Progress and the New Young Streak-Free-Shiners

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!

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Probably A Lack of Moisture in the Form of Pear Juice

Citizens, it has been too long.

The silence of the Collective has grown unbearable. Did you realize that an excess of silence leads to tapeworms, burrowing needlers, tiny mice, and occasional halitosis of the mouth? Neither did we, citizens – until now.

So here we are, proudly speaking our minds. We speak truth to power, compassion to justice, trade to manufacturing, affection to affectation, and lymphatic disorders to vodka distillers.

We are not ashamed of our silence – far from it! We embrace it as a long-lost brother whose hearty handshake belies his uncertainty of a good reception after five years spent swindling schoolteachers. But when a game has run its course, when the last car has crossed the finish line and the last driver has finished letting the last liquor spokesmodel suck the last magnum of champagne from her body, then the flag-waver can walk quietly from the track with his head held high. His task is done, and his humble dinner of fresh steak au poivre awaits on a plain table wrought by his father.

Work, citizens, is no more to be shunned than muscular liquor spokesmodels. Let that honest perspiration soak your noble brow. Come home tired from a days’ work for a half-day’s pay, knowing that you have advanced the cause of senseless capitalism an iota at the cost of one irreplaceable day of your life. Be glad that Adam Smith’s invisible hand rests heavily on your ever-weaker back. You are the Atlas supporting this world, and one day – maybe not today, nor tomorrow, nor next Tuesday – you will receive the wages you so justly deserve.

Take up the task of expanding your mind, like a vice set in reverse. Read, think, feel. See what’s in front of you, and what’s to the left of that. Take the scent of the wind that wanders the world. Let no day pass without poetry, the sublime dance of the sacred profound. Look for the meaningless absudity of existence like a tendril of smoke at the heart of a cloud.

That, citizens, is a life surreally lived.

Teach Your Children to Dance, Your Peaches to Laugh, and Your Eyes to Sing

Citizens, we of the Collective recognize only one way to deal with opportunity: grab it by it’s fluffy bunny tail and haul it straight into your arms for a passionate kiss. Opportunity is not your brother, your friend, or any kind of stranger. You are on a first-name basis with that random-fated goddess daily, and her lips are all too eager for yours – but you need to prove yourself worthy.

Grow a pair. Two if you need them, but not less than one. Floor it from the top of the onramp all the way to the end of the lane. Go full afterburner. Tell your ego to write all the checks it wants and sort out the bill later. 

Don’t sit still gathering moss – the market for moss is piss-poor, so unless you savor the tang of poverty and a life well and truly wasted you’ll stand up to the mountain and let your sweat shout defiance at gravity.