You Have Upset the Balance of the Universe by Being Born

 Advice on How to Live
By Dr Robert MacLean, PhD
(A new chapter every so often)

INTRODUCTION

    You are doing something wrong.  By now that should be obvious.
    You have failed at love (see LOVE).
    You have failed at your work (see WORK).
    You have failed to acquire enough power (see POWER) even over your own life to be able to control your future.  You are still, after all this time, "on your way."
    Or, conversely, you have succeeded.  You have made it to the top.  But there is something you have neglected to do that would permit you to enjoy your life there.  Something you don't have.  Some lack in you.  You are at the top of the wrong profession.  You are admired by the wrong people.  You have married the wrong person.  You have the wrong children.
    And you are getting older (see AGE).  It is a time, for you and for the culture, of sexual withdrawal.  You are divided as by a glass wall from everything you want.  You have made the wrong choices.  The moments of decision, botched, or fled unnoticed.  There is nothing now but celibacy, darkness, age and death (see DEATH).
    Am I close?
    You may not even exist.  The greater part of the East and a substantial number of western intellectuals--Buddhists, Hindus, linguists, logical positivists, behavioral psychologists and webmail employees--are prepared to argue that your existence is an inconvenient mirage.  A non-thing.
    You would not survive as you at all if you did not irrationally and shrilly insist on so doing more times a day than you care to recall.  Your sense of yourself in the world, over and against the world--as opposed to the world, let us say--is maintained by a series of fictions not of your own authorship frantically shuffled by your imagination at a rate of several per second and so hysterically contradictory that the sorting process never quite stops.  You are impressionable almost beyond reclaim.  Some slow-witted c and w lyric can have you lurching around moodily for days.  Your opinions, your feelings, your memories, quite possibly even your "self" are not things of your own (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). 
    Only your suffering verifies you.  You suffer, therefore you are.  Of this you are almost certain.  It may be fleeting. You may be no more than the tip of a brief flare of suffering but you do have your pain.  You may even need it.
    With what thoughts shall we comfort ourselves?
    You have put aside the old commandments, the old theories. The various therapies are no longer persuasive.  You are not even sure any more what it is you want.
    Let us pray.
    Heavenly Father, in Whose eyes we are but scuttling insects busy beyond our own deciphering, grant we beseech Thee enough light to sin by and know what we're doing.
    But prayer no longer works.  It has been castrated by the contradictions (see GOD), is nothing now but an arbitrary attitude, a pose before the mirror, an act of futile self-encounter.
    You are, when you think about it, desperate.  You are not what you want to be.  You are not where you want to be.  Or how.  And you have not the courage to face your own death.
    Little can be done for you at this stage.  You need time. You need language that will put some distance between you and What Is.  You need someone to sort things out for you, a dispassionate figure in a lab coat to interpret the X-rays and guide you in your struggle to become more truly yourself, sort of thing.  You may not be able to stand it.
    Are you sure you want to do this?
    It won't be easy.
    And of course, you can't breathe this air indefinitely.  Sooner or later you will dive back into life and forget everything again.  Which is more or less how it all happened in the first place.
    But for the moment at least, the Doctor is here.
    Get on the table.

AGE

    You turn thirty when you turn twenty-nine.  You turn forty when you turn thirty-eight.  You turn fifty when you turn forty-seven.  The Doctor expects to be sixty by the time he's fifty-six.
    Of course it goes by fast.
    You are already changing shape.  Your neck is shortening.  Your shoulders are narrowing.  Your flesh is slipping down your chest.  The skin on your throat needs ironing.  You are not yet gaga, but how will you know?
    The whole experiment is failing.
    You do everything very slowly now.  You concentrate.
    Things continue to happen, that's what's really insulting.  The young reach new conclusions about beauty.  The movie stars in People are caressed by life while you pass your pebbles from pocket to pocket like one of Beckett's wretches.
    The Doctor would tell you you're going to get through this but you don't want to get through it!  This has gone far enough!  Soon, the drawer.
    But we cannot altogether hide ourselves in thoughts of our passing.  What the soldier fears is not death so much as mutilation.  Before what infirmities will you grovel, how grotesque will you have to become before you are granted the mercy of oblivion?  (See DEATH.)
    Can the God who made the middle finger the longest, who made shit and urine water-soluble but not blood, have permitted this? (See GOD.)  This is what you get for relaxing with the given.
    You sit there hunched, palsied, impotent, trying to spend all your thoughts, get it over, but the stream is endless.  Are you talking to yourself?
    The whole thing is inconvenient.
    At least you have learned not to appropriate the future to yourself.  You have that poise.
    Builds character.
    Go out and be soothed by a movie or something.  Stop bothering everybody.
    Age is a club.  Find somebody with more or less the same mileage and compare symptoms.  Don't just witness magic!  Be it!  Age is passion (see PASSION), otherwise it's entirely pointless.
    You have always been half one thing, half another--half earth, half sky--it's just that now the ratio is more like one to two.  The soul is sticking up out of you like a hardon.  Life is a delightful surprise!
    Housewives, you can buck the old fart up by encouraging him to think of his leathery carcass as been-through-it-all glamorous.  Jaded-but-hanging-in.  You never know your luck till the ball stops rolling.  It all depends on how you sell it, tell him.  You may even get some action(see SEXUAL TECHNIQUES).
    Guys, the women in our lives have not stopped wanting it.  They're still not sure what it is, many of them, but they do know they want it.  The marital regime is once a day (see LOVE, INTERIM), even if it's only telling them.  Any old state of grace, what the hell.
    The Doctor isn't going to complicate your ignorance with some kind of theory but he would like to point out that your experience here, in the sense of, you know, life, is open-ended (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).  To try to reduce it to a hieroglyph may not give you the kind of looseness you need to negotiate the turns.
    It doesn't matter if it's taken you your whole life to find out how to do things.  It's always present time, which is what keeps your chances fresh.  And it's not over yet.

ANGER

    Anger simply cannot be made to disappear.  Not by you.
    It isn't like sex.  Sex can sometimes be commanded away, at least for the moment (see SEX).  It doesn't have to deform the judgement.
    Anger does.  It can be appeased by the object of your anger.  He/she/they can acknowledge your value, recognize your pain, reward your effort and dissolve your anger from without.  It's  like reading a book that has an effect on you, seeing an exceptional film, falling in love with a painting--it can change your rate of metabolism for hours, days; alas seldom forever.  This can be done to your anger but, I repeat, only from without.
    In the absence of the world's solicitude your anger lies there wedged, a boulder in a gorge, blocking you.  You have to go around.  You have to climb.  You have to leave behind much--sometimes everything--that you were.  Your comfort, your dignity, your sense of being able to control what happens to you.  You will resume these in another life, the life that awaits you on the far side of the boulder.
    This, by the way, is why so much of the world believes in reincarnation (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).  You are never sure whether reincarnation is to be looked upon as a reward or a punishment.  As much as you revel in your own existence you find the idea of having to do it over and over again, odds are in relatively wretched circumstances, dreary beyond relief.  Be assured.  The fact that half the world believes in reincarnation is no more reason even to glance in that direction than the entire world's believing the earth is flat.  Theories of the hereafter are invariably pictures of the now.  Panic looks in the mirror.  When it realizes it's looking in the mirror it disappears.
    You reincarnate several times a day, and never more so than when you are angry.
    There is something essentially unfair about anger.  With every other emotion--love, sex, hunger, ambition, even fear (see FEAR)--you go forward to engage with the world in a way on which you can reasonably expect to follow through.  Follow through on anger and you can wind up on Death Row.
    (Freud ascribed guilt feelings to sexual desire.  This may have been the case for the Victorian culture he rose to diagnose--see FREUD--but not for you.  What makes you feel guilty is anger.)
    It is seldom, to the point of negligibility, that your anger can be harnessed to some project that will benefit you.  You want to destroy.  You want to annihilate.  It is irresistible, exponentially self-generating and inevitable.  Anger, that is--and as bulky as these observations are they can crowd onto the pin prick of a murderous wrath--makes you angry.

BODY, YOUR

    You are a little shocked by the fact of having a body. To be in the world is one thing; to be a body in it is quite something else. You wake, sit on the side of the bed and see yourself in milady's mirror, as much an apparition to yourself as to anyone else. What is going on?
The Doctor reports that very often in his adult life when he has looked at his watch it has either been on the hour or thirteen minutes past. Two times out of three, say. Is his body doing that?
(The Doctor by the way does not have a wrist manacle. It is rude to wear them in the evening--see MANNERS--and the phones have replaced them anyway.)
Getting a haircut, examining your imperfections in a new mirror, you conclude again that you're OK, you look good. You don't know how you do it. Exercise for you is walking around while you floss.
It must be a gift. You think you're enchanted. You think you're an exception. You think you're a special case. Now: is thinking so different from being so? (See REALITY.)
But what kind of gift is it? You are your body and yet there are robotic aspects about it, the wiring and sealed cables and so forth. It makes you nervous. Your hypochondriasis drives you to excesses of sunscreen and time-release vitamins. Your interrogations of partners before and after the sex act are brutal, brutal. And if the Hindus are right and you do reincarnate, will you always be this lucky?

BOREDOM

    You are bored.
    This isn't the kind of boredom where you're sitting around late at night and you say what do you want to do and the other says I don't know, what do you want to do?
    This isn't like waiting for the ferry to leave and you look at your second left knuckle, having never really noticed it before, and then at your belt buckle.  How did you get that scratch on your hand?
    No, this is a profound boredom, a boredom that inhabits every superficially joyful act you perform (see JOY).  Your laughter is bored.  Your love is bored.  Your boredom embraces life, rather than the reverse.
    You are tired of getting up in the morning.  You are tired of shaving.  You are tired of clipping your nails.  You are tired of getting your hair cut.  At the thought of going to the store to buy food you fall to your knees in despair.
    Your ambition depresses you.  You are weighed down by your accomplishments.  The people who serve you, who don't want to be anything, who hang around looking at the light, get drunk, go to a movie—why aren't you like them?
    Evil bores you.  It is only the energy of good.  You can't even be evil.
    You have tried culture.  Beguiling dull eternity the heart plays hide and seek and comforts us with culture.  You have served time in the academy, you have walked around bloated with thoughts, parsing phonemes or whatever, you have sat around with your colleagues saying things, expressing opinions, and you know the following:
    -  You wouldn't be the way you are if it weren't for Jesus and Hemingway.  Hemingway's suicide was more significant than, say the Pope's could have been.  Any pope's.
    -  Hitler may have been Jewish.
    -  A successful artist is one who captures the imagination.  Critics, like mothers, insist on calling it genius.
    -  It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
    -  The paradox we live in all democracies (see AMERICA) is that the majority is always wrong.  This does much to explain Hollywood and Broadway, which must court the market.  The market is democracy-with-money, and is wrong, i.e. will rarely give the individual what he/she wants.  Democracy, notwithstanding, is the best social order to be oppressed by.
    -  Bullshit is that which is commonly believed.  The purpose of education is to alert the mind to bullshit, the dangers of which are nowhere more present than in the academy.
    -  The solution, finally, is to forget.  Forget everything.  You had to learn it.  Now let it go.  Suppress it actively.  Machine-gun it, it will stalk you.
    Now you are back to your boredom.
    You wander in traffic muttering some mnemonic shopping-list phrase.  They will find you under the wheels of a truck whispering bank-laundry-kiwis-bank-laundry-kiwis.
    You have tried drugs.
    Summer is a drug.  Sex is a drug.  Poetry is a drug.  Drugs are drugs.
    Cocaine is God's way of telling you you don't make enough money (see GOD).  Cannabis drops you into a hole.  Unless you are dominating the conversation you sit there staring into the other holes, and cough so hard you almost blow out your prostate.
    The Doctor is acquainted with someone who took LSD in Delhi and became a dog, was actually persuaded that he was a dog.  He prowled the streets on all fours and, on encountering a fight involving several dogs, hurried in and participated.  Afterwards there was some question whether he required treatment for rabies.  So we can't recommend that.
    It looks like you're stuck with the inconveniences of life, of which here is a short list:
    -  airconditioning;
    -  hot-line radio turned way up in taxis;
    -  fluorescent light;
    -  babies, unrelated;
    -  babies, one's own;
    -  beauty, others';
    -  beauty, one's own.
    The whole thing's inconvenient.
    You'd better fall in love (see LOVE, FALLING IN).

CHARM

    It's not that you deny the horrors of life, it's that you want a world without them, and the act of faith that is charm gives it instantaneous birth—an innocent rather than a naive world.  And innocence was born to be insulted.
    Your charm, if you only knew it, is your seriousness, but you experience seriousness as danger.  When it takes hold it replicates, draws other seriousnesses to it until it collapses under its own weight and makes a fool of you.
    It is your defense against being a fool that you identify yourself as frivolous.  Nothing can take you in.  You work yourself into an ecstasy of confession but your positions are larks.
    You affect, for example, a character (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).  Character is always a comic device—people don't have characters—and your arch parody of your own holds at bay a screaming claustrophobia.
    Do you want more?  You might not be able to perform your service if you had more, not that it's available.  Even this threatens to become a style.
    (See also MANNERS.)

DEATH

    The first thing to be aware of is that it's all right to die.  It's OK.
    It's not something you want to plan for your weekend but when it's time to shuffle off into the not-know you just have to do it.
    You've seen it coming.  Your reflection in the darkened bathroom mirror as, drunk, you pull up your pants in profile, your own ghost.  Pings in the robot.  Sooner of later something goes and then—boop!—so do you.
    It's all right!
    You're going to live forever, don't worry.
    I wish I could tell you the ground of these feelings but I can't.  I have to fall back on the fact that I want to tell you—that I want to tell you that and not something else.  Not much to go on, is it?  No, it isn't.  Forget it.
    You will pass into an arena of competition and hierarchy even drearier than the one known to you here.
    And between —these two poles—the anything-anytime uncertainty and the intuition of your immortality—you.  No possible moral code (see MORALITY), no guarantee, not even an indication, a sign.  Just you, and the riddle of the three score and ten.  Four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, three in the evening.
    How can you be anything but wrong?  What among all the wrong human things isn't wrong?  Let us be gloriously wrong!  The only other choice is to be ingloriously wrong.  Everything can be taken two ways, every piece of evidence can lift or depress you.  Can we hope that the starving are numbed to their pain, that the sick secrete chemicals to protect them, that the hunted animal is sealed safely in its panic?  You may have to die to accept life.
    Meanwhile you know things you don't know.  You pass between all chances.  Your ignorance, a beautiful dignity.  

FEAR

    You are a swashbuckler.  You live beyond your means, both financially and psychologically.  You live dangerously, which is to say naked and unashamed.  Play and danger are what you need.  There is no security anyway and heaven loves those who dare.
    Fear is a bore (see BOREDOM).
    And what is guilt but fear of punishment?  Also boring.  Surrender to the air and ride on it.  If there is a cosmic bureaucrat monitoring your behavior (see GOD), give him a good show.  Sell it, baby!  Be selfish.  Be a monster.  Sin, as Martin Luther said, bravely.  You have an obligation to indulge yourself.  Once you start going for safety it never stops, it's like money.  Never enough.  Go without assurance.  Safety is vulgar.
    Taking this attitude towards fear--an attitude of disdain--gives the right relation.  Fear is ignoble.  You are noble.
    You are more than noble.  You are divine.  Fear is forgetting that one is divine.  What can possibly happen to you?
    But here is the paradox: anything can happen to you, because divinity is vulnerability.  Insofar as you are divine, that far are you vulnerable.
    Which leads to a seduction: if you make yourself tall enough you'll fly, fine, but do you want to fly?  To get high, to experience joy always can only be desirable (see JOY), and yet you find yourself yearning for a vision with a little blood in it, even if it's your own.
    The analogy is to religion.  On each of the several continents the vast majority of sentient adults are apparently bores committed to some form of religious practice or metaphysical speculation; whereas if they really believed in their eternal natures as you do it might occur to them that eternity is adequate for the contemplation of the eternal.  We have made a privileged intrusion into time.  It is the moment for things of the earth.  If they're not to your taste you'll just have to wait for the bus back.
    So it is with your fear.  You cling to it not perhaps because you are afraid but because you find it cozy, like gray weather (see WEATHER).  You suspect that it may be the price of sensitivity (see MANNERS).  Uncertainty and ambiguity are the stuff of life.  How can they be relished without fear?  Your very sensuality requires that you feel fear.  There can be no shiver of anticipation without it.
    Make yourself tall enough and you'll fly, yes, but make yourself small enough and you'll get by.  Humility is comelier than pride.  If you are of a higher race it is the condition of your moment here that you forget that.
    Fear, that is, is luxury.  An indulgence.  If it makes you feel better, go ahead.
    (See also MORALITY).

FEMINISM

    Freud taught us that every act is sexual (see Freud).  With the women's movement we have emerged into that Periclean light of day in which every act is political.
    It is in some places now illegal to speak of women as in any way different from men.  If you are a man you may feel you know better but try to keep the issue in the background.  They taught you how to put on your own pants.  You didn't like that.  They taught you how to tie your shoes.  You didn't like that.  You can do this too.
    Women are a constant in life.  You can't run away from them.  Many men actually become women (see HOMOSEXUALITY, YOUR).  You have at least one woman inside you, possibly more.  You are outnumbered.
    Feminism has refined our manners (see MANNERS).  The Doctor believes that we are here for a holiday.  A change.  Shooting-the-rapids sort of thing.  Soon we'll be back in our livingrooms watching TV.  Progress is the good we do while we're here, a natural offshoot of our divinity.  (But see MORALITY.)
    Many women are working towards a value-affirming committee-endorsed rapprochement after which everything will become smooth and predictable.  You regard this as a little ambitious but you play along.
    "Well then are you a feminist, Doctor?"
    "Not particularly."
    "Why not?"
    "I don't know.  Why am I not a Methodist?"
    "Perhaps you weren't born into a Methodist family."
    "Were you born into a feminist family?"
    "How do you know I'm a feminist?"
    "How do I know I'm sitting in a chair?"
    "Because your ass is going to sleep?"
    "That's exactly how I know you're a feminist."
    Remember, you're as good as they are.  You even have tits.

FREUD

    Freud lost credit when Darwin did (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).  The id was only the ape within.
    And with Freud has gone an arch, erudite science of rescue and a compellingly romantic authority.  It's too bad.  But you still know what you knew then, that the important thing was that one individual came toward you and touched you into bloom, not that what he believed was the truth.

GIMPS

    A man is in love with a woman.
    She is beautiful beyond his reach and he doesn't tell her anything about it.
    Then he does.  He stutters, and when he stutters his dentures pop against his palate.  The more nervous he is the more laborious his stutter.  He is conscious of a strawberry mark that stains his face, and cannot meet her eyes.
    She listens, but she has been told the same thing many times--in many ways perhaps daily--and is not particularly moved.
    He nods understandingly and manages to convey that he won't give up.  He'll talk to her again.
    A doctor tells him his eye has to come out.  He doesn't know what that will do to his chances but there's nothing to be done.  He has the operation.  He wears a patch for a while and then acquires a glass eye which he studies in the mirror.  It glints artificially and he can't control its direction.  People look at him funny.  He improvises compensations, develops a squint, a leer, a way of looking at them with his head sideways like a pigeon.
    The woman, distant and in monocular vision, goes about her life of semiconscious grace.  He thinks of nothing but her.  It is not that he wants to achieve her, it is that he needs to give himself to his love for her.
    She notices nothing.  He does not present himself.
    There are complications in his condition and his leg is amputated.  He learns to walk on a sophisticated prosthesis until he hardly limps.  Chemotherapy makes his hair fall out and he has to wear a toupée but the treatment keeps him going.
    He stands naked before the mirror on the flesh-colored prosthesis, a long way from his dream.  He practices walking noiselessly.  He doesn't give up.
    She doesn't marry.  She hangs around with men who are bad for her and, by turn, loves them.  He knows her pain.  He sees it hiding.
    The doctor tells him his colon has to come out, but he will survive.  He can lick this but he has to have the operation.  There will be a colostomy bag for voiding mounted on his side, a considerable cramp to the style.
    He has the operation, and is some time getting his strength back.  His sense of possibility has been shattered.  He reassembles it.  Rebuilds himself.  Learns.
    She is on the beach playing three-to-a-side volleyball with the wrong men.  She is splendid, modest, deceived.  A little vulgar perhaps, but in the way suppressed nobility is vulgar.  Unthinking rather than insensitive.  Unambitious rather than complacent.  Horse-like.
    He walks toward her in a bathing suit, sand grinding in the joints of the false foot.  His skin is pale but red-splotched, his silhouette compromised by the undisguised bag and the leg strap.  He pats the toupée.
    The ball bounces past him--he cannot pivot to catch it, though he tries--and she gallops after it with unrestrained heaviness, almost passes him and then stops, recognizing him.
    He is still finding his balance from his attempt to catch the ball.  He smiles shyly, turns his head sideways, squints.  The more acute his urgency the more agonizing his stutter, so he says nothing.
    She passes from recognition through confusion--she looks around--to comprehension.  He has been striding toward no one but her.  There is an ecstatic certainty about him.  Can she see him as anything but a stripped-down and naked hero?

GOD 

    God is love.
    You aren't.
    You don't love enough.
    You don't love anyone, unless you want to count your weevil-like self squirming through the muesli of life looking for the powdered sugar.
    God, however, loves you.  You certainly don't deserve it.
    Reality is God.  We are broken eggs on the teflon frying pan of God.
    God is the world, and is not the world.  He is omnipresent in the world the way you are omnipresent in your body.
    You are a god, and a human being.  There is a God who looks after you, loves you.  You are entirely on your own and at the mercy of an uncertain future.  All of this is true at once and without contradiction.  It's difficult to get the mind around but the Doctor wants you to accept it.
    OK.  I'm sitting on the porch of a cottage on a beach in India, dictating this.  When you do this kind of work you can move around (see WEATHER).  The sand, the sound of the sea, some strolling nudists—and over by one of the other cottages, a cobra, moving very slowly.  Everyone knows it's there, no one's going near it.
    Now, who made the cobra?  Forget about evolution, the mathematics is wrong (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).  You can see the shaping hand on every creature, don't give me nineteenth-century theories.
    What kind of concept is "cobra"?  What kind of mind did that come out of?
    (My stenographer requires that I comfort her.  It'll go away soon.)
    Let me put it another way: is God a personal or an impersonal God?  Does He have a face?  If God is impersonal, and God is love, what does that add up to?  Do you want impersonal love?
    Better than nothing, I guess.
    If God is impersonal—and this is a comfort insisted upon by many—what does that say about you?  Are you, ultimately, impersonal?
    It's not an easy idea to like.
    Flip directly to SELF-IMAGE, YOUR and we'll kick it around a little more.

 GOOD TIME, HAVING A

    A good time should not be underrated.  Venturing out into the not-me.  Cultivating agreeable sensations.  Sometimes it's the only thing that keeps the Doctor from swallowing all the pills.
    Let us divide it into its parts:
    Eating.  Or more properly, eating out.  Not all that possible if you have children.  Of course children are another mode of having a good time.  Work.  Church activities.  Don't bother the Doctor with all that.
    What's your favorite food?  Answer quickly.  Sugar.  Unless we are ruthlessly honest we won't get anywhere.
    At the Doctor's favorite restaurant there is a dessert called sex.  Zabaglione and ice cream.  "I'll have some sex, please."  It's an impersonal force.  The difference between a visionary experience and a mystical one.  The Doctor can actually feel himself getting fat.  But on me it looks, I don't know, sensuous.  Decadent without being altogether unboyish (see BODY, YOUR).  And even when one is a brain-dead pool of adipose and cholesterol one will still be able to solicit some sympathy from one's love object, the Doctor feels quite sure.
    Drinking.  So you have a little drink.  Stick with the wine, it won't fry your prostate.
    The discipline in life, let's be quite clear, is to expect nothing; to make your image zero (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).  Discipline takes faith, and vice versa.  The Doctor admits that this is a spare program.  Your vitamin pills may not protect you.  Wheat germ is useless in these cases.
    There are times--the Doctor suggests this with all possible tact--when your only recourse is to gross stimulants.  Go out and get drunk, agree with people.  Sit there among the OMM's (Only Mildly Miserables) in their various interpretations of ceremonial dress and watch the trumpeter's cheeks inflate.  The saxophonist is at rigid attention.  The vocalist scats on her knees.  Pour yourself some more of the present tense.
    Being merry.  You sweep your partner to her feet and onto the floor.  Her eau de cologne is almost as suspect as your own.  You dance, as it were, reek to reek.
    Your lips go to her ear.  "I'll have some sex, please," you whisper.
    She pulls back and gives you a look.  "I thought you were interested in higher things."
    "My last girlfriend  had higher things.  She was only twenty.  They were coming out of her collarbone."
    She smiles.  It's looking good. 

HAPPINESS

    Etymologically: luck.  That which, perhaps, mayhap, happens.  Now.  Then.  Sometimes.
    What a glorious thing, to pursue it!  How nuts!  Let us have nothing less!
    (See, however, JOY.)
 

JOY

    The rollercoaster of moods.  It depresses you.
    The trouble is, you believe them.  They are associated with attitudes, philosophies, manners (see MANNERS) so intimately, each can so powerfully induce the other, that you can never quite distinguish between chicken and egg.
    You like your depths.  You are seduced by them.  They afford a style of melancholy that puts you in touch with areas of yourself that seem otherwise out of reach.  About sexual longing, for example, at least a certain middle-aged sort of it, there is something sad that you covet almost as hungrily as the desired object.
    But you can easily spend too long down there.  You prefer joy by inclination, as what someone called an esthetic choice.  Besides, it's more fun (see GOOD TIME, HAVING A).
    The trouble is that it's not always available.  There may be a cycle at work--you suspect at low moments that you are manic-depressive--but you have your frivolity to fall back on (see CHARM). If joy induces frivolity (as Errol Flynn movies induce energy), frivolity can induce joy, though it can take a serious effort.
    Let us not demean frivolity.  Are not the convictions that we can fly in space and cure cancer essentially frivolous?  Aren't the heroes always the frivolous ones?  Oliver Cromwell, sternest of puritans, said "A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he's going."  Are not you a hero of frivolity?
    But maybe not.  You work a little too hard at it.  Put yourself out a little too much shuffling your associations, trying to organize your frivolity--it's all so determined.  You come to the thing impure--you are an ant, not a grasshopper!
    And there go all the plans you had for being bad and feeling good.  Your ambition to be marginal, to place yourself above respectability was after all an ambition.  The cruelty of the world insults your coyness.  The whirlpool of feelings swallows you up.
    And it is here, perhaps, at the low point of the vortex, that you glimpse your redemption.  It is in your very impressionability, your very susceptibility!  You think everything is your fate!  You are seduced by every game!  You believe anything!  You have no control!  You are entirely without protection--and this (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR) in itself is noble (see MORALITY).  Landing asprawl on the moment, standing on the moment, flying on it like a god sort of thing!  You need to get out of the house more!
    You know a certain fugitive happiness, and swing your arms.

Also by Robert MacLean:
Mortal Coil: A Comedy of Corpses at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE, AmazonIT, AmazonES;
The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE, AmazonIT, AmazonES;
Greek Island Murder at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE, Amazon IT, Amazon ES;
and the Toby books: 
Foreign Matter at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE, AmazonIT, AmazonES and Smashwords; 
Total Moisture at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE, AmazonIT, AmazonES and Smashwords; 
The Cad at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE, AmazonIT, AmazonES and Smashwords; and
Will You Please Fuck Off? at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon DE, AmazonIT, AmazonES and Smashwords.