Dear Me Letter: Making a Misery Happy

Dear me,

There’s a billboard across the sky written in black energy so you can’t see it but you can feel its fangs. It’s like an advertisement to make you try to buy it like you buy toothpaste or Coca-Cola. It says “No Spirit of Play Allowed Down There.” Then in parenthesis it says “Except on weekends at at parties, then only by catagories.”

So we get our playtime in categories like tennis, golf, our favorite hobby or game. Then we have TV and movie categories where we can watch other people play while we get fat and become glazy-eyed couch potatoes, which is a rung or two lower than doing it ourselves.

And work isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s against the rules to make work a playful thing to do. After all, that’s your “living” and we all know what “making a living is.” It’s serious work and mostly miserable. You get the gist of this when you see bumper stickers that say “I’d rather be (whatever)". Maybe “making a living” should be called what it is: making a misery. The rule is you have to be serious about your work if only to show the boss you’re worth your paycheck. You can be good-natured and cheerful if you feel like it. But if you feel like an old dried up leather boot that’s been kicked around and chewed up by Mack trucks, you still have to force yourself to appear to be a civilized part of the human race. That by itself is hard labor that’s worth time and a half or more.

By the way, I’ve heard some people like their job and have fun doing it. But maybe they have a purpose in their lives that fits with what they do. I’ll bet a silver dollar that’s the key: having and following a purpose in life.

Anyway, one time I was not only feeling like that old chewed up boot, I felt I was being it. On the way out the door to meet a friend for lunch, I passed by a mirror and out of the corner of my eye saw a grey reflection like a small thundercloud with a condor-like appendage. I turned to find it was my face. The strange appendage was my nose. Rather than go out and gray up my friend’s day, I decided to force myself to smile. And did it ever take force. Since I have an underbite that pulls the corners of my mouth into a natural frown, I had to practically use pulleys to crank them up even to a straight line. The effort it took to make that smile, then to cough up some semblance of a laugh was trying to get popcorn to pop over a cake of ice.

A little while later, I finally started feeling a little better, then better still, and went on to meet my friend, pleased that I’d blown that thundercloud away, plus also realized a good use for force.

If the other billboard in the sky wasn’t enough to keep us in misery, there’s another one. It says: “Do what you don’t want to do.” Among others I’ve seen, I bought this trap most of my grown-up life doing office work to make a misery, when what I really wanted to do was create. I finally filled my tank up to the teeth, stuck my tongue out at the billboards in the sky and said, “That’s it! I’m doing my art. Start.”

 So I’m not making a misery so much anymore. I suppose you’d say I’m making a happy. So maybe there’s hope after all.