Say Hello to Mr. Sunshine

Originally I was going to put “the sun is gonna shine anymore” in the description box. The notion comes from a song by way of a movie, the song being “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More” the movie being Truly Madly Deeply. In that film the couple (I won’t give much away, but watch the movie, it’s great) sort of sickeningly sings the song to each other. At that point in the movie, if you are not in a syrupy, lovey dovey mode, you might want to turn it off and go back to self pity and weeping. After all, who wants to see happy people (actors) and then go to bed alone.

There's a really good reason for that scene, though, and probably for (my) reaction to it, a reason that’s clear by the movie’s brilliant and touching ending. Just watch it already, put it on your Netflix. What? You don’t have a Netflix account? All I can say is that it’s one of the best relationships I’ve ever had.

I digress, and I’m a little off the road I started anyhow, but that’s going to happen often, and I’m not going to apologize even though I guess saying that is a bit of an apology. Argh. My brain.

Back on the original path—the song, and my transposition of it. The lyrics start: “Loneliness is a cloak you wear / A deep shade of blue is always there,” then of course the eponymous refrain, “The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore.” So to me, the sun is gonna shine anymore makes sense. It turns the negative into a positive, sort of, with the caveat of "anymore," which might make the casual reader step back, asking, “Is it really going to shine?” (Even if you didn’t casually read and do that exactly, still, it works in my head.)

Notwithstanding the time I had wrapping my brain around the idea of “gonna,” and noting that I disposed of the “ain’t” right away, I couldn’t get past the potential for those same casual readers (droves of you) to think I didn’t know what the heck I was doing with language in that case, never mind the idea was to alter the lyrics to a particular song and make it more positive, with the aforementioned caveat.

Welcome to my world, then. I have a degree in English and a penchant for rearranging the rules and wondering if anyone gets the rearrangement, or if the joke's just mine and then just on me. Works the same for my art as my life and my writing. I seriously tend to be too—serious.

But, like the sun chasing the moon or vice versa, in some Mesoamerican mythical drama, the sun is gonna shine anymore. Without the caveat. Because frame of mind is important for how we perceive the world and, gasp, how the world perceives us. Not that we can exactly control the latter, though we can influence it, but the former, well, we have a handle on that.

It has been a long road for me, this realization, and lately I have been lucky to know a line of people in my life who are lined up to, for lack of more specific terms, kick my ass if I don’t quit Thomas Hardy-ing my existence. Happiness may indeed be the occasional episode in a general drama of pain, but, then again, we can string together the occasional episodes to make a continuous episode of mostly happy. Something like that.

At the very least, it's my newest social experiment. :)

So here, the new blog, the first post, the revamped website, Saints all in a row, room for more avenues of expression and I’ll be damned, not a single shirtless picture of me to be found!

Oh, one more thing. The title of the blog comes from the title of an Air song, reminding me to be a little more cheerful.

Now, go back and check out the website. I’d love to wake up one day and need to buy more bandwidth!