Light and dark.

I'm a nice person socially and polite, willing to get along and definitely not a jerk, although I may be a bit lazy and not always want to do a lot of things that take energy if I don't enjoy them. It depends on what it is - I love sports and outdoor recreation, but not 'guy stuff,' like putting together sheds or making home improvements or mowing lawns, so much.

But I refuse to be nice all the way through. It's just not me - there's a rebellious side and an inner conflict and darkness in my soul that won't go away and I'm not sure I want to go away, since it's fused to my very identity. Brendan Perry has a stanza in "Sloth":

Sometimes when I'm sad
I drink to the health of my torment
And dance at the altar
To the tune of a drunken black tango.

Sometimes I feel like that, and it's nothing to do with me being a miserable or burnt-out person.

I just like moody, challenging, sad, haunting but beautiful things. I don't like things that are good and happy with no conflict. I like movies with happy endings but it's sweeter if they had to go through some misery to achieve it. Every writer worth anything knows this and employs it. You can't have a happy story all the way through, or it's just not satisfying.

I like, for lack of a better term, negative music, negative poetry. Novels and movies I like a bit lighter as their length and immersive power can prove overwhelming if they don't contain both dark and light in turn. And by negative, I don't mean I like death metal, or horror movies, or cheap flirtations with senseless gore or psychotic things or have any juvenile fascination with antisocial reaction-provoking. Quite the opposite; I've always hated those things for the cheap trinkets they were, and could never see the point in being a punk literally, though I liked the music when it was couple with intelligence; rebels with a cause, like The Clash.

No, by negative I mean melancholy. Nostalgia. Setting suns. Autumn's first chill. I like Stina Nordendstam and Martin Gore and Cat Power and Swans. I like Emily Bronte and Sylvia Plath and Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and EA Robinson's "Richard Cory." All these things are ineffably, intangibly beautiful to me - fill me with an overwhelming rush of poignancy, bring me just to the point of tears, to that Buddhist "Now" when all my senses are finely honed and open, and I feel alive, and see the world as it is - equal parts majestic and tragically sad.

I suppose I'm a contradiction in some eyes because in a meaningful way I'm really still just a child, and I like very innocent things as well. Winnie the Pooh, The Jungle Book, playing with kids and having action figure wars, throwing a ball back and forth, playing almost any kind of board game, hiding eggs for kids on Easter, watching kids open presents on Christmas (when they're not spoiled kids; and even though it's a tad bittersweet as I recall my own days in Toyland), cute feel-good movies including romantic movies if they're done right, cute children's books if they're done right, and until recently the excited buzz surrounding holidays, though sadly that's now gone. I like stuffed animals and comfy beds and big roaring fires or small cozy ones, and I like the innocence of being with someone you really love, like a contented child, and without any thought of sexual activity.

As usual I suppose I continue to be a person of extremes, either in a kingdom of bliss or a complete void with only the faint tinkle of angelic chimes to break the silence. I fear the days when I can't find any beauty at all. I imagine some of the darkly beautiful things I like (think of Sally singing to herself about Jack in The Nightmare Before Christmas) I like not because of the darkness itself, but because that darkness serves as a contrast to, and to sharpen, the angelic, fragile beauty that's there. It's mournful but not without hope, and so I seize on the hope. When you're bombarded by happy things all the time, it sort of blunts your senses, doesn't it. I don't like cutesy family movies, or much by Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks, except maybe as a distraction which is then pretty much forgettable.

But a Leonard Cohen song, simple, a little dark, but full of aching and longing - that will lodge in my head and heart forever.