Joy

joy

joi/

noun

noun: joy

1. 1.

   a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.

   "tears of joy"

Joy, today, was a simple thing.

It was picking up my dog, after a week apart, and being snuffled. It was putting on snow boots and a ridiculous hat and walking to the good bagel place, where it was all steamy and warm, for a toasted everything with veggie cream cheese. It was walking a little further, into the small independent bookshop that just opened today in my neighborhood, and geeking out over the coolness of jersey city. It was being on the train, blasting the same Ke$ha song on repeat five actual times and trying desperately not to dance. It was pulling into Hoboken where approximately 100 people dressed as santa claus piled trashily into my car.

It was, later, eating that bagel.

It's so easy to let bad emotions swallow you whole. Sadness, inferiority, stress, depression, anxiety. As a counter-balance its good to let the happy ones swell and rise up, too. When you can find them. Today they were easier to find, and I appreciated that.

Where the hell were all those Santas going, anyway?

Well, Alright Then, Entire World

"The half-life of love is forever."

I already ranted a bit about Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her on this here blog, but now I have finished it, and then I immediately reread (some of) it, and now I'm about to reread (more of) it, again, so it's imperative that I communicate to absolutely no one that this book is wildly, stupidly, just-go-ahead-and-punch-yourself-in-the-face important.

IMPORTANT.

It's filthy and raw and disrespectful and emphatically real. I appreciate nothing more than brutal truth, so this was a marvel to read. And though I tend towards being effusive and dramatic, I don't use words like "marvel" lightly.

I can imagine tons of people not liking this book. It's crude, overtly sexual, racist, and plain depressing. And though I suppose we must give people the right to their own opinions (eh) I would have to counter that it's the very foulness of it, up against language so perfect it feels like fire in your hands, that makes it so special. It combusts.

Light and dark. High and low. It's the mix of the two where art is found.

"Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might pick up a baby's beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.

This is how you lose her."

People. Read it. Love it or hate it, but I promise that you won't be bored.

http://bryanpatricktodd.com

A Love Affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was required to read The Great Gatsby in high school, like approximately every other American human being. I read it begrudgingly, and I didn't like it. What's the point? I remember thinking to myself with a condescending sniff as I sat there in my English class. Who cares about these people and their silly lives? Who cares about this rich guy's obsessive love for Daisy, who sounds kind of flighty and irritating anyway? And what's the big deal about her voice? Boring.

About two years ago I began a mission to read the classics I'd missed, or re-read the ones I had read when I was too young to understand them. I started with this one, and when I say it walloped me what I mean is that F. Scott Fitzgerald himself stood up and punched me repeatedly in the face with his magnificence. I gasped out loud at many sentences, re-reading the same paragraphs over and over as I tried to understand his way of weaving things together. Every single freaking word is perfect and right and the whole thing is just stitched together with a weird atmosphere of party lights and alcoholism and a leaking, desperate sadness.

I read it on an airplane, traveling south. I had a pencil and I underlined the crap out of it, moment after moment, which is a thing I never do to books. I finished it with a bang and immediately started it over again. I know it's fiction, but the atmosphere of the story is so true and visceral I felt like I could reach in and somehow dance my way right into it. That's the magic, to me - knowing that every part of Fitzgerald's imagination was born from his reality. The world he wrote from was real and actual. The events were manufactured, but the world was his true life, and he captured it for me, for everyone, and through some crazy veil of time and chance and typographic trickery I can see it too.

I know everyone knows this book is greatness, of course. I'm just feeling a bit effusive about it on an otherwise inoffensive Saturday, and wanted to share after bumping into this letter he wrote to a young aspiring writer. I want to tattoo it onto my hands.

PS: I know I am behind on real posts. My sincere apologies to the random five people who are reading this. The summer has run away with me, but I'm getting back on track now.