The Anti-Cheer: Marrow, The Society for the Advancement of Despair

While kittens play in the windows at Macy’s Union Square here in San Francisco and glassy-eyed shoppers are decking the halls all around you, some of us might take more comfort retaining our gloom, wrapped tightly in out blackest clothes and hoping that no one gets any of that holiday cheer on us by accident. Not that we don’t love kittens. We do. But with everyone so seasonally happy-hyped, it’s like you gotta watch where you walk on the sidewalk so you don’t step in any and track it home. Fortunately for us, there’s Marrow (The Society for the Advancement of Despair) whose tagline is, “Own your misery.”

Do you wish you could just be left alone with your sadness? Why can’t people just let you be miserable? Don’t they understand that it feels good to feel bad?

We do.

Marrow believes that it’s everyone’s right to wallow in sadness. It’s a human need to embrace a little depression, and sometimes you just need to share that misery with the world.

Our state-of-the-art Unhappiness Enhancement(TM) facilities are the perfect place to explore the depths of your discontentment, and our mood crash coaches have been despised the world over.

We offer 10-15 night courses in a wide range of activities to amplify your pain. We can promise that when you leave us you’ll be worse than when you came, and you’ll have the tools you’ll need to bring sadness into your whole life.

Marrow is actually a local band, but morseo, an experience. Watch their videos, where like in “Street Preacher” they literally take their “Happiness is Fiction” signs and fire-brimstone sermons to the streets — of Union Square. Also recommended are their holiday-gathering appropriate t-shirts with plain text reading “Happiness is Fiction” and “Everything will not be ok.”