Looking for light, I spent Saturday evening off and on reading this article about good deed doers.

One of those collections where each story is a few paragraphs long. I am a complete sucker for that shit.

The short stories work well with my ADD. Randy and I were watching music videos and talking. When there was a lull in the conversation, I’d read a few more feel good stories.

I was looking for my happy happy.

This has been a thing for years. When Joey was a little guy just learning to talk, he would say words twice, rapidly. If he wanted to watch Blue’s Clues, he would say “Blue Clue Blue Clue”. If he wanted me to draw for him, he would hand me a piece of paper and a pencil or crayon and say “happy happy”. Which was him directing me to draw smiley faces for him. So now, it’s never just “happy”. It’s always “happy happy”. 

Anyway, it’s been a weird time.

I have people who I love very much who will be going through a painful loss. When? Who knows? Tonight? In a month? It’s just really hard and I want to make everything okay, but I have no control over the “okayness” of anything. I know so many people who have kids in high school and college who are struggling because of the apocalypse. Life includes a lot of suffering. It seems to me that a lot of people are getting extra doses of suffering these days.

Everything is weird and a lot of it is super upsetting.

I decided that I wanted to make an effort to do something nice for other humans more often.

To just take a goddamn moment to try to improve another person’s life or at least make them smile.

Then, I got an email.

An author sent me an email this morning. She said she read my blog and asked if I would consider giving her book a boost.

The email was engaging and funny and her story sounds amazing. Then I realized that she made my plan of helping someone out easy today. I didn’t have to go looking for something nice to do. I didn’t even have to get out of my bed. All I had to do, was write a post and plug her book.

So, while it might seem like I am doing her a favor, in reality, she did me one as well.

Here is an excerpt from her letter:

“I’m simply dropping you a line to talk about a book I’ve written about being a menopausal woman in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Since I couldn’t afford the Ferrari, and I couldn’t be bothered having an affair, I went from previously perfectly locatable in the Cotswolds in the UK to utterly bewildered living in the wilderness of America when I set about walking from Mexico to Canada.”

So, I haven’t read her book yet, but I did order it for my Kindle. I’m looking forward to reading about her travels.

If you’d like to support an artist, please consider buying Everything You Ever Taught Me. 

I can tell from her email the book will be a funny and insightful read. Plus, she used the word “cheeky” which for some reason makes me laugh. And it makes me think of Michael Meyers on SNL playing Simon in the bathtub. Cheeky Monkey.

Also, I want to make it clear that my plan to help other people as I can is completely selfish.

Of course, I want others to be healthy and happy, but I know there will be a payoff for me as well.

You could join me. We can pay it forward or pay it back. We can pay it over, under, sideways, and down. I don’t care how we do it. But if we all take just a little moment to care for someone else? What’s not to love about that?