I alternate between giddy, gleeful, face-clutching shocks of joy where I bounce and screech in pleasure and vast flatline plateaus of void feelings, sure that I’ve missed the mark already, burnt my life-candle past redeemable. Most days I’m sure of it.

But then I think: By whose standards? Even if they are my standards, they are polluted, adulterated by a culture that sells bridges named happiness to a trash island in the Pacific. I’ve been raised in it, slathered in it, fried in it. Where does what culture wants me to be end and what culture has shaped me to want begin?

All the channels have chatter in them. Betweens stations of the radio. At any given time I am running scenarios, trying to tune into the best version of the universe to walk through. But I can’t tell if I am moving the goal posts or seeing through a ghost when I plan my life.

In one version I have failed to achieve in a conventional sense and am trying to cover my mediocre tracks, wasted the good start I’ve been given and now need to rationalize my bad choices by saying conventional success wasn’t my goal in the first place.

In another version I am an early guest at a party that no one knows if it will be big or not. I think each of the world’s communities needs a plan for its own sustainability and I am writing mine, because I believe even if climate change is solved the world is heading in a scary way. There is no guarantee a green world is a better world if the same interests dominate it. So I am planning to overcome that in my own life. The Lower Heaven series is the fiction-writing arm of that plan. Because you need to put your words down if you ever want them to influence anybody, he tells himself.

But I could be completely wrong, and then how much time will have I wasted, when I could have just been happy at some simpler level? That’s hard to imagine because I can’t undo my choices and can’t fathom not making them.

I am just trying to be happy, without closing my eyes to the world too much. It’s hard to do both, but the fact that in the beginning of 2020 nothing on the news seems true in the slightest makes it slightly easier. It stresses me out being so much in my own little world. I feel like I’ve been in reaction-mode and needing to defend my mind, not just from stuff on the news. (Work craziness.)

Despite everything, I am feeling more balanced than I have in a long time. A little less frantic- hopefully I can string a few of these weeks together. In the meantime, just going to keep stringing words and paragraphs together, and one of them will be the last one I write before something big happens.

Cheers y’all,

Ben