From Iceland — A WELL-LAID MAN IS A HAPPY MAN

A WELL-LAID MAN IS A HAPPY MAN

Published September 3, 2004

A WELL-LAID MAN IS A HAPPY MAN

You go over to Bæjarins bestu with hot dog on your mind and by the time it´s your turn you´re no longer responding to commands from your belly region. Even cold beer in the hot sun doesn´t make you any more contented. Your beer gets hot as your heart turns cold just thinking about all the rejection waiting out there if you let it anywhere near you. One false move, and there it is, noses turned up, lips quickly moving away, pupils suddenly turning merciless and small. I hope it´s not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. That´s all I´d see when I watch the playback. An endless succession of rejections.
I wanted to be a writer once. A poet. An artiste of some sort. When you spend all your time hanging around bars, you feel more productive if you can convince yourself you´re searching for inspiration. But I couldn´t take it anymore. The pressure got to me. I´d spend all day being rejected by publishers and all evening being rejected by women. I had to quit either one or the other. So I abandoned my artistic career.
It all comes down to the pursuit of happiness. And the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of sex. A well-laid man is a happy man, an unlaid man is unhappy, no matter what else is going on. Money, power, poetry, art. They´re all just shortcuts to sex. Of course, if you have good looks, you don´t need all that. Which is why the beautiful never amount to much. But at least they´re happy.
Will this goddamn summer never end? At least in the winter you can take some joy in the fact that everyone else is miserable too. Except the beautiful, of course. But at least they don´t flaunt their happiness quite as openly. Fuck ´em. Ah, but if only you could…
Goddamn waitresses make you lose your appetite every stinkin´ time. Come over all jolly and bouncy, there to take your order, but if you asked for what you really wanted their smile quickly fades away. That´s why no one ever says anything they really mean. And sunglasses make everyone look cool, cause you can´t tell what they´re thinking. The window to the soul obscured, everyone´s a mysterious stranger in the sun.
Will this goddamn summer never end?

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