On Being Happy

(Originally Written March 21, 2009 in the Journal)

On Being Happy

The Ocean is enormous. Its vastness is actually quite terrifying. The islands I see dotted give me comfort. So does the almost fluorescent blue of the more shallow parts. It is as if someone spilled giant paint cans on a deep blue canvas. The light blue is less horrific than the deep blue.

I'm not a poet, just a fraud. A mouth with words spewing out of it. I vomit feelings and spit out thoughts sloppily thrown together. I wish I could paint or draw to express myself. There is little satisfaction in filling a page with characters in a futile yet endless aim of expelling the nonsense in my head.

What is in me anyway? Don't go there, it's not fun. Besides it's all a jumble of poignant pointlessness. This would be so much more meaningful as a black line on a white canvas rather than a mishmash of ink dots on lined paper. What am I worrying about though? Who will ever read this?

Why do I go to dark places when I'm happy? Why can't I be inspired by beauty? Why must tragedy always occur befor3e I choose to write? This is my existential crisis! I can't be happy about my happiness.

Fred was an average guy. He liked stuff. he was optimistic and cheery. When things would go awry he would roll them off as if nothing happened. Minor setbacks or major flaws, it mattered not. It wouldn't stick to him.

He questioned this trait often enough though. It was unsatisfactory. How can one be so happy in an unhappy time? It was selfishness he told himself. Or maybe he was just shallow. Maybe nothing was important enough to him.

Fred and Sara dated for three years before Sara left him. She had been threatening to do it for the last year of (in his mind) healthy, normal relationship. It was a dramatic break-up, dividing groups of friends and all of that. Fred gave up the apartment, all the stuff and most of the friends and the cat. Sara gave up Fred.

The day after Sara left him he felt relieved. There was nothing she could hang over him anymore and Fred felt relief from this. Amazingly enough what he had been dreading for a year had happened and instead of being miserable, he was ecstatic.

With time now in major abundance in his life and nothing to hold him back he moved from Washington DC (where he loved to live) to Los Angeles (where he hated to visit). But his buddy was in Los Angeles and in need of a roommate.

As a salesman, Fred was marketable pretty much anywhere. He took a job as a retail manager in a fashion mall. It wasn't a dream job or anything but it paid well and gave him the opportunity to network. One has to have a job in order to find one. His dad had preached this to him since he was fifteen and it was engrained in him like some Confucian mantra.

Months went by and he grew closer to his buddy like they were in high school again. His brother was doing what he loved (graphic design) and Fred realized that surprisingly still, he was miserable. But Fred was himself quite content with a stable, albeit unfulfilling job. The irony of the situation burned in his mind for weeks until it finally forced its way out of his lips.

"Drew, you know I love you man. Why are you so unhappy? I just don't understand it. You've got an awesome set up here. You're doing what you said you wanted to do when we were kids, you have a great girlfriend, a cool apartment, everything seems to be going well but I can just see in the way you carry yourself that something's not right. You're unhappy."

Drew looked him square in the eye and said, "life is shit. What can you do?"

"I don't understand. Everything seems to be going so well with you right now."

"Appearances, life is all appearances. Sure, there is some beauty in this world, but beneath that veneer of glamour the world is one ugly motherfucker". Drew sighed, laughed to himself and took a big sip of pretentiously expensive red wine. "That's why I do my design. Beauty is vision and vision is shallow. Shallow pays big money."

That night Fred realized how different he and Drew were in the way they saw the world. Drew saw the beauty, counted it as plastic, shallow, formulaic and somehow sinister. Drew knew that behind all that plastic was an ugliness so appalling that it ruined everything. On the other hand, Fred saw only the ugly. He felt the beauty though. To him, beauty wasn't perception - it wasn't vision. It was beyond that. It was the experience. Life is full of experience he thought to himself, and thus, life is full of beauty.

This thought made him happy. But when he realized he was happy he felt guilty that he felt so happy and Drew was not. "I'm such a shallow person" was the last thing he said before drifting off to sleep.