Whenever I’m getting ready to start a new writing project, I feel the way I imagine a tire feels swelling with air.
Archive for the ‘happiness’ Category.
I was a phenomenon of rather far-fetched notability when I was thirteen: a pubescent white boy residing in a middling suburb of a fair-to-middling city in the South in the early 1950s whose ardently embraced role model, hero and highest god was the ever-laughing black musician and performer Louis Armstrong, the self-taught (musically and every other way) son of a prostitute plying the night-side of New Orleans, the greatest musical improviser since Beethoven, the most important figure in American music in the 20th century (rivaled probably only by Stravinsky in the world), a cultural revolutionary, a marijuana devotee and laxative-consumer extraordinaire. So what did I know, right? Well I knew this: What I loved about Satchmo as a young teen, and I do mean loved, I later confirmed to be the sine qua non of the greatest art man produces—-the joyous making of something new, brilliant and affecting from the nondescript raw materials of everyday existence. Pops’ bucket didn’t have a hole in it.
Pleasure is a sensation, happiness an emotion, satisfaction a mood, and contentment a dreaming rumination.
If you want to have some good, uncomplicated slack time, cultivate an amoral scoundrel as your companion. He’ll be very entertaining, introduce you to some fascinating people, and catch most of the checks out of vanity. Warning him you don’t trust him with your woman or your wallet will take the pressure off both of you, erasing ambiguity from the relationship.
When your daughter becomes a teenager, adopt an extreme new hobby such as sky diving, hang-gliding, acrobatic snowboarding or anything else you can think of to balance your perspective rigorously and keep it in balance for the next six years.
I once drove from Dallas to Houston with a business associate named Gene who hailed from Forth Worth. His family had been dirt poor, and Gene had had to work at the famous local stockyards from his ninth year until he graduated from high school. On our way down the state, we were overtaken by a lean young Urban Cowboy in a whistle-clean silverado pickup truck; he severely wore a Stetson hat and carried a .30-0-.30 in the gun rack. I asked Gene, “How much does a new Stetson cost these days?” His answer was, “Don, I done shoveled so much horseshit, cow shit, pig shit and sheep shit that I don’t give a shit about no cowboy shit.” No one else sees the world as being as stark and hard-edged as many of the Texans I have met. They find the harshness to be clarifying rather than disquieting.
An old man who was a customer of mine in Valdosta, Ga, philosophizing with the assistance of a mayonnaise jar filled with moonshine one afternoon, apprized me of the following life-lesson: “If we all throwed our troubles on the table, we’d wind up pulling our own back out of the pile.” Valdosta is as South Georgia as it gets. I once saw a salesman who was not from thereabouts get attacked for walking into a tavern wearing a necktie.
Some people say we can’t be happy unless we’ve experienced pain. I would say that they’re full of crap.
Whether publicly or privately, on the job or on the make, if you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong.
In my twenties, as a salesman, I drove several hundred miles a week. When I’m taking a trip now, I want to get to the destination as soon as possible. The idea of “exploring the countryside” would never enter my mind. I just want to get to the hotel and turn the air conditioner on, and a glance out the window on the way is all the spur to my imagination I require.
A man and a woman are deciding what to do with their evening. The woman says, “I need to get a couple of things at the mall, Baby.” The man says, “If that’s where you want to go, Sweetheart.” As they’re making their way to the car the woman thinks, It’s sweet of him to do this with me. I know he loves me, while the man thinks, I hope that black-haired girl is working the register at The Gap tonight. I could really go for some of that. He holds the door for his wife to get in the car, brushing his cheek with her lips as she lowers herself into the interior.
Good People Need to Learn How to Duck. It did me good one morning when I entered the building of a prospective customer—a man-and-wife start-up operation—and discovered in the receptionist a young lady who was happy as a tick to be working there. She enthused: “They called us into the warehouse last week and said that we are all a family. They said that if the business succeeded and they succeeded, so will everybody here. They’re like the mother and the daddy.” Well the company did really well—thanks in no small part to all the energy and infectious volubility of this young woman—but a year and a half after we met they let the receptionist go. “Why did they do that?” I asked her and, not too happy now, she replied: “I don’t know. He just said the Corporation decided it needed someone more polished. I didn’t even know that we’d become a corporation.”
You make a mistake, and the consequences force you to recognize the error of your ways. You see yourself differently now, and you don’t like what you see. You want to improve, and you start to become a new person. You work hard at this, and you find that you are sensitive to details you never noticed in the past. Eventually you are entitled to say that you have made yourself a new person and a good person. Does that mean that you can reacquire the state of grace you cost yourself? No. You were not the only person changed by your mistake. The ingredients of your state of grace, I’m sorry to say, are no longer in the mix, at least not in the same proportions. Your hard work and new-found empathy, however, suggest you might do better next time provided that you stop looking forward to the past. ( I write this directly from the heart having today destroyed through my stupidity a relationship I was grateful to have and cherish, in the process doing terrible damage to the feelings of an excellent man who trusted me without demur and was therefore particularly acutely vulnerable to the unintended offense.)
A person has nothing to do with the resources he receives at birth, whether that’s a lot or not very much. But he is responsible for that which he does with them, and in this connection his guiding principle ought to be: maximize the potential.
The gleam of pleasure in a lady’s eye is doubly poignant when you think about how brief a time it’s going to be there. It hasn’t been a walk in the park for me to be a man, but I would elect to die before I’d agree to become a woman.
From a World History text published in 2378 AD: “When the females of Canamerico became entirely, as distinct from largely, promiscuous, the males could think of nothing else but availing themselves of the now-perpetual opportunity to fornicate at will, and the entire energy of the culture became exclusively vested in sexual activity. At this juncture the Gulliverians began quietly stealing children from the inimical homes in which they were unloved, untaught and unattended, placing them in the coast-to-coast system of stables maintained as worship-houses by the Houyhnhnms Order. In the hygienic countryside stables the children dwelled in peace and comfort among a population of horses and dogs until their 16th birthdays, their creaturely needs provided for by acolytes. The Gulliverians had initially planned to remove the children at age 13 in order to install them in boarding schools, but the Charitable Elders stayed their hand when they discovered that the children, having been so tenderly and with such mute and humble adoration attended by the animals, displayed in adolescence a strong and abiding desire to reciprocate the creatures’ beneficence by taking over the stables’ care-giving and maintenance functions from the Order, undertaking themselves their guardians’ and former playmates’ grooming, exercise, feeding, medical services and companionship keeping. When the Elders beheld the children at their self-appointed work, they declared: ‘School can wait. This is their education.’”
If I were an Eskimo, I’d stay put.
Shaking Hands with Reality. Industrial salespeople are the least prejudiced, least parochial, most objective and most flexible-minded people in America. Other people are able to nourish their illusions and misapprehensions for years on end without being challenged; and some are even protected in their ignorance, negligence and folly by professional safeguards. But the assumptions of industrial salespeople are tested 5 to 20 times a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year; and unless they learn to see clearly and speak effectively—the latter entailing a good working knowledge of human behavior—they cannot survive in their positions. Nor can they compensate (as some kinds of salespeople do) through chicanery, for if their products don’t perform as advertised they will not continue to be accepted by the customers, whose own survival depends on trustworthy raw materials, services and tools.
If you hunger for human experience, you should become an industrial salesperson. In no other capacity can you meet as many different people doing as many different things at as many levels of life, nor trace so many personal histories over such extended periods of time. I am not talking just about observing people; I’m talking about interacting with them. You may easily go from calling on a vice-president at Lockheed to visiting a jackleg paint and body operation to surveying the needs of an opera company to making calls with a neophyte salesperson you are training, all before lunch. And you are on your own, bear in mind, at liberty to decide whom you’re calling on, what product you’re trying to sell, and when you want to make the appointment. Of course you have to pay your way, but if you manage to do that, you’ll be one of America’s “last cowboys.”
Whenever I go to Italy, I always feel they’re waiting for me there, gathering at the airport, searching the skies, murmuring, “What time is Don’s plane supposed to land? We can’t start the fun without him.” A childlike (I mean that as a compliment) and beautiful people. In other European countries, when you ask where the church is they will politely stop and tell you. The Italian will take you by the arm and lead you to the church.