Happiness was that summer I spent in Portland, living on the floor of a friends house and we’d wake up all together and prance around the backyard and smoke drugs and steal and ride our bikes and go to shows and we were kind of a pack and we were all living at a house where the actual residents—god knows why—allowed us to stay there and camp out in their yard and floor. Every morning the sun was so bright and glinty and the flowers and blackberry bushes and the really good coffee, better coffee than I’ve ever had in my life, and the strange little miniature bridges and walkways of Portland, and the houses, walking down the strange suburban streets of Southeast late late at night to the dumpsters...
And I felt some genuine enthusiasm.
And I jumped out of a second story window into some big fluffy cloud-like bushes at a house party in Southeast. And the bushes, they caught me.
And I was happy.
And ambitious little sinner that I was (delighting in what was unlawful because it was unlawful, as old Augustine said) I put a bottle of wine in my jacket at the grocery store and walked out. But when I got out, we realized it was cooking sherry not wine, and we laughed and laughed til our bellies ached. and drank it anyway on the long pleasurable walk home, because we badly wanted to be drunk.
And our bellies ached.
And even when the barista at ye olden anarchist cafe grabbed me by the shirt and accused me of shooting up in their bathroom because I’m a delicate little flower and had stayed in the bathroom reading too long and they had lots of heroin addicts at the anarchist cafe, I was still carefree. I’d never done heroin and never would, ever.
Even getting the boot, I still smiled and skipped out and laughed on my merry way like Tom Bombadil, oh rum dum a dillow, wind in the willows, putting out a blanket and selling the VHS video tapes I found in the Blockbuster dumpster in front of the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne or whatever that main street was called.
I smoked opium that summer, and it made my chest and legs so cold, I didn’t like it, it was like being frozen from the inside out.
And I had no love, but that was OK because I had friends and a worn-out Belle and Sebastian tape, that just meant I was free, some people around me had love and I liked basking in their sweet love, seeing them sidle out of their bedrooms together in their underwear to make coffee.
And it seems to me now (though I didn’t know then, obviously) that 2002 a little bit was the true end of the 90s, the 90s stuff and people were still stumbling around there making zines and drinking coffee and sitting out on blankets in the grass wearing their little black hoodies with their stickers and travel mugs but i don’t know…it was like after 9/11 they were still wandering around twitching but the head had been cut off and they didn’t know it yet.
And another happiness was being a little kid back in the bushes hidden in the yard with the butterflies and bugs and sandboxes and the old wishing well, all alone.
And the dense humid air of the south with the birds and the smell of jasmine and flowers.
I liked others but happiness was not so much others. Time with others.
That was stressful. Now I know that a kind of happiness is the time with others
Happiness was a few sweet weeks alone in the springtime where it was warm and I was busy writing and feeling the forward movement of my endeavours, yes I was in sync with time and using my will, I was still using adderall and such, and I still felt forward momentum, the possibility of true progress and personal improvement, and I felt so inspired reading so many novels and books there at that house, Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson and all the Bolano books on a futon….and taking so many long lovely baths in that big old bathtub.
Happiness was working late at night at Kinko’s making my zines knowing I had an audience and people would read them and I’d get some letters sent to me and feeling like I was part of a tribe, and feeling like this medium was so free and hybrid, it allowed fictions disguised as non-fiction and true non-fiction and journalism and little fan-selections of your favorite writers writing and a hybrid of everything and you could just go between them and you’d get some kind of response and you were part of a lineage, a strand in a long genealogy.
Happiness was being 10 and flying across the ocean to sing in my second soprano boy voice for the Pope, John Paul II, to tour Italy for twelve days…to sing and work for old Mr. Sibley, and everywhere we went be greeted with such affection and huge amounts of homemade food and be with my comrades and we saw places and things many had never seen, the backs of churches, the bishops houses, the old church architecture…I brought back gifts for my family, everything was so cheap, I brought back so many thousand Lire…And I loved those quiet mid-90s airports, before the deluge. I went to the quiet little RDU airport and said goodbye and everything was genuinely different and strange in Italy, things were cheap, Italy was still Italy…not just an appendage of global capital.
So peaceful.
And the food on the plane, so wonderful. Peanuts. And proper soft drinks with crushed ice. Even Cherry Coke.
And flash forward 12 more years, happiness was touring with my band, my dear beloved friends, everywhere we went people were happy to see us and there was food and affection and good weather, and we were like some tribe, a wolf pack.
That was also happiness.
And also, here and there, having a long layover somewhere, a day or two to explore a new city, I think back to Madrid and London, I just had a night and a morning, just enough time to go for a long run around town, to get a nice dinner, maybe check out a few bars and graveyards, to curl up in a comfortable AirBnB bed as a big foreign thunderstorm beat against the windows.
Happiness was big family gatherings for Easter at my grandparents house, my grandfather in his grease-stained undershirt in a kitchen smelling like tabouli and kibbeh, the big dishes of Lebanese food, kids running around, adults running around, and the elderly there, all of us packed in, maybe 20 of us into that nice house before it burnt down. Seeing all my cousins, seeing my family, taking a little canoe out in the pond, the sound of the south, the feeling of a full house.
Living at a group house in Greensboro, having a tribe all around and me alone in my little green room at the top of the stairs, having a reason to be there, creating art, living it so fully with my friends.
Waking up hungover at Patrick’s place in DC in the basement or whoever’s place somewhere there in Logan Circle embedded in a big group of DC friends and it was so dark and cozy and we just wrapped up in blankets and made big salads with oil vinaigrette with the perfect proportion of oil and vinegar and basil and garlic salt and cuddling up in blankets and watching Twilight Zone all day with the blinds drawn.