July 20: Joy, happiness of spirit

The late Christian apologist Walter Martin used to point out that God never promised people happiness. He promises them joy in the afterlife but not bliss in this one. 

I, for one, am sick of sanctimonious mushy gushy reverends saying things like "God loves you and He can't wait to shower you with blessings so you'll be happy." Yeah, tell that to the Christians who were fed to the lions in the coliseum.

-

My mom paid me a compliment the other day when she said I am one of the least materialistic people she knows. It threw me for a loop because I've been saving my money for a new car for the past three years (thank you, buggabugga, for wiping out my bank account.)

I asked her to explain herself and she reminded me that my cruddy little apartment, which I have called home for nearly two decades, would be anathema to the vast majority of people living in First World Canada. My apartment is tiny. There is no balcony. There is no outdoor pool or view of the city skyline. The hallway floor outside my apartment is the colour of faded limes. I don't think it's been replaced since I moved in here in June of 2003.

My apartment shortly after cleaning.

-

Conversation between me and Lorenzo in Rosebud, Alberta, circa 1992. I was 19. Lorenzo, 27:

Lorenzo: What will make you happy, Steve?

Steve: Honestly?

L: Yeah.

S: Fame.

L: Really?

S: Yeah.

L: Well then you'll never be happy.

S: Why?

L: You're not guaranteed fame. You don't get to decide if you'll be famous or not. That's for others to decide.

S: Like the general public?

L: Well, if you're a believer, God gets to decide that. And if fame will take you further away from God, then God won't let you be famous.

I still believe Lorenzo was right.

-

 About five years later, I started a fledgling theatre company in Calgary. It mounted four plays (solipsism alert: all written by me) before it disbanded in 1998. One of the actors who auditioned was terrible. I cast him anyway. He whined about how badly he wanted to be a professional actor. Only that, he said, would make him happy.

He was an outcast in school. He believed that if he made it as an actor, it would mean that he had triumphed over all of his adolescent tormentors. I could relate, to a degree, and I wondered how many young actors there were out there who were pursuing the craft for the wrong reasons.

That guy is not a professional actor today. He is in another field now and Google tells me that he is excelling in it. I am happy that he found his way.

-

I feel disconnected from God since buggabugga started. I have not been attending church. I have done some virtual services. They are not the same. For me, the days just bleed into each other. I work a lot. I take my kid to splash pads a lot. He is happy in splash pads and watching him in them makes me happy.

-

Doing magic shows makes me happy even though I am not a master magician. I feel like a fraud whenever I attend magic conventions. I went to one in Montreal once and found myself alone in a room with four young guys who had just gotten into magic a month ago. Two of them were fathers who wanted to do tricks for their kids. The other two were brothers who wanted something to impress girls.

So I wowed those guys for a while and then I remembered the words of Penn Jillette, who said that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. I knew I wasn't going to learn much if I stayed there the whole time so I wished those guys well and then I went into another room where a guy named Wesley James spent the next two hours destroying me.

-

One lonely night in March of 1970, Stephen King started writing his Dark Tower saga. In an afterword to the first volume, he likened it to sitting behind the controls of a steam shovel and getting ready to unearth some massive fossil from the ground. The rest of his novels, by comparison, would be trinkets, I suppose.

In my Grade 10 English class, Mrs. Bruggeman told us that there are two kinds or stories - ones that are written for escape and ones that are written to edify. She gave us a whole bunch of criteria to help us determine which was which. Later, there was a quiz, which I failed. In retrospect, I am happy I failed it. I'll just let a story be a story, thank you very much.

-

I used to know a casual acquaintance of the late Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen.

"Leonard was a slut," she told me once. 

She may have been old enough to be my mother. We danced once at the company Christmas party and she held me tight. When I was offered a job in Alberta, I told her I was torn between going back home and staying out in Ontario where there was more opportunity.  I cried while we talked. She is dead now.

Leonard was a slut.

Yes, but he wrote something - I think he wrote something - like "Poems, poems, get out of my brain. Put yourselves on paper so I can live again."

I guess that's one of the reasons I'm so unhappy. I have so many story ideas and I know I'll never have time to write them all down, to give them the perfect life I believe they all deserve.

In Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, a writer invents a device that writes her books for her while she's sleeping. It just kind of taps into her subconscious, extracts the vapours, and turns them into prose.

If I had something like that, well I guess I'd be miserable. I'd feel like the world's biggest cheat.

When you visited Leonard Cohen's house, you were surrounded by folders of unpublished poems.

-

As I write this meditation on happiness, my son waits for me in the bedroom. He is happy because Caillou is on TV, he has toys to play with, and he is alive.

Yes, I think there is a lesson to be learned here.

Still: Poems, poems, get out of my brain. Put yourselves on paper so I can live again."