The Place Where Things Feel Good

and other destinations to consider in 2025

Introduction

February 18th? Perhaps.

I am sitting in a cafe trying to remember the moment. How quickly it goes.

How terrifying that it’s still right back where I left it.

I am exhausted right now by the context of my life. There is far too much to make sense of. And so I think I hide here, at times, in the safety of simply being alive.

Is it hiding? Hiding would imply something of the “real world” which I am still not quite convinced of.

I’ve switched positions in the cafe, from the table in the middle to the bar by the window. The music is soft and a bit angry. I like that. I’m thinking about the way it is absolutely necessary to have someone to speak to in an artwork.

In The Place Where Things Feel Good

In the place where things feel good, everything is completely unlimited in direction and opportunity and possibility for eternal expansion. Combine two entities in this state of limitlessness and watch how big infinity can get. This is why we get so excited about “working together”. In the place where things feel good, this type of huge space is not at all scary, unlike the case of the place where things feel bad.

In this bad place, which may be easier to describe, some feelings of emptiness accompany the great expansiveness of everything. Eternal joy becomes a humiliating monotony. In the place where things feel good, one can laugh at this humiliation. Just absolutely die in the way that yet again we’ve fallen for joy.

I’ve begun sipping my latte with a kind of frantic pleasure. I look out the window and see a woman in the house across the way eating nuts on the couch, one by one out of a bag and looking occasionally right back at me.

I can see through to the back of the house, in and out the tall windows and there seems to be a small patio, or yard, or porch (I cannot see the flooring, only the space), the other side of which contains a different window to a different house and I get lost in a thought of whether or not I am making any sense.

This question of sense, again, is still less pleasant terrain than the woman staring at me eating nuts. What has become interesting, is that she is undeniably aware that I am looking too. We have maintained eye contact for long enough to be certain of each other. I am now sure that I am a part of her morning. She has headphones on and I think she’s talking because she’s swaying slightly and I think she’s forgotten about me now because of how freely she’s moving. Suddenly, with all of this permission, I feel like a terrible intruder. What scandalous surprise did I hope to find in her peaceful morning? The feeling of being alone with yourself is one we all know pretty clearly.

I get lost so easily today, slipping back into the past and future and forgetting the page, and thus the moment, altogether. And on each return is the same delight. Across the way, a woman exits from a door made of wood, framed with yellow bricks and a stone awning with a real kind of intricacy for something so rundown. Out front the birds hop on a bush or maybe it is a tree. They fit so easily in the bush/tree’s many branches – bouncing effortlessly though the shivering leaves.

A note on shivering: I wrote first that the leaves were twinkling and I was unable to move on, for their motion is clearly much colder and far less predictable than any twinkle I have known.

The sun is coming out or perhaps it was always out and I am only now in one of those moods to notice the sun’s positioning. The day today has an undeniable desolation to it, and I think it is that feeling I am holding off on confronting. Few people pass the cafe today, and the ones that do look very cold or unhappy, like the couple that has parked in front of me now and seems to bicker about something that hasn’t happened yet and I’m sure is still absolutely upsetting.

So what about the inside of this cafe? If no one seems delighted to be outside on a day like today?

Inside, the familiar relief is there, but I sense that it is tired. I am glad to be in the comfort of these indoors on a day as February as today, but even this comfort is beginning to grow old. This is a thing I believe the seasons are for. To minimize the chances of getting stuck in any familiar feeling too long.

I have felt this type of unsteadiness before, some terrifying way of holding both good place and bad place very close together. I have experienced the way it tastes to to drink the foam of a latte once it is cold and thick like a swamp at the bottom of my drink. But have I felt this flavor of mouth and heart on a day like this one – cold in the kind of way that wants us home alone eating nuts on the couch? Together, it is all delightfully fresh.

And here we are again, right back in the laughable monotony of the situation. Always something to marvel at. What a surprise.

This is such a good argument that I am almost proud of the complexity my doubt has taken on. It feels an honor to know a demon this well.

Trying to Cheer Each Other Up

For a period of time, the music in the cafe became even angrier than it was at the beginning of my time here. It’s softened again and I am enjoying the way it is trying very hard to cheer me up. I cannot say it’s not working.

Trying to cheer someone up is one of the very nicest things you can do, and it’s such a shame that the act is always received by a cranky person. For this reason, the act of trying to cheer someone up becomes not only one of care but one of remarkable bravery. For a moment in time you seriously feel like an idiot, making some very funny jokes to a person that hates you more for each word.

I think that I’ve fallen in love with every person who has given me this gift – the gift of moving me from the place where things feel bad to the place where things feel good by testing the seriousness of my devastation. Devastation rarely seems to run as deep as we want to believe.

And so a day like today takes on a certain precarity. Shall we hold our despair together with levity? Or hate each other in our futile attempts to cheer each other up?

We are seriously so fucked right now. Let’s start by laughing at that.

Conclusion

I think of ending this activity but I am enjoying myself so much. It seems that I can write myself into love and I am not ready to leave. Patches of snow line the street, though they are very sparse and completely filthy and I think of what a filthy thing filth is, what an ugly concept, what a tragic thing to be so known. This, I believe, is the allure of the Truth. The Truth is always something impossibly simple, terrifyingly plain, blindingly obvious and humiliating in the way you have only just now arrived at its elementary conclusion. The Truth and its wake of oblivion will decimate us over and over again – that, I do think, is a promise. And so the reason to choose this deal?

In all Truth’s tragedy, filth does not grow well in this particular ecosystem of honesty.

The ecosystem of the heart is a beautiful question. Still less interesting though than the cold man who just walked past, that kind of wobbly stagger in his step, wrapped in a very puffy very bright orange coat with his bald head poking out of the top, exposing a vulnerable amount of skin for the temperature of today’s air.

There is such an agency that comes with the understanding that today is a story for me to tell. That my piece of the moment is something undeniable. That we’re all part of it. Where else would we be?

I have begun to feel an agitation. The day is calling to me. I have been reminded of my mission.

Yours,

Tala

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