There is yet good in the world. (Surprise!)

I just got back from vacation, writer-friends.

Okay, fine; I use the word “vacation” a bit liberally, since my “vacation” consisted of getting up at 4am for an early flight down to parts southern, then spending several days with teetotallers and then driving back from Alabama-ish overnight with three young children, only to find that our above-ground pool had bred three new species of algae and that the giant pumpkin plant my wife planted a month ago had taken over approximately 92% of our garden. But still.

I realized something, though, while I was traversing the Bible Belt, and it’s this: there are still good people in the world.

I’ll explain.

See, there’s this strange, fucked-up world that exists in my head. It’s rather consuming, and it’s what I’ve lived with for a couple of decades, so it goes with out saying that such a mode of being becomes ingrained—habitual, so to speak.

But there’s a problem with habit: you begin to think it’s the norm. Except habit is not the norm; it’s only in your head that it’s writ large and applied to the whole world.

There really are decent people out there.

So what if my daily existence oscillates between mind-numbing work and a seething morass of self-hatred and judgement? Not everyone is like that. Some people actually understand balance and stability.

It’s hard, sometimes, to comprehend that fact.

My habit, friends, as a writer, is to take things to a fundamentally awful end of the experiential spectrum. I look at any given situation and find ways to make it worse. I brutalize my characters, bringing them as close to the edge as is possible, grinding them down, mercilessly crushing their spirits to find the hard, unbreakable, diamond center where they finally, irrevocably meet the unavoidable truth of their existence. I tend to see the worst. My stock-in-trade is the worst.

But if you spend long enough doing that, you lose sight of other points of view. There really is another way of looking at things. A perspective from which everything really isn’t dark, dismal, painful, and hopeless.

I know, right?

There’s a different way of looking at the world, is all I’m saying. There are actually people out there with well-adjusted children and a distinct lack of internal conflict. And, strange as it may seem, some people have achieved happiness sans chemicals.

I…I guess I’ll have to account for that somehow in my fiction, now, won’t I? Weird.

(I don’t get it either.)

(I may have to have another drink to deal with this little revelation.)

(Who’s with me?)