Diary Friday

A long rambling journal entry I wrote some years back on the nature of happiness. For some reason, after the chaos of yesterday – it came to mind. Happiness is meant to be fleeting, momentary. It is not meant to last, time immemorial. It is just not the nature of the beast.

At least that’s how I see it.

May 1993

Happiness is such a weird thing. I no longer know what it is. The word itself seems silly to me. Simplistic. Joy sounds more appropriate. Appropriately fleeting, more indicative of the actual thing. A flash, a burst, a revelation – here – and vivid and true and wonderful and then gone.

A moment.

But I appreciate such moments. I try to anyway.

Like standing in the back at Lounge Ax, with Max [Ed: an old flame.] We were watching the show [Ed: a Pat McCurdy show], and at some point, a joke started between us. I kept calling him “mean-spirited.” I would say something, and he would make some face, or react in some cranky way, and I would say, “No need for such a hostile face”, and it all boiled down to me calling him (or at least his facial expressions) “mean-spirited.” It wouldn’t even be part of a sentence. He’d give me a look, or make some cranky comment, and I would state flatly, “Mean-spirited.”

The first time I said it, we got into this big brou-haha.

He jerked himself up when I said it, and balked at it. “Mean-spirited? I’m not mean-spirited. That wasn’t a mean-spirited face.”

“Uh. It was totally mean-spirited.”

Even his so-called mean-spiritedness makes me laugh.

So after that, because he seemed so sensitive about it (maybe touchy is a better word), I couldn’t stop myself. Also, sorry, but they WERE mean-spirited faces! Not seriously mean-spirited, but in that pissy irritable short-tempered cranky way he has at times. So anyway, I would say something, and he would argue me in this cranky tone, and I would reply, in a tired voice, “Mean-spirited.”

The third or fourth time it happened (with a big argument after each one: “Mean-spirited? That wasn’t mean-spirited! I’m not mean-spirited!”) – he confronted me. I was laughing in his face. I was teasing him. He was such an easy target.

He exploded: “I’M NOT MEAN-SPIRITED.”

I did an imitation of his cranky face, and said, “That was mean-spirited.”

“You think that was mean-spirited?? Well, how ’bout this?” He made a face.

I labeled it. “Mean-spirited.”

“This?” He made another face.

“Oh God. So mean-spirited.”

Another face. I nodded. “Very mean-spirited.”

This charade went on and on and on. If anyone had been watching us from afar, they would have had no clue what the hell we were doing. He just kept making face after face after face after face, mean-spirited scowly faces (but each subtly different) – with me saying, right in his face, “Mean-spirited. Mean-spirited. Mean-spirited. Mean-spirited. Mean-spirited.” An innocent bystander would have taken one look at that and thought: What the hell is going on over there?

He was a cranky slide show. I provided commentary.

Then he made one totally goofy face, different from all the others. God, I can see it now. Big buggy eyes, a goofy huge smile – he looked retarded and very happy. I started to say, out of habit, “Mean-spirited” but then – I just broke down into laughs – and said, “Okay, that was just funny.”

It made him laugh too. He could feel how funny the face was.

And then later, after the show, we were deciding what we wanted to do next – Maybe he asked me what I wanted to do – and for whatever reason, I got shy, I felt insecure, whatever, and I answered his question, in kind of a little-girl voice, “I don’t know … what do you want to do?”

Basically, I became a jackass.

It just slipped out.

And he pounced on it, and said, imitating my baby-voice, “I don’t know – what do you want to do??”

I said, “Woah. Mean-spirited.”

Max said (and this was his best line of the night): “Mean-spirited? No, that wasn’t mean-spirited. That was even handed.”

I just ROARED with laughter. “You are so right!!”

He laughed too. It was a great laugh. It felt good. The whole thing suddenly just felt so good, so unembattled. So free.

To me, that is the meaning of joy.

Happiness is not a word I “get”, as I have said. At least on a huge scale. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a “happy” person. How could there be? Maybe you get to a point in your life when you are over your wild mood swings and caring so much about stuff that you have a nervous breakdown every 10 minutes, and you can say, “Well, I take the good with the bad.” (Or “bad with good” is probably a better way to put it) “I take the bad with the good, and all in all, I can say that I am happy. It is a good life.”

But I’m not sure about that.

I have flashes, sensations, moments – like the “mean-spirited” game with Max – but mostly these sensations of happiness are tied up with images, sensory reality. These are the things I subconsciously hold onto when I plummet.

Here are some of the images that stay in my brain – actually, no. Not even in my brain. They are remembered images. Not thoughts or plans or ideas, or anything cerebral. All of this stuff is remembered in my soul, in my DNA. Most of these sensations of joy last a second, if that long. But in that second, I seem to live a fuller life, and see things in a more vivid way, and I take a huge breath of freezing air, and everything that comes after that moment of joy is colored by it. How could it not be?

I was walking home from an audition. Mitchell and I had just moved to Ashland. I live about a 20 minute walk away from Shiel Park, where the audition was. It was light out when I walked there, and dark when I got out of the audition. I shouldn’t have walked home. I realize that now. But I was new to the neighborhood. I cut over to Ashland on Irving Park (a mistake.) Irving Park is a street that is basically falling apart. People roam the streets, no one stays in their apartments, everyone just roams about. The sidewalk stoops were crowded – but only with men. There was not a woman to be seen on the streets.

So I was walking by the stoops, all dressed up, and within moments, Irving Park became Street O’ Catcalls.

I did my usual “I am deaf I am blind I am dumb” act. Although I did have a couple of fluttery internal moments, keeping my eye on Ashland at the end of the block. Determined. Determined that I would not be ambushed.

Despite all of this, it was a beautiful night. Warm, blue-black, and high up in the sky behind me – a golden full moon.

I did not stop to moon-gaze though. Obviously.

But then – across the street from me – I saw an amazing thing. And I couldn’t help myself. I stopped, and stared.

Across the street was what looked like an old abandoned house. Blackened, falling apart, sagging, broken windows, but someone obviously lived there. There were straggly curtains blowing out of the broken windows. There was a porch, with a roof over it, and 2nd story broken windows looking out onto the roof. And sitting on that porch-roof, on the very edge, watching the cars go by, checking out all the action, was this gorgeous black and white husky dog. He looked like a wolf. Like a wild wolf, sitting on a roof on Irving Park. You just knew his eyes were that ice-blue. He looked like a wild animal in the middle of the decaying urban landscape. Incredible. He just looked so COOL, and sailing above him, behind the house, was the glowing moon, and he was just the COOLEST dog. That’s all I can say. He was so COOL. Just sitting there, on the roof. I suddenly did not care about the hissing men on the stoop behind me. I stopped and just looked at the haunted house, who the hell lives in that blackened place, the moon above, and the damn DOG.

I was all the way across the street but I whistled to get the attention of the wolf. I didn’t think he’d hear me, but he did. His head shot my way, ears sticking up, alert, and he STARED at me. We stared at each other. He was spectacular. I couldn’t see his eyes that far away, but I could feel his attention on me. Those icy husky eyes. Like Max’s eyes.

Looking at the dog, eye contact with the dog, the moon, the house … I felt something. Something big. It moved me.

Happy?

I don’t know. Something. Joy. Joy in the image. Joy in the sensory details. The entire image was 100% satisfying to me. Sheer pleasure in what I see and hear.

This is what I value. This is how I recognize joy.

Here’s another image, or set of images that I hold dear. I turn them over and over, smoothing them like moonstones in my head, because the images soothe me.

It was a Saturday night. I was kind of down. Hormonal, maybe. Can’t remember why. I was blue. Trying valiantly to shake it. I had had acting class with Bobby that day, and during a sensory exercise, something popped inside me, something I hadn’t felt there at all – I hadn’t felt any pressure of something that needed to burst, or something hidden I needed to express – but something was there – and suddenly I was screaming and pounding my fists on the floor. Like a maniac. It was exhausting. And fun. But I was wiped out. David drove me and Bobby home. Bobby was very pleased about the work done by everyone in class. He said, flatly, “Today, in particular, you all looked like inmates in an insane asylum.” A high compliment indeed.

That evening, Mitchell and I were going over to David and Maria’s for dinner. We stood on the Belmont L platform, waiting for the train.

It was a wild night. Windy. Dark. A big big storm was coming. It was in the air. You could smell it in the air. I love storms, and I love to be out in a storm. Something rises up in me, big and strong and excited and fierce, to meet the storm. It was already night, but you could still tell that the sky was thick with clouds.

The L platform for some reason was crowded with rowdy obnoxious high school students. About 20 of them. Mitchell and I separated ourselves from them, and stood down the platform a-ways. Two 14 (or so) year old girls were sitting on the steps of the transfer platform. They had long hair whipping around their faces, big jackets, they were talking too loud, and too much, and they were blowing bubbles. Constantly. The wind was so fierce and so strong that the two girls would just hold out their arms into the wind and let a stream of bubbles fly away.

It was borderline obnoxious, because I kind of wanted to concentrate on the storm, but after a while – I liked it. The bubbles were magic. Incessant. Like harbingers of something, something special.

The L platform lights are a swimmy orange. They make everything look very weird. They turn your skin a sicky grey color. The bubbles were floating and careening through this orange, then across the tracks and away …

From the Belmont L, you can see, in the distance, the Sears Tower, monstrosity that it is, red lights flashing. The clouds weren’t low enough to cut off the top of the Tower. And in the sky, down around the Sears Tower, was one of the most violent and amazing lightning storms I have ever seen.

It was mesmerizing. I didn’t want the train to come.

There was no thunder. Just lightning.

We watched the lightning show downtown as though we were little kids watching fireworks. I gasped. I clapped my hands. It exhilarated me.

The sky was a really thick deep blue, dark-grey, and the lightning was blinding white, and constant. Forks forking off of other forks, lighting up the whole sky, being reflected in the glossy black walls of the Sears Tower. The Sears Tower, standing its ground in the middle of all this. The huge wind. The bubbles all around us, filling the air.

Mitchell and I just stood there, and soaked it all in. The many many elements of the scene. I opened my heart to it.

And suddenly, Mitchell was hugging me. This tight tight hug. I hugged him back, and we held onto each other, in complete awe of the beauty of the night, hugging amidst the wind and the bubbles.

I found joy in that moment. Not happiness, that word is shallow to me. But deep and profound joy. It stays with me. I did not have to reach for the sensation. It was suddenly just there. And it stays with me.