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CELEBRATE 2023 - A LIST OF THINGS THAT MADE ME HAPPY IN 2023

1

Having a human body

In Hinduism, it’s said that there are three things more valuable than anything else: rebirth in a human body, the desire to know God and the company of a holy person. I definitely have the first, feel confident I have the second, and am working on the third.

In December of 2023 I was my most ripped self, after having gone to the gym five to seven times a week over the previous twelve months. I used to be a scrawny, pitiful man, weak of body and spirit. I am six feet two inches tall, and have, at times, weighed as little as one-hundred and forty pounds. Not anymore. Today I weigh one-hundred and sixty-seven pounds and feel fantastic, or as close to fantastic as someone still weak of spirit can feel. I’m working on getting ripped, spirit-wise, but for now, I’m happy about the body I’ve built. I have muscle I’ll likely never use, and enjoy the way it looks in the mirror, often while feeling ashamed I enjoy it. Mark Twain said that “vanity is insanity.” Get me my straightjacket.

2

Honesty

I’m not actually six foot two. I’m six foot one and one half inch. Honesty, not distance from floor to crown, is the measure of a man.

No one is more honest than a child, thus the cliche that “children can be cruel.”

Two weeks ago I was in California with my sister-in-law, her husband and their two children, aged seven and nine. Child A and Child B were both lovely to be around, were funny and sweet and endearing. Toward the end of my visit the seven year old, Child A, told my wife—by way of a small hand slicing a shape in the air—that I’d become fat. Imagine someone drawing the letter L, an L whose bottom, instead of being a flat horizontal line, looks more like a pear laying on its side. I knew I’d gained weight—was even proud of it, often announcing to no one the number between my feet on the scale—but assumed it was all muscle. Wrong. Once again, Brad was wrong. Brad was someone new now, he was Fat Brad. Fat Brad had no idea he’d become ‘skinny fat’, that he’d come to embody countless ‘skinny guy pot belly’ JPEGs, all of which redirect users to diet and exercise websites promising to help men of a certain age become their best selves.

I’m happy Child A was so brutally honest. I’m happy I was able to take in this revelation about myself with equanimity, not hostility and bitterness. In sharing this information I’m attempting to pay tribute to Child A, without whom, in 2024, I might be Fatter Brad.

3

Sleep

Pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell claims that ten thousand hours spent doing anything renders one an expert. Assuming eight hours of rest each night, this means that before their fourth birthday, a child is an expert in sleep.

If I, on average, have slept eight hours each night since birth, today I have an astonishing one-hundred and forty-six thousand hours of sleep under my belt. Strangely, and possibly as a refutation to Gladwell’s thesis, I have no idea what I’m doing when I close my eyes, and feel very amateurish when unconscious.

I have far more than ten thousand hours of experience looking at and making paintings. Knowing what I know about the medium can feel like torture. The corniest cliche in art is that we all long to unlearn what we’ve learned, striving to once again paint like children. Picasso, that jackass, is the source of this insipid idea, one that’s led artists to believe they must first be able to paint like Van Eyck before they can allow themselves to paint like Congo, the famous English chimpanzee and abstractionist.

‘Professional’ artists long to paint like children because children paint free of ambition, or in pursuit of money. The suffering which accompanies art making is primarily rooted in the suffering that comes from being engaged in business. Anyone can paint like Congo if they like, there aren’t actually rules about learning a skill then abandoning it. But to paint like Congo or like a child, one has to forget the stress of being an adult, or a non-chimpanzee.

Sleep, the last area of uncompensated activity in the human experience. Because I’ve never been paid to sleep, never had my sleep reviewed or compared to the sleep of others, I can rest with the same nonchalance I had when I was twelve years or six months old. Expertise is exhausting, restrictive and pleasure-killing. Maybe I do have specialized knowledge about how to rest, and maybe I’m an expert at snoring with my eyes shut, but because it blissfully happens while I’m unconscious, I only suffer the pain of being a talented sleeper in my dreams.

4

Mystery

Understanding is overrated. I have no idea how matches work. Each time I light one I feel like I’m witnessing a miracle. Every day I engage in numerous activities—or interact with numerous objects—that I find mysterious. I could solve certain mysteries—like the mystery of the match—simply by educating myself, but then my world would make sense, A would lead to B, and that sounds boring.

Who are these mysterious people I see when I leave my apartment? Celebrity Skin magazine was first published in 1986, devoting each of its glossy pages to photographs of celebrities in the nude. Now defunct, it lives online as various websites, each demonstrating an admirable work ethic when it comes to tracking down stills of actors both famous and obscure without their clothes on. Naomi Watts and Michael Fassbender? Yes, obviously. But also, Adam Richards, who played Cop #3 in Police Academy 4, and Lisa Lipton, who had non-speaking roles in two episodes of late nineties Law & Order. Where are the people hunting down these images and uploading them to shitty, nonprofit websites pro bono? I’ve been in many cities in many countries. I’ve walked idly down a street smoking a cigarette or heading to eat breakfast and glanced briefly at the curtained windows of nondescript apartments. Was the webmaster of videocelebs.net working in that dimly lit apartment in Frankfurt? Was an intern at nudography.com taking a nap above that bookstore in Houston?

Aldrich Ames is currently in prison in Indiana after having been convicted of espionage in 1993. I live in New York, as did Ames at one point while spying for the Soviet Union. He used to contact his handler by making a mark on a certain mailbox with white chalk. This image obsesses me. Who was walking behind Ames and saw him do this, unaware of what it meant? What did they think? Are people all around me communicating with shadowy figures by leaving cryptic messages on mundane objects? My downstairs neighbour often whistles the same note for an unusually long time. Who is he contacting? Why does that older woman at the gym stack her clothes next to the chest press machine, then wipe it down exactly three times before using it? Am I the only person in this city not doing something mysterious and important?

Nude celebrities and espionage barely scratch the surface. Somewhere a man is flattening juice boxes and adding them to an enormous collection he’s been working on for decades. Why? Somewhere a dog is learning to flush the toilet. Somewhere, right now, someone’s writing something in their diary. It means everything to them but nothing to me. What does it mean to everyone else?

5

Character Actors

Andre Braugher died on December 11th, 2023. You might not know him, but you know him. Between 1993 and 1999 he played grumpy detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Streets. Between 1989 and 2011 he also played that guy in countless movies and television shows.

“I know that guy,” you might’ve said to yourself, unable to place him. Braugher often played cops, particularly moody, quasi-philosophical cops. He also played lawyers, and once, on an episode of Kojak, a mugger. You’ve probably seen Andre Braugher and actors like him more than you’ve seen Brad Pitt or Meryl Streep, but you haven’t known their names, and you’ve rarely, if ever, seen them on red carpets or magazine covers.

For the almost half century I’ve been alive I’ve been obsessed with television and movies. I watch reruns of Cheers feeling as familiar with Woody, Sam and Diane as I am with my cousins, my close friends and my grandmother. When I feel depressed, Jessica Fletcher—the irritatingly nosy mystery novelist cum detective from Murder, She Wrote—is there, never nagging or tired of my bullshit. Forever reliable, characters in media remain what I need them to be on repeated viewings. In 2023 I came to realize that the people who make these movies and shows so comforting aren’t the stars but the supporting actors, whose faces I’ve seen migrate from show to show, movie to movie, their names unknown to me, but their effect comforting. If movies and television are a body—Tom Hanks the head, Demi Moore the arms and Morgan Freeman the feet—it’s these unsung players, forever working in the shadows, who generate each successive heartbeat.

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