On Happiness :  I sat outside yesterday. I just sat there, cross-legged in the grass, and read. This is not something I normally do, nor normally have the interest to do, for I am not the nature-ey intellectual that I sometimes wish I were, but with everything that sat heavy in my mind, I needed to sit in the air. Somewhere real.

Life presses down with such intensity and unforgivingness and (at times) what seems like malice, that I can’t help but feel like Atlas balancing the weight of the world between my shoulders. I can’t help but feel so big, and yet the complete contradictory knowing that even Goliath was beaten by the smallest of things.
So I was blessed with a few morning minutes, unshackled, to let my mind wander, and it did (as it does when I attempt to read purely for recreation). And I am glad it did, because as the newborn sun hit my skin, it also drew my eye. It danced along the upper ridge of a sandstone cliff about a half of a mile in the distance. It embossed nearly every rock and edge with crisp distinctiveness, and yet slowly seeped in through every crack and valley in that milky morning way. I had lived here for six years. Had this always been here?
I looked around. No, ‘looked’ does not hold the proper weight. I studied? No, no. I perused. I thought to myself, “Would all of this look the same to someone here on travel? Would it be more beautiful to them?” Then it was that familiar feeling of vacation where, for a moment, everything seemed new again. That rare feeling of wonder. That spark of interest- like a sudden, short-lived rebirth. Everything seemed instantly and exponentially more striking. Happiness. It was then that I realized the truth that held residence in Thoreau’s words: “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.” The human tendency for sensory adaptation pushes for nothing less than to shut off the subtle. We fall asleep to most everything around us and the mind becomes myopically focused only to the extreme.
And it is more than easy for the pseudo-philosophers and the unreserved to spring to their feet in that “I know this one, I know this one!” type fashion. They will jump and splurge about the evils of anyone who falls into this type of unappreciative lifestyle, but, as the majority of us know, giving proper time and respect to each deserving particle is less impossible, but a completely intangible ideal.
That is how happiness works though. We believe in an infinite universe of subjectivity, where happiness is born from the neglect of the negative, and the appreciation of the positive; a place where if one were to blind himself in a way which he will only see good, he would be genuinely happy. David Weiner, a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio executed a study on levels of happiness in different countries. “Weiner visited Bhutan, where he met a man with this rather unexpected advice: To be happy, you need to set aside a few minutes a day to think about death” . The man is proposing something wise, something quite the opposite of what is normal to us. He is suggesting the acceptance of the negative, not the avoidance of it.
The truth is: happiness is not what we make it to be. It is merely a word to describe such an abstract group of feelings. We are taught that it is some positive thing that we feel when the big man is treating us well, but this sense of contentment comes not only from good, and so, many of us are misled in our search. Tom Owen-Towel, a Unitarian Universalist minister and friend spoke in one of his sermons: “Joy, in addition to being found midst the mundane surprises of our days, is also likely to turn up amidst the torments and tumults of existence…I urge you to allow both joy and sorrow to mingle fully in your life.”   The saddest and most somber truth is that, because of this, many of us will not ever find our happiness. It is not uncommon, of late, to see those trying the impossible; those who will waste what little energy they have reserved when the sun is finally setting, in an attempt to convince themselves that the bad was good.
But water is not wine. Lead is not gold, and not even their weight in denial can change the truth. We’ve all tried the route of procrastination, the ignoring of the imminent truths, and they’ve all resulted in our own personal Columbines. So we must learn to accept things for what they are. It is true happiness that lies in the twilight between good and bad. That grey area where both light and dark dance in chorus, for one cannot exist without the other. They play off each other harmoniously, the absence of one rendering the other raw and alone. For without good, darkness would envelope us and wrap us in itself. Without darkness, light would become wearisome. Monotonous. Routine.
 
This is key.
 
It is recognizing that, no matter what measures are taken, we will not find everything good. It is allowing the dark to make the light just a little bit brighter. As Mason Jennings sings- “…beautiful, like the darkness between the fireflies.”
The truth is, that happiness is shining in all brilliance when things are just o.k. When the bad is not so powerful as to smother you, but just enough to keep you on your feet. Just enough to force you to leave your couch, walk out into the air, and notice the subtle beauties that this world has to offer.”

Around 4:00 AM; the night spent prior to writing that essay, I was awakened by a shrill, piercing sound that sparked through my wall as if it had consisted of protons as positive as Gandhi was uplifting, and my head was the most perfectly polar opposite-attractive ball of electrons in existence.  A sleep-deprived “gasp” on my part was quickly and closely followed by a lower, bowel sweeping whine that exhibited more wave-like properties than particle ones. I pulled the oily, yellow-orange ear-plugs from my ears. There was never any hope of ignoring it. With a shaky hand (entirely autonomic and from the cold and nothing else)  I lifted the single, dog-hair covered sheet of which the dog-hair was, more likely than not, more efficient at retaining heat than the actual sheet itself, and lowered my icy triple-layer-of-socks’ feet into a carpet-lined pool of dog urine that, when combined with my legs and sock-covered feet, literally redefined them as two large flesh-stemmed cotton swabs on an attempt to soak up an amount of liquid way beyond their ability. It took me until I was halfway across the remainder of my room for the liquid to reach my skin, and partly on account of the sleep deprivation and partly because of my desperate need for warmth, I let the socks remain on me and squished my way into the hallway.
The hallway smelled like pennies and was spackled with chunks of coat-hanger and shreds of toilet paper smooshed between carpet. The dog loved toilet paper. LOVED- toilet paper. Unfortunately I mean that in both the literal and figurative senses, for while she enjoyed the occasional roll –figuratively- as a soft, fibrous chew-toy, she spent the plus-part of her toilet-paper immersed time H.O.T.; Hips On Top.
I pushed open the door to my mother’s room, on the opposite end of the hallway from mine, and stepped inside. My urine-soaked socks were now lined with a few layers of urine-soaked toilet paper that increased by number with each consecutive step. It created a sort of endocrinal snowball effect; a Charmin Ultra katamari.
Her room was always dark. She exhibited these bursts of creativity where she would spend hours or even days immersed in some sort of project in which she would, for the most part, go back and redo days later. A common one was painting the walls. Her bathroom went from white to red to metallic gold leaf. My bathroom evolved from a casual ivory to a blinding synthetic Barney-purple. The only consistency between any of these artistic endeavors resided in the color of her bedroom, which was always dark. At this point in time, it was a dank, swampy green that made the room appear fathoms deeper than classical measuring came to portray.

I shivered.

“Mom?” I ran my hand along the wall in hopes that it would lead to her room and not the edge of some black cliff overlooking some black water that so evenly blended that it looked as if I were just walking through a pitch-black room.
“Mom?” I could hear her to my right. She was crying. Her cries weren’t limited, though, to the widely acclaimed sniffle and poofy-red-face that is so common in Hollywood. No, her cries were, in all honesty, the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. They were like a vacuum that sucked any sort of light or happiness out of the room and left only stagnant melancholy and heavy air. Each individual wail was like a crescendo of pity whose birth began in a sniffle of self respect and whose death ended in an unrestrained scream of an utter lack of dignity. It killed me to see my mother like this, but, on the other hand, it happened so often that my callousness was only surpassed by my exhaustion. This time, somewhere underneath I could have been sad. Er-Angry. Maybe bitter. Can’t be sure. No matter my driving psychological affect. I always felt the need to ask perhaps the world’s most useless question.
    “Are you ok?”
    It’s useless in that, regardless of the situation, the answer is always obvious. I knew the answer; No. As always. No no no no no. In earlier times of slightly more self control and motherhood, she might’ve attempted to give the impression the answer was yes; though I could smell the “No” underneath. Now-  any sort of pleasantry or attempt to shield me had completely deteriorated.

    “They’re torturing me, Casey. Why won’t they just leave me alone?” Was a common response.
I would then spend a good fifteen minutes or so telling her things would be ok until it just got too weird and I just got too sad and I was forced to retreat back into my cold, blanketless room. But first I had to relieve myself in the room that was a purple dinosaur.
    The floor in my bathroom was colder than my feet, which wasn’t surprising for the urine soaked socks had had time to reach equilibrium with the room temperature and could now be considered pee-sicles. The toilet and mirror and tile and shower head and light switch were all polka-dotted with purple woops’s which either gave the effect that my bathroom had been diagnosed with an alien strain of the chickenpox, or it was just a complete shit-hole. I sat down on the frosty white toilet seat. A mix of constipation and lack of restraint led me to “over-push” and un-gently wipe and I spent the remainder of the night in curled position in dirty sheets in schizophrenic company trying my hardest to fall asleep with sharp, hemorrhoidal pain.
This was every night. It was miserable. So- If that essay I wrote had any personal relevance, any at all, I would convince myself that everything I was going through at the time was simply the darkness between the fireflies- the highlight or underline of all of the good stuff in life. If it had any sort of true, from the heart meaning, the dog-hair was a blessing of warmth along with the urine, my mother’s condition was making me stronger, and I was simply undergoing anal exfoliation. Unfortunately, that essay meant nothing to me at all.