I feel really good tonight. It feels solid and stable, and I'm sure it's gonna last.

Lately, things have been strange. I started writing my serial Smile back when I was happy about life, happier than I'd been since I was a kid, and it shows. I had some big ideas that I wanted to get across to people. I wanted to show them that life can be fun, that it's possible to be really proud of your life and glad of the person you are. It's not automatic, you have to earn that sense of your place in the world, but you can get there. If someone who wasn't excited about being alive could read my story and come out smiling on the other side, I'd have achieved what I was aiming for. But that turned out to be a hell of a goal to set.

Back then, I used to have daydreams about a girl. Her face was always different, but her eyes never changed. She was a visionary, she was someone who could see where her life was going and who was happy of what she saw. I'd imagine that girl with me, smiling, proud to have me with her, and it was easy to envision. I felt like I was on that same track, I could see the same world she was seeing. I was on that path, and it was only a matter of time before everything came together and made the vision real.

I was sure that my sense of amazement about life was going to stick, but along the way something tripped me up. I'm not sure what it was, since nothing particularly bad had happened in my life. It could only have been a lot of little things, and through a gradual process of degrees I found myself off course. Smile lost focus, I stopped having those daydreams, and I barely even realized it had happened. I kept thinking of girls as something to masturbate over, so to speak, but I couldn't conjure the image of that one woman. The person I could connect with, the one I wanted to spend my time with, the one I was sure I'd find eventually, she wasn't in my head anymore. Things in my mind got dull, and subconsciously I began putting the whole notion of a meaningful future on hold.

I think the only way to explain it is entropy. "The degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity." Without some motive power, everything is going to run down eventually. I had stopped making a deliberate mental effort toward improving my life, and once I started to coast it was only a matter of time before I slowed to a stop.

Pulling myself out of the hole started with a realization that I'd begun looking at the world in a largely negative way. Once I became aware of it I started trying to straighten myself out, but it was an abstract task. In the end it was a lot of little things that set me right, the same way that a lot of little things had set me wrong. Now that it's past, I can see that the largest positive factor, the one that stands out above the others, was definitely my friends.

Hanging around with most people just tires me out. They end up trying to saddle me with their burdens, consciously or not, and I've never found a polite way to break them of the habit. With my friends it's not that way at all; my friends bring out my good side, because we know that, mostly, life is not a drama. Life is a day to day process, and we can't carry each other's burdens, so we don't try. We talk about trivial stuff, we laugh, we go to movies, and when something's wrong we get it off our chests, but we don't dwell. We can all take care of ourselves, and to us it's more important to be comfortable together than it is to lean on each other too hard. We've become friends out of a mutual, intangible sense of life, one that lacks in our various lesser friendships, and that's the core of the strength behind us. We all know it and we all respect it. To us, trying to get inside each other's heads or crying on each other's shoulder are alien ways of communicating.

Because of that, I don't even know if my friends realize that they've helped me. My friend Josh sent me the email that inspired the redesign of this site. It was about how no one has yet taken the mantle as the net's premiere serialists; we have cartoonists, editorialists, humorists, but no one has really stepped up as a notable writer of fiction on the internet. He thinks that he and I could be the people to do it, and the line he wrote that really sold me was: "Art is only slightly subjective -- people can have their likes and dislikes, but everyone knows what's good."

I hadn't thought about it that way before, but I think he's right. People can argue for one work over another, and not everyone is always gonna agree, but in the long run people as a whole really do know what's good. They know which movies are classics, they know which books stand the test of time, they know which albums will still be playing twenty years from now. As I read his letter it reminded me that things will work out that way for me. People will know that my stuff is good. Not everyone will agree, but overall, I'll stand out. At some point, somewhere in my subconscious, I'd started to doubt that, and Josh helped set me right.

I moved into a house this summer with my friend Matt, his brother Dave and their friend Coady, and we get along great. People come over to our place all the time, which has given my social circle a big shot in the arm. I like living in a place that's got some activity, and the house itself has a kind of country charm, with a wood stove and everything. I bet in the dead of winter I won't think it's so goddamn great, but for now, the place and the people have definitely helped loosen me up.

Now that I live downtown I've gone to more punk shows with Matt and our friend Chris this summer than I have in the rest of my life. There's nothing better than a punk show when you're young, a little buzzed and willing to get hurt. It's a great release to slam around with a bunch of other guys (and the occasional brave chick), but you've really gotta experience it yourself to appreciate the finer aspects of waking up in the morning sore and hardly able to move. I've never had so many bruises, but it's a great feeling to walk down the street in just enough pain to remember that you did something fun the night before. I've gotten to know a few guys from local bands, and one night I walked around town talking about wrestling and horror movies with one of the guys from Fallen Year. It's been excellent, and so far none of my injuries are permanent.

My friend Brad helped me fix Smile to the point where it may not end up as the Holy Grail of stories like I'd hoped, but it'll still be a ripping good yarn. I've known him longer than anybody, and he even came out to a few punk shows with us. He's not as big a fan of the physical violence aspect as Matt and I are, but hey, what sensible person is? I guess there's something to be said for watching a band without taking an elbow to the face. (You should have seen the bathroom the night that happened, my blood was everywhere. You can tell I'm new to the scene, because I thought that was cool as hell.)

I don't see Mark as much as I used to, and I hardly ever bump into Terry anymore, but whenever I see either of them it doesn't take long for us to fall back into our old groove. We're still good friends who've just started going in different directions.

And I haven't seen Andrew or Tim in years, but back in junior high when I was too lame for the cool kids (and too cool for the lame kids), they were the ones who took me in. Those three years would have been a whole lot rougher without them.

The final icing on this big friendship cake has been a song, a framing device to help me examine the way I've been thinking of my life lately. Music can really change the way I look at things, it can help alter my mood, it can add a filter of color over a whole day. Fall Back Down by Rancid has been in my head for a week, and having it stuck in my brain one night is what spurned me to write this. The feeling I get from listening to that song acts like a mirror, making it easier to examine things in my life that I otherwise would have had a hard time isolating.

I know I'm past my troubles, because tonight I even had one of those daydreams. I saw the image of that girl again, and she seemed a little different than before. How she's changed I don't know, how my vision of my future has changed I'm not sure, but I know it's still good. I saw that dream-girl look into my eyes and for the first time in months, I felt like I was worthy of the attention. It was a goddamn wonderful thing to get back, and I think the degrees of my internal compass have been turned far enough into the clear that this time they won't revert.

Nathaniel Branden wrote that it doesn't matter how slightly your predisposition has slipped into the negative -- Once it's aiming in that direction it's only a matter of time before things in your life start to fall apart. On the other hand, it doesn't matter how slightly you're progressing forward; as long as you've found a positive mindset, as long as you're making some headway, as long as you're advancing, your life will eventually get better. It's not a matter of how much you improve, it's simply a matter of making sure you're improving. As long as I pay attention to the details in my life, as long as I avoid letting myself coast too often, I'll keep moving on up.

But of course, you can never be sure of these things. Something can always go wrong, things happen in life that we can't predict. If I do get lost again, if my subconscious view of life starts to slip back into the red, I don't think it'll derail me as badly as it did before. I righted myself once, I can right myself again, and I'll always have my friends to keep me standing up straight.

01-09-03