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Minor FunLet's pretend that there are only two kinds of fun: major fun, and everything else, which we shall call "minor fun." Major fun is the kind of fun that is so intense, so engaging, so total, that you really know, when you have it, that what you are having is fun. Minor fun is the other kind of fun, the kind you are barely aware of as being fun. Like the watching TV kind of fun, or the eating potato chips, or the day dreaming kind. Minor fun is generally pleasant, mild, kind of euphoric, kind of like flow. Minor fun is what we have when we're doodling, making paper clip chains, twiddling thumbs and other twiddlables, getting comfortable, feeling well-fed. Minor fun is smelling something good, seeing something pretty, hearing something nice, tasting something tasty. Major fun is the fun that people write books about, that people risk their lives for. Minor fun is the kind of fun that people spend most of their time having or wanting. Some times, minor fun can get close to major. Like when you taste something exceptionally, surprisingly delicious. Or when you really, really make love. Then you find yourself feeling all those kinds of things they talk about when they talk about flow. You get timeless. You get completely engaged, totally in the "now." You get larger than life. But most of the time, minor fun stays minor, in the background, barely noticed. I'm thinking that minor fun is something we might really need to pay a lot more attention to. I'm thinking that for every 10 minutes of major fun we spend maybe 10 days having the minor kind. I'm thinking that when we go without minor fun long enough, like maybe 10 minutes, we start getting into some really major misery. I'm thinking that when we were at our most natural, we were having minor fun most of the time. But downtown and in the office and family room what we hear most of the time isn't so much fun. Horns blaring, copiers copying, the TV. I'm thinking that major fun, as fun as it is, isn't enough fun to last us through the hours and days and weeks of hardly any kind of fun at all. And that the maybe the only way for us to find our way back to happiness is for us to spend a lot more time paying a lot more attention to fun of the minor kind. Beginning, for example, with your very desk and the hitherto little-known art of Fun Shui, achieved through the cunning and often haphazard placement and/or removal of photos, toys, plants, miniature fountains, candy jars, pithy sayings, etc,. as practiced in office cubbies around the official world. Continuing, I suppose, with the wearing of comfort clothes to go with the eating of comfort foods, the frequent exchange of greetings, jokes, email, the use of humor, smileys, and other signs of ongoingness.
Theses on Minor Fun 1. Major fun is screaming orgasm. Minor fun is foreplay. 2. Deleuze and Guattari write about minor languages, literatures, groups. Anything smaller than a majority. For them, such forms can't really dominate well, unless they carve out a space for themselves, wherein they become a majority anyway. A society should be as good as the forms of minority it celebrates. Same goes for minor fun. 3. Major fun is a symphony, or rock opera. Minor fun is doodling, hummed under one's breath, a song drifting in over the wind and gone again. 4. In the Phil Dick story, and the lesser Spielborg movie, a "Minority Report" sticks in the craw of majority opinion. Minority fun can muck up the major's (or the Major's) gears. 5. The minor leagues are often for fun. Remember that an amateur is a lover. (See thesis #1) 6. The Morris Minor is a car. Evidence. Fun is attached to it. Evidence. 7. Minor has many associations with childhood, and hence those experts of fun have much to report. (Try typing "fun" into that maximum word fun machine, and see what happens) Miner Fun reserved for another time. Bryan Alexander |
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