One Writer's Attempt to Disprove to Herself that People Suck and that Maybe, Just Maybe Sometimes It's a Wonderful World
When every subject and object of your love is gone; and everything you hate, can't stand, are driven crazy by takes on greater space in your consciousness is when it may just be time to rethink. I have of late been seeking ways to do just that--to tone down the intolerable, to find something lovable.
Here are a few items I'm considering, those things which will take on the onus of keeping me willing to rise again every day and break into that juice-popping life worth living..., or at least worth peeling in preparation for a bite:
Preppies addressing one another by last name.
When a supremely funny-in-his-own-right comic finds something in his set so funny himself that he breaks into laughs [Jerry Seinfeld in outtakes, laughing at Michael Richards' bit on smoking too much/leathery face/brown teeth; Ricky Gervais on The Graham Norton Show, in a squealy laughing refutation of something absurd Norton says]
A book so good you intentionally never finish it, so like a moment of mutual love at first sight walking away you keep it from ever ending
The fast-forward button on the DVR
The mute button, too
"Getting" a very craftily, subtly plied literary allusion on an otherwise mainstream show [as when Foreman (Omar Epps), discussing House's (Hugh Laurie's) motives, comments on the life being "nasty, brutish, and short" attitude (which is originally from Hobbes' Leviathan: aint I smart?)]
Knowing sub space
That which gives one license to cry
That which is so black in humor that you want to share it with the first person who will listen [such as when Reese Witherspoon's Freeway character, Vanessa, shooting the serial killer Bob (Kiefer Sutherland) "a bunch of times;" falling to her knees, putting palms together in serious prayer, and looking up and saying, "Oh, God..., that was so fukking bad."]
Escaping martyrdom
Avoiding pronoun shifts (and knowing how to...)
The very moment when, after hours of uninterrupted 11-on-a-scale-of-10 pain, the ER doc's administration takes effect
Genius documentary
Brilliant cinéma vérité
The sexiness of slow motion [for example, in The Craft; Reservoir Dogs; Chariots of Fire; "King of Queens," "Strikeout" episode; Ferris Bueller's Day Off]
Language
Accents
All things French
British satire
Jewish men
Enjoying so-called "guilty pleasures": video games; cross stitching; "Nip/Tuck"; classic 70s hot rods; big, square-bodied trucks [the first F150s]; re-runs; good [all things being, of course, subjective] reality TV
Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre
Quotable comments not yet caught on [such as performance artist Nao, a contestant on "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist," telling a fussy critic/judge, "I am not responsible for your experience of my art."]
Working, having worked, and getting paid [a living] for doing work you love
New sex with an old love, a literal re-union that refreshes the legendary, that compensates with experience and years apart for all that wasn't in those adolescent years of initiation and awkwardness
Doing something for the sake of that something alone [obviously the most difficult, but, for example, doing a kindness without telling a single other soul about it--hence, no specific example can follow here, now can it?]
Being so broke you are smoking tobacco from butts in the vacuum cleaner in a pipe used for pot (so now you're broke, stoned, and hungry again)..., but being so broke that at the same time, you get that rare opportunity to catch a scumbag frauding your checking account--because it only has 19.00 in it and the checks he wrote for 1,000s bounce!
Synchronicity
Irony
Being correctly diagnosed as having a particular disorder [ADD], after forty years of that disorder being misunderstood/misinterpreted as behavioral, as recalcitrance, rebellion, as conscious, willful, intended malevolence, etc.
Writing, not to teach (and thus escaping the straight jacket of supervision censorship as it weeds out the "unacceptable" or not dumbed-down enough in its underestimation of students and its self-imposed interpretation by a common denominator of one); writing not even necessarily for being understood, for communicating, or for expressing--but for the very moon-pull of that which is called upon to, is compelled to, write.
