the normalization of happiness

Who knew that lame trips to the convenience store through a rainy, polluted street and the ensuing perusal of unacceptably manufactured products in colorful isles under bright lights to the tune of middle-class shmaltz could be so agonizingly missed-- the way I used to sing, out of boredom, on the way there and chew gum. But that was life! That is all it ever really is. 

Normative notions are sometimes true, the way that anyone's face perks up in attention to the common language of "I am happy/but I am not happy", and really, it is probably the only thing which could be universally understood.  

One step removed

The truth is, one only writes when well enough, by which time, the original problem sheds its relevance. To understand is, quite literally, to feel the same. And when things like art and beauty have meaning and inspire, one is just happy enough to write and cannot really correctly remember what it was like to have your will crushed before you or to wonder how many disconfirmations of the natural proclivity to rationalize in the direction of hope it takes to pulverize that proclivity. And so, one will never accurately recreate those fears and sensations.