Sam Cooke - Good Times
The Persuasions - Good Times
Jamie Xx - Good Times (feat. Young Thug & Popcaan)

You bought it because of a cute girl at a party. This was a few years ago, right after you moved back to the city - you found yourself in a corner at someone's birthday whatever, talking to this person you'd never meet again about her PhD in neuroscience. She'd been studying the different ways a person could change their brain's chemistry without pills, she told you - how all the methods stack up against each other, where your sadness comes from, how to build up your walls. Exercise, she said, looking at you in a way that made you feel far too seen. The second you feel that gear shift from season to season, just start running. It helps everything.

The last time you'd bought a pair of sneakers was in high school, when you'd cry period cramps every other gym class and then sneak off in your shorts to smoke weed alone out by the loading dock. Exercise! You picked at your beer label, grasped for anything that wasn't that memory. What about... those lamps?, you asked, you idiot.

Of course nothing. Those ones you sit in front of? That are supposed to act like sunlight. Or whatever.

Oh yeah, she said. Like, SAD lamps? shrugging, draining her beer, checking her phone, not even giving you the chance to go there's absolutely no fucking way that's what they're called.

But so then just like that there's you, shotgun in your dad's Jetta at 11 on a Wednesday morning, headed to some Craigslist hoarder's Mississauga bungalow because "UPLIFT BRAND S.A.D. LAMP $65 OBO, STILL IN BOX." The house smells like cat pee and old carpet and the guy tries to charge you an extra $5 you do not have on you. Your dad idles in the car outside; those high school sneakers are stuffed in a box in a bag under your bed, untouched and ticking.

You get it back to your place, maneuver it onto the kitchen table, and: this thing does not fuck around. "UPLIFT," yes, stamped across the box plus a huge unpeelable sticker on the back. Not heavy but cumbersome; cartoon-briefcase-oversized, complete with a handle at the top in case you want to take it to work with you every morning I guess? But the most surprising thing about it is the light - even though, like, duh. You press the switch and the room just floods; clear-June-a.m.-with-a-hangover light, everywhere. You and your boyfriend just stand there in front of it like the 2001 monkeys, gaping as it gently x-rays you.

And then for years you just, like, have it. That winter, every morning after he leaves for work, you slump in its glow and stir your cereal; at first you turn it off after the half-hour the instructions recommend, but eventually, fuck it, you just leave it on and let it light the room while you sit all hunched over on the couch, doing your weird scammy from-home writing job.

Soon you'll have parties in the dead of winter where your friends come over and gaze into its cornea-scorching glow, drink beers before it, try to see if they can register a change. Soon you'll start moving it from room to room (that's what the handle's for!), and then, after the breakup, from apartment to apartment. When people come over and see it in the corner of your new bedroom they'll ask, and then when you tell them they'll want to know if it works. And you can say whatever you want, but the actual truth is that you have no clue, that you've been sounding out the different notes in this question for years but have come no closer to figuring it out, if anything are probably further and further away each time. Is sadness made inside or outside the body? What do you need to get the levels right? Still, though, you keep it on your desk just in case, because who knows? It might work or it might not but it's a witness. A nice idea. It glows.

[Buy Portrait of a Legend / Street Corner Symphony / In Color]