Joy?

Writer’s Warning: after suffering from depression and creative writer’s block for over a year, this is the first rather creative piece I wrote. It’s in draft form. I mean no one disrespect in this piece. It is simply my unharnessed creativity freely flowing without the time to make it respectable.  Still, I’d like to share it.

For some, joy is the most elusive. Even after a half-century or more, it’s shown its face once or thrice? I think about when did I really experienced joy. One time, when young, my brother and mom got an old house that we thought was out of reach. In that moment, I had joy. But that’s only a house that we learned later was infested with bats and the curse of poverty.

I had joy when my adolescent brother and I spent the summer writing in our rooms. I made coffee on my General Electric coffeemaker, and he on his Proctor Silex, and I wrote a novel on my Sears typewriter, and he on his manual Smith Corona. That was joy. We loved one another then.

I did not experience joy at my wedding or the day my kids were born. It’s not that I failed to love them. On the contrary, I was too numb with surprise and the new trajectory of life to welcome joy, and joy was a bit too shy to come under such circumstances.

Love and pain are always together, you know, on the ballroom floor. One cannot love if they only hate, and if one hates it’s because at some point someone hurt them very badly. Maybe daddy did not ever come home. Maybe mom’s computer was more important than playing with them or you? Maybe your parents just didn’t like you. There is no rule after all that says a parent must love a child.

There is no rule either that you have to love God or even like God. It’s not like you can fool God like you did your wife of 20 years. I don’t like God. Wait, I stand corrected. I don’t like Y-O-U-R God because he acts like Putin, Trump, or a CEO drunken on a fragile ego. It’s all about HIM.

I wish if I had a wish that God was a girl, and I don’t mean a woman. Wouldn’t that be cool? I’d rather play tea with a cute girl than play war with Hitler.

Maybe God is such a man or is it such a boy. Yes, a toddler that is smart enough to play Minecraft. We are nothing but villagers that he enjoys setting on fire, torturing, even killing our children. After all, that is what we do, isn’t it? We are made in God’s image, if I am not mistaken. He did destroy the world and everything in it three times. No, the devil is testosterone. If we could neuter men, we’d have a better world? I learned that watching Doctor Pol and driving school buses. I hope this is a testament to keeping mine though.

But she knew, didn’t she, and wondered if you really did love her because she wanted passion. And passion is not love. Yes, I was right when I told her that passion and love are different, but where I was wrong is that passion is not lust. Passion is the result of unconditional love. Few have it. Passion and joy, I think, are closely related.

I was a poor liar.

I tried to lie to God. I never liked mass or church. I just don’t like it, but I served on the altar for 8 years pretending because how would God know? Besides, I was Catholic, and forcing one against one’s will has a kind of sadomasochistic cleansing of the soul to it. We should do what we hate and pretend that we have joy, as if we are all those same-looking beautiful Miss America women smiling through the disappointment that someone else that looks just like them won. Yes, it could have should have been them. I agree.

No, I’d be honest with God. “Dear Lord, I don’t like church service. People sing badly and it’s the same words over and over again, but each time we expect a different result.”

There is a Satanic word for that, but I should focus on joy, not insanity.

Do I love God? I have no idea, but I am beginning to think that life is hell because we are born only to realize that we are slowly dying, and that everything and everyone in our lives will die before us if we live long enough for our “Golden years.” How is that joyful? Does God love us, really? I cannot find such in a guide to a healthy relationship.

So maybe joy is a disorder that should be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders: Joyful Disorder or Joyful Person Syndrome, though Syndrome has, I fear, fallen out of fashion, but the DSM has always been about politics weeding through science.  It’s also based in Christian thinking, not that I hate Christianity. I am one, or was or it’s selective. I don’t know. That is why there are Paraphilic Disorders. God forbids! Why is sexual diversity sinful or is it immoral or is it a disorder? It’s none of that. It’s about choices, choosing to harm someone or something that is immoral.

Oh, joy. I forgot.

It’s just that according to the Social Security Administration, I have 25 years left to live, give or take a couple. The SSA is like the Grim Reaper. I got my terminal diagnosis or is that diagnosis?

What should I do if I live these 25 years? If I make it that long? Should I sue the SSA if I die younger? Can you sue them for me? That should make me joyful.

I really don’t know because there is no one, no one at all. It’s just me, and sometimes the loneliness is so heavy that it lacks description.

Freedom is loneliness, but I then realize that not only do some of us spend most of our lives alone, but when we die, we are alone for all of eternity. But at least we won’t know of it. We will be dead after all. So, there goes my posthumous hope of joyfulness over you suing the SSA on my behalf.

Joy can only be in a moment like girlhood is. Girls are only girls in the blink of an eye, but boys stay boys for a chronically long time, sometimes a lifetime. That is why I like girlhood. I am not predatory because that would be awful, and disgusting. I have a big heart, but we just don’t believe that people are genuinely kind. We are but will practice killing it in ourselves.

I don’t hate boyhood at all. It’s good it sticks around, but I wish girls did longer, too. Because I feel God is in them, in kids in general. Adults are just children trapped in an aging storm. I see no maturity difference between the swearing kid on the bus and the swearing parent. It’s just that one cannot and one can because someone said so.

No, the most joyful moment for me was meeting a person who gave me a beautiful smile. I know it sounds tacky, maybe even ridiculous, but the smile she gave me was like how I remembered the eternal smile I got in two dreams. The smile also reminds me of my friend who was killed by a school bus and tractor-trailer. It was a face of pure love. It’s kind of like that Taylor Swift song where there is snow on the beach. Someone looks at you as if you were a billion dollars just for them. Now, that is “weird but fu##ing beautiful.” That is why I drive school buses because my childhood friend is there in spirit.

As my supervisor put it though I modified the statement, “Men fall in love with a girl they see, and women fall in love with what a guy can be.” A girl’s smile gives a man joy followed by a tsunami of darkness and pain.

It’s a sad way to put it, God and then a billion dollars, but I think only our culture can appreciate that money somehow makes God better. It doesn’t.

It does, sadly.

You will have to trust me when I say this, but if I had to choose between one-billion dollars and a person who loves me just as much as I love them, then I would take the person. I can always make money, even if I struggle like I do now, cleaning buses and driving them for 60 hours a week when I am well enough to do it. But I cannot seem to make a true person that would love me. That would take a miracle, and I am too heartbroken with disappointment to believe like little girls believe in unicorns or an adult who believes in hope. That is the difference. But it turns out that I like unicorns, too, and would be joyful in seeing one, for real. So would you.

I don’t know or understand this world, and like most of you, I want something after, but what we do have in this life is each other, and we should take joyful lessons from the creatures we tend to love the most, our doggies. They love you, and I have no doubt that they do the way you should love another. And if you don’t do that, you rob that other person of joy and yourself. But the problem is that dogs don’t choose us. We choose them. They are dogs after all. You cannot love someonewhot chooses you in a relationship unless you are lucky enough to be in love with them. But in that way, dogs are more spiritual without them knowing it, or maybe they know more than we think. I don’t speak dog after all.

But we all want to be loved, and most of you take that for granted. Joy passes by you while you do more important things. Joy does not and cannot last. If it did, then joy would die, too, just like all the rest of us.