by Paul Klemperer

What makes you happy?

Driving back from a gig in Dallas around 4am one night, I'm in the shotgun seat doing my job of keeping the driver of the band van awake and we're musing (a genteel term for bitching) on the exigencies of playing bar gigs for a living, or for that matter, the exigencies of any repetitive job, maybe even a job you basically like but that still grinds you down little by little, and the subject of happiness comes up.

Staring out at the wan starlight and the much brighter lights of truckstops, oncoming headlights, floodlights specifically designed and positioned simply to illuminate billboards for bored nightdrivers to stare at, all those lights, all that energy serving such a less than profound purpose, it's all too easy to let the vacuousness of Interstate 35 get inside you and activate that little voice of doubt that whispers "What's the point of it all?" Sitting there, empty and exhausted, knowing you won't crawl into your own bed until 7am, just when normal well-adjusted people are waking up next to their beautiful spouses in their picture-perfect ranch-style homes, you realize there's only one practical solution.

So after you've stopped at Whataburger and are now back on the highway contentedly eating dead flesh on a tasty bun, you begin to wax eloquent. Just what is the deal with happiness, anyway? By now it's a painful cliche almost not worth mentioning that American consumer society substitutes commodified experiences for real self-worth. But those commodities still pull on your libido like a red-breasted robin yanking a slow worm out of the ground. You know that doesn't equal real happiness. You know that material culture is just filling a void. But what is that void?

Taking a different tack (since you're beginning to depress the bass player who is doing the driving and now warns you that if his eyes fill with tears of despondency and hopelessness it could impair his abilities), you bring up the age-old perspective that maybe happiness is over-rated. Maybe staying busy, being productive is the answer, or an answer anyway. You know plenty of people who always seem unhappy, stressed out, full of real and imagined complaints, and yet they get a lot done and in their own small way make the world a better place. In fact their unhappiness kicks them along, pushes them to do good works, like a donkey following a carrot he can never reach. Maybe individual happiness isn't the big deal we make it out to be.

Then you think of that girl you were talking to in the bar (the beautiful blonde who had had enough drinks to become loquacious, but not enough to forget her boyfriend). She did that missionary work in Central America when she was a teenager and it opened her eyes to be with people who had so little, living in cardboard shacks, and yet they were happier than 99% of the people she knew in Dallas, who were more concerned with what they lacked than what they were blessed to have.

The bass player grunts at your sentimentality, but you were trying to make a real point, not just regurgitate some biblical cliche. Anyway, he's not much help himself since he's always bringing up things like how the sun will eventually go supernova and destroy the earth, and the universe appears to be exothermic, meaning all energy will eventually dissipate, leaving only cold floating dust, believers and unbelievers alike.

But there was a point you were trying to make. You recall the thought you had when you went to that Austin Ice Bats game and were surrounded by 5000 screaming rednecks as two hockey players beat the living crap out of each other on the ice, and then during intermission a purple hot rod was driven onto the rink and a guy shot rolled up Ice Bat T-shirts out of a compressed gas bazooka into the stands, and you thought "Are these people really happy?" But the question was really much more profound than it sounds now as you relay it to your fellow passenger on this lonely highway in the small hours before dawn. The question included both the knowledge that you were an outsider and so who were you to judge, and the knowledge that all the flash and glitz served no greater purpose than the campfire of a stone-age tribe surrounded by a terrifying world of darkness. You wanted to tell them happiness is more than the absence of fear. But of course if you say things like that you'll just get the crap beaten out of you.

Then you see the billboard for Sun City Retirement Village, with the huge photo of octogenarian musicians jamming in the twilight of their years ("It is your destiny, Luke") and you know that you will be in Austin soon. You get a glimmer of the truth, through a glass darkly and all that. It has something to do with being aware of all the aspects simultaneously; happiness is consciously being part of something that's bigger than you.

You communicate this to the bass player in a garbled, bleary-eyed word picture, and he says, "I know just what you mean." Then he changes the subject.