True Happiness This Way Lies

As you may have heard, I’m getting a Masters in Fine Arts in Writing. I took a fiction class recently as part of that program.

I wasn’t looking forward to it. My experience with fiction—well, let’s just say that I do not have good memories of the writing process. Now, my novel, All the Evil of This World, is a fucking amazing book, so amazing that I told my wife that when I die, I want to be buried with a copy of it. But I picked the highest degree of difficulty possible when I wrote that book. It’s an episodic novel that tells the story of one trade from seven different vantage points: a clerk on the exchange floor, the market maker he works for, a two dollar broker, a derivatives trader at an investment bank, a sales trader, an execution trader at a hedge fund, and his portfolio manager. There are seven chapters, one for each of those seven characters, each written in a different voice. This was hard. It was a bit like method acting—I had to get inside each of those characters when I wrote their chapters. There is a lot of overlap between the chapters, and you get to see events from several different vantage points, which means that the engineering of the book is very complex. Amazingly, I never wrote an outline. I wrote the whole thing sequentially, from start to finish. But I agonized over every word in that book, and each chapter went through a few dozen revisions, until I was finally satisfied that the finished product was perfect. The whole process took five years. Only a few thousand people bought that book. It didn’t really have great word of mouth—it’s the filthiest thing I’ve ever written by a factor of ten, so people weren’t really recommending it to friends or family members. I had people tell me that they threw their copy in the trash so their kids wouldn’t find it. I laughed—and cried while writing that book. It’s the one thing that I’m most proud of to this day. If you’re interested, you can get it here.

Anyway, what I learned in my class is that when you have a short story, and a main character, the main character yearns for something. Maybe for love, but nobody really writes love stories anymore—which is too bad. Maybe for reconciliation. Maybe for hope. Maybe for a tangible object. There is something that the main character wants very badly, and we’re reading about how he or she is going to get it, or not get it. I like the word yearning. It’s like wanting, but more. Every cell in your body yearns for something.

My first crush was in seventh grade. There was a girl in my class named Dana. Dana was a teacher’s pet, a real suck-up—she would sit there in class, in seventh grade, and nod to the teacher whenever the teacher made a point. She had dark curly hair in a bob. I used to stare at her relentlessly for six hours a day. I yearned for a relationship with that girl. At the first school dance, I decided I would give her a gift. I went to the mall and got an ID bracelet engraved with her name. It cost me $12, a fortune at the time. I approached her at the dance and opened the box, revealing the bracelet. Dickbrain, she said, whirling away, leaving her gaggle of friends to laugh at me. She never spoke to me after that incident. She ended moving away and going to a different high school about a half hour away. The next time I saw her was one weekend sophomore year while taking the Achievement tests—she was in my testing room. We exchanged pleasantries, which was something. Then I saw her a few months later at some regional theater event at a local high school. I was starring in our school’s version of A Chorus Line. She ran up to me and hugged me. I was shocked at the inexplicable display of affection, but also how large her breasts had grown since seventh grade.

I saw her a couple of years later at the University of Pennsylvania, while I was visiting my girlfriend (now wife). She sat at the same table as us in the cafeteria, and studiously ignored me. That was the last time I saw her. I Googled her a few dozen times after graduation, never finding anything. How could someone of that level of intelligence, graduating from an Ivy League school, disappear from the internet? I got my answer five years ago, at a high school reunion. Her best friend told me that shortly after graduating from Penn, she converted to Hasidic Judaism, and was living in central New Jersey, off the grid. That would explain it. We have a saying for that in the world of finance: good miss. Still, sometimes I wonder if she regrets mistreating me.

What am I yearning for now? As you have probably also heard, I am working on two books. One, a book of essays that this essay will appear in, along with sixty-eight others, and two, a personal finance book that is based on a very big idea. I am excited about the personal finance book. I wrote a draft of a proposal last October, gave it to my literary agent, and after about eight months (about four months too long), we had a finished proposal. All that was left to do was submit it. But after three months, he hadn’t submitted it. This is where the yearning starts. All I wanted was a book deal. I wanted it with every cell in my body. My ego needed it. I wasn’t about to be someone who published two books and then was done. Anyway, the story has a happy ending—I will have a book deal imminently. What do I want out of the book? Well, I think it is a pretty powerful idea, and I think it can change the lives of millions of people. I also want to make a fuckload of money off it. I don’t really want fame, but the fame is a precursor chemical to the money. Is it permissible to yearn for money? Absolutely it is—if you’re going to work for it.

One of my favorite songs from my adolescence is from the band The The: True Happiness This Way Lies. It’s the intro track of their Dusk album—acoustic guitar and vocals, nothing else, and if you blink, you’ll miss it. Matt Johnson is probably the most underrated lyricist in history, and what he wrote was a song about yearning, the best and most beautiful song about yearning ever written. Here are the lyrics:

And have you ever wanted something so badly
That it possessed your body and your soul
Through the night and through the day
Until you finally get it

And then you realize that it wasn't what you wanted after all
And then those selfsame sickly little thoughts
Now go and attach themselves to something or somebody new
And the whole goddamn thing starts all over again

Well, I've been crushing the symptoms
But I can't locate the cause
Could God really be so cruel?
To give us feelings that could never be fulfilled

Baby, I've got my sights set on you, I've got my sight set on you
And someday, someday, someday, you'll come my way
But when you put your arms around me
I'll be lookin' over your shoulder for somethin' new

'Cause I ain't ever found peace upon the breast of a girl
I ain't ever found peace with the religion of the world
I ain't ever found peace at the bottom of a glass

Sometimes it seems the more I ask for, the less I receive
Sometimes it seems the more I ask for, the less I receive
The only true freedom is freedom from the heart's desires
And the only true happiness this way lies

In the winter of 1994, I was utterly alone. I was trapped, literally trapped in a school that I never really wanted to go to in the first place. When I say trapped, I mean there were walls around it that were keeping me inside. I had few friends. It was a cold, dark winter, a period of my life where hours felt like days, where days felt like weeks. I had nothing to look forward to, until an old friend reconnected me to my ex-girlfriend from high school. It was decided: I would to go visit her in Philadelphia. I used to listen to this song on my Discman, with the foam headphones. And I dreamed of going to Philadelphia. When the day finally came, I boarded an Amtrak train in New London, and arrived about eight hours later. Some desperate soul had picked that exact moment to commit suicide on the train tracks, halfway between New London and Philly, somewhere in New Jersey. I sat on the train and waited, while watching fire trucks and ambulances speed by on the tracks. When I saw her in the train station, she was half-buzzed from Zima. We went back to her dorm room and rolled back the years.

The only true freedom is freedom from the heart’s desires. 300 million people in this country, with their wants, their needs, each one of them trying to have it all. Our ambitions. Our desires. Our goals. Our dreams. I’d be lying if I told you that there isn’t a part of me that wants to check out and noodle around with music for 16 hours a day, and do nothing. But it doesn’t work that way. Life is about wanting, yearning, right up until the very end, until we finally let go for eternity.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: The The – True Happiness This Way Lies.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.