes, you can always weigh the odds again and make a more suitable choice.
But what if you jump? You make a choice and you jump. I think that’s the best choice you can make; the most logical. If you stay on the edge, or you move back, the edge and the jump will always be there, tempting and tantalizing. Why defer the choice?
Some might say because it’s a final choice and because you will always have the option, you can postpone it for later. It’s not like the edge is going anywhere, right? Wrong. I say you should always jump the first chance you get, because once you jump, there is no going back and there is no more choices. Why would you postpone a move that solves your dilemma so quickly? How come people (including myself) defer such obviously logical choices for more than a single second?
I like these kind of choices. I like changes and commitments that you cannot revert. They simplify life so much.

I think it’s kind of funny, I think it’s kind of sad,
The memories in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.

That’s not about death of course. It’s about giving up in despair. It’s about indecision and inability to deal. It’s about petty problems that prove impossible for weak people.
It’s about me.

Justice Is Lost
Justice Is Raped
Justice Is Gone…

…And no justice for all, because a bunch of petty, raisin-brained dictator-wannabes wanna be dictators. And frak them all.

Frak. Frak. Frak. Frak me sideways.

I, like most of us, am worried about where we are headed. I, like most of us, am skeptical about the election results and whether it’ll have a real impact for the better. I don’t think anyone has any doubts about whether the times can get worse, because they sure can, as the past four years have shown. But for the better? I don’t know.

However, like many stupid young people, I have my hopes. I hope for for a more realistic government. One that is more in line with what the people want and need. You know what? I want a less stupid government. One that does not tell so many lies that even its own body starts believing them.

I hope for less religious mumbo jumbo and more information and wisdom. I want a government that works efficiently and knowledgeably and let’s people do whatever they want as long as they don’t break the law. And I want real, realistic and usable means to change the laws if they are broken and bad.

I want freedom. I want a government that is afraid of its people, not a people that are afraid of their government even when they are in their own bed. Even worse, I don’t want a people that don’t care about their government as long as it doesn’t step on their toes and vice versa.

I want people to listen to each other. I want people not to turn their head and pretend that they just don’t see. I don’t want the stupid idiots who decide my fate to still think that what is said in some book from several hundred years ago is absolute truth, no matter how strange, immoral, improbable, unacceptable, malicious and unscientific it is.

I don’t want my government officials to say that they do their job because some god says so in some book, or because it’s their religious obligation, or because some guy who died 1300 years ago is quoted to have wanted so.

I want them to do their job because the law says so, or because it’s their moral, social or logical obligation, or because the people want so.

I want some information. I am sick and tired of being treated like an idiot. I want freedom of the press and media. I know it’s got its own bag of problems, but hey, that’s much better than what we got already: all the problems of a media-driven and media-blinded society and 2% the functionality.

I want science and knowledge to have real value, not just as things to do in university as a way to pimp up your resumé to get the hell out of this dismal country. I want the wheels of industry, commerce, trade and technology to start turning and to move this country forward.

I want an education system that instead of force feeding children with crap and filling their heads with superstition and guilt and unreal notions of hope and salvation, teaches them to think and choose and provide them with data to support their choice. I want our schools to be playgrounds for the real world out there, not 11 years (or 12 or whatever the number currently is) of isolation from reality and Newspeak practice. I don’t want teenagers to learn more from ditching school than attending.

I want people to panic! I don’t want us to go about our lives like sheep the night before they are slaughtered, or like the anecdotal frog that never jumps out of the water that is slowly starting to boil. Our situation is very dire. I want to see people start screaming out of their windows that they are “mad as hell” and that they are “not going to take it anymore.” Why no one does that, unless it’s election time and they are one of the candidates and preferably there are more than three million watching?

On days like these, why it is that I find the immortal songs of Mr. Bob Dylan to be the ones that speak most loudly my heart and mind?

Do times ever change? Am I a fool to hope? Am I a simpleton to be knocking on heavens door? In days like these, I feel like my hopes, and most people’s, are blowing in the wind.

شنیده‌ام که گور جای خوب و خلوتی‌ست
ولی کسی در آنجا تو را در آغوش نخواهد گرفت

The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land…

What can I say more than that?

But that’s not what I intended to write about.

I also don’t believe in smaller conspiracies. I don’t believe that all the elections in the world are fixed. I don’t believe that the NSA monitors everything on the Internet (they do, but they have no reason to care for my data, and I’m taking all the measures that I logically can, so if they really can break AES, well, there’s not much more I can do!) I don’t believe that the bank tellers are all my enemies. I also don’t believe that the Azad university teachers are forced to flunk students, so they have to pay the tuition multiple times. And so on and so forth.

Let’s get back to that election thing.

It’s getting near the presidential election here in Iran. And as always, people are all filled with false hope or with empirical pessimism. Many (most) of the people, specially the educated, believe that the election results are predetermined and fixed. They believe that no matter what their vote, the desirable candidate for the “powers to be” comes out of the ballot boxes. Other believe that the general, stupid public will vote for the worst of the worst and the worst of the worst will be president again.
Many people, smart people, people starving for change, people hungry for freedom, people who should know better don’t vote. Sometimes they don’t vote for even more stupid reasons; e.g. that their perfect candidate is not running for presidency or because all those who are running are bad.

I hereby ask the conspiracy theorists to think about it a little more. I’m not saying that a few hundred ballots here and a few thousands votes there are not bought, sold, exchanged, inserted, deleted or corrected! That’s human nature. But I don’t think that actually has any significant influence on the results. When you can coerce millions of people to vote for you with a ripped coat, a stupid smile and a promise to bring the oil money to their tables, why would you need a nationwide conspiracy to pad the ballots or fix the election or con the counting process?! Don’t you think the former’s much cheaper, more effective and less prosecutable (in this country, at least)?

I would ask the pouters to stop pouting and come and eat their dinner! I know the candidate selection and screening process in Iran is retarded and ridiculous. But one of these candidates is going to be elected your next president whether you vote or not. In any given group of candidates, there must be bad and worse. Go and vote for the least bad so the next president (hopefully) does the least amount of damage. Even bad is better than the possibility of worse. The only logical reason you might have for not picking a candidate in this case is if you genuinely believe that you are actually more likely to pick the worse! If you think you are worse than the average idiot who walks this country at picking the better (or least bad) among 5-6 guys for presidency, then you should not vote. But who really believes that?!
(Of course, I wish more people did, but as some very smart guy has said, the problem with the world is that wise people are always full of doubt but the idiots never have any! I’m sure that those who actually believe the above are almost definitely the ones that are way more qualified that the average populace to vote.)
In short, you have to vote even if you don’t like any of the candidates or the one you liked best is not among them.

The logical pessimists are the hardest to deal with logically. It is painfully obvious that the vote of one person has absolutely no significant significance in the result of the election. And any rational person should know this and would know this. However, if all the rational, logical and sane people sanctioned (or embargoed or whatever) the election it is obvious that all the voters will be the irrational, the illogical and the insane! It’s called “super-rationality” people! Look it up!

Anyway, I think a perfect solution for me is Kindle DX (because it has PDF support) as long as the DRM is not too constricting. I guess I’d have to dust off my old ninja outfit. We are raiding Amazon warehouses tonight!

We have all tasted that feeling… when you’re alone and you’re cold inside; when the world is frakking you up left and right; when life is just one tortured moment after another; when people you love don’t love you back; when things you want just slip out of your hands; when each breath comes only as an obligation; when you’re full of despair, not just for yourself, but for the human kind and this tiny planet; when blood and fire and war and hate is all that goes around and comes around; when days are dark and nights are stifling; when ice is the only remnant of justice and nothing remains of fair; when happy endings are only in stories like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet…
The human condition is so full of pain and misery that it’s almost ridiculous that people still hold on to hope.
The interesting feature about everybody’s darkness and despair is that they think it’s their pain and theirs alone and they alone have to bear this unbelievably unbearable burden of excruciation exasperation. Take a good look around you, people! Everybody has problems! Everybody is in pain all the time, except those who are too stupid or too wise to be reigned by it.
Anyways, when you think about it, you realize that there’s nothing special about your pain, and you are just like everyone else. We are all on a Gaussian bell curve of misery and heartache and those out of the 6-sigma domain are far too busy with either joy or misery to notice where they are.
When you think about it, none of us are unique in our sadness and despair. In fact, hardly any of us are unique in any meaningful way, least of all in our thinking. The saddest part of the human existence, the way I see it, is the 500 channels of the same shit on the TV, the loads of crap on the Internet, the tons of dung in the cinema, music and books. It’s mediocrity that is our biggest misery. It’s the 7 billion soulless bodies on this planet, all either trying to feed themselves, or trying to kill each other or (the saddest of them all) trying to look and act like each other.
So don’t be sad you puny worm-food bodies, and don’t be happy. You may think that your burden is the size of a mountain but it’s not. You are just another worthless droplet in this putrid sea of mediocrity. Smoke that in a pipe!

I’ve been rambling on for more than 420 words, and while I’m sure there is a point to be made, I don’t think I’ll be the one to make it tonight.

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

That’s Sir Walter Scott. I can’t say I know one end of poetry from the other… well, that’s it. I have no point to make there!

“Welcome… to the desert of the real!”

Take the following sample code for instance:

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void foo ()
try {
    // Some code
} catch (...) {
    // More code
}

As surprising as this might be to some (or not) the above is a valid C++ function definition. That’s right. No regular body in this function.
Now, the skeptics among you might wonder what usefulness this might possibly have! Wonder no longer. The foremost use (and the most straightforward one) is in the context of constructors and correct exception handling.

Suppose you have the following class and constructor:

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struct Bar
{
    Bar ();
 
    // Baz is another class that might throw an exception in its c'tor.
    Baz m_baz;
};
 
Bar::Bar ()
    : m_baz ()
{
}

How can you handle exceptions that might be thrown when m_baz is being constructed (e.g to do something useful with them?)
The answer is obviously a try body for the constructor. A la:

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Bar::Bar ()
try
    : m_baz ()  // Note the "interesting" placement!
{
} catch (std::exception & e) {
    std::cerr << "'Bar' c'tor is FUBAR!" << std::endl;
}

This has other very cool usages too. For example, to define a macro, with an aesthetically pleasing usage, to track entry into any function (for run-time call graph generation and other analyses.)

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#define TRACK_FN                                 \
    try {                                        \
        GlobalFunctionTracker::onFuctionEntry    \
            (__FUNCTION__, __FILE__, __LINE__);  \
        throw (42);                              \
    } catch (int)
 
// Use the above macro like this
void qux (int arg) TRACK_FN
{
    // Do your thang here...
}

Of course, this is not the most efficient way to implement this, but its the most beautiful one!
Some notes:

1. In effect, we are injecting code into the scope of the function. All the function arguments are available in the try and catch blocks.
2. If you use this try-block thingy for a constructor or destructor, the exceptions thrown in the try block will propagate automatically beyond the local catch! For all other kinds of functions, this will not happen and if you catch the exception, it will be stifled unless you rethrow it explicitly.

In any case, my point is that whatever this intelligence is, it’s no more artificial than our own, and we are probably no more real than it.
Maybe we should call it Third Intelligence? Obviously, calling machine intelligence Second Intelligence would be wrong, because they are third after mice and dolphins. We are fourth at best! “So long and thanks for all the fish” anyone?

Let me quote a great quote from a (supposedly) great person:

The question of whether computers can think is no more relevant than the question of whether submarines can swim.

Obviously, there must be a reason that I’m writing philosophically about AI at 6:28 in the morning. I have just started reading “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” (a seemingly great sci-fi book, available freely online) which apparently deals with the Singularity and the post-Singularity world. I’m in the middle of chapter two (out of eight) and I must say that the opening chapter was refreshingly original for me and sweetly violent. I recommend it even if the remaining 6.5 chapters are total crap.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

George Bernard Shaw said that. If you are a religious person and you are happy, well… good for you. But you have traded reality for happiness and peace, which makes you like an ostrich.

It will be the same shit, only a different day. Get over it already, because statistically, the day after that will yet be worse and the day after that even worse still.

Wake up and see
I’m dead as dead can be
The doctor told me.
Some day, I’ll get up, I’ll get up and walk away
Wake up, face me
Don’t play dead, cause baby,
I’ll spit at your feet and say-
‘you fuc*king disappoint me.’

Dead as dead can be,
Cold and too far away to see
A brief and vague reflection
Of what could and might still be,
In Amsterdam the tulips have all grayed
I wait for you to face me,
Don’t play the fool cause,
I’m waiting to spit at your feet and shout-
‘you fuc*king disappoint me!’

Cold and uncaring the scene
A scene of misery
The paramedic tell thee
‘Dead as dead can be.’
But some day I’ll get out of the morgue and pay
The way to fame and fortune
With a brain as hot as sin,
Yeah some day I’ll find you to say
‘You disappoint me
Baby, you disappoint me.’

Perfect! I found it while searching for one of Constantine’s soundtracks: A Perfect Circle’s (wikipedia, Last.fm) Passive (sorry for the crappy lyrics site) but I searched for “the doctor told”, instead of “my doctor tells me”.