I’ll address the state of my happiness up front and admit I’m far from bliss, even farther than I could walk in a 7-day journey, and I’m soon to find myself awake and barely sober in well-worn party clothes on the bathroom floor firmly entrenched among the tiles of Day Three. But regimens often seem harder than they really are in the beginning, much as love feels more intense than it really is right before you move in.
So hope remains, etc.
My task for the day is:
Random Acts of Kindness
I probably should have planned better. I am familiar with good deeds. Though I do not talk of my years of volunteering for the fire department in those terms, I do recognize that I saved a life here and there, and that I made some small indentation upon the chrome surface of worldwide hatred. It would still fuck you up mightily if it were to run you over. I should have cut a fuel line.
So I started the morning trying to imagine how I could be kind, randomly. Then I looked up ‘random’ and understood the inherent fault with this particular REGIMEN OF HAPPINESS.
How can it be random if it falls specifically on Day 2?
My ATTEMPTS at (random) kindness bordered so close to comical that several were actually held for questioning, while others were given free flight lessons in Florida. In both Craig’s List and Technorati, I performed searches for ‘in need of’ and ‘in desperate need of,’ and mostly found personal ads with guys offering angle shots of their cocks and other shots short of right angles of any sort.
It reminded me of those few times when following an emergency call, I wound up helping a sick or injured person utterly undeserving of any help whatsoever, and subsequently felt dirty, and I know you think I’m being facetious, but I talk to God, and I can tell you that before helping each of these people, His exact words were , ‘Your call, Rogers. Either way.’
Amen.
Nevertheless, I did randomly strike up a deal with kindness throughout the day, but it is not in my nature to talk about my good deeds. Please believe me, however, when I say that one of those kind acts made me as happy as I could possibly be. And another almost nearly so.
One thing I did do (past tense of the phrase I hate most in the world – ‘do do’) was to finally give up on meat. I saw some PETA (YES, THAT PETA) film, and it caused me to waste all my good deedliness on our porcine brethren. My good deed is that I’m giving up meat. Honestly, I gave up pork a while back, and beef to a lesser extent, and only RARELY eat endangered species such as cougar or spotted owl, and then ONLY NOT TO CREATE AN UNCOMFORTABLE SCENE.
Rest assured I would never risk my internet traffic by taking bacon away from anyone, or making people feel guilty, but I really, really like pigs. I didn’t like watching them being shot by a bunch of ignoramous rednecks. And believe me, if booze could only be manufactured from slaughtering animal babies I would be the first in line to jam the skull saw into the partially birthed foetuses.
Yes, I also made a donation to PETA. I’ll be honest. I NEVER in a million years thought I would turn over my funds to PETA. But I’m trying to attain happiness. I’m willing to do almost nothing.
Results
For Day Two, I’ve performed ‘random’ acts of kindness, that were not random, and debatably kind.
Do I feel a little happier?
Well, kind of. But I didn’t control for external variables, namely 1.5 liters of Carlo Rossi Blush.
Tomorrow:
Forgive your enemies.