Desperately Seeking Sequels

My, how I have changed May I never recognize who I was before

“You don’t need anymore books!” -

“Betty and I talked about this the other day over Portuguese pastries and coffee: people think happiness is a room you walk into. That’s bullshit. Happiness isn’t like owning a house, a car, jet skis; too many people look happy because they have the accoutrements of happiness. The right school, the right body, the right career, the right amount of money. I think back to this past summer, Ray Bradbury talking about people wanting to have things instead of wanting to be something. About how nobody knows how to make a life anymore. Stories are what make a life, and this year I want more to tell. Who do we want to be? What’s the life we want to be living? That’s what I want to ask as we move into the new year. Not what we want to have, but how we want to move around in the world making things happen. Do we want to live by the sea, walking around in the salty air, or in the city, enveloped by technicolor dreamscapes and the rush of passersby? How do we want to make a difference – through laughter, through going across the world and helping foreign communities, through finding cures for cancer, through art? Do we want to ride bicycles, read at the library, draw silly things, go to the movies, kiss in the shadows, drink champagne and grape fourloko until dawn, stay in with chamomile tea and good friends, seek forgiveness from a church? What is life but everything? This year, I’d say: choose joy. Joy is a choice. Joy is this: I am alive. I will make the best of this. I will live, I will live, I will live.”

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them