Assembling the IKEA cabinet of happiness

 

 
     So I went to the opening plenary at the Organization of American Historians at the Sheraton Thursday. It was a brisk walk across the Loop from Madison Street to North Water and Columbus Drive, and it put me in, shall we say, maximum high spirits, seeing the people, the buildings parallaxing by.
     I got there about 4:10 p.m., checked in for my press credentials.
    "I'm from the Chicago Sun-Times," I said. "Or what's left of it."
     Which is very on-brand for me — acknowledge the elephant in the room, say the unsaid thing, spill more of my business than is purely necessary. Shutting up, as I often also say, is an art form I struggle to master. Still.
     There was 20 minutes before I was supposed to meet a reader who is a member of the organization — her email lured me there — and there was a concourse filled with booths from book publishers. Why not plunge in?
     Here I did an unthinking thing. Regular readers know that in 2009 I took a trip out west with the boys, then 12 and 13. When it was over, I wrote a book about it, pieces of which pop up here from time to time, like dead fish floating to the surface of a poisoned pond. It was supposed to be a keepsake for them, but for that to happen someone would have to publish the thing. So I'd have something tangible to hand them someday. Otherwise its a bunch of electrons that could wink out of existence with a hard drive crash. And look, here were these publishers, all around me.
     So I blundered up to one after another who might in theory be interested. There was the University of Illinois Press, which I'd actually sent the manuscript to, years ago. They rejected it with a sniff of "Not an Illinois book," ("But it begins in Illinois!" I'd objected. "And ends there! And involves three Illinoisans on an adventure!" No dice).   
      To my credit, I did try to browse the spreads of new books — but honestly, while the covers were well-designed and they were all in English, the subjects didn't interest me. If I'd been encouraged to take whatever volumes I wanted home with me, I don't think I'd have snagged one.  The subjects were obscure, rococo and uninviting. 
     The only book I actually flipped through was "Food Autonomy in Chicago" by Pancho McFarland, published by the University of Georgia Press. Years ago I'd been to the The 70th Street Farm in East Englewood with Sarah Stegner, then chef at the Ritz, to check on her tomato plants, and somehow imagined that a book with that title might connect me to similar stories related to food autonomy. Stuff I could put in the paper.

     But honestly, I couldn't make sense of the table of contents — the words slid off the page. I didn't take notes on the chapters, and the media at the University of Georgia Press didn't respond to a request for the table of contents. But two paragraphs describing the book from the publisher might give a sense of the thing:

     This examination of a sector of the food autonomy movement in Chicago provides important new ways of understanding race relations, gender, sexuality, spirituality, pedagogy, identity, and their importance to the dynamics of social movements. Additionally, the book explores how revolutionary culture, principles, and organization of American Indigenous, diasporan Africans, anarchist Mexicans and others have been adopted, adapted, or rejected in our food movement.
     In this autoethnography of the food movement, McFarland argues that at our best we work to establish a new society like that theorized and enacted by Indigenous and Black anarchists. However, the forces of Wetiko (colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy) make the work of BIPOC food warriors difficult. Wetiko’s conceptual categories—including race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship—influence our worldviews and affect our behaviors.

     Are you beginning to see what a book on three guys getting lost in Yellowstone Park might not find an eager publisher? I am. 
     Though not on the spot. I presented myself to several editors at several publishers, whose reaction could be best described as a sort of numb disinterest. Being with the Sun-Times meant nothing. Being a published author meant nothing.  I meant nothing.

     What did I expect? Them to leap up and embrace me. "Comrade!" 

     Eventually it came time to go upstairs for the talk — I plan to write about that Wednesday. Afterward, still not grasping the situation, I returned to the publishers' concourse to resume raking my fingers against the brick wall. 

     "We're looking for books about Native-Americans," said an editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, when I finally paused for breath and could register the plea in her eyes, which said, in essence, "Please go away now."

      Suddenly I saw myself as if from afar. A gray-haired man, spewing nonsense. Really, had I been a bum, whoops, unhoused person, living on Lower Wacker Drive, and wandered up, with my layers of jackets and shiny pants and red ruined face and went from booth to booth, asking for a chaw of tobacco, I don't think my reception would have been much different. 

     Feeling quite eviscerated I collected what little remained of my pride the way a person who had actually been slashed across the abdomen by the razor of book publishing circa 2025 might collect his guts in both hands, and waddled out the door, trying not to step on his dragging entrails.

     I rode the train home, grim, and came home. grim, my mouth set, my wife's attempts to boost the mood water off a duck's ass. I grimly made myself  a plain dinner. Cashews. Cheese. A simple salad. Stuff that wouldn't boost my blood sugar. 

     Sometimes the only thing to do is go to bed and hope it makes sense in the morning. 

     And you know what? It did make sense in the morning. I blinked into the world, had one taste of stale grimness, a kind of mental drymouth, spat that out, and starting thinking, belatedly. 

     Looking back on the night before, I realized my mistake. Not right away. For maybe an hour I puzzled over it, like a guy trying to assemble an IKEA cabinet, holding a sheet of instructions in one hand and pawing through an unpromising mess of shiny metal screws and wooden dowels and plastic spacers in the other.

     But eventually an idea took shape, an that idea was this:

     It was my fault. 

     I should have parked my ego at the door. Shut up about the damned book already. I should have asked each publisher what their favorite new book was. Should have asked them about their visit to Chicago. Asked them anything. It's not all about me, obviously. I went in there hot, talking about myself, and should have resisted that and done my damn job. I had set myself up, dropped my guard. 

     How many times have I quoted that damn T.S. Eliot line about humility? It doesn't mean jack shit if you are not yourself humble. Which I'm not. But can be. With work. I've done. On occasion. It takes effort. You can sure as hell try. Harder than I thought to try Wednesday night.

     Not just try, as Yoda says. Do.  There is no try.

     But no shame there either. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you — that isn't T.S. Eliot, but also true. Realizing that it was my fault was very liberating, oddly. The world is the world. Every loser and headcase has a grievance. Certainly a better takeaway than, "You're a loser who can't get his books published." Today is a new chance, a bright shiny span of hours to use as I please. Learn from yesterday's sorrow then fling it away.

     There is an expression in Norwegian, "Du er din egen lykkesmed," which Google Translate puts into English as "You are the master of your own luck." Though my Norwegian friend Gry says it scans to locals as, "You are your own source of happiness." It's too easy, when something makes you unhappy to let it sit in your craw, festering, to accept it on face value, blame others — "Wah, those publishers were indifferent to me!" — when you can also spit it out, rinse, learn something. You have X days to live, and then you wink out forever. How many days, how many hours, are you willing to lose to unhappiness based on things beyond your control? Are you going to be happy? Or not? Your call. Don't look for outside validation. Your own happiness is always within you, though often hiding. You need to flush it out.