Citizens, it is imperative that we all realize the value of self-pity.
Self-pity is the tweezers dropping the fly in the ointment. Self-pity is ten gallons of ice cream for breakfast. Self-pity is the shadow of the clouds that bring torrents of cleansing rain. Self-pity is the friend that never calls until he’s drunk, broke, and in jail.
We all hurt. We all feel shame and pain and fear. And the weight of all that feels like Ossa on Pelion sometimes. But we are each Atlas, strong enough to make moles of our mountains.
Death is the only thing you don’t come back from. Death is the only defeat. Who chooses not to rise chooses not to breathe.
It’s easy for us to beat ourselves up. There’s no challenge in an opponent who won’t fight back. There’s no glory in victory over a spoiled, self-indulgent child. You may as well play checkers with your cat.
There are examples all around us. Trees survive lightning, fires, and droughts with less resources than the least of us. And as tempted as we may be to stop, take root, and wait for troubles to pass around us, each kind thrives best according to its nature.
We make meaning because we need it. We do not accept the hand-me-down dictates of old. We dance on the knife-edge, and no amount of denial will ever blunt that blade.
Take the last chance as your first step. Accept no substitutes for who you have to be.
Categories: Life on the Brink
Tagged: choice, living
Citizens, surrealism does not just happen. We all want to live in a world free of the tyranny of sense. We all want to be the heroes of our own tragicomedies, we all want to sculpt loving tributes to our proud Viking forebears from frozen oxygen. But this takes work. A true revolutionary lives by the defiant sweat of her half-mad brow, dragging the world forward by it’s cute little bunny ears into a bold tomorrow where the soup of the day is glass with paper. Revolution does not come in dribs and drabs, but in a glorious flood sweeping the old order away like so many matchsticks.
Think big! Bite off more than you can chew! Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. Crush your reluctance between the hammer of your will and the anvil of your destiny. Cast your bread upon the water and make a sandwich from the bag. Someone upstream will provide the chips.
Eat cookies for brunch. Read a magazine backwards while translating it into medieval Portuguese. Build several dozen Windex-spewing robots and ship them to your friends.
Sing with the monkeys! Sing! Sing! Dance with the skeleton of Frank Lloyd Wright.
After much careful meditation, ascend to a higher plane of being. Check for free pizza. If none, come home.
Teach a watermelon to gargle. Email the video to your favorite celebrity.
Make today the day you make today your day!
Categories: Living Weirdly
Tagged: defiant sweat, Frank Lloyd Wright, goals, proud Viking forebears, surrealism, watermelon training
Citizens, we are appalled at the state of food today.
It is as if some culinary commissar had issued diktats in favor of bland homogeneous pap. “Food should be colorless and inoffensive,” say the vast herd of restaurateurs. “It should have scent, taste, and texture, all standardized for maximum efficiency of consumption. But it should not taunt the blind nor tempt the innocent with riotous hue, luxurious sheen, or other visual debaucheries more appropriate to the harlot’s bed than the dining table.”
We of the Collective could not agree less. Bring forth a profusion of Day-Glo orange meats and shocking blue grains. Let the dance of spice and savor titillate the eyes as it does the tongue. No more meek sandwiches and salty crisps forgotten the instant they’re consumed. Declare war on your sleeping senses! Rouse them from torpor with every kind of shock and surprise!
The sensual is the surreal, citizens.
Categories: Culinaria
Tagged: cooking, culinary commissars, food, staid conformist toadery
