Monday, September 26, 2011

Happiness is all about spinning plates.

I think it's time for a rebuttal to a post I made closer to the beginning of this year. There aren't that many, and I think it's even on the same page, so if you want to go back and read it, please, go ahead. I'm not even going to link it because, seriously, scroll down with your scroll wheel. It's right fucking there. You want me to feed you, and work your mandible for you too? No, you shitcogs. Do it yourself. Lazy fucks.

Any-who. The post in question is the one in which I thoroughly railed on authors for being, usually, so far up their own asses so as to never make true human connections because we are, quite literally, far too pleased with ourselves to see anyone beyond ourselves. Even others are there only as a reflection of ourselves. I think that I would like to revisit that, and maybe even say that that was an overdone idea… perhaps not completely extirpate the ideology all together, but at least to add an addendum.

Since that was written, I have looked back on it a few times and wondered if what I wrote there was actually true. Did I mean that, or was I just being morose and grim? I think that there was definitely some truth in it, but for the most part, I overplayed the sentimentality inherent in a writerly life and mistook my need for fans to be above that of friends. I think that’s my biggest problem with the piece. That was inherently stupid and wrong. I want to make you laugh, and I want you to like me for it, but I also want people to like me and I want to like them. There's a looot of likin' going on there, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I scrawled a "I like you. Do you like me? yes [] no []" message more than a few times.

We are all looking for that human connection. That one person who you feel more strongly connected to than anybody else – or at least a bunch of people that you are comfortable around. The older I get, the more I realize that’s what this life is really about. It's about those connections. And even as I write this now, it sounds like a bad motivational poster, but goddammit, it's true. What we want more than anything else is to feel like we are, in some way, impacting others. We want to feel like we have made a difference in someone's life for the better, and I'd go so far as to say, it's really not about other people affecting ours. That's perhaps the magic of friendship… or at least true, heart-felt friendship or love. You are in it because you want to make that other person happy, and in so doing, you have heightened your own existence as well.

So, am I inherently the cold, sociopath that I made myself out to be? I actually don't think I am. I think that I want to please my friends with any modicum of skill I may have, whether that be through words or whatever other skill I may or may come to possess at a later date (spinning plates has always been a talent that I yearn to master). My existence, your existence, and everyone else's existence is all contingent on the fact that there are others that exist. And I think that's what is most important -- we brush up, feeling and testing our weight against the presence of others. How we affect others is not only our legacy, but our quantifiable and qualifiable happiness as well.