COMING UP WITH A COMPLETE LIST OF WAYS TO FEEL GOOD

20 minutes milling around in the corridor - just enough for us all to get done saying hello and talking about the game and to start to whet our curiosity about what the assignment was going to be. When they opened the door we couldn't have been more ready. We shuffled in to where they had a bunch of desks set out, each with a beautiful, plump pad of fresh writing paper and frankly and honestly the most mouth-watering pencil you've ever seen, long and elegant, made of pale wood, STAEDTLER embossed on the side in royal blue, pristine eraser on the end, point tastefully sharpened, by which I mean that it wasn't overly sharp - by which I mean it wasn't going to snap as soon as I set it to paper - if this has happened to you before you remember it, and you remember how undignified it feels to chase the broke-off nib of graphite to prevent it being caught between the paper and the flesh of your hand to trace embarrassing spidery shapes in the periphery of the page. We sat down and they said Welcome, and we all said Thanks - great to be here, a pleasure, we're obviously intrigued - can't wait to dig in, and so on. And the director, who had red cheeks and the mischievous smile of a boy, said - Well, we've got a good one for you today, and we're really looking forward to seeing what you come up with, because this is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people, and we just know you're going to have a whale of a time getting it done - matter of fact it's all I can do not to shrug off this lab coat and dismiss one of you from the session today so's I can tuck in to this one myself, is the truth of it. But I jest - and all the lab techs laughed along with him, and we laughed along too, because it would have been a real kick to see the director pull up at one of the desks, but it was also ridiculous.

Then he said, Today we're asking you to come up with a list of ways to feel good, as complete as you can, we want the full range, we want to see all interests and desires reflected here - then he paused and said, Now, you know I can't tell you why, but let's just say that what you come up with today is going to play a big part in developing new rewards and incentives, and he winked at us, and Billings the lab tech lifted the whistle to his lips and puffed and then shouted Write! and we picked up our pencils and got to work.

Ways to feel good - easy for me, because I enjoyed much, and I took great pleasure in the things in my life which yielded to me a spiritual reward. I wrote down "flowers - pick a flower," then, collecting my thoughts, circled it and drew a curving arrow down to the next line where I wrote "PICK A BOUQUET OF WILDFLOWERS," underlining it, then progressed my form by, on the next line, in my best hand, writing "Buy a gorgeous bouquet of flowers from the florist downtown next to the French restaurant and set it in a vase on the kitchen windowsill," at which point I felt I was now drilling into the specifics of that which truly made me feel good, and I kept going: "Catch a fly that has been irritating me," then "Catch a fabulous, iridescent beetle," then "Set a glue trap on the porch and see what ends up in there." I reviewed my work and was horrified to see that 100% of it was so far devoted to flowers and bugs - not at all representative of most of the things that make me feel good, and furthermore seemingly the output of a 10-year-old boy on summer vacation, with agency of his own but not yet hardened by cynicism - which would be embarrassing if, when they were collating our output, it turned out that the collater was a sexy female scientist and the responses were not anonymised and she thought I was a child or a childish man. So I changed tack a little and tried to write down things that I felt were more universal catalysts of good feeling that also had a poetry to them and perhaps also were somewhat masculine-coded, and I wrote "Summer afternoon walk alone through dappled light of pine forest," and "Craft beautiful item yourself", and "Make and drink tea," "Tie dye a t-shirt", "Buy a gift for a friend", "Go to the museum," all of which I stood behind and felt proud of as pencil was raised from paper at completion of sentence - and that was when Billings blew the whistle for a second time and called, Stop writing! and we looked around us in amazement like, Now hold on a tick - we're creating a comprehensive document here, a complete list of every way that a person might feel good, and we got - what? Three minutes? Three minutes, we got?

They collected the papers and waved goodbye and we shuffled back out to the corridor, deflated - or at least I was, and found myself deflating further as the comparative cheerfulness of my cohort made me despair over the way forward for us - the big US - by which I mean people. And because I have an expressive face, with eyebrows that have been described as "vivacious" and lips which tend to turn up or down with my mood, regardless of any attempt to control them, it wasn't long before some of the others turned to me and said Hey - hey - what's the matter? Couldn't think of anything? And I had to remind them that the Director had intimated to us, hell, practically told us, that they would be using the findings from our session to program rewards schemes the world over, that we, tiny cogs in a vast and crushing machine of control, had been given that one brief moment to secure happiness for billions, no less than a mission of salvation, the pebble in a pond on whose surface ripples of happiness would lap over our descendents for maybe forever, but that even with such a mission we had been unable to harness our energies in service of the common good. And that furthermore it just went to show how much of an afterthought happiness was to these people, since they'd only given us three minutes to come up with the list.

And they all laughed and said Relax, it's not that deep, and I shook my head sorrowfully. And they said No - for real - it's not about that - the Director is a sort of industrial artist, Warholesque, after Holzer, after Landers - many connections in SoHo, both SoHos, actually - all three, in fact, there’s a third SoHo now - drawing on interactivity in a focus group setting, experimenting with notions of "human resources", with the dialectics of desire and so on. He broke new ground at Credit Suisse with his installations. You must have heard of that series. At H&R Block he’s basically a partner, his deliverables are so notable. You must have heard of them. And there was an email about this. You didn't see it? And best of all you'll be listed as a collaborator on this project. There'll be a sign at the gallery entrance, when this piece is installed. This will be huge for you and your work. You have work, right? Mixed media? Sculpture, something like that? Oh? Well, you'll get a lot out of the piece. That's what all this is about. It's about desire, and feeling good. There'll be a label at the gallery if any questions remain, which they will - which they ought to, considering the work. There’ll be volunteer staff there who can guide visitors towards the answers, if need be. Mainly art students.