The other night Dennis broke into song while feeding the cats. Two rooms away, I was struck by it. It sounded to my ears unabashedly joyful and my emotions clacked around inside me like Yahtzee dice with the first thought tumbling out as “when’s the last time I felt pure joy?” followed by “what’s happened to that emotion?” and so on and so forth. Where I landed was on sadness. I do have an occasional wash of “Wow, Yes. This moment is good.” and it’s often while on some long walk and the sky is blue and a bird sings and such like that. So I know there are pockets inside me where that stuff rubs around and hasn’t turned completely to dust, but yet ….

In the NYTimes I saw this great piece on the wonders of watching adults be goofy (or rather how back in the day: Advertising late 80s/early 90s, the regular folx dancing with abandon movement seemed to be afoot). One namecheck is the Bjork video “It’s Oh So Quiet” shot in 1995 when I was a video promotion person at Elektra records. Directed by Spike Jonze, it’s got some unadulterated joyful bits with literal dancing in the streets. I remember seeing it for the first time in a planning meeting for how we would be marketing this bit of magic and while I know for a fact I was charmed and smiled the first time I saw it, I also know there was deadset gravity in that room what with all the brow-knitted muckity-mucks coming up with ideas on how best to get this lark out there in order that the public would buy the album and radio stations would play the single. My job: Get MTV and VH1 to spin the shit out of it. Gawd I hated that job of always selling. Knocked a stake through my soul on the regular. Yet there I was doing it for three years solid. Dorothy peeking behind the curtain of music where the joy didn’t live. I manufactured some of the joy stuff back then with substances but I’m not sure that actually counts.

So where’d it go, the let-loose-ness? The dance like no one’s peeping, sing like no one’s perking. Well, sure, I understand how endorphins work (OK, not really). How I’m pretty sure they dim a bit with age. I found this article about that, which to be honest I haven’t read all the way through but am fairly certain it’s saying things like endorphins change as we get older. But I also found this, which suggests a kind of boomerang activity where raw happiness returns substantially from your fifties on. U-shaped, they say. An upside-down smile turned right side up over time, I say. Taken on the face of it, sure, phases of life, carrying great responsibility in those mid-years of career, family, and so on. All that makes sense although what I’m getting at is more about what happens when joy becomes more nuanced, less raw. That, I think, is just natural aging stuff. What happens as we all add layers of experience and responsibility into our lives. Also though, what happens with personal history. The other day, listening to a TJL episode, there was mention that when a trauma happens in life, the person you were in that moment becomes ambered, frozen in that time. Whatever age, you keep on going, become who you are, still recognizable ongoing (usually, hopefully) but the emotional flash-freezing means you’ve left that bit locked up. Hearing this detail stopped me. Yes. I for instance can pinpoint a moment where I passed from the room of carefree into a space with less windows, a little less helium. A time at twelve coming home from school and my mom was in our shared room and I could hear her crying. Because of course she was. She and my dad had just gotten divorced. She was lonely. Real human emotion there. I though was caught out in a place I didn’t recognize and two things (or at least the two I can remember) happened: my joy at having just come from whatever it was I’d been doing that had made me happy felt inappropriate in the face of this sadness and I need to take care of her so therefore no time for silliness. It was a kind of slot dropping in the door of the speakeasy I wanted to enter where everyone was dancing and I could hear them but I wouldn’t be let inside in that moment. That’s not in any way to say I didn’t get silly and joyful because I definitely did, but it was a more guarded pfizzle of emotion, let out in spurts like a slow leak maybe.

Currently watching Daisy Jones and the Six. One of my all-time favorite books now set to moving pictures and my current takeaway is on two levels. First, what the hell with the amazing seventies fashion! Mixed emotions here: I actually was wearing those things because I was in high school in the seventies and I could wear (or at least did wear) tank tops, halters and things you could see through. Plus a lot of short-shorts because I lived in California. If I’m sad about anything to do with the series, it’s that I won’t be wearing those things again although I did find a halter top bought when I was in my forties and wore pretty successfully that I apparently refuse to give away. Second about Daisy&Co., the music. The high from it. The joy I do remember feeling when I was sunk into sound. Where it took me. The rock’n’roll kind. Again, though, it was guarded. I could completely give myself to a song, album, soundtrack while laying on my bedroom floor with headphones on. I could definitely lose myself in an audience watching a band but that was a more measured abandon. I was always/usually on the lookout to make sure nothing bad would happen. The click of caretaking. I look at my high school smile above and see caution behind it. I still have that.

I’m also currently aware that the style of joy I’m sporting is more layered. Fine. I’m okay with that. There’s a halter top under there somewhere.