A Happy Feeling Nothing in the World Can Buy

Nattering nabobs of negativity beware.

Your chimney will never be the same. [Photo by Daniel Stevenson]

The reason for the season is, when spoken of that way, always supposed to be Jesus Christ. And this day, when spoken of this way, is always supposed to suggest that returning our focus to the birth of Jesus Christ is what and how we should be doing and approaching our celebrations. But that’s not the real reason for hauling out that old chestnut. The only reason for hauling out that particular chestnut is because it provides you cover for yet another attempt to crap on/all over any and everyone’s desire for a “good time.”

You see the reason for the season is joy killing and joy killers abound. I should know. Not only am I a joy killing member…I am the club president.

“Eugene? I need you to help with the morale out there.” The statement was earnestly delivered and accompanied by a lot of Dale Carnegie-esque cross-body contact and direct eyeball to eyeball action.

“I’ll do like I have been doing: my best!” I’d have clicked my heels on exiting if I had thought it wasn’t going to give away the game.

Especially since the game, as it stood, was to make my inner world, the outer world, and so no sooner than my ass had hit the office chair then I’d launch into a symphony of sighs. Long, mournful exhalations that stank of hopelessness and despair. They always said to help out with the morale. They just never specified which kind of morale. And as things stood I was an undiscovered master of the bad kind.

Mirthless and leaden in affect my objective was to manifest my feelings about the job in a performance art piece entitled “Slow Walking + Ill-Timed Coughing”. In a sense, a performative sense, it was perfect. You worked longer hours? Perfect. Loaded up with extra non-overtime work? Even more perfect. Screamed at by the boss? Perfect. That is, because there was nothing to be done to make you less miserable there’s nothing they could do to stop you from making everyone else more miserable.

[W]hen Johnny Mathis sings, “it’s a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy,” it sounds like a battle cry. Or like something Frank Booth in Blue Velvet would say….It both scares and fortifies.

And the cherry on a much more crappy cake: the amount of joy in joy killing knows no bounds. So, happy to be unhappy and bad vibing like it was an Olympic sport I learned a little about myself and a lot about other people.

Specifically: they can’t take it. And I can bring it. The misery, that is. So, like a clownfish, I maintain a resistance to most attempts to bring me down and barely notice that it’s happening half the time. The other half of the time? It’s almost sort of welcome.

Every time/all the time outside of December.

The December holiday season full of Chanukah and Christmas celebrations I am an unabashed fan of. While the mimetic efforts of everything from Thanksgiving to New Year’s might be hell on your relationship in its vain attempts to be/seem film worthy, the reality is there is something unremittingly, unyieldingly joy-fueled about the 31 days of December.

Complete with its soundtrack, its filmwork, the holidays are a juggernaut of misery-crushing glee where the only haters are people whose early life experiences with it involved alcohol, fistfights and poverty. You see, the expectations caused the actualization of failure to be that much more stark. If you were poor, sure, it sucked in November too. It just really sucked in December.

But the opposite is also true here. The psychotic excitation that children feel on their first introduction to…mystery, is what endures. So when Johnny Mathis sings, “it’s a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy,” it sounds like a battle cry.

Or like something Frank Booth in Blue Velvet would say. That is, it sounds like something you don’t really mean at the same time that it sounds like something you really mean. It both scares and fortifies. And I am proud to say I love it now as much as I ever have. I can be cynical about almost everything else but this kind of cornball? It’s my lifeblood. And I like blood. Lots of it.

So, you’re not digging on Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, repeated viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life along with The Godfather (it’s a Christmas movie if there ever was one), eggnog, hot toddies, and socks and stockings by an open fire as the Yule logs burns?

Siiiiggghhhhh…I guess that’s ok. We’ll all be dead soon enough. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you sooner than me.

But until then? I’ll be over here listening to the chestnuts pop.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

Happy Holidays, y’all. You deserve it.