GANG: It is Cloudy and Cold, the feral kittens outside chomp on the bikkies they dupe us into giving them by peeking cutely through the windows, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is keeping me company, and but for a moment, all is right with the world. Admittedly: I do have to go get a haircut later, which I hate, but y’know what, maybe I’ll get a hamburger or something while I’m out. I feel pretty bulletproof today, and I’m ready for whatever bummer bullshit Bloganuary is gonna throw at me, bring it on.
Wait what? AW MAN, BAMBOOZLED AGAIN.
January 5th:
What Brings You Joy In Life?
(Obligatory reminder to subscribe to my once-monthly newsletter here, which rounds up everything I wrote in the preceding month, grants access to a curated members-only Spotify playlist, and includes a piece of exclusive bonus collectible content I will NEVER repost anywhere else, ever!)
This is a simply enormous category; I am a man VERY easily made happy by VERY many things, and a comprehensive survey would be unwieldy and cover the surface of this island Earth several times over with my dense, glow-in-the-dark handwriting. Also, I already resemble Homestar Runner enough as-is.
And so:
Your humbled Bageler Presents:
An Abbrebiated
List of Happymakers
- That the aforementioned feral kittens are apparently just as worried about the away-team beaming down to that comet’s surface as I am. Don’t worry, wee meows! Cadet Uhura’s gonna figure it out through my favorite scientific discipline: ACTION LINGUISTICS.
- When you salt the pasta-water just right and don’t have to add any to your finished noodles.
- Sad Christmas episodes of any show, ever, doesn’t even matter if it’s a show I watch, hook that shit to my veins, gimme that good yuletide bum-out
- Stumbling across a series of books from The Past, like before you were born, that is exactly your shit, like a rabbi who just wants to lead his congregation but keeps having to solve murders, or a space-western take on the ‘lost age of Earth’ framework that assures us “Mankind has conquered space before” and was written by a woman in the 1920’s, or a court wizard in an alternate Edwardian England who acts as magic CSI for his king in ways that are clear parallels to forensic science, or a newspaper strip about a possum that did impossibly hilarious things with language a decade before we stole Hawaii and Alaska at gunpoint.
- When you can see your partner (or other Person of Importance to you) actively being kinder or more patient to themselves, or otherwise growing in that most difficult skill: treating the self as one treats a loved one.
- When a pet of any kind does one of those big full-breath deflation-sighs, like oh I’m sorry, did you have a hard day knocking shit off my desk, is your boss really on your ass for that Sneeze In Daddy’s Face report?
- Speaking (usually by phone) with someone who really understands the mechanisms and game of conversation, the flow and rhythm, and you both know you’re both doing it, it’s amazing; it’s like a game of chess where you aren’t trying to beat each other but playing to enjoy what a great game chess is together.
- Putting waaaaaaay too much work into a dumb two-second editing gag for my Percy Jackson read-through podcast or a goof for one of these posts that is for MAYBE three people in the Northern Hemisphere, not in a mean, exclusionary inside-joke way but in a “relatively few people grew up watching Peter Benchley’s The Beast and writing Redwall fanfic” way.
- A rare, difficult-to-describe communal experience that used to be much more common and whose best recent referent is probably Elden Ring. When it dropped, everyone who was playing it was doing so without the benefit of guides or walk-through videos; we were all talking to each other and sharing hints and secrets like it was 1998 again and all exploring this belligerently obtuse and mysterious thing together, and it was wonderful. Prior to deciding this bullshit website was my true medium, I had toyed with doing pretentions daily diary-comics, and I think this one from the era probably sums it up best:
I don’t know that we’ll really ever see the exact same thing again, but then that’s what I would’ve said before Elden Ring came out; as Maddow says, we live in hope. - Y’know what, a nice simple one for the capper: breakfast for dinner; it’s a home run every time. And I think I’ve figured out why: we don’t have any time to enjoy breakfast in the morning. How are we supposed to savor nice, buttery scrambled eggs with Monteray-jack melting all over them like a drunk man’s fear of karaoke when we’re counting down the minutes to selling most of our day to The Man, Damned Be He? And for that matter, what the hell is with people in shows and movies having time to hang out and do plot-relevant shit before work or school? I know Bobby Briggs didn’t kill Laura Palmer, but being a high-school boy chilling at the diner an hour and a half before school just makes him seem more like a murderer to me. I guess you could say he was awake because he had football practice, but by his own admission he didn’t go because he didn’t feel like it, so why the hell did he still get up that early??? Toss that shit in the conundrumpster, this citizen doesn’t need it; what this citizen needs is waffles by moonlight.
That was fun! See you tomorrow! I’m gonna go put some bacon in the oven.
(That’s not a joke, try it if you’ve got an oven, it will change your fucking life.)
–This Complete Bageler