What are you doing when you’re at your happiest?
This is a deeply personal (possibly lurid) question. What’s worse, it’s not terribly easy to answer. So much time is spent around pursuit of what you want, rather than actually getting there.
Where I’m from, the puritanical image of pleasure requires cost, or harm on the body. The safest option is just to do away with pleasure and call yourself better for it.
It feels selfish to think of what really makes you happy, maybe even indulgent.
Can I tell you a time I felt indulgent?
I briefly worked with a startup for a tabletop game that was meant to be like Magic the Gathering but with more structurally simple rules. Due to my relationship with tabletop games (story for another day) I helped write out the lore of the world the game was set, rather than anything relating to playing the game directly. It was honestly a blast, the story ideas I have today are too far outside my capability, require too much research that comes too slowly. It was the last time I really allowed myself to just make something up. I wrote enough little pieces that I asked around for a writer that has more experience with horror, since that was a part of the card game, but not really my wheelhouse. It didn’t take long until I met a fella we’ll call Fella. This Fella had a better habit for writing than me, read more voraciously. Above all, Fella was terribly polite. I explained the world and he seemed very excited to get started on his piece of the story.
I get what he was doing now. There is a way HP Lovecraft writes that is stilted and unsettling, rushed and yet also longwinded, like he was writing to the kitchen timer that trilled upon the end of his own comprehensibility. Fella caught this vibe very well, but I didn’t see it then. My birthday was on a day off, and as this fella’s editor, I took the liberty of restructuring the prose of his story as Eve took fruit from the forbidden tree. It felt great, and it was a horrible mistake. Fella was rightfully upset, I reverted it back to the way it was, but the relationship soured at that point, and then Covid hit too soon to paint over the bad experience with new, less bad experiences. As we were all surviving quarantine, the project was put on ice. No one saw a penny from the whole thing, and when next I checked, fella had hopped to another state living his own life.
Some people, often later in life, talk about how they truly have no regrets. I’ll let you know if I ever get to that place, but I doubt I will so long as I remember this moment of indulgence.
These days, I dip my toes in pleasure, doing what I can to moderate, to not throw so much weight as to knock something over. Rather than the figurative Bull in a China Shop, I want to be the one from that episode of Mythbusters, the animal that knows exactly how broad his horns are, and dutiful to peruse the China at a careful, albeit startled, pace.
I try to learn deeply the cost of my doing, the consequences for my actions, and with this we can bring an example that I feel has hurt people less than my escapade in editing.
If you’ve talked to me at all, it is very likely that I have recommended something to you, with some care to what you express interest in. I love the process of playing matchmaker with people and movies or tv, books or comics, that they may likely enjoy. It’s my way of getting to know people. It’s my way to give something to someone so their day can be a little brighter.
Part of this practice, this one place of many where I am at my happiest, is that I have to be okay with people not picking up anything I recommend. Plenty don’t have time or space for another task on their plate. Many don’t want homework as a result of a social interaction. I understand this, partially, for the sake of my own sanity. It would be too costly to leave the house if this was an unacceptable end to an interaction. In my recommending, I’m happy to be heard and share my joy with others. That’s more the point than anything.
This also means that there are a handful of shows that I’m very likely not going to see, and when friends orbit around these favorites of theirs, I work to be as clear on the receiving end as others are when I am on the giving end: I’ll share in your joy, but I really don’t want to watch Mr. Robot. I’ll hear you talk about it all day, but that’s my limit.
It feels like internalizing sales tactics, while doing everything you can to make sure your customer’s cash stays in the wallet. The end is what’s going on right here. Whatever happens after is gravy.
There’s something indulgent about imposing your preferences, your taste, your opinions, onto someone else. I bet people in sales feel an incredible rush in turning a no to a yes. In a way I’ve been on both ends of that. It’s a dynamic I don’t value anymore, in part as apology to the horror writer Fella from before covid, but hopefully also in service to you.
Another place where I am at my happiest is in writing. The attempts at sentences I have to backspace before the first clause is even finished because it wasn’t right. The review of what I have written and the satisfaction that I made something that is, in whatever way digital media can ever be, here. I work along plumbers and sheet metal guys now, mechanical contractors. I’ve seen plumbers apply primer and glue to PVC with the meditative concentration of saints, I’d like to think I feel something like that, though lacking in comparable skill, in my attempt to write this out.
I long to take pleasure in things that build others up, both in feeling their agency and taste, as well as deepening the capacity for choice and complication of taste. I think we can make that happen here. My research assistant Ephison Frank is here to keep me in line. He’s more than the blog mascot, he’s the only reason this thing can move at all. Ephison is not only a true delight to have in class, but a severe reminder on the perils of existence, and the insistence of braving the world as it is for love of what it is.
Any complaints may be directed to Ephison Frank and his Rowdy Rangers, Emmison Milkshake and Ennison Naughty-boy.
I don’t know what the next post will bring, but I look forward to it, and I hope you do too
