I asked the cashier for a bag because I was too ashamed to carry it out of the store. In question: Marley and Me, the DVD.  I was looking for a lachrymal stimulater — in other words, I wanted a good cry. I should have rented Love Story. Never fails.

Before I discuss what this post is really about I want to ask, if anyone knows, did Owen Wilson try to kill himself before of after this movie? And next, whatever they used to put that dog down so peacefully, I’d like some of that when I lose my verve to chew through manuscripts.

When I was fourteen, I went to an “alternative” arts camp. Instead of putting on Fiddler on the Roof and Guys and Dolls as we had at my previous camp, I was now in plays by Lanford Wilson and Edward Albee. Musicals gave way to theater, or more precisely drama. It was my first exposure to “serious” art and, little sponge that I was, I picked up on my counselors’ disdain for Neil Simon and his ilk. I came home that summer changed. Soon after, I started reading poetry and writing. And I would continue to gravitate towards counselors and teachers who shared a similar world view.

I wonder how my tastes would have developed without that experience. I’m still a deeply sentimental person. At a recent middle school performance of “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown,” you could find me bawling during what may have been the most off-key rendition of “Happiness” the world has ever heard.

I like to cry. I want to cry. So what does it take? Why did four million or so people cry for Marely, and not me? Or Tuesdays with Morrie? Or Last Lecture? My dying uncle, who read and loved Tuesdays with Morrie, said I was a snob.  People cry when labradors and old professors and young professors die because it’s fucking sad. But it’s kind of like Woody Allen’s line: if a person is stoned and you get a laugh out of them, it doesn’t count.

Why do we feel one kind of writing is manipulative and another authentic, when it’s all manipulative? There was a really cute guy at that alternative camp who I had a major crush on, until he read me one of his poems. We were in the woods and I believed my first kiss was around the corner. He read the poem as if he were alone, which is to say with too much feeling. When I said that I didn’t think it was quite working, he said in his own defense: these are my feelings, you can’t criticize feelings.

A  full calendar year would pass before I would know the sublime pleasure of a first kiss.

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