Most of the time, stock photo models are just grinning idiots with no emotion. Where's the pathos? The agony? The heartache? The evil? Harold tries to be like those grinning idiots, but that haunting gaze betrays his façade of happiness. Look into the Abyss long enough, and it begins to look back at you.
"Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?"
-- Ernest Hemingway
"I'm not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I've got."
-- Kurt Cobain
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
-- Virginia Woolf
"Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is."
-- Sylvia Plath
"Yes sir, I am a tortured man for all seasons, as they say, and I have powerful friends in high places. Birds sing where I walk, and children smile when they see me coming."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
"When time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you."
-- David Foster Wallace
"I can now see everything falling to pieces before my eyes."
-- Ian Curtis
"Death may be the greatest of all human blessings."
-- Socrates