🚨 LAST ONE 🚨

Join us next Friday for the final Summer School session of the season: Self-Promotion Clinic!

This week’s question comes to us from Norma Trevino:

Is it possible to be happy while desiring nothing?

I hope so. I think so. I don’t know.

Because as much as I don’t like admitting it, I desire things. And I don’t mean things from the “peace in our lifetime” pile, although I certainly desire a lot of things from that pile. I also desire things from the other pile, the things pile, more than I’m comfortable admitting.

Let’s talk about the yellow boombox. A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to a boombox. This wasn’t a vintage boombox (things from my college years are now vintage, kill me), it was brand new. It had a radio (yay!), it played tapes (excellent), it played CDs (fine), and it had a Bluetooth connection (which I was begrudgingly ok with.) It was freshly made consumer-grade nostalgia designed specifically to trigger every Gen-X gene in my body. And it worked because not only did I want that boombox, I desired it. And because it wasn’t something I needed and my birthday was coming up, I took the coward’s way out and started dropping hints to Erika that the boombox might make a good birthday gift, which is bullshit I am too old to be doing.

It also didn’t work. Erika, who is smarter than me, got us tickets to Mosswood Meltdown instead, which was amazing. We got to see Iggy Pop, Bikini Kill, The Dead Milkmen, and a bunch of other awesome bands. (For the record, I hate all music festivals except Mosswood. It’s hosted by John Waters and attended by all the right kinds of freaks. Do not invite me to other music festivals, please.)

A couple of weeks passed and I started thinking about the yellow boombox again. Plus, the friend who’d originally told me about it got one and started sending me pictures of it, which only made me want it more, as he knew it would. (Prick.) The final nail in the coffin was when it showed up at Costco for two-thirds the original price. (I love Costco. They treat their workers right and have a reasonably priced shitty slice of pizza, which is the best kind of pizza, as we’ve discussed.) I bought the boombox.

It showed up a few days later. (It was delivery only. Not available in store. Yes, this deprived me of a slice of pizza.) And my first reaction was that it was much larger than I expected it to be. It is ridiculously large, almost three feet in length. It also takes eight D-cell batteries, which made me very happy the first time I had to pick up eight D-cell batteries like I was still in college, and is guaranteed to make me less happy with each subsequent visit to the corner store to get eight D-cell batteries. It is also very yellow, which filled me with joy. (The only thing that would’ve made me happier would’ve been a very hot pink boombox.)

The Friday after the boombox showed up I took it to the dogpark. And I gotta say, I felt a little ridiculous carrying this very large anachronism in public, almost like I had a fresh Ed Hardy tattoo on my forehead. However, you can’t walk through the dogpark with a three-foot long bright yellow boombox and claim that you were hoping not to be perceived, so I owned it. I got to the bench, fished a tape out of my pocket that I’d found tucked away in a corner of our apartment—Purple Rain—and hit play. Which is when I realized that a forty year old tape sounds like a forty year old tape. With no other option, I switched it to Bluetooth (annoying) and created a playlist of 80s hits on my phone to play through the boombox. Within a few minutes we had a dance party going in the dogpark. By the end of the night, we had a Total Eclipse of the Heart singalong going. (A few weeks later we had a Dolly Parton memorial playlist.)

And that’s when I realized that while the big yellow boombox originally came from one pile of desire—the things—pile, it actually belonged in the other pile of desire—the desire for community. The desire for joy. The “peace in our lifetime” pile. It’s really hard to feel the total emptiness of all human direction that engulfs our lives right now when Grace Jones is telling you to pull up to the bumper. It’s really hard to yearn for the sweet embrace of death when Annie Lennox is telling you what sweet dreams are made of. And while we should be paying attention to all of those things in reasonable amounts, I think Emma Goldman said it best: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution.”

We needed a weekly dance party, and now we have one. The big yellow boombox has more than paid for itself. So I’m not worried about people who desire a thing here and there if that thing brings them, and by extension the neighborhood, some joy.

It is possible to be happy while desiring a thing here and there.

What worries me is people who can’t be happy while desiring everything, even as they have nearly everything.

We are currently suffering through a time where the people who seemingly have the most, are not only the most unhappy, but also the cruelest. And their cruelty is most pointedly directed at the people who seemingly have the least. Which means that the question “Is it possible to be happy while having almost everything?” needs to be considered as well. Or, to ask it another way, “why are these rich motherfuckers not happy?” Is it necessary to be miserable while desiring everything?

When I was a kid, walking home from school with my friends and still trying to get a handle on how the world worked and why we were in it, we’d come up with stupid topics of conversation like “what would you do if you had a million dollars?” A million being the highest number we could think of at the time. And our answers were, of course, as stupid as you’d think they were. We’d buy a circus. We’d get Wolverine claws. We’d go to the moon. We’d pool our money and buy the Six Million Dollar Man. We’d get a really tricked-out A-Team van. We’d buy every Star Wars toys. We’d buy every comic book in the world. And eventually someone would take it seriously and say they’d buy a house for their mom, and everyone would razz them for being a mama’s boy. Because young boys are idiots. But eventually everyone else would come around and agree that a million dollars was more than enough to get a house for our moms and still have plenty left over. (My parents paid $40,000 for their first house. They saved for years to come up with a $5,000 down payment, and took on a mortgage at insane interest rates.)

We were playing a silly game where we were declaring our heart’s desire if money were no object. As kids from working class families, the source of all our problems—and the fights we witnessed between our parents—was a lack of money, since we all had that in common. But again, what we really wanted was peace, a lack of worry, happy parents. For a myriad of reasons.

In 2026, humanity minted its first trillionaire. And if I could go back in time to those kids and tell them that, they’d be amazed. But first I’d have to explain what a trillion was, which I’m not sure I could do because it’s an almost unexplainable number, it’s a brutal number. A selfish, hostile number. And I imagine that once they’d kinda sorta wrapped their heads around the number, maybe one of the kids would say “He must be really happy.”

Which of course, he is not. The world’s richest man is also the world’s most miserable man, the world’s cruelest man, and the world’s most self-loathing man. And to cap it off, the world’s biggest racist, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. A number that is projected to climb into the millions. (Some of you drive his cars.)

I’m in the middle of reading Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich, which I recommend if you’re in the right headspace. It’s very good. It’s supposedly a history of the powerful fascists of Silicon Valley, but all I can see is how fucking absolutely miserable every one of these motherfuckers is. Rich and miserable. These are men (I have yet to run into a woman in the book.) who depleted their things pile. They have more money than they will ever need. They have private planes. They have Wolverine claws. They have yachts that fit inside bigger yachts. They have every comic book in the world. Some of these motherfuckers have been to space! (Kinda.) And yet… despite making their way through their own things pile, they are not happy. Despite making their way through our things pile, they are not happy. Despite making their way through society’s social safety net (as meager as it was), they are not happy.

Which of course begs the question, what will it take for these motherfuckers to be happy?

And that answer is, of course, our joy. Having worked their way through their own piles of limitless insatiable dark desire and not finding the one thing they were hoping to find, the closest they can get to joy is taking it from us.

The yellow boombox didn’t bring me joy. It allowed me to express it, and to share it with my neighbors in a fun new way. But that joy was always in my heart. That joy is replenished in conversations with friends and neighbors. That joy is replenished when I am surrounded by people I love, and who love me back. That joy is replenished when I am painting, or making a zine, or spending time with Erika, or riding my bike, or watching Reacher punch bad dudes, or listening to a song I really love, or hugging my daughter.

They don’t have that. Their hearts are empty. So they try to take ours. They take from the most vulnerable first, because they are cowards. And it might look like they’re succeeding. A lot. But the only way they can truly succeed is if you give them the thing they most desire, and are incapable of producing themselves.

Joy is an act of resistance. Keep dancing, keep looking out for each other, they fucking hate it.

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