🎃 We’Re BaAaAaAck! 🎃

Next Friday, Mule Spooky School kicks off with How to Negotiate, a terrifying topic which we promise to make more treat than trick.

This week’s question comes from Sarah Vieira:

What’s the most recent silly, small thing that made you radiant with joy?

A few months ago the chowderheads in charge of a small Iowa town passed a resolution allowing a prayer to be read at the start of their council meetings, which of course went completely unnoticed by me, and by you, because in our current hellscape new terrors drop every three minutes. I only found out about it this morning because a former councilman (the only one who voted against the resolution, which might explain the “former” part) got himself on the docket and kicked off the evening’s very important small town business with a prayer to Satan. And as if that wasn’t enough to fill me with delicious joy, the prayer was immediately followed by a pastor in the audience demanding the council act immediately to “lift the curse,” and the mayor deciding that “the curse” was new business which—according to Robert’s Rules of Order—needed to follow existing business. Chef’s kiss, no notes. (Okay, maybe one note: I encourage all of you to picture this scene reenacted by the Muppets, with Sam the Eagle as the town mayor. You’re welcome.)

Malicious compliance is a gift. One I desperately needed this week.

It’s not been a great week, if I’m being honest with you. Nothing particularly bad happened. In some ways, that would be easier because then I could point at the bad thing, establish cause and effect, and use that to justify my mental state. Not being able to point to a cause on the outside means the monster is on the inside, and monsters on the inside have access to systems you don’t want them having access to, which is… bad. Also, in the realm of particularly bad things, there are truly bad things happening on a daily basis to many particular people, and if brain chemistry were a logic problem then I could line up all the bad things that are happening to everyone and see that I’m doing fairly well, comparatively. But that’s not how brains work. You just wake up one day and your brain decides to fuck you without warning like a parish priest. So it’s been a particularly bad week, mentally, for no real good reason, other than—of course—the perpetual weight of all things currently happening in the world, which is a lot. In short, everyone’s going through it and sometimes it’s your turn.

Thankfully, I’ve spent enough time in therapy to mitigate the effects of a bad week. (A privilege that should be extended to everyone, even Brad who believes he is “too smart for therapy” and yet somehow still in last place in his fantasy football league.) Which previously used to spiral to bad months. Bad days happen to everyone, bad weeks are worrisome, bad months are… a problem. So I’ve spent the last few days in a very careful (and to be honest, not always 100% successful, but that’s ok) attempt to avoid the kind of shit that sends me into a depression spiral. (While at the same time the monster in my head is trying to get me to do the exact opposite, which is fucking exhausting.) I’ve avoided going online. I’ve avoided talking to people about certain topics. I’ve avoided some people because they tend to bring up those topics. And I’ve avoided big decisions, because when I’m having a bad week I tend to make bad decisions. Unfortunately, having a good week doesn’t necessarily mean I make good decisions. But I’m a little more open to being told that I’m making a bad decision, and trusting the person who’s telling me as much because I realize they’re doing me a favor.

Thing is, avoiding things that make you spiral isn’t enough. To truly pull out of a bad week, I have to do something. I have to do the exact thing that the monster in my head is trying to keep me from doing, which is finding my joy. Finding a way to be useful. The monster in my head is trying to convince me that nothing I do matters, and if nothing I do matters, well… what am I doing here, and you can see where that goes. So, to avoid the spiral, it’s good to make something.

On Tuesday, I sat down to do something of little consequence that would keep me incredibly busy for a few days. I laid out a book. One of the joys of making your own books is that you can make a new version of an old book anytime you want, whether the world is clamoring for it or not. (They’re not.) But it’s the kind of thing that makes me feel useful, allows me to focus on a small thing, and keeps my head busy enough that it’s not spiraling into doomsville. I’m fixing all the mistakes I didn’t catch last time. (Books are always full of mistakes.) I’m having to relearn things that I’ve forgotten since the last time I did it, and I’m even taking the time to actually learn how to do something I half-assed last time. (I’m self-trained at this shit. There’s a ton I don’t know.) This is also the kind of thing that I can put on my headphones for, block out the rest of the world, and listen to something fun. So for two days, I sat in front of a large monitor, looking at page layout, setting up style sheets, cleaning up style sheets, aligning things to baselines, killing enough widows and orphans that Chuck Schumer asked me for a campaign donation, and doing weird layout math. As a final treat, I got to make a very stupid cover. This morning I uploaded the new book to the printer, and in two to three weeks I’ll be holding an object that will forever remind me of having a very bad week, and the trick I used to climb out of it. So that’s a thing.

Sometimes joy is a fig. A thing that starts by trapping a wasp, and then reflexively builds something meaningful around it. The protective space between you and what would hurt you.

Sometimes you have to shrink the world to the size of the joy available to you at the moment.

Over the last decade of bullshit there’ve been times when I felt like I had the energy to take on the world, and times when I’ve needed the world to become one room, or one book, or one sink, or one sock drawer, or one song that I played over and over. There’ve been times when I’ve found joy in being part of a large crowd marching for something, times when I’ve found joy hanging with my neighbors in the local dog park, and times when I’ve found it because all the socks in the sock drawer were perfectly folded. And while perfectly-folded socks aren’t going to topple fascism, an afternoon of doing that might give me the time I need to recharge my batteries. We are all so tired.

A few weeks ago I started cleaning our stovetop. We have an old stove from the 1950s (best guess). It’s seen better days, but it’s a beautiful old stove, and it’s got parts in a way that modern stoves don’t tend to have parts. My intent was just to wipe down the burners, but for some reason on this particular morning I decided to start pulling some of those parts apart, then I remembered I had some degreaser stashed in our back room. Six hours later, I’d taken apart the parts of the stove I was comfortable taking apart, degreased them, cleaned them, wiped them dry, and put them all back on. Then I went online looking for replacement knobs since a couple of them were on their last legs. I planned on doing none of this, in fact I had other plans for that day. But once I started I needed to finish. I’m bringing this up because you asked about recent things that made you radiant with joy, and doing that work filled me with joy, and again like the book I’ll hold in my hands in two to three weeks, left evidence of the fact. Now, when I walk into my kitchen I see my stove and it reminds me of our very good day together. Which, yeah… it’s weird. It’s just a stove. But that’s ok. Sometimes joy is in weird places.

Our home is a collection of random things that give us joy. Objects that remind us of moments in time. Struggles overcome. Happy surprises. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures from friends who we want to support. Things we give each other. Including flowers, in several states of decay, because they’re always kept around long after they’ve dried out. They contain memories, and it’s hard to throw out a memory. Especially a memory wrapped in joy. There are days when I need them all. Ultimately, they are all mementos to survival.

At some point not too long ago, a few of our friends discovered Swedish death cleaning (I think there was a book going around), which is about throwing away as much of your stuff as possible so that it doesn’t become a burden to whoever has to deal with your stuff after you kick it. I contemplated this for about five minutes before I decided I wanted to be a burden to whoever has to deal with my stuff. I want them to go through it all, wondering what joy I found in all of it. Wondering if they looked hard enough maybe there might be some remnant of joy left in it for them. Wondering why there was an old baseball on the shelf until they realized that was the baseball we used the last time we played catch together.

In a few weeks there will be a new book on that shelf, and it’s not because the shelf needed a new book, it’s because the book needed to be made. Sometimes we have to make things to trap monsters.

Mostly, Swedish death cleaning isn’t for me because I am not done living, which has its good weeks and its bad weeks. And during those bad weeks, I need to both reacquaint myself with the reminders of things that have brought me joy in the past, things that remind me that we beat the monster yesterday, and also make new things because tomorrow they’ll remind me we beat the monster today.

And hopefully the most recent small thing that brought me joy won’t be the last thing that brings me joy.

Hail Satan.

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