'Join Me' and 'Yes Man' are semi-autobiographical memoirs/novels (some parts must be exaggerated, surely?) halves of one story, as published in 2003 and 2005. They are probably meant to be separate stories, but the symmetry is so strong it's easier to treat them as one. In 'Join Me' Danny Wallace, who has surely made more lives better than we will ever know in a thousand tiny ways, started a collective (it's not a cult!) by accident and loses his girlfriend, while in 'Yes Man' he was inspired by a man on the bus to 'say yes more' and does so for most of a year, while finding new love in the process of risking all. It may all sound a bit twee, or a bit silly, but they do work and they do capture a transitional stage in the life of a man called Danny. Danny might be a bit strange, but he's jolly nice with it.
Note: these books are a bit sweary so they must be good to get past my swearing intolerance. Remember that as we go on, if we can go on past this writers block. Oh, trumpety trump! It's like trying to think through a brain of syrup. Incoherence, giant ear muffs over the eyes. Keep going, keep going!
In a sense it's superfluous to go into details of how the founder of Join Me put up adverts in local media simply saying to join him, and to send a passport photo to his address in a demonstration of dedication, and that people actually did it. In an era when people famously have stopped joining things, people joined him when not even he knew what the point was yet. And through all this and personal tragedies, although not too great tragedies as the surely partly fictionalised girlfriend Hanne was a bit mean, there exists a Karma Army as a result to this very day. A Karma Army that does random acts of kindness just for the fun of it. That's an awesome thing to have on your list of things accomplished: Started international army of kindness. It's not a 'stupid boy project' at all. That's all I'll say about 'Join Me' as it really deserves to be read to be enjoyed, and serves mainly as a prelude to the one I really love, 'Yes Man'.
'Yes Man' was the book I read first, picking it up at random from a rack of bestsellers in a supermarket. 'Yes Man' is the one with an unalloyed happy ending. 'Yes Man' is dramatically worse, but almost offensively wonderful. Go read it. Please, for sanity's sake. In the aftermath of the events of 'Join Me' and some other events, Danny is a bit sad, withdrawn from the world and taking no risks. One day that man on the bus appears, and everything changes. At a surface level, the whole thing is more contrived, but it's also just that bit more romantic than 'Join Me'. Encapsulated into the narrative is a different paradigm to life, and one that people rarely even consider. Yes, it is rampantly silly to say yes to everything ('si a todo!'), but it is also one of the healthiest ideas to crawl out of a cave and scream for attention in many many centuries. We should all say yes more, or as the default, and leap into the unknown. (Note: I haven't, but plan to sometime. Stop looking at me. Oh fine, tomorrow then!)
Of course these two books were never meant to be self-help manuals but really works of entertainment. Their value is incidental or to some extent accidental, but that value does exist. It exists within the witty and self-deprecating prose of Danny, the adventures he gets up to in what some declare 'stupid boy projects' but which are really acts of sanity. In the mad mad world of the remaining twenty-first century some things are going to have to go. Conformity is something that will hold more people back on the grand scale, and quite a few of them are people who would like to join something that does nice things, and go through life 'saying yes more'. Here's to them, and here's to Danny. He's changed lots of lives, including mine tangentially, and maybe it's time to just finally give in on the hypocrisy and say yes to 'Join Me'. Or maybe you should instead?
O.
Note: The following book 'Friends Like These' didn't work for me personally. I therefore do not write about it except to note that it exists, and you might like it. If you exist. If any of us exist. This post was completed in place of 'What if there is a God and his name is Ernie?', which is in development torture. Sigh.
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