Issue #14/95, July 20 - August 3, 2000   

How to Be Happy

The eXile Guide

Old hands in the publishing business will sometimes speak of a mystical link between an editor and his readers. For a certain kind of publisher the link with his reader is something like ESP, and something like a religious rite. You start to feel as though you're seated with your reader in the same row of audience, suffering and rejoicing with him with the release of each good or bad issue. You feel like you're on the same side, both riding the same hope, in on the thing together to the bitter end.

And sometimes you feel other things about your readers. You feel it when they've got family problems. You feel it when they're freaking out because they're about to be sentenced to 18 months in Danbury. And sometimes, and now is one of those times, you feel still subtler things. Right now it's us doing the feeling, and what we feel is that you, our beloved eXile reader, have become distraught and dangerously unhappy lately. Stop and look at yourself: those blank eyes, that slouching posture, the way the flesh hangs off your face...You've lost the ability to appreciate life in all its beauty, friend; you're flailing, helpless, in a freefall.

And deep down inside, through the single wailing note of a single anguished heart-string, you're crying out for help. But who will hear you? Who in this cruel materialistic world, which consigned us to cubicles, made a sideshow of God, and with a snort ten years ago even proclaimed history over— who will answer your cry?

Well, cheer up, reader. Help is here. We'll answer that cry. Laugh if you will, but we at the eXile know a thing or two about being happy.

You may not believe it, but to us the world is a revelation, each day a gift. We keep fit, take time out to smell the flowers, enjoy daily the company of decent, loyal friends and family, and look to the future with great eagerness and anticipation. Sure, we complain a lot, but complaining has its place, and this case that place happens to be our job. It's what we do, not who we are.

And who we are, in private, are people just like you—inwardly striving to better ourselves, often confused as to what it's all about, at times overcome with a sadness we don't understand, and clinging instinctively to a hope for a better future. And like you—like all people, in fact—our most closely-held private desire is the simple desire to happy. We want relief from our worries and the world's approval—and for all our bile and misanthropy, it's these simple desires for peace and acceptance which motivate everything we do.

We're trying to make our way. And sometimes it seems to us that this eXile thing will get us there, and sometimes it seems that, on the contrary, it won't. But throughout it all, we never stop seeking happiness. And very often we find it. Oh, but how we find it! Should we all of us be thrown in prison-camps tomorrow, and tortured ceaselessly for the rest of our waking hours, we would still remain to the end thankful for the brief time on this glorious earth we've enjoyed until now.

Dear reader, it seems to us that you are lost, that you've had your head turned by the false temptress of despair, and have lost sight of those countless little things that give us life. We want to show you the way back.

Why? Because...Because we love you, that's why. Because part of being happy is sharing the secrets of happiness. But most of all, because it's so simple. It's simple to explain how to be happy. We'd do it even if it were difficult, but it isn't, and we don't have to. That's the way life is. The best things in it are always simple—like a nice long walk down a wooded lane.

So here it is, the eXile guide to happiness. No big theories here, no lengthy philosophies affixed to glossaries of terms, no diets and no dictums. Just a few concrete suggestions to help get you reconciled with Your Old Friend Happiness.

Part 1
Friends

You may not have them. Big deal! Buy a dog. The pain of loneliness stems entirely from that myth of myths pounded into us in childhood, that all happy people have friends, and that people are worth befriending. We don't believe in God, but if we did we'd ask him and we're sure he'd agree: human beings are pretty low on the list of desirable companions. In our world a man inevitably desires actively the professional and personal failure his best friend, and in 9 cases out of 10, the best friend secretly harbors the same sentiment. They rebroadcast your most intimate secrets, and plot to destroy your relationships with significant others. A stranger, on the other hand, will never bother to waste his energy praying for your downfall. A passing acquaintance, kept at the proper distance, is also much more reliable than the close friend who silently rages at the obviousness of your character flaws, and can't keep himself from scheming no matter how hard he tries.

The experience of criminological investigation makes possible an even clearer illustration of this idea. The random street-mugger stabs his victim once, takes his money, and runs away. The domestic murderer on the other hand leaves a bomb site of slashed and disembodied parts when he finally falls upon a loved one. If you're a married woman reading this, think of your husband and ask yourself; how many of my body parts has he grown to know intimately? Then ask if your husband also knows you as a person intimately; yes, of course he does. Then, when you've done that, ask yourself if you've ever felt that this person you live with who knows you so well had ever come to hate you, if only for a moment. If you're honest, the answer will be yes. He knows you and he knows all of your body parts. And if some accident should force a violent change in his feelings, he will probably want to deal separately with each of his many acquaintances.

But if it's friends you must have, choose them wisely. The ideal friend is eccentric, lives happily alone, and has no other friends, which ensures that he's always home if you need to call. He has no interest in your job and is only peripherally interested in knowing you as a person. He is ideally utterly selfish and quietly consumed in his own thoughts for the duration of your every meeting. You ask him for advice about something and he answers mechanically, his advice transparently useless. On the other hand, he lends you money whenever you need it, so long as you always pay it back. And when you introduce him to your girlfriend, he horrifies and repulses her, ensuring that you always know where you stand with both of them.

But of course, friends of all shapes and sizes are still one of the chief joys in this life. If you should find yourself with a close friend, one who makes demands on your time and allows you to make demands of his—well, it goes without saying that you shouldn't abandon him on our say-so. Make the best of it. Take him fishing; invite him over to watch a ballgame. If you're a woman and you have a close girlfriend, see a show and have an ice-cream together. Go the Petrovsky Passazh and marvel at the remarkable variety of shoe styles. Go ahead, try on a pair or two! Dream a little. Be sure to remember their birthdays and call at work when you know he or she's due for a promotion. And never, ever flaunt your new friends in your old friend's face; show your awareness of your old friend's seniority, even favor him a little at this first meeting; make the new friend "earn it".

At times, you may wonder if your friend is gay. He might be. If he is, it is a situation which must be handled with some delicacy. It may hurt his feelings, but the sad fact is that your first task in such a position is to demonstrate to your friend in the bluntest possible terms the unequivocal nature of your heterosexuality. Take him repeatedly for nights out on the town in search of loose female company, and do your best to make sure that whatever success you have occurs right in front of his eyes. A good tactic is to invite your girl and her friend back to your friend's place, then take the girl back to his room. Show self-control in bed at this moment; take a long time. On a business trip, pester him with invitations to order callgirls, and when he hedges, order one for yourself anyway. The next morning, complain about a red spot in an unmentionable place.

Once you've accomplished this much, you can then begin to think of your friend's feelings, and how best to nurture him at this difficult time. You might suggest, innocently as it were, that he go visit certain places in town without you, offering generously that he probably needs a break from your company anyway. Or you might simply stop calling him, to show your willingness to give him his space. In any case, you must always remember to be careful; your friend is likely to be very vulnerable at these times.

As for you women, your task is not so much to manage friendships as accumulate them. If you limit yourself to just one or two female friends, you may be missing out on a chance to gain valuable perspective on where you really stand in the world. Look at it this way: if you were the most beautiful, most glamorous woman in the world, and you only had two friends, how would you know? You wouldn't know. But you'd know if you were able to see yourself at dinner parties where every woman you knew and a few others were certain to be present— and sadly, the only way to ensure that these dinner parties even happen is to throw them yourself. Therefore you must make it your task to have as many friends as possible.

Yes, friends are the building blocks of human happiness. As Blake said: "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship". But for all their importance, it is not our friends who occupy the greater part of our thoughts and worries. It is those other, more special "friends"—our lovers.

Part 2
Love

The secret to finding happiness in love is hardly a secret at all. Whether you will it or not, you and your dream mate will find each other at some point in your life—it may be in your teens, or later in college, or in an answered-prayer of a shooting star which falls from the sky just as your mouth begins to harden into a late-twenties frown...it may even come much later... In any case, that moment comes at some time or other for everyone, and from that point forward, everything is clear. You and your dear one court each other, you get married, and then you live in perfect conjugal bliss together for the rest of your lives. It never happens any other way.

Sadly, it does happen that people may deceive themselves into believing their moment has come, when in fact it hasn't yet. They then soon find themselves living with an interloper. And for as long as the delusion persists in both parties, which sadly it sometimes does for quite a long time, these unfortunate men and women may experience an unhappiness of special, fiendish intensity, and unhappiness so profound that they may begin to question whether or not men and women should live together at all. These poor men and women may find themselves after some time recoiling at each others' touch and dreaming of certain household accidents. Women may detect their men locked in the bathroom masturbating night after night; while the man in the late months or years of his internment will soon learn to feel his woman's expectant, attention-hungry eyes burning through him from across the apartment even as his back is turned, and his eyes will snap wide open, and his hands will grab a tight hold of the nearest possible thing, as he realizes he has nowhere to go to escape.

Chance sexual encounters, of course, are a different story. The happy person who has not yet found true love knows a great deal about these. There are a great many sexual positions: the "missionary", the "doggie-style", the "kama-sutra", the "sixty-nine", the "power wendel", and countless others. Enjoy them all; you only live once. In fact, have as much sex as you want, but take care to remember: you can never really know if you've satisfied your partner, so you should at least ask to be reassured on the question as many times as possible, to help temper the pain of not knowing. As for the legendary "wet spot", there really is one—and somebody has to sleep in it! Also, it goes without saying that one should always remember to use protection; the untroubled mind is a happy mind.

Sex can cause unhappiness, but the lack of sex is the more common obstacle to contentment. If you're unhappy because you're not having enough sex, the eXile again advises you not to worry. Your day is coming. That star will fall from the sky yet. You can push it along by making yourself available in as many places and at as many times as possible; you can also answer personal ads, meet people through the internet, and so on. That is, you could do that. But you shouldn't. The best course is one of patient dignity, forthrightness, and confidence. Remember, you are not looking for sex, but for a soulmate and a lifetime companion. Your task is spiritual and intellectual as much as physical. Enjoy the spirit of this chase; it is one of the joys you inherited with the gift of life. The greatest joys are the hardest won. And in this wonderful world, everybody wins—sometime. Even you, sugar.

Part 3
Children

It is commonly held that children are a great joy, that a person's life is not complete without children, and that only children can make a marriage holy.

This is not true.

In fact, children are noisy, they smell like old broccoli, and are infuriatingly selfish and demanding. The first three years of a child's life are an unqualified nightmare for his parents. They never sleep, they worry over his endless series of illnesses, and they live in constant terror of his growing up stupid or, worse, too much like the other spouse. Your reading days are over once you've had a child. Your days of doing anything at all are over once you've had a child. They own you, and they ostentatiously flaunt their proprietorship in an endless rant of inarticulate howls and screeches, which will leave you dreaming of replacing your heir with a hamster or a gila monster.

It gets better when they grow up, right? Wrong. Kids grow up one of two ways, and in each case you lose. Either they disappoint your expectations, or the exceed them and lord the fact over you until the day you go to the grave.

So the eXile's advice on this score is to ensure your happiness by not having children. Late into middle age, you will still be reading, improving yourself, opening doors to new worlds. You'll visit friends who have kids and come barging back through your door later with an ecstatic sigh of relief. What have you found in the eXile guide to Happiness? An extra twenty years of life, for starters.

Part 4
Drugs

Should you do them? Man, after all, is the master of his own conscience. But our strong recommendation is that you abstain. Drugs appear to enhance sensation while actually robbing their users of truly valuable experiences. You would do better to take a long walk, or visit an elderly relative, or lie on your back and trace the outlines of a cloud in the sky, and not muddy your glorious future with the dark specter of narcotics.

But if press ahead you must, we implore you to hear our counsel. There are grave pitfalls ahead which are easily avoided, without sacrificing any of that gusto for adventure. At least listen to the dangers—and make your own choice.

Our gravest warning is with regard to marijuana. We urge you to leave this drug behind. If it doesn't make you paranoid, it leaves you confused, unable to drive, speak, work, or do anything all except eat Pringles, listen to classic rock and sleep. Use it for years and you'll have the brains of a cod. Your bookshelves with be filled with Herman Hesse novels. You may even wear a ski hat indoors. Don't do it.

As for the rest, hey, it's your life, friend. All we can do is offer a few maxims to remember. Never do heroin two days in a row, or more than three times in a week. Never bring cash to a coke dealer's house, and never think that obtaining one last "booster" gram of coke is going to rescue your plunging mood. Actually, avoid coke in general, because the euphoria doesn't last long and is terribly overrated, something no one wants to admit. With phenomine, make sure to remember to eat something the first day. When you finally crash, remember, those gloomy, suicidal thoughts are merely the result of a disturbance in your serotonin balance. The world is just as full of joy and possibility as when you first placed your rolled one dollar bill on the mirror three long days ago. Avoid hallucinogens in urban environments. Never think you're saying anything profound on ecstasy, because you're not.

But enough of this! Enough! The truth is that you'll never be happy as long as you do drugs. Happiness can't be manufactured. It can only be experienced via natural activities, like taking walks or talking with the elderly. Incidentally, in general, we strongly recommend long walks as a fulfilling leisure pastime. Long walks and more long walks are the true secret of a happy life.

Part 5
Activities

If you haven't done so already, the eXile strongly recommends that you add long walks to your regular regimen of activities. Moscow is a wonderful place for walking. Some of our favorite spots include the Moscow river along the Yauza and Kotelnicheskaya riverbanks, the area surrounding Patriarch's Ponds, and even Red Square and the accompanying Alexandrovsky Gardens, that magnificent parkland of weed-like grass and two or three species of flowers located adjacent to the Kremlin walls. Walking is that rarest of activities, at once both exercise and relaxation. Walk an hour a day and you will feel stronger in the legs, less lethargic, and less oppressed in your thoughts.

Walking is also an effective prophylactic against bitterness and loneliness. In conversation the natural ambivalence human beings feel towards one another is a source of hostility and tension, but two people passing each other on the street experience a relationship of perfectly satisfying warmth. But be sure to augment your walks with a more in-depth regular social regimen. Otherwise your street encounters will lose their warmth—and may threaten to take on a somewhat psychotic character.

As for other activities, we hear some people have gotten a lot out of having a bird feeder at home. You might want to try that. Bowling is something that's always brought up, but we're not sold on it. It's hard to look sexy on a bowling alley. What else? Life is full of surprises... There are all kinds of ways of curing the blues. Actually, when you're really down, it never hurts to go out to a bar and get into a good old-fashioned altercation. Imbibe obscene amounts of bottom-of-the-line vodka, then find someone weaker than you who is with his girlfriend, and begin pushing him. Push one shoulder, then push the other shoulder. Push it harder, and ask him single-word questions like "What?" Eventually, he will be forced to respond. Hit him as many times as you can in the face, or hit him in the back of the head if he turns to walk away. If he falls to the ground, drive your shoes into the soft temples of his head. You will feel awful the next day, but then the day after that, you will feel less awful, until finally, after another day or two, you will feel happy.

Otherwise... well, otherwise, you can take a long walk. The promenade at Park Pobedi is nice if you can get there. Gorky Park can be nice, as many people are happy while walking there. The thing is, walks help you think. Man wasn't meant to be stationary. We've learned that over the years. It's one of our secrets.

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