Joy

This shot is on the back of my masseur business card.  What am I selling?  Hopefully an hour of joy through touch.  Touch is my language of love after all.  Actually sometimes I think I need all fucking five languages, happening simultaneously and without warning...

People talk about happiness a lot.  I find the search for happiness a fleeting struggle, like eating an ice cream cone in the heat of the summer... it just keeps slipping through your sweaty fingers.  Happiness is not something you can touch, or even really describe.  Is it feeling?  A state of being?  What?  Joy on the other hand, I know how to describe.  It tingles up my arm when I see something that inspires my senses.  It causes tears to well up pushing something so beautifully irritating out of my eye so that I don't get sick with jubilee.

My ex Beau took this picture of an old theatre in New Orleans.  This picture represents joy to me for a few reasons.  The first is, selfishly because I charged the Nikon Beau used on my already maxed out credit card.  The thought of an artist with no camera made me really sad.  He had to pawn his old one to make rent.  Even sadder I felt.  When he opened the box from the camera box, he looked like I remember my brother or sister looking on Christmas morning.  He ripped away the tape and looked into the box like an excited, yet overwhelmed budding artist.  At first I didn't think he had a gift.  But after our breakup, I managed to take a peak at some of his post breakup work on Facebook.  The work was stunning.  I replied saying I liked one or two shots, but never got a response.  It's funny how someone can impact your life.  Even if it is just for a couple of crazy months.  Sometimes I wish I could share this with Beau.  Why is it that people don't seem to stick around?  Am I completely and utterly forgettable. Or do I have such way with people that it sends them running for the nearest EXIT sign?  I'm trying to find the joy in this period of utter self reflection and solitude.  I do feel that I am at the most creative, inspired period of my life.  Yet, ironically, it is occurring during one of the hardest, most eye opening, scary times of my life.  On one hand, I am such a disappointment, but on the other hand, when I am alone, in my car, smoking a cigarette and listening to some wonderful instrumental happy melody, forgetting the world, and all it's pressures, pratfalls, judgements, court dates, and creditors, I feel really satisfied with how much I have experienced, both good and bad, light and dark, mellow and zany.  I just want to be able to finish something.  One project, one idea, one thought.  Thanks to this site, perhaps this slew of subconscious streaming thought will find an ear, who want to listen, help and guide from a far, in a language of love sent through the information super highway.  Or as Cory Crayn's grandmother calls it... THE INTER WEB. I loved that, and I love you Cory.

Ask yourself, where is your joy today?  Does it look and feel like you expected?

photo credit:  Beau Bradley Griffin