Me, Happy

As I type this post, I am happy.

I am not, by my nature, generally a happy person. My theory is that life is long and if you’re happy all the time you become less appreciative of the feeling. I try to stay something like neutral in general, and then experience brief excursions down into sadness and up into happiness.

But right now I am happy.

I am so happy right now, in fact, that I am going to pause for a long aside to describe the last time I was almost this happy.


The Last Time I Was Almost This Happy

I used to spend a lot of time at our local library. My personal pick for the prettiest, coolest girl at the library was a young woman who worked in the audio-visual area named Tricia. (Or Trisha—I never knew her well enough to learn how she spelled her name.)

Tricia was very pretty—seemingly in a rock and roll sort of way—and also she seemed to have a very laid back, relaxed personality. By my nature I’m kind of a tense guy and it relaxed me just to see and now and then chat with a girl who at least seemed to be as laid back and relaxed as Tricia always seemed to be.

So I liked Tricia.

One afternoon the library got in DVDs of two of my favorite old science fiction movies. As I was taking them to check-out, Tricia was working at the AV desk. I said, “Look, Tricia, the library just got in ‘It Came From Beneath The Sea’ and ‘Earth Versus The Flying Saucers.’ For a guy like me, right now I am as happy as if Anna Kournikova were taking me out to lunch.”

Tricia laughed and said, “Have a nice afternoon.”

So I was doubly happy—I was happy getting to re-watch two great old movies and I was happy seeing Tricia laugh.

That was me, happy.


But I’m even happier right now.

I’m happy right now because for as long as I’ve been doing Impossible Kisses, I’ve always talked about music. I’ve put up lyrics for songs I’ve written. I’ve talked about arrangements of other songs. At one point I even put up some music notation describing a melody I enjoyed playing. [Remember, from This Makes Me Think Of “The Swan” from December 07?] But I’ve never been able to include me making music myself.

I don’t like talking about something when readers don’t have the option of judging my own ability, when readers can’t judge whether I know what I’m talking about or just have my head up my butt. I was very happy, for instance, when I got access to a scanner so I could upload my sketches and drawings so that when I talk about art and images readers could have an idea of what weight my words should carry.

Well, now I can include music too!

I’ll be talking more about this in the future. Right now I want to get right to it.

One note: The guitar you see me playing below is not a PRS SE One. The Paul Reed Smith SE One is sort of the official guitar of Impossible Kisses. [Remember, from Knobs, back in September 07?] However, none of the guitar stores around here stock the guitar. Damn it. The guitar in the video clip below is just kind of a gypsy guitar that I picked up and talked into moving in with me until I meet a Paul Reed Smith SE One in real life that I can settle into a long-term relationship with. This guitar is just a friendly guitar that lets me have my way with it for the moment until we both decide to go our separate ways.

Okay. Just click on the play button below to see—and hear!—the new kind of thing that will be popping up here from time to time. [P.S. I’m not left-handed! My webcam reverses the image. There’s a software option to flip the image correctly but I never even noticed that I needed to do that. I’ll get that right, so to speak, in the future. But it’s kind of cool looking at me as a lefty—the Paul McCartney-webcam version of me!]