Every year, NPR (or some other media outlet that is equally unafraid of the fun things in life) reports the winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, and I always mean to write about it, but end up instead reading all the winning passages and surfing off into other such awards (Bulwer-Lytton, the Ig Nobels, etc.) that honor spectacular failure.
I recently stumbled upon Bad Sex again, however, and coupled with my dog, it has become the final nudge I needed to get back into indulging in the things I love (like cringe-provoking non-sequitur).
No, dammit, I do not think of my dog and bad sex in any sick way. My dog, Hanna, who we got as a pup with three legs, is now eight-ish, and cancer has taken one more leg, leaving her with two on the left side and none on the right. We aren’t sure how much time the operation has bought her, but she is happy and perky and playing and social: no less a joy, and no less full of joy, than she was when we first met. She does not, like the winners of “failure” awards, let loss stop her. She doesn’t seem, anyway, to mope about bemoaning her lot in life, wishing for the good-ol’-four-legged days. She simply grabs what she can, be it food, a squeaky toy, a nice grassy spot in the sun, or affection and wrings all the joy out of it and into her being. She chews on the rawhide she has, wasting no time wishing for the ones that she walked past at PetCo.
Ok, yeah, I know that sounds all self-help-y and fluff-nauseating, but sometimes it takes these things to remind me that life is short. I used to write, out of joy. I used to compose, sing, and play music, also out of joy. I stopped doing these things somewhere along the way, in part because I let myself believe that if I weren’t fantastic at them, I shouldn’t waste my time creating, and should just consume the art of others. I let myself believe, as well, that any attempt that failed was proof that I should give up. Both of these thoughts, however, are bullshit. My brain knows this, and my mind is catching up, thank goodness.
Therefore, the people who win Ig Nobel, Bulwer-Lytton and Bad Sex awards are my new patron saints. They stand as beacons of the idea that failure is:
- subjective,
- proof of trying, and
- practice toward success, not to mention
- meaningless, if the attempt gives satisfaction.
I will, from now on, sing my own songs, write my own poems and stories, dance my own funky moves and taste everything that is handed to me. Yeah!
