The Happiness Playlist by Mark Mallman

Author:Mark Mallman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Think Piece Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-03-04T20:18:21+00:00

December

In the kitchen, the wall calendar still reads November. I tear this page off. With a marker, I scribble a manifesto for the new month.

Goals:

Step outside one’s self.

Watch good things unfold.

Enact change in third person.

Turn off autopilot.

Create your now.

Be the child.

Quiet the mind.

The music is its own reward.

There is a garage across town where Eugene records his music podcast. It is early afternoon. The bent gate is stuck in mud and has to be forced open. Plastic tarps hang from clotheslines. A bunch of shovels lean on a dirty pink child’s slide. Things that were made to be inside are outside. I imagine the kitchen floor of the house is congested with lawn mower parts. To the left of me is a collapsed statue of a cherub emptying a vase. A homemade TARDIS has been placed over the entry to the garage. Inside the garage is an internet radio studio. Out from the TARDIS steps a human hulk. Eugene.

“Yo.”

“I was beginning to worry I was in the wrong junkyard.” I step over a broken lawn chair.

“Nope, this is where we record.”

“Do you plan on murdering me at the end?” I ask.

He laughs.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

There is a drum set in a corner and a mixing board in another. Electric guitars hang on the walls. Underneath them is the type of furniture sectional you’d find in a frat house. We sit at an octagonal poker table with microphones on miniature stands. The fragrance of stale beer wafts about the room.

“Mic level?”

“Vo-cal-Vo-cal-Vo-cal. Too loud?”

“It’s good. Let’s start.”

Eugene sifts through handwritten pages torn from a spiral notebook.

“Your latest record is philosophizing on the nature of happiness?”

“Yes. Songs can be a recipe for joy and healing. They can also be a recipe for evil and disaster. The chord is the conscience of the lyric. If we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ over a minor chord, it would sound sarcastic and insincere.”

“If life is difficult for whatever reason, then we can turn to music to experience joy? To come together?”

“I don’t think there’s a point in history of music dividing people, except putting parental warning stickers on albums or something.”

“Is the way in which you’re ruminating about happiness informed by your work as a musician?”

Eugene speaks more formally than I’m used to.

“At the moment, my war is getting out of bed in the morning,” I say. “This is why I’m exploring the issue of happiness. There’s a different war I’m fighting.”

“The war of . . .?”

“The war of the self.”

He interrogates me next about a stage rant the previous summer. I’d gone off the rails discovering a numeric disparity between love and hate in Google results. Hate turns up 591,000,000 results. Love scores 6,940,000,000.

“That’s ten times as many incidences of love over hate. Yet we’re biased toward our fears when we look at the overall scope of the world.”

“We create our own heaven and hell, so to speak.”

“That’s where music’s potency can steer the mind. For instance, Pharrell’s ‘Happy.’ It’s medicinal. It makes me happy. It also annoys people.

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