This Week's Laughter #14

An archive in happiness

Is laughter happiness? I am standing at a coffee shop that brands itself as something of a haven for science-fiction and fantasy enthusiasts, complete with a vending machine that offers DVDs, video games, and board games. It’s flush with trans-pride stickers and tags. All of its specialty drinks are offered with some cheeky name referencing a show, manga series, or otherwise. Behind me there are some seven tables each with room for at least four comfortably where one person sits, none daring to occupy another’s space. Perhaps in reticence with COVID but I suspect more in reticence of becoming visible in a way that work or productivity or study doesn’t necessarily want you to become visible. There’s a man who keeps sighing loudly about every forty seconds. Since I started trying to type, he has sighed six times.

Across the street from me is a chase bank with a barre studio somehow wedged rebelliously into what would otherwise clearly be the bank’s lobby space. It’s become a sunny day in spite of the Seattle Fall trends to be overcast and dismal for most of the times, most of the day. In these observations I ask again: is laughter happiness?

Where did all of the light come from?

When I’ve discussed to acquaintances that I am writing an archive of laughter, that I am trying to document my joy for a given week, I have evolved into giving a quip about how “the saddest people are the ones who write about joy because we attempt to create what we desire most; we create more because we can never achieve the creation of said most fundamental lack.” What I’ve been learning is that unhappiness and happiness can occur simultaneously; they are not, I realize and as I’ve been pitched since I was capable of grasping the concepts, oppositional even if they are held as contentious or opposites. In fact, I would even be willing to adopt the mantra that oppositional forces are largely exaggerated. Physical phenomenon like magnetism or a rockslide cutting off the path of a highway, sure, those are oppositional to their compatriot forces. Yet psychic opposites simply don’t feel as antagonistic to me these days. Laziness and discipline can exist together, hand-in-hand. Desire and apathy. And, worse yet, these psychic oppositional forces all tend to overlap with each other. Apathy blending into happiness blending into discipline, and so forth.

This week heralds a slew of anniversaries: I was engaged to my betrothed Heather a year ago, I began to date my betrothed Heather six year ago this week, and it has been one year since the October 7th Palestinian resistance began and subsequent Israeli genocide. There are also non-anniversaries happening: an aurora borealis was visible from Seattle for the second time this year, a catastrophic hurricane is heading toward the Floridian coastline, this is the fourteenth installment of documenting laughter. Is the visibility of an aurora oppositional to an engagement, a genocide? Is a hurricane oppositional to resistance? Is laughter happiness?

Liminal spaces continue to be a source of fondness. Not somebody’s apartment, just the lobby of an apartment complex.

It feels a bit like circling the drain at this point excepting that there is no pipe for which the thoughts to flow out, to be expunged by. A conical funnel. Perhaps I’ll have its walls greased. The thought experiment as a marble evading the resistance promised by gravity’s pull and instead accelerating until the marble, eventually, launches itself over the lip of the cone, to be lost among the horizons.

Did you ever play with marbles as a kid? It feels like such a boomer subject, but I absolutely did. I collected them. Shiny objects that made fun noises that you could roll around and try to own some sense of crystal treasures. I can name only a few times in memory which, playing with them on a table, one rolled off onto a hard floor and cracked in half, or worse, shattered. It felt like a betrayal to realize that treasure can break.

Here are some of the laughs from this last week.

• A damp newspaper tossed into the brush outside of an apartment complex flipped open to a half-page advertisement for sexyjobs dot com. A chuckle as I kept walking by.

• Walking home from a birthday party and wishing for a nightcap after two beers that’d left me rather unsatisfied. I stopped at a cocktail bar near my apartment complex and got a plain old Fernet. The bartender was talking to a guy about his superior music taste. There was some older rock song playing, sounded like it came from some UK or UK-adjacent band that was simply called ‘The -noun-’. You know. The Strokes, the reptiles, the umbrellas, the laundry, the sweaters, the mice, the balloons. I’m not really sure who it was. The customer guessed who was singing the song incorrectly but did it with a guffaw, pleased anyway. The bartender looked at me, laughing, and asked can you believe that? Kids these days don’t even know their music. He probably grew up on blink-182. What clocked me as in in this moment? That I was one of two people at this bar on a Thursday evening? A loud laugh. Intentionally trying to fill space.

• Sometimes I laugh out of discomfort, too, even if I hate the behavior for it really is a simple show of cowardice. I was playing my sunday league of soccer. These are randomized teams, and though it is a queer soccer league, some days are notably more straight than others. My team was a bunch of ball-hogs whose strategic gameplay involved getting ball, running up the middle, then shooting as hard as they could against a wall of about six defenders without a second glance as to anyone they could pass to. One of the less selfish members of my team was yelling quite vehemently. He had a soccer-Dad vibe about him. By the third game he was calling out the selfish-playing individuals responsible with all types of here you fucking go again going and ruining another game, or do you fucking assholes realize there are ten other people here who want to play as much as you do? What can you do? I thought he was right, but I also didn’t really care enough to correct him. I was unhappy with touching the ball maybe six times total across two hours, but I just assumed that’s how this week would be, and had already mentally moved on to next week’s. An uncomfortable laugh.

• I think every close friendship should have several core lacks. I read books and they care about books but watch movies. Or they go to music shows but I don’t have the energy to stay out all night anymore so endear to be regaled by their stories. I am not the movie person. I have a movie person. They’ve never been the movie person for someone. A breathy laugh, almost like a wisp.

A few of my described laughs.

Thank you for reading, as always.