“He only earns his freedom and his life who takes them every day by storm.” --Johann W. von Goethe
Geez, maybe my dear friend Tom thinks Mr. Goethe actually meant what he wrote. Tom is worse than the nastiest alarm clock attacking my sacred slumber. The man can wake you up from the doldrums of a so-so job: he will pester you into doing what you want to do. ’Hell beguile you, enthrall you, and invigorate you until you give up the pitiful misery of a disliked career. If Tom can’t stimulate you into your active pursuit of work life happiness, you’re doomed anyway.

Damned fools we are, all of us. Rich or poor, we are inconsistent and so funny in the handling our wallets.

Your happiness and your money require your boundless and playful freedom to make mistakes:  are you willing to screw up? Will you mess up good and often?  Can you do regrettable things and decide not to regret them? You are entirely responsible for your adventure and for the outcome. More so, you must be able to laugh about issues that drive others to suicide. How much fun can you take?

Hope lies between you and your happiness.  How can you be happy today if you are waiting for better times anxiously? Peddling hope can produce shit loads of money as you have witnessed and experienced unfortunately (ever been a member of a church or part of a network marketing religion?), but it is always a win-lose type of transaction. Being a sucker for hope is costly and it deprives you of your happiness, while your freedom remains uncultivated.  The best thing you can do with hope is giving it up for good.

Abandon self-improvement.  If there wasn't the Monday Morning After, motivational and self-improvement seminars could be such a meaningful way to spend your weekends and your money.  And how has that been working for you? What more is it than plain addictive behavior on a deeper and more sophisticated level? Agreed, our silly attempts to improve ourselves do have entertainment value--as some sort of spiritual masturbation.  Beyond that, all offers of self-improvement products imply that you're not good enough. Self-improvement is detrimental to your self-esteem. It destroys confidence and intuition, the most important traits you need to enjoy yourself and ultimately to make money.

Get rich quick!  Come again? Making plenty of money can be fun and if I can contribute to your drastically or gradually increased income, I shall be grateful. However, neither I nor anybody else can promise that it'll happen to you soon or ever:  There is NO "ironclad system for people like you"!  In fact, there aren't even other people like you, because you are an individual with all the benefits and disadvantages that come with it. At any rate, you can have a grand time with or without accumulating assets. The discussions of "rich" and "poor", the differences, and how to make it from poor to rich are absurd and construed. Only bloody idiots try to get rich.  Being rich won’t buy you anything, having cash in your pockets will. I suggest for you to stick with simply making money. There is nothing wrong with money and:  the--legally and ethically sound--ways of monetary acquisition are practically unlimited.

Freedom is free.  Duh!  Happiness is easier to obtain than you think. And you got some money already. I won't teach you new tricks, I refuse to give you advice, and you don't have to learn anything.  You are indeed good enough as you are today. What, then, is my mission? What's the purpose of my stuff?

I'm not on a mission from god. There is no absolute truth to anything and I am not conceited enough to believe in any purpose. If my writing makes you laugh, great!  If I can instigate you to explore your freedom and if you feel inspired to make regrettable mistakes, what more could I ask for?

Disclaimer:  Note, that everything you are going to read and digest here is NO investment or professional advice whatsoever!  My ideas have entertainment value at best and before you put any of them to use, do yourself a favor and see your damned physician! In a nutshell, this is what you can expect:

No Promise
No Delivery
No Benefit
No Guarantee
No Satisfaction

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Thanks for the reminder!” --Kay G.

Money has less in common with money than you may be inclined to think. In fact: everything else is more connected to money than money itself.  Weird?  No need to panic:  just get your mind off your dough for a minute or two. Profound, eloquent, and hilarious: Ajaban will "guide you through the Apocalypse for fun and profit!™"

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"I have not laughed as much as I have reading the information on rumpelstilz.com. Laughing is something I have needed to do right now because I have been taking life all a bit to seriously over the last couple of months. I have been able to laugh at myself and the mistakes I have made with money as I read through your website. You know what? The sun will rise tomorrow whether I have money or not and it is up to me to choose the attitude of how I will greet the day and others around me." --M.P., Australia

"When economists reach agreement on the theory of capital, they will shortly reach agreement on everything else. Happily, for those who enjoy a diversity of views and beliefs, there is very little danger of this outcome.
Indeed, there is at present not even agreement as to what the subject is about." --Christopher J. Bliss,
Capital Theory and the Distribution of Income

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"You've got to follow your passion. You've got to figure out what it is you love — who you really are. And have the courage to do that. I believe that the only courage anybody ever needs is the courage to follow your own dreams." --Oprah

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“You've got to find what you love.  Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.  And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.  Don't settle.  As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.  And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.” --Steve Jobs

Stay Hungry.
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Measly $25 can increase quality of life, yours and theirs: kiva.org.
Be somebody’s banker. You’re rich enough!

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Employees hate their jobs almost by definition. According to Forbes Magazine, 87% of Americans don’t like their jobs. No surprise here. Shocking is that hardly anybody questions the status quo of modern slavery. We, the citizens of a developed country, scream for MORE jobs we can hate? That’s what “developed” means: hating what we do with our lives?!

If you despise your current job, chances are you won’t like your next job either. 87% hate their jobs today and 87% will hate what they do next month. Am I suggesting a revolution against “the oppressors?” Indeed, but who is the oppressor? The “evil corporations?” Absolutely NOT! Employers only provide the means for you to do what you crave to hate (“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” --Voltaire).

School and college have prepared us to live life in hatred, to live the best years of our life looking forward to end it--with retirement. It is insane to quietly accept being bereft of an enjoyable and productive life. WE are guilty ourselves of murdering our individuality, creativity, and our freedom.

You desire to love your job or to find a job you can enjoy? Are you out of your mind? It won’t happen soon, but if you hate what you do today you can hate it better in the future ... much better, in fact. My new book “How to Better Hate Your Job” seems crazy--and indeed it is unruly, wild, and provocative. No, it is not politically correct. I’m so sorry, dear!

Oh, you are self-employed, an entrepreneur perhaps, and you believe this book is not for you?  Think again:  can you afford not to know what’s going on in the minds and in the subconscious regions of job-hating employees? Really?! Even if you are not an employer, you deal with such people every day.  Even for you it’s time to get a clue.

Get your copy now--Paperback or FREE eBook download--and tell your friends, enemies, and your hunchbacked relatives about it. For the time being, it’s an “Advanced Reader’s Copy.” Some bugs still need to be eliminated and few things have to be altered before the final version will go to print. So? What are you waiting for? ’It’s important to do at least one regrettable thing every day ...

Excerpt from my upcoming book:

How to Better Hate Your Job
hating what we do is what we love the most

"You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul."  --Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse

Compadre,

You, my loyal reader, will have the first look at a couple of pages today. You'll get the unedited version, as everything you have been reading from me here is raw and unpolished.

"How to Better Hate Your Job?" Isn't that a subject matter limited to employees? Oh really? Since when do employees have a monopoly on hating what they do? I don't know entrepreneurs and self-employed folks who "love" everything they do, including the ones doing what they love.  Apropos, this love thing is overrated. People are destroying themselves and their assets with their silly obsession to do what they love to be doing. 

Is it possible to follow your bliss and to survive and thrive? Sure it is, but most folks on the quest to combine love and work bury themselves under mountains of self-inflicted pressure.  In the ugly process to make money with love--without working the streets--that love stuff can mutate into something hardly recognizable. Visualizing makes people happy these days: so visualize a blue balloon after you let the air out, shriveled up, still containing residue of spit and an idea of bad breath.  If you insist on doing what you love "no matter what," you have a great chance ending up like that balloon ... unless it pops first.

Anyway, working as a corporate slave has a bunch of similarities to working as a slave of your own business, with obnoxious customers as your superiors. Company or government owned serfs may even enjoy benefits that the self-employed cannot afford.  In other words, if you are working, you're doing a job. And if you are doing a job, parts of it are not pleasant.  There is no way you love it all. You my dear Saint, even if you rather bite off pieces of your immaculate tongue before pronouncing such a dirty word, you HATE some of the things you do.

My wild guess is you don't hate it well enough.  We would all be happier and less creepy if we allowed ourselves to hate more freely. Am I seriously suggesting hate is healthy?  No time for stupid questions. I have gotten ahead of myself already. Let's get into the real nasty stuff:

Hatred is one of our favorite forms of expressing passion. It is difficult to be angry or hateful without being passionate, unless you are a coldblooded school shooter or postal worker before becoming uncorked.  Hardly anything offers us the opportunity to "feel strongly" as readily as emotions we normally try to avoid.  We hate to hate, we say.  We don't want to be angry and yet, once we're all worked up and we have talked ourselves into a flying rage, we don't seem to be interested to stop our madness. Damned, we love to be enraged. We feel something, how amazing, and we can lose all perspective over it.  Hatred is beautiful and we wouldn't want to miss it. Can you remember when you expressed joy with a similar outburst of passion?  Excitement over a creative idea you had?  We'd feel mortally impoverished if we had no "reason" to be angry and hateful.  Half the population finds meaning in it.

Pain is our secret love. What could be better suited to arouse our passions?  Pain is even more intense than emotions we label as negative, like anger or hatred.  People wish to die painlessly.  Some of us would rather die than feel pain. Pain tops the list of everything unwanted. We may hate the unions, but more so do we hate a toothache. No, we don't love pain ... or do we?  When we are in its claws, it's not easy to escape or to concentrate on our freedom to choose. When we are "in pain," it dominates our thoughts and actions.  Pain is a 24/7 affair and as passionately as we may hate it, pain fills many people's lives with purpose. As much as we insist we despise it, some of us live for pain and for painful experiences we've had. Hardly anything is denied as vehemently as our passion for pain.

I am a cruel bastard, of course, accusing individuals of loving their pain but go ahead and listen to a coffee circle of little old ladies. They talk about who died recently and how they died, what illnesses they have themselves and everybody else they know.  Pain sucks, but be careful not to take it away from other people without their permission. For some, pain is the love of their life.

Hurts and pains are valuable to us.  We dearly love and pamper them. People in general are sadomasochists.  I can't be serious? Oh yes, I am.  They may not give this precious character trait much room in their sex life, but they find it particularly appealing to make other people's lives difficult.  At least in traffic and around money issues we are a tough crowd.  In turn, when others are making things easier for us, we're having difficulties accepting it freely without guilt. I wonder, are there a dozen pages in the Torah, the Bible, or the Qur'an free of pain and suffering?  Find a newspaper not peddling copy with pain. We grew up on that stuff, more so than on mother's milk. Pain sells better than anything else because it is more valuable to us than anything else.  We thrive on it.  Trust me, if you know of some pain somewhere, it can be turned into a cash cow. Time is money? Nonsense, pain is money.

Hard earned money makes a bunch of us proud. You do not believe me that pain has cash value but you are proud how hard it is to make a living?  If you think money earned through grueling toil is more precious than easy money, you do believe pain has a higher monetary value than fun. Our society promotes pain. Hence it is considered a supportive thing to make it more difficult for others to make a buck.  When your company cuts down on overtime, your superior calls you in on Sunday, and even if you get laid off--they are doing you a favor. I have observed often, when employers reduce pay or increase workload and responsibilities, employees become more loyal on average. Some of them quit, sure, but most of them hang on to their miserable jobs more desperately than before, for dear life.

Sick puppies we are, we are especially grateful when others complicate our lives. Don't you dare blaming harsh work conditions on corporate leadership.  They are doing the right thing after all. Heroes crave pain. Fun and cash are worthless compared with our beloved pain. Suffer some more.  It's good for you.  I am a negative, sarcastic bastard, aren't I? No, you are if you're proud about your hard-life syndrome.

Positive is not good enough. Ecstasy is preferable over positive thinking or positive experiences.  Positive is rather boring and not at all what we are after. Positive, negative--what's the big difference? There's no thrill in it. What we call positive is a crude beginning, a fragile foundation for what we want.  Excitement is one of those inflationary terms used by too many car salespeople and therefore void of meaning. Everybody is excited in TV commercials. How ordinary and mundane!  People who say they are excited aren't really excited. They're in a controlled positive state, slightly above being bored out of their minds.  Or they are acting. How many individuals--small children and Tom Cruise excluded--do you see jumping up and down over their lives' details?

Ecstasy is what I am talking about.  No, not the drug! Ecstasy in pill form ist still limited in its abilities and therefore useless for our purposes. Pure ecstasy about you being yourself, being where you are, doing what you are doing, thinking what you are thinking, and best of all, without nasty side effects. Forget about the feeling part for now; it's too women's lib, controlling, and delusional. Why should anything be any different, this moment?  It may scare the green slimy crap out of you but this is what you want ultimately, don't you?  Extreme enjoyment of everything.  Uh, not you of course. You want to leave the world a better place, for the damn children, and that is best accomplished with mediocrity and misery.  Good for you, O noble one.

Oops, did I step into something when I attacked your feelings? I am so sorry I ate your sacred cow for lunch. Brooding people demand of the world around them to respect their feelings. They want to be considered as deep but they are only narcissistic, miniature Gaddafis, Hitlers, Chavezes, and Castros controlling their personal relationships in lack of a little country all for themselves.  Dictatorship of feelings excludes happiness.  Follow your feelings and not only the people around you are screwed.  So are you. If you refuse to do what you fear, you'll miss out on tons of fun stuff. For example, every sane person going into business for herself is scared.  That's natural and important.  You can't wait until the fear subsides and you better start new projects WHILE you are afraid of and prepared for possible consequences.  Your fear keeps you on your toes and your senses sharp.

You eat what you feel like eating, you buy what you feel to buy on a whim, you always say what you feel, and you give in to every mood taking a hold of you AND you want to be respected? If your feelings run your life, you have no self respect and of course you don't deserve anybody else's respect either.  Watching you running your life into the ground is no fun and too painful for even the greatest S/M aficionado.  Listening to feelings--or whatever the hell you want to call it--is fine.  Acting on feelings as a rule is devastating. Your stupid feelings are not the source of your happiness. Feelings are like warning lamps on your dashboard. You got to have your car checked when you see the low-oil-pressure lamp flashing, sure. When you see the water temperature is below the normal operating level, you don't need to respond at all.  Just drive gently until the engine warms up.  Same with feelings.  They tell you something (it's rarely helpful and hardly ever reasonable).  It's o.k. to listen.  That's it.  Pretty dumb to act on everything any douche bag tells you, eh? If you always react, you become a puppet of your own baloney.

Happiness stems from your happy responses to everything that's happening to you, internally and externally. In at least 50% of instances, your response must be counter intuitive because most things that happen are not natural happy-makers.  You are not responsible for everything that happens to you, by the way, as the new age religion would have you believe. For your personal happiness you are responsible, for all 100% of it.  Hey, how are you feeling?

People are on the cute but futile mission to make the world a better place.  We are compulsive fixers.  Adorable! How much better is better? Windows Vista was meant to be an upgrade to Windows XP, and even with Microsoft forcefully shoving the newer and the better down our sore but patient throats, better is not always better.  Quite often the long expected upgrades to our lives are disappointing.  Microsoft does not have a monopoly on degenerate improvements. We are all good at it. The better job we are looking and longing for will have better this and better that, but we will hate it anyway after three, four moons. Yes, we will even hate it better.

Positive thinking attempts to enjoy the positive and to see the negative in an improved light. No matter how bad things are, there is always a positive side to it.  Look at the bright side.  Really? Sure, five years later we can laugh about almost anything. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, writes in his little gem of a book "Man's Search for Meaning" how he taught fellow Auschwitz inmates to develop a sense of humor to improve the probability of their survival. Fabulous stuff, reaching inch deep under anybody's skin. Here, I don't care about positive vs. negative or the possibility to improve your life. Of course, you can improve your status quo or you can worsen it. Both times you are fully intending to make it better, but you have no control over the outcome.  Jocular as the universe works, we never know what's what until the final results are in.

Self-improvement is a pacifier for so-called adults who refuse to grow up. Improved communication skills, another cosmetic lift of this and that, the higher vibrational rung on the spiritual ladder, a better job, the thinner you, a more environmentally conscious global warmer, the more sensitive husband--and the difference to more shiny and expensive rims is? Both better and positive are mind numbingly boring. When my brother died of cancer at age 35, my hunchbacked relatives said it was positive: he was finally relieved of his excruciating pain. Vomiting is positive also: it gets the bad stuff out of your system and pretty soon, you'll feel better.  An overall improvement, is it not?  If you wish to improve yourself and better the world, puke a lot or die. That'll do and even your loved ones will approve.

Who gives a rat's pink behind about a better life? What we're really after scares the bejeezus out of us. That's how radical it is.  Heaven on Earth?  Did you sleep through the last five minutes? Heaven on Earth would be better than what we're experiencing and better ain't making the cut, remember?  Join a cult or sign up for a Pilates class if that's what you want. I can't help you with heaven sooner or later, after you're dead. I'm selling the ecstasy of hell.

That got your attention, eh? Yeah relax, I didn't mean it.  At least not literally, anyway. I certainly don't mean you should engage in heavy breathing, religious trances, and vigorous morning exercise. Do it if you like but it's not a prerequisite for life in ecstasy. What you need to do to experience complete ecstasy is ... uh, NOTHING.  Baffling, I know. Savor reality, your reality. "Why should anything be any different, this moment?" I asked a while ago. There is nothing you can do about the world and your experience, this second. It is what it is.  Spiritual lame asses want you to accept what is.  Painful at worst and sleep inducing at best.  Type A personalities prick you to fight what is.  Sounds like the perfect recipe for a heart attack to me, exhausting at best and painful at worst. At any rate, fighting reality is futile.

When new age folks talk long and loud enough, they come close to making you believe that your reality is subject to your personal responsibility:  you "created it."  Aging new agers are the most impertinent and insulting of the three groups.  The other two are just pussies but new age folks are religious fundamentalists. 77% of the Tutsi population in Rwanda were chopped up in 1994 with machetes, faster than Nazis ever managed to butcher Jews.  According to the average well-read, but nevertheless ignorant new age dorks, the Tutsis must have created that and they were responsible for their own bloody demise? Nice!  The Jews shouldn't pipe up about the holocaust because they "manifested" gas chambers, chimneys, and the German sentiment that Jews are best kept in ash trays and their gold teeth in vaults of Swiss banks? Wow! Lovely people, my ancestors, weren't they? A heritage to be proud of.

Sometimes I wonder if the callus new agers are the new Nazis, or the old ones who traded their brown shirts for flowery ones and swasticas for peace signs on leather necklaces.  Fascists they are for sure because they're convinced to be better and consciously more advanced than the rest of us who don't buy channeled garbage. Why should dead grannies know more about life than alive grandmas? It's like, duh, and not that funny.  New agers prefer dead people's chatter over the gossip of live ones. You should feel threatened somewhat because they'd rather channel your ghost than talk to you in person.  It's called unconditional love. I love you, dead or alive. Dead is easier.  Besides, having my ears glued to the claptrap of a dead guy is more lucrative than listening to you.

But I digress. "Why should anything be any different, this moment?" Integration is the magic word. Own the world. Make it yours completely.  For this second. You are enjoying your dinner?  What would it cost you to be ecstatic about your enjoyment of your dinner? Nothing. Agreed, it seems relatively easy to integrate pleasant experiences we have. Still, we don't do that. Dinner is just o.k.  We take it for granted and we are not ecstatic at all. You expect to be happy owning so many toys you can't afford yet?  Bullshit! It won't happen. You aren't ecstatic--not even happy--about the stuff you do have.  Integration is claiming full ownership of your experience, and for now we are talking about the positive details of your life.

How many selves do you have? Dumb question, I know. I don't intend to warm you up for a sweet personality disorder, and I discourage the notion to tell your colleagues at work that you are, in fact, Napoleon Bonaparte. However, you know you are using a different personality of yours when talking to your employees than while you are taking an evening walk with your spouse. Your children deal with another one of your "selves" than the telemarketer on the phone. To be precise, each of your kids may know a different you than the others. Spending a week visiting your mom may bring a self to the surface you thought you had overcome long ago, eh? We operate a variety of selves for a host of purposes. Approaching your boss with the who-broke-the-bathroom-mirror self you use for practical purposes in your household may not be advisable as it is doomed to talk to your infants with your how-about-a-raise voice.  Personally, I don't believe it's a great idea to use your nipple-talk-bedroom self when calling the IRS to negotiate a payment plan, but what do I know.  Voice, attitude, self--what difference does it make? We have multiple selves and that is perfectly in order. The more complex an individual you are, the more selves you are developing and employing.  You can invent and use as many as you see fit.

Some people believe in having a "higher self," handling affairs of higher vibrational importance.  Or take the idea of "the observer" in the background, elevated above earthly issues. Even the old hat of vast and powerful "unconscious" areas of our minds aren't extinct yet in Freudian circles. Woo-woo is en vogue, but that magical higher-holier-saintier humbug is an expression of a spiritual inferiority complex.  Pissed off about a tiny dick, you start looking for something impressive elsewhere. We aren't considering ourselves adequate enough and crave to be better than we actually are. At least we want to know of something better deep inside-above-around us that justifies a perceived upgrade. We love our cats more than we love people but we don't want to be uncomplicated like cats.  We want to be special, with a soul--oh yeah, and the older the better--a higher self, and unloved unlike our pets.  I am not surprised you don't agree with me. Anyway, the capricious soul artistics of higher self dependents are alright and I won't talk you out of it if you're having fun with it.  Keep your higher crap.

For the rest of us, maintaining a self--equal to the bunch of selves you have in daily use already--a self that's thrilled all day is not a bad idea.  Crazy?  Maybe. You can be crazy about your life without ACTING crazy. I do not suggest you jump up and down in utter delight in public. Even a Tom Cruise can lose his job over such a display. You can keep your cool, others may accuse you of not being a happy person, and you can still be fully aware of having a blast. "How is everything," asks the waitress.  "Fine," you nod with a full mouth because that's how these beasts try to catch you, so that you are incapable of articulating the truth.  At the same time you may thank the god of burgers and French fries on your inner knees for this heavenly pile of grease.  Ecstasy without showing it. It affects your driving less than a cellphone conversation. No impaired judgment.  Yes, integrating positive experiences like milkshakes and chocolate chip cookies looks possible and easy.  Claiming ownership over the joys of a root canal procedure may seem somewhat less attractive, in comparison.

Negative is just an idea.  It does not need to mean anything.  "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," said Billy Shakespeare. Do you want happiness?  You sure? That is not as difficult as most people believe. You can be happy all the time. By getting rid of bad feelings and trying to do what makes us feel good?  Nonsense. You and everybody else has tried that, unsuccessfully.

Negative thinking is the flip side of positive thinking and basically the same.  Remember the half full beer glass? Half empty or half full, it is the same glass and the same stale beer. I am stunned how every positive asshole the world over repeats the same anemic allegory. And then what? Even the positive stinkers hate their jobs and invest in hope for a better tomorrow.  If you hope and mope for an improved world, yours today isn't that positive, even with positive post-it affirmations plastered all over your refrigerator.  Frustrated, we choose the label "negative" for our current reality and try to make it go away.  Oh no, we try to replace the negative with positive goals. We intend for our pink dreams to squeeze the ugly reality out of existence.  Works fabulously, doesn't it? Yeah, right. Sad result is usually and not surprisingly that awful facts don't change.  Awful remains awful. Disappointment worsens instead of disappearing, and we find ourselves in an emotional downward spiral, still banking on hope since we are so positive. 

Before we go on allow me to sling some more dirt around: a store clerk, maybe 22 years old, told me yesterday that hope is all she has in life.  How bitter must she be, how much is she hating her present life, if hope is her only solace? "I have no hope," I told her.  A terrible thing from her perspective. For me it is terrific. I have no practical use for hope.  A positive thing for one of us can be negative for another.  The positive thinking craze is a platitude. There's no substance to it.

Take your "negative" mood or a nasty experience as a foundation to work with.  For that moment in time, facts are facts and you CANNOT get rid of them.  It is awful and by all means, feel free to call it negative.  If happiness is indeed what you want, your only chance is to be ecstatic about the current facts. You want to be thrilled about things the way they are and feel.  Nuts? Sure, there is nothing sane or sober about happiness.  When I say "you," I don't refer to everything you are.  Just to one personality or self of yours permitted to enjoy with all plugs pulled, while the others worry about the important issues at hand.  Recall a conversation you had with a child, when you had to speak earnestly and matter-of-factly to him about a "deed" while you were bursting with laughter "inside," with a different self.  Have you ever cried with sadness, deeply mourning maybe, while realizing how comforting and wonderful it felt?  And of course, it wouldn't have been appropriate to admit the great part to others. Perhaps you didn't consider it appropriate to admit the warm and fuzzy side of your sadness to yourself.  You did get a whiff of it, though, I am convinced.

See the difference to awkward attempts at positive thinking? Feeling sad or angry and overriding that with screeching laughter, "re-framing" negative emotions with something you think is positive is simply idiotic. Nope, that won't make you happy.  Being sad, angry, depressed and allowing another part of you to realize that it is perfectly permissable to feel sad, angry, depressed--turns the tables. People usually fight against emotions that are considered negative. Fighting down tears or trying to not be angry when you are angry already is silly and futile. It doesn't work and it prolongs the emotions you don't want.

You hate getting the flu and dealing with the symptoms right now?  I don't blame you. You have the choice to hate how you hate your damned flu, or you can be ecstatic about the way you hate having the flu. I do NOT tell you to be ecstatic about the flu, genocide in Darfur, or a sledgehammer falling on your toes.  That would be a bit odd.  I do NOT ask you to "accept" genocide and crushed toes. I do NOT suggest you find the "positive" perspective of starvation, malaria, and manmade atrocities.  Come to think of it, starvation and malaria are manmade by now, also.  I do NOT think AIDS in Africa is a wonderful experience to reminisce about twenty years from now, and everybody involved ought to be thankful. The holocaust has not magically become "a blessing" over the course of sixty years.  Continue hating what you hate.  If you hate what's going on in Darfur, hate it with passion. Is it healthy to hate? You better believe it, but usually we are too slow to realize that.  People die because we want to look like saints.

There it is: ecstasy and--God forbid--lust in the way we hate.  We don't love the flu and we never will.  We can hate being flattened by the flu and parallel, we can be passionate and thrilled how we hate being flattened by the flu. People fight "for peace" with so much passion that they miss the moment when they turn belligerent and violent themselves.  Allow a self of yours admit to having a grand time fighting against global warming.  I am afraid the global warming religion has gathered so much support so quickly only because it "feels so good" to fight "the good fight" with so many likemindless people. When it feels good, we don't let the facts bother us too much.  Greenpeace supporters enjoy the thrill of the fight against environmental evil or what they perceive as such.  Hell, I understand. I hate Japan killing more than a thousand whales per year and blatantly lying about the purpose. Research?  Research, my arse!  I hate it and I know how thrilling it is to hate the Japanese whalers.  Don't tell me PETA people don't feel lust over the challenge of a new violation against animal rights. Geez, that stuff defines them and keeps PETA in existence ... and in the money.

And now the unthinkable. I despise people murdering people, genocide, school murders, deadly family tragedies, or 9/11.  Duh.  Who doesn't?  Terminal illnesses, the death of one person or many. Horrible!  Anybody who likes such things got to be a sick, a very sick character. You can't love cancer and torture.  Can we allow ourselves to feel ecstasy and passion about the way we hate horror?  It's up to you. Nobody would make a dime with horror movies if we couldn't and would not be able to feel lust and passion about abhorrence.  Recall the simple experience of crying in sadness and simultaneously feeling comfort and warmth perhaps. My wild guess is we are--one of our many "selves" is--capable of being passionate and ecstatic in the face of any human emotion or experience, throughout the entire spectrum of what's considered negative and positive.

How willing are we to "integrate the world," to claim ownership for the whole damn experience, and to be passionate and in ecstasy about EVERYTHING?  Ecstatic about being excited, ecstatic about being depressed, and ecstatic about hating to be depressed.  It's messed up when your cat dies.  One part of you feels passionately how messed up it is when your cat dies.  Will you let that part blossom--in secrecy, to your personal protection? Back door happiness is what I call that. We don't want that stuff, the death of our pets is not welcome, but it doesn't have to steal from us what's thrilling about life. Don't look at me with this deer-in-the-headlight face as if I was the most cynical creep you've ever seen.  According to some sources, 11 million children die each year of preventable and treatable causes.  About 318 kids croak while you are nursing a beer.  You know already how to enjoy life in the midst of crap, even without my complicated and long-winded explanations.  You don't need me to learn that.

What you need me for is to realize that what works for minor problems--like being happy while nearly 2,000 dead children keep popping up for each emptied six-pack--works for the real issues in life also:  you can hate your job, your life, your wife AND experience ecstatic fun. It may take a little time but you'll get there.  Apropos time, what you really want to work on is called "Bitch Lag."

Bitch Lag is the time it takes you from the moment you get pissed off to realizing you can't reverse, undue, or otherwise remove from existence what has pissed you off. Bitch lag is commonly filled with passionate bitching and complaining, whining and cursing, empty threats and contemplation of what could and should have been.  While engaged in bitch lag at the water cooler, you are less useful than a quadriplegic in a wheel chair. Employees can afford long, extended periods of bitch lag because their generous--or stupid--employers continue to reward the professional whiner with paychecks. Some employees live there, I mean their entire lives are a continuum of bitch lag with benefits.  Entrepreneurs or the self-employed are rendered completely unproductive precisely as long as they're affected by bitch lag. While you fight a hated fact, you can't do anything about it. When you get a kick out of how you hate a certain fact, in your reality of the moment, instantly the costly and time consuming fighting subsides and you CAN do something about it. Get it?  I am confident you do.

Intensity is popular.  We crave adventure, firsthand from bone splintering skateboarding, or secondhand from reality TV and the big screen. People hunger to experience life intensely and then what happens? Positive experiences are not intense enough and if they are, the excitement wears off quickly. Intensity of negative experiences lasts longer--the more we hate them, the better--and skilled as we are in getting worked up about awful stuff, we suck much more intensity out of our negative experiences.  Pain is the pinnacle of negative experience. Pain is intense, and we don't escape it. Thank God for pain!  Religious sadomasochists do, every goddamn day. Ha, and since we are capable of climbing the ladder of passion with a little help of things that piss us off, we are able to reach equally high rungs of ecstasy induced by the stuff that pleases us, also.  Unless we are total morons, that is. Pain and passion are not excluding each other and both can be experienced simultaneously? You bet. If I were wrong, S/M wouldn't exist and the monks would have never discovered it, for your benefits.

Pain triggers a higher intensity of passion. We are more passionate about pain and our mishaps than we are about our openly declared passions and preferences. Plain fun won't bring us as close to ecstasy as does pain. Whatever sucks in our lives has a phenomenal potential to invigorate us. Pain bypasses conscious decision making. You don't think long and hard if you should get upset over something that hurts you.  It happens instantly. SNAP!  And you are pissed off, bathed in sweat, and the adrenaline is pumping overtime.  Uh, the doorway to ecstasy!

Our admitted passions, like repair of vintage automobiles, quail hunting, or chess don't get us that animated so quickly. Well, here is an invitation: identify, locate, and evolve the part of you that can be ecstatic and put the damn thing to work, all day, everyday. Impossible?  Yeah, right.  If you have ever been cheesed off about your superiors and you indulged in bothering your poor spouse with every idiotic detail, you can do it.

Pain is not always an objective fact.  Pain and suffering is subject to perception.  Increasing your perceived pain level can help "produce" ecstasy. You know how much you hate and love when you get worked up over a banality. Literally, a fly in love with your bald scalp has sufficient power to get you into a state of mind you don't want to be in all day. Keep your blood pressure up and your physician may advise against it. In other words, a fly on the wall is not worth having a heart attack over--is anything?--and you have the choice to increase or decrease the perceived level of pain. Once your passion gets going, you can tune down the perceived pain level a notch or two. Otherwise you'll look silly and you don't want to waste your energy on nothing.  I assume your most common pain is not having your guts hanging out of a shrapnel wound but rather work related grievances, relationship problems, financial worries perhaps, or your teenage daughter's sharply declining grades.

Discover your ecstasy in your painful moments as an option, and once aware of it opt out of the pain gradually if at all possible.  No need to stay addicted to pain and hardship as most of our fellow citizens are.  Since you don't need to rely on awful things to be passionate, you now have the choice and the freedom to be ecstatic about any experience.  Hence fun and enjoyable things become equally valuable as the realm of pain for your utmost delight.

Hate with joy! I mean, hate with a passion. Realize how much you love to hate whatever it is you may be hating. And when you have bitched yourself into the delirium of hatred, flip the switch.  You know by now behind your lust for disgust lurks the part of you that enjoys your misery tremendously. It's going to continue the excitement without you having to maintain the hatred.  Once excited, you are free to move in any direction.  To be exact, we are heated up passionately all the time but glaring hatred allows us to see it and to claim that part of ourselves.  True excitement is what we want.  Now it's time to lose your hatred. It has lost its perverted purpose.

If I'm not too wrong that kind of excitement, passion, ecstasy or whatever the hell you want to call it is what we are actually after.  We say we want a house, a boat, and vacations because we secretly hope to get thrills and ecstasy out of that stuff. The older we're getting, the more jaded we become and we know all the stuff in the world doesn't come with ecstasy in the bag. Saddening and reason enough to give up the pursuit?  On the contrary, with the real source for thrills and passion between your ears, you gain the ability to get the most fun out of house, boat, vacations, snowmobiles, and other toys. You can, at will, but you don't have to. It's what I call freedom.

King Gillette, a traveling salesman, was shaving his stubbly face with a dull straight razor one morning in 1895.  It was painful. Mr. Gillette's passion turned that pain into the development of a product.  He wrote, '"As I stood there with my razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on its nest--the Gillette razor was born.  I saw it all in a moment, and in that moment many unvoiced questions were asked and answered more with the rapidity of a dream than by the slow process of reasoning. It seemed as though I could see the way the blade could be held in a holder; then came the idea of sharpening opposite edges on the thin piece of steel that was uniform in thickness throughout, thus doubling its services; and following in sequence came the clamping plates for the blades and a handle easily disposed between the two edges of the blade.  All this came more in pictures than in thought as though the razor were a finished thing and held before my eyes.

“Fool that I was, I knew little about razors and practically nothing about steel, and I could not foresee the trials and tribulations that I was to pass through before the razor was a success."

Years of development lay ahead for Gillette, who formed his company in 1901.  He did not put his first razor on the market until 1903, selling a grand total of 51 razors and 168 blades in the first year of production.'  (source: Smith, Dalzell - Wisdom from the Robber Barons)  Pain and passion as source for products and wealth is not a novel idea.  The ground has been broken centuries ago.

Happiness can be a painful experience. Some are afraid what hardship may happen next, while being happy.  Naturally, such thoughts sabotage happiness instantly. Others murder wife and children before they blow their own worthless brains out, on the happiest day of their lives.  I am not making this up.  Happiness can be dangerous. Why else are we so scared of being happy all day?

What is happiness? Losing yourself in an activity.  Entering the trance of a task, any task, and forgetting the world over it.  You can experience that during sex or while doing your taxes.  Doing "what you love" is contrary to mass opinion NOT a prerequisite to being happy.  It doesn't matter what you do.  Crucial is how deeply and completely you immerse yourself into what you do. To be happy, you got to get lost, completely.

As fervently as we chase it, happiness appears to be so foreign to us that it takes extra efforts to live with it "in peace."  Crap we are accustomed to seems easier for us to integrate as our own than happiness.  If you care, make happiness your own and normal, also.

Hey, it's free.

Egbert

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance, in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

 --Rumi

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