Happiness

(Originally posted on 07/06/2003)

We went to Dallas for the 4th. The trip is a couple hundred miles north from Austin, laced with a long, straight road and surrounded by a vastness of nothing. It's a good place to think, so as Susan and I settled into the amiable road trip silence, my brain picked a couple of things to toy with.

The first was, what the hell am I doing in a minuscule metal box, stuck to the side of this humongous ball of rock by nothing but frickin' gravity?

Luckily, that one passed quickly.

The other was the whole idea of happiness. My thinking (a big-stretch euphemism, I know) went something like this:

Is it impossible for homo sapiens to be truly happy. Is discontent woven inextricably into our genes? Let's face it,  we've got a rocky history. Lack of claws or blunt teeth or thin skin or general deliciousness don't show up anywhere on the evolutionary playground's top ten list. More likely our forebears topped the menu at the Darwinian Diner.

Being a food item is unsettling. It fosters skillsets made up of things like Hiding and Scurrying Away and Poking Desperately With Pointy Sticks. Protohumans who mastered these skills got to breed. The rest got invited over for lunch.

We pulled a pretty good trick with the whole brain thing. Who'da thunk we'd grow a computer made of meat? After that, the skillset exploded to encompass things like Shooting Pointy Sticks With Catgut Stretched Across An Unpointy Stick, and Dropping Rocks On The Bastards. Somewhere along the way we started working together and added Make Loud Noises To Stampede 'Em Over That Cliff Over There, and Shoot Oodles Of Pointy Sticks All At Once. Sure, some of us still got et, but they were mostly the slow or stupid ones. The paranoids and the natural born killers we called \\leaders\\.

If you accept this whole evolution thing -  and I'm afraid I will until God stops by for a beer - then the prospect for long-term happiness is looking rather bleak.

The world we find ourselves in - this society thingy - is another kind of evolutionary trick, albeit an artificial one, the product of the meat computer. Where stitched-into-the-DNA evolution says survive, society says submit. Survival is not about being submissive, it's about not being hors d'oeuvres. You don't build a Volkswagen Microbus with plastic flowers on to go attack your neighbors, you build a tank. We didn't grow a lava lamp behind our eyes; we grew a survival machine. Therein lies a many-horned dilemma.

Am I saying happiness a hopeless cause? Not at all. Just don't demand it all the time, for here there be dragons. You can't fight dragons, even metaphorical ones. The best you can do is add to your personal misery quotient. Denial is expensive.

One other thing this tells me: savor that bit of happiness when it does come. Dig in with gusto, use both hands, and suck the marrow from its bones.

Maybe some day our ponderous evolutionary machinery will lumber onto the path we've chosen for ourselves. Homo sapiens may fit better, be happy and fulfilled, living together in peace and harmony.

'Scuse me if I say so, but I'm glad I won't be around to see it.

On the way home Friday night, every little town between Dallas and Austin gave us a fireworks show. Rolling across the forever plains of Texas, my better three-quarters and I held hands, listened to The California Guitar Trio and watched the sky grow colored mushrooms.

I was happy.  All the moreso because I'm often not.