There are a lot of things that delight me. A sunset, a sunrise, petting a dog, playing video games, or an ice cold beer after a long day. These are all temporary and will not make your day, however. In thinking about a true delight, one that affects my day, I found myself hard struck to find one… until earlier today.

Upon sweating through my original shirt due to the sweltering heat, I found myself rushing home to change my shirt and avoid the embarassment of a sweat stained shirt. Sadly, as I entered my personal domicile I was reminded of the horrifying fact that it was laundry day. Searching through my stack of shirts I never wear, I found my dads old ‘The Descendants‘ shirt which has the characteristics of being from the ’90s. Old, grey, and strangely loose.

As I left the house to walk to my local convenience store in search of an Arizona and a bag of chips, I heard an older voice say, “Hey man where’d you get that shirt?”. Stopping my usual stare at the ground style of gander, I looked up to see a man about the age of my dad with a smile. “Really cool shirt man.”, he said with generosity. My natural preoccupation with hating anyone I don’t know was quickly disarmed.

Through a slightly lengthy conversation that I do not see the need to reiterate I talked to this man about my dads love of punk music and my subsequent music taste due to the tutelage my father had bestowed upon me. His departure after this conversation left me with a smile. Not only was I complimented but I was given a chance to talk about my dad, someone who I look up to and see someone else who appreciates him for the way he raised me.

It is in this moment that I realized what a delight truly was. It does not need to be an outward exertion of dopamine into your brain, but just a simple act of kindness. Something that makes your day not because it was trying to but because it meant something special to you. Whether you are reminded of someone you love or something you love there is an importance in love.

As Ross Gay says, “my delight grows — much like love and joy — when I share it.”

This poem is long but good so you should read it.

Either peace or happiness, let it enfold you

When I was a young man, I felt that these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun.  I trusted no man and especially no woman. I was living a hell in small rooms, I broke things, smashed things, walked through the glass, cursed. I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed. In and out fights, in and out my mind. 

Women were something to screw and rail at. I had no male friends. I changed jobs and cities, I hated holidays, babies, history, newspapers, museums, grandmothers, marriage, movies, spiders, garbagemen, English accents, Spain, France, Italy, walnuts, and the color orange. Algebra angered me, opera sickened me, Charlie Chaplin was a fake and flowers were for pansies. Peace and happiness were to me sign of inferiority. Tenants of the weak and addled mind. 

But as I went on with  my alley fights, my suicidal years,  my passage through any number of women, it gradually begun to occur to me that I wasn’t different from the others, I was the same. They were all fullsome with hatred, glossed over with petty grievances . the man I fought in alleys had hearts of stone. Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating from some insignificant advantage. The lie was the weapon and the plot was empty, darkness was the dictator. 

Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times, I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed, the better I felt. Maybe the other life had worn me down, I no longer found glamour in topping somebody in conversation or in mounting the body of some poor, drunken female whose life had slipped away into sorrow. I could never accept life as it was. I could never gobble down all its poisons.

But there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking. I reformulated. I don’t know when, date, time, all that. But the change occured, something in me relaxed, smoothed out, I no longer had to prove that I was a man. I didn’t have to prove anything, I begun to see things. Coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a café or a dog walking along a sidewalk or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there, really stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose, it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself, and its eyes were looked at me and they were beautiful. 

Then it was gone. I began to feel good, I began to feel good in worst situations and there were plenty of those, like say, the boss behind his desk, he is going to have to fire me, I’ve missed too many days, he’s dressed in a suit, necktie, glasses, he says “I’m going to have to let you go”, “it’s alright” I tell him. He must do what he must do, he has a wife, a house, children, expenses, most probably a girlfriend. I’m sorry for him. He’s caught.

I walked out into the blazing sushine, the whole day is mine, temporarily anyhow. The whole world is at the throat of the world, everybody feels angry ,short-changed, cheated. Everybody is despondent, disillusioned. I welcomed shots of piece, tattered shards of happines, I embraced that stuff like the hottest number, like high heels, breasts, singing, the works. 

Don’t get me wrong, there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism that overlook all basic problems just for the sake itself. This is a shield, a sickness. 

The knife got near my throat again, I almost turned on the gas again, but when the good moments arrived again, I didn’t fight them off like an alley adversary, I let them take me, I luxuriated them, I bade them welcome home, I even looked into the mirror once having thought myself to be ugly, I now liked what I saw. almost handsome, yet a bit ripped and ragged, scars, lumps, odd turns, but all in all, not too bad, almost handsome. Better at least than some of those movie star faces like the cheeks of a baby’s butt.

And finally I discovered real feelings for others, unheralded, like lately like this morning, as I was leaving for the track, I saw my wife in bed, just the shape of her head there covers pulled high, just the shape of her head there, not forgetting centuries of the living and the dead and the dying, and pyramids, mozart dead but his music still there in the room, weeds growing, the earth turning, the tote board waiting for me. I saw the shape of my wife’s head, she so still, I ached for her life just being there under covers, I kissed her on the forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seat belt, backed out the drive, feeling warm to the finger tips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill pass the houses full and empty of people. I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.

That is my favorite poem of all time. For reasons that I do not feel like divulging and reasons that anyone reading does not care about.

I do not love apathy yet I find myself constantly surrounded by it. In most worldly affairs, I do not care. For those I do care about, I care too much. In earlier years I found myself consistently angry at the world for better or for worse. I do not know if I hated as much as Mr. Bukowski, but I did hate. I never gained anything from this hatred nor did I find any inner happiness.

There is a danger in hoping against hope. An inside dialogue of wanting things to go wrong because they must.

As we read through lines such as, “I felt that these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun.  I trusted no man and especially no woman.“. There is an internalization of not just outward hatred but inward hatred. Flakes of misogyny slip between the lines as a heterosexual man begins to divulge a leering towards woman. This hatred while not tied to woman is thus attributed. To read this, however as an indictment of woman by Bukowski would be reckless. It serves moreso as an indictment of self and the destructive hatred that is perverting Bukowski’s mind.

In my opinion, Bukowski’s most powerful lines are, “I went on with  my alley fights, my suicidal years,  my passage through any number of women, it gradually begun to occur to me that I wasn’t different from the others, I was the same. They were all fullsome with hatred, glossed over with petty grievances . the man I fought in alleys had hearts of stone. Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating from some insignificant advantage. The lie was the weapon and the plot was empty, darkness was the dictator. “. In this we see the penultimate cause of the problem. Allowing yourself to be enveloped by a hatred. Allowing others to further feel this darkness instead of attempting to garner an empathetic aura into the world. To continue the cycle is to harm the world.

“When the good moments arrived again, I didn’t fight them off like an alley adversary, I let them take me, I luxuriated them, I bade them welcome home, I even looked into the mirror once having thought myself to be ugly, I now liked what I saw” As we allow ourselves to love not only each other but ourselves we will be filled with happiness comparable to no other. To look around and enjoy without a guise of needing to be smarter or better we internalize a sense of love so desperately missing in apathy we forego knowing for understanding.