Bankers never have difficulty taking remuneration.

Artists, on the other hand, can’t wait to apologize when they ask for cash. “Maybe my painting’s priced too high.” “Is it OK to charge $20 for my CD?” “Really, I’d be happy if someone just read my poems – they can have them for free.”

That’s verbatim dialogue from people in my workshops.

Well, my creative friends, it’s time for an attitude adjustment.

Really?

Let me start here: Are you kidding me? Why would you, who have labored so long and hard, who have stayed up late and awakened early, who have put something really precious and vulnerable out there – why would you undervalue it?

Bankers do not create anything. They do not even create the capital in which they trade. Their main instruments are derivatives, which are exactly what they sound like – they derive their value based on other things or the work of others.

I will grant that Jamie Dimon is a smart and motivated man. He’s said, “All corrective action will be taken.” I would like to think that if I had lost $2 billion and plunged by company’s stock by 12%, I would have to humble grace to decline my salary.

But I am not a banker.

Standards of success

In the banking world, success means one thing: Money. You may not like it, but at least money’s an objective, quantifiable measure. More money equals more success.

Then there’s the social proof that comes with it. Everyone knows when a banker has a big income – he shows it off with conspicuous consumption and his bonus becomes public knowledge. His friends may be jealous of him, but they don’t think the money made him a bad banker. On the contrary, they’ll say mega-money is proof he’s a good banker.

Creative differences

For creative people, on the other hand, money does not equal quality. There’s no objective measure of aesthetics. In fact, creative success is highly subjective and a matter of much debate.

Yet another problem looms just as large. There’s a general consensus among artists that financial success can’t be trusted, and diminishes the creative process.

That’s where attitudes need adjusting.

I will never contend that financial success equals creative success. It doesn’t. Money and aesthetics are two totally different animals. But neither does financial achievement mean creative failure.

Hans Abbing, in his 2002 book Why Are Artists Poor?, describes artists as being members of a “gift economy.” They feel their talent is a gift, Abbing argues, and this gift only “passes through” them – they are merely its conduit and thus should not charge money for it, lest they degrade it.

But conduits need money too. The original Western conduit, the Oracle of Delphi, was vastly paid for her services – kings brought troves of treasure to benefit from her foresight.

In my experience, the feeling that each of us has a gift is not unique to artists. Bankers have a gift too, and they’ll make sure you know that if you question their fees. Rick Warren, in his bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life, argues that we all have a unique gift.

I hate to say something that will make artists feel less special, but maybe if we all acknowledge that everyone has a gift and everyone should be valued when we offer it, we can get over this purely psychological block.

Artists’ social proof

Artists, however, reinforce a different social proof than bankers. Many artists jealously disparage other artists who do well financially. They attack where it hurts most – by denigrating the art. Even Hans Abbing does this – he writes that Polish composer Henryk Górecki wasn’t a good composer after he became popular.

Do you feel that way? I don’t. Górecki’s Third Symphony – recorded 15 years after he composed it, the symphony that made him popular – is so beautiful it makes you cry, but he never copied its style again. Like any true artist, he kept changing and challenging himself.

Would you say that Salvador Dali couldn’t draw because his paintings sold at high prices? He had one of the most astute hands of any artist in history. His work was his work – whether he got a lot of money for it or not.

We should cheer when any artist makes a mint. It means that more people are experiencing the work. When good artists make good money, we all benefit.

The same cannot be said for bankers. In fact the opposite – the more money they make, the worse off we all seem to be.

Adam Leipzig, Cultural Weekly’s publisher, shares insights and trainings to help creatives and entrepreneurs get transformative results.  His new training program, from Passion to Profits: How Entrepreneurs and Creatives Can Make It Happen, will be available June 19.

Image: Jamie Dimon, after apologizing.

All aboard!

We especially recommend #7, Irene Borger on Creativity, and #33 with Gregory Orr.

- A.L.

Click here to enjoy.

Or direct link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/new-school-at-commonweal-exploring/id258210918

Below, you’ll find Neil LaBute’s new, 1,000-word short story, “Across the Universe.” Your assignment? Write a new story with one or more of the characters and/or story elements from Neil’s story, no more than 1,000 words.

Entries will be judged by Neil LaBute (writer and director for theatre/film), Susan Orlean (New Yorker writer and author of the current bestseller Rin Tin Tin) and Adam Leipzig (Cultural Weekly’s publisher & managing editor).

The prize? A used copy of The Scarlet Letter (you’ll understand after you read the story), acquired from Strand Books, personally inscribed to you by Neil, Susan and Adam in honor of your victory!

Writing contest judges: Neil LaBute, Susan Orlean, Adam Leipzig

Contest Rules

1. Your story must include one or more of the story elements and/or characters found in Neil LaBute’s story “Across the Universe.” You may only enter one story.
2. Your story must not exceed 1,000 words, including the title.
3. Email submissions only.  Send to contest@culturalweekly.com. Entries must be received by 11:59 pm Pacific Time, May 30, 2012.
4. You must submit your story as a Word document. You must include your name, phone number and email address on the first page of the story only (your name, phone number and email address do not count in the 1,000 word limit). We will remove your name before the judges read your submission, so it may be considered anonymously.
5. You grant Cultural Weekly the irrevocable right to publish your story (whether it is the winner or not) and to archive it indefinitely. You keep the copyright – we’re not Google or Facebook.
6. When will the winner be announced? We don’t know – it depends on how many submissions we get!

Good luck!

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

By Neil LaBute

It is a sobering thing to willingly ruin a life. Even at seventeen, Beth knew this to be the truth. She knew it, yet she also knew that this simple but powerful fact would in no way stop her from doing it. She looked down again at the massive “D” scrawled in red ink at the top of her paper and then flipped through the pages. Words like “NO” and “AWKWARD” shot out at her like arrows fired from battlements high overhead. In her heart she was aware that she hadn’t spent enough time doing the assignment and had relied too heavily on Wikipedia for her own good, but she could never have imagined that this would be the outcome. A big, fat “D” for her efforts. She lifted her head up and looked around the lunchroom; a few classmates were glancing over at her but turned away when she caught their eyes. Suddenly she felt like that girl in the Hawthorne novel that they had trudged through earlier in the year who had to wear
a scarlet letter sewn onto her dress. The shame was that intense and no less humiliating, at least when you’re a junior in high school and your teacher reads a few excerpts from your paper as an example of what not to do when fulfilling his course requirements. No, when that happens to you it seems as if vengeance is the only option and so vengeance, Beth decided right then and there, would be hers.

He was a married man, her teacher, with three kids and a wife who appeared to be a bit older than he was. Beth approached him a day or so later in the hallway, stopping him on his way
to the ‘Staff Lounge’ with a smile and a flip of her long hair. She asked him for a moment of
his time and even after seven years of teaching, he was still happy to give of himself and promised Beth a meeting on Thursday. Just a quick conference that would clarify some of the mistakes she’d made in her paper and a chance to do some extra credit work to bring her point total back in line with the other B- students in his class. He smiled at her while glancing at his watch; he scribbled the day and time of their appointment on the back of an envelope he was carrying and then turned and moved off down the hall. Beth watched him go and realized that he was a fairly attractive man and still young and that, in spite of her recent laziness in class, she had learned a great deal about American Literature from him over the course of the year. That same thought flashed through her mind at the mall when she went into VICTORIA’S SECRET and snapped up three pairs of panties that were on sale.

That night, after dinner and Tivo and homework, Beth even looked up her teacher’s picture in her Freshman yearbook and stared at him for several minutes, his face captured there in black and white and frozen forever on the ‘Staff’ page for anyone to gawk at. It was a candid photo of him at his desk that had been used that year and she traced an index finger over the image several times. After a moment she got up and closed the door to her bedroom and went back to the annual. Beth could feel a warmth and wetness spreading along her new thong and she reached slowly inside it to satisfy herself with a strange mix of infatuation and terror creeping through her young, powerful limbs. The climax was intense and surprising and even scared her a little as she fell asleep with the lights on in her room, uncertain what any of this actually meant to her and her own tiny place within the vastness of the cosmos.

Standing in the hallway just before noon with a ribbon holding back her thick mane of hair, Beth gathered herself as she waited for all of the students from the eleven-o’clock hour to leave the classroom before she entered it. Of course she wanted to be spotted there. Of course she called out to her friends and laughed loudly to catch the ears of passing faculty members as she was about to meet for her appointment. This had to be done. This was the beginning of the end, at least for her teacher. She knew that the blanket of lies that she was about to unfurl had to be thick and plush and heavily scented with deception. There would be many meetings with the principal and counselors and school board trustees before this was through, endless calls to her parents and moments of weakness where she would feel as if she could no longer go on, but on she must go and see this through to the end. To repeat what he’d whispered to her in that room, the offer he made to change her grade and the way he had touched her knee again and again (Beth had repeated this false report to herself on the bus so many times that it now felt like the absolute truth) and she would never waver or sound less humiliated than the time previous, she promised herself as she stepped inside and closed the door firmly behind her.

He looked up at Beth—this condemned man–somewhat surprised and no doubt having forgotten about the meeting, and in no way aware that his small and simple life was about
to change forever. All because of a grade and a few careless comments he’d made at the expense of this student. All because he’d written a “D” at the top of that paper instead of a “C.” All because Eve had sprung forth from Adam’s rib when perhaps, after the miracle of creation, it would’ve been better for God to just walk away and leave well enough alone.

Sweet Gwendolyn in her white dress
was out gathering May flowers.
Under sunshade hat, her pale face
blushed to the singing bees,
and her golden curls lay passive on bent shoulders
as she stooped to pluck a white lily.

The Countess passing by took one look,
galloped up, and reined her stallion sharply in,
high over the modest figure
of Sweet Gwendolyn with the downcast eyes.
She leaped down from her horse and knelt,
laying the whip in tribute before the golden girl.

That foolish one swooned forward to the ground
on a great white puff of dress fabric
and a scattering of flowers. At that,
the Countess rose in all her black pride
and put her dirty leather boot hard on Gwendolyn’s bent neck,
pushing down the golden head to the grass,
and gave her a smart lash across her innocently upturned behind.

Gwendolyn looked up with begging eyes
and a small whimper of submission,
as the Countess pushed her over and threw the skirt up,
exposing legs and bottom bare,
and shoved the leather whip handle between squeezed thighs of virtue,
forcing them apart to reveal the pink pulsing maidenhood.

Foolish Gwendolyn for not wearing panties.
But how could she have known what was in store?
Her skirt fell over her head like petals of a fully-opened flower,
and her legs waved in the air like stamen and pistil,
inviting the bee of the Countess’s tongue
to slip in and sip nectar in the golden fuzz.

Poor Gwendolyn moaned with shame and pain
as she lay back crushing her May flowers, exposed and unresisting,
until the Countess, in full charge, pulled her to her feet,
tied the whip end around her neck,
remounted the big black horse,
and slowly trotted on,
leading the sobbing girl a captive behind her
off to her dark castle.

Edward Field is the author of more than ten books of poetry, including Counting Myself Lucky and A Frieze for a Temple of Love, and a memoir, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the W.H. Auden Award, the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. “Sweet Gwendolyn and the Countess” may be found in his book, After The Fall, copyright © 2007, University of Pittsburgh Press.

When I repeated that to the writer Frank Deford, he said, “Did Billy really say that? (Laughing) I remember Billy telling me that he was responsible for something like 40 victories a year as a manager. That sort of goes contrary to that, but that’s a very sweet sentiment. And I would subscribe to that absolutely. I’m enough of a romantic to be for that. Sweetness and light.”

I once asked a number of successful sports figures and writers what they considered the best thing about sports. Eddie DeBartolo, whose San Francisco 49ers won five Super Bowls in the 23 years he owned the team, put it succinctly. “Winning,” he said.

“Edwin Bennett Williams called it ‘contest winning,’ said former New York Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi. “I guess with him it was winning a trial, and then he became the owner of the Redskins. There’s no high like the moment when you’ve just won a game. You watch the players file into the locker room and you look at each one’s contributions. The euphoria in the locker room after a win, particularly on the road, because there is no sensation like silencing the road crowd. And then you are together for the trip home. There’s nothing like that plane ride home after a great victory.”

Peter Kenyon, who as chief executive built the English Premier League soccer clubs Manchester United and Chelsea, echoed DeBartolo.“Winning is our mantra, and it won’t happen without winning,” he said. “[We] are in the ultimate competitive industry. People talk about being on the stock market and being measured every quarter. Well (laughing), we’d love to get to be measured every quarter.”

“You have a winner and a loser virtually every day [in sports],” said Dave Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times. “I say that as a writer. People ask me, ‘Would you have rather gone into writing a general column or writing about politics?’ In politics, you seldom know who the winner is and who the loser is for 10 or 15—maybe 100—years. In sports, you know every day who won.”

Sal Galatioto, president of Galatioto Sports Partners, said, “The best thing about sports is the fact that you get a group of people that come together for one purpose, and you know what that purpose is at the beginning of the season: It’s to win. These athletes—say what you will about how much they get paid—most of them work extremely hard. They are incredibly talented. They do things that normal people just can’t do, although it looks easy on TV sometimes.

“And it’s that coming together for a common purpose and then achieving that goal which is amazing to me. And that’s why Americans love the underdog. The U.S. hockey team that wins the Olympic gold medal, or the baseball team that comes out of nowhere to win the World Series. Everybody roots for the underdog. It’s the way it is. It’s part of America.”

Donald Dell, the founder and chairman of ProServ and one of the giants in sports business, said, “Ironically, one of the great things about sports is teamwork, which is much more prevalent in team sports than it is in tennis.”

Roger Staubach called the best thing about sports “the hard work that goes into being successful. They can pay Michael Jordan all the money in the world,” he said, “but he’s going to fight and practice and work hard. Tiger Woods is out there making big bucks, but he’s got to work on his game. In sports, you can’t be successful without working at it. Some people have so much talent that they get away with working less, but you have to work at it.

“There’s a team aspect to it. You’ve got goals and aspirations. You want to get to where you want to get to, but you’ve got to take someone with you, and I think sports makes you realize the importance of someone other than yourself. You learn that you are there when someone needs you and they’re going to be there when you need them.

“And the other thing is perseverance. I think that in life, you get knocked down, you’ve got to pick yourself back up. When you’re knocked down, though, you don’t cook the books, you don’t give up on your faith, you don’t change up on your values. You just continue to fight. Sports taught me that, taught me a lot about resilience and perseverance, and those are all important things in business.

“You’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to realize that you can’t do it by yourself. You need good people and you’ve got to expect the unexpected and that challenges and difficulties happen, and you’ve got to fight through it and you still maintain your values when you do it. You find out the best in people when things are difficult, and sports teaches you that, too. There are just a lot of great things in sports that are transferable into business.”

Rick Reilly, voted National Sportswriter of the Year eleven times by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, said,“The best thing [about sports] is that you can’t fake it. Just because you’re Tom Seaver’s son doesn’t mean you get to play in the big leagues. But if you’re Martin Sheen’s son, you get a job. Believe me, if Tom Cruise’s child wants to act, he’ll get to act. And if Aaron Spelling’s daughter wants to act, she gets to act. These people who are famous for being famous…it doesn’t work in sports. You have to prove it, and you have to prove it every year. Derek Jeter doesn’t just get to get by next year because he was in a lot of ads this year. It’s not like being the pope. It’s not a lifetime appointment.”

Gene Upshaw, who passed away in August 2008, was a Pro Football Hall of Fame offensive lineman and the long-time executive director of the NFL Players Association. He had this to say about the best thing in sports:

“The camaraderie you build with your teammates and the people that are involved in the sport. You take that with you wherever you go. You can never ever let it go. And anyone who has participated has that feeling.

“You’re in this unique fraternity, and it’s there for a lifetime: good, bad, indifferent; winning, losing, traveling, crying—all of it. It’s the camaraderie. It’s the greatest thing that you get out of this. The relationships you build through that.”

Gail Goodrich, a basketball Hall of Famer, echoed Upshaw: “The camaraderie of being with your teammates, having a common goal, and working together toward it,” said Goodrich. “That first year after you retire, there is an adjustment. The biggest thing you miss is that association with the team.”

Jerry West was in the same backcourt on the Lakers with Goodrich for two different terms. One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players, West, who later built championship teams as an executive with the Lakers, said, “The harshest lessons learned in life are probably through sports. There is no gray area. You either win or you lose. And I think it tests the character of all players. It tests the character of the people working internally. And it can lead to hastily made decisions that sometimes damage a franchise more than they would ever help because people don’t want to lose.

“I think management has a great responsibility to the ownership, almost to the point where I believe that you should lose your job if there’s something that the owner wants to do and it’s just not the right thing to do because it is an emotional thing. I do think that were all at risk sometimes because we’re opinionated and we think we know what’s best for the team, and we don’t own the team.

“I like to think I’d never work for money in my life. I do it because I love it. Obviously it’s important to get paid if you’re in a business like this. But I think the most important thing is, if somebody hires you, they should trust your instincts enough to let you run the team and for them to not interfere with some things that maybe they’re not very familiar with.”

Randy Vataha enjoyed success in college (Stanford) and in the NFL (New England Patriots) as an undersized receiver. Looking back on his playing career, Vataha, the president of Game Plan LLC, said, “One of the reasons I enjoyed playing football is you have so many teammates to share the experience with. Every year, like a lot of people, I’ll get near a television when that ball comes down on New Years’ Eve in Times Square. And you say, ‘Why would all those people get there 10-15 hours in the cold before that ball drops down? Why do they do that?’ And it’s really to share an experience with everybody else.

“Well, when I played at Stanford, the team had not been to the Rose Bowl in almost 20 years. So, to be able to win the Pac-8 and share that with your teammates, and to be able to go on to win the Rose Bowl, was a phenomenal experience. A lot of those guys have been dear friends for life, and they were all sort of forged within that teamwork. You can’t ever replace those kinds of experiences with your teammates.”

Al Leiter, who pitched for the Yankees, Mets, Marlins, and Blue Jays before moving into the broadcast booth at YES and the MLB Network, said, “I have yet to meet a teammate, or even an athlete from another sport, who is not highly competitive. And I know after 20 years professionally—15 or 16 years in the major leagues—what continues to drive my love for the game is to compete at the pinnacle of my industry. To face the greatest players in the world and make quality pitches to get them out. It’s a rush. It’s a tremendous degree of satisfaction, even in the smallest battles.

“As a player, my perspective is about competition and winning. And it has to be [the same] as a fan. And I would say sports are encompassed by the desire to watch competition at its best with the feeling of euphoria or sorrow with a win or a loss next to your team.”

Offering perspective from the front office on the best thing about sports, Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay said, “It’s the opportunity to compete in a game as a grownup. What I enjoy is that on Sundays you get to have your team compete against their team and see who wins. I like the fact that as adults we still get to play or be involved in a game that’s usually reserved for younger people.”

Pat Williams, senior vice president of the Orlando Magic, has spent a full life in sports as a player and executive. He cited the relationships you make as among the best things sports offer.

“The people you are involved with—the coaches, the athletes, the media,” said Williams. “You just do not meet those kind of people in any other walk of life. I ran into a man who grew up in the Philadelphia area. He was almost in tears talking about what the 1983 76ers meant to him and to his father and to his neighborhood. This man…was very emotional. And that just brought back to me the power of sports. And the impact it has on people’s lives.”

Sports journalist and broadcast pioneer John Walsh once said,“The best thing about working in sports at ESPN is that there is a range of different possibilities every day. There are different mediums. There are different types of stories. You can come to work and be talking about Kobe Bryant on the court and his spectacular play, or the Kobe Bryant fall from grace off the court, which is an interesting, dramatic story as well. There is laughter and tears, all kinds of emotional stories that come about on a daily basis.

“What’s happened in sports in the last quarter-century has been so overwhelmingly breathtaking and widespread that sports have come to represent life in America and the range of experiences, and the range of stories to cover is pretty astonishing.”

Jerry Kavanagh is a former editor at New York Magazine and Conde Nast.

Image: Eddie DeBartolo, having a good day.

I know a bit about the Beastie Boys. I’ve seen them in concert several times, though the live format didn’t play to their strengths. The best way to listen to the Beastie Boys is with earbuds in, the world shut out. Their recordings were dense, complex and sophisticated, their rhymes expertly crafted for maximum effect. Each of the three had a highly distinct voice; you can listen to any line in any Beastie Boys song and immediately know whose voice you’re hearing:

Horovitz: Some static started
Yauch: in the pool hall
Horovitz: Hit a motherfucker’s face
Diamond: with the cue ball

I could not possibly tell you which of the Beastie Boys I related to most; they maintained a Tao-like perfect balance among the three. Adam Horovitz was the expressive one, a grimacing method actor, always mugging for the cameras. He was the rocker of the group, with a nearly un-musical Jerry Lewis whine to his voice. He was also the Beastie Boy most likely to drop a literary reference into a song:

You slip, you slack, you clock me and you lack
While I’m reading ‘On The Road’ by my man Jack Kerouac

Mike Diamond was the funny one, and the one with the most skillful lyrical phrasing, though his voice had less distinctive character than the other two. But he understood hiphop, and he could scat:

Jump the turnstile, never pay the toll
Ding ding ding doo-wah diddy, busting with the b-roll …”

Adam Yauch had the most memorable voice in the band, menacing, gravelly, instantly recognizable. He appeared to be the most intense and serious of the three. He rarely smiled, and on the early records he sometimes came off downright scary:

Roses are red
the sky is blue
I got the barrel at your neck
so what the fuck you gonna do?

When he wasn’t scary, he was often highly despondent, and always made you believe he was feeling it, as when it’s 4 am and he’s got the Hassenpfeffer ale:

I got nothing to lose and so I’m pissing on the third rail

As a rapper, he was slow but had superb timing. “The Sounds of Science” would have been a great track even without him, but listen to what his weird drawl adds:

An MC … to a degree … that you can’t … get in college.

Yauch appeared at first to be the least charismatic of the three Beastie Boys, but he would gradually emerge as the George Harrison of the group, the spiritual one, and he came out as a Buddhist and a pacifist sometime between their third and fourth records, suddenly dropping references to the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King into lyrics, writing songs with names like “Shambala” and “Boddhisatva Vow”, and coming up with rhymes like this:

I want to say a little something that’s long overdue
This disrespecting women has got to be through
To all the mothers and sisters and wives and friends
I want to offer my love and respect to the end

Yauch’s transormation was a surprise, though in retrospect the philosophical, otherworldly sensibility had always been there:

Diamond: I once was lost
Horovitz: but now I’m found
Yauch: The music washes over and you’re one with the sound.

Quickly after revealing himself to be a Buddhist, he kicked off a series of activities including the Tibetan Freedom Concerts of the late 1990s, and founded an organization called Milarepa. Adam Yauch’s level of energy was amazing; he was also an adventurous filmmaker, and a skillful and inventive bass guitarist (note that the Beasties’ best rock song “Sabotage” has a bass solo, not a guitar solo).

When I heard the news that he had throat cancer back in 2009, I felt terrible for the suffering I knew he’d be going through. I tried to post a cheery joke on Twitter:

@asheresque: they say Adam Yauch’s voice won’t be harmed during cancer surgery, but it might get raspy

The news was pretty unbelievable. Yauch appeared to be one of the most admirable and truly successful figures in the musical business, not in financial terms, but on the level of greater achievement. Like Bob Geldof (and, arguably, Bono) he was one of only a few rock stars who managed to transcend the limits of the scene and reach a higher stage — translating thoughts into action and actually stepping out to try and change the world.

In June 1997 I went with my daughter Elizabeth to the Tibetan Freedom Concert at Randall’s Stadium in New York City (she was 11, and mainly wanted to see Alanis Morissette, who wasn’t very good). During a break in the all-day show, Elizabeth and I were strolling around the tents outside the main stage when we spotted a bunch of orange-robed Tibetan monks off in a not very visible corner behind a trailer, looking like they were busy doing something interesting. “Let’s go,” I told Elizabeth, and we found ourselves in a small procession of Buddhist monks walking to the East River between Randall’s Island and Astoria, Queens, under the Hells Gate Bridge, so the monks could bless the East River. COOL!

We were silently welcomed into the group. There were maybe twenty of us, half monks and half hipsters, the monks leading and us trailing behind. As we walked I spotted a familiar face and nudged Elizabeth. “That’s Adam Yauch.” Not surprisingly, he was part of the procession, walking behind the monks, eventually participating in the ceremony as we all blessed together the waters between Manhattan and Queens. I didn’t talk to him; it seemed like a solemn moment and I couldn’t think of anything significant enough to say.

In retrospect, I could have talked with him about happiness. Here’s an interview with Project Happiness that was published just last month. I’ll let MCA get the last word.

PROJECT HAPPINESS: What brings you fun in life? What’s fun for you, and what brings you peace?

ADAM: It’s such a simple question, I don’t know why it feels complicated. In terms of what brings me fun in life? Just goofing around with friends… laughing at myself. As for what brings me peace? Just trying not to do anything that’s destructive to anybody else, or trying to do things that are constructive in the world, that really brings me peace. The times when I feel unhappy, I can almost directly trace it to, oh, I shouldn’t have done that, or I shouldn’t have said this, or whatever. That’s what would take away my peace, or make me lose sleep or whatever. If I feel like I’ve done the best that I can or conducted myself in the most constructive way that I can in a situation, then I feel peace.

Re-posted with permission from Literary Kicks.