Keep Your Cliff’s Notes, We Want the Whole Thing Gone

Citizens, we of the Collective challenge your pallid notions of story. “Should’ve” is no more than “didn’t” writ large and shouted down to drown out your fear of failure.

Write what calls to you. Sing your heart’s song, and if the notes you strike stand beside the bars let them. Convention is gathering to wait silence’s fall. Break your bones for ink. Scrawl with mad abandon on the walls and they will crumble to dust.  Build cities of light, lust, and ether where they stood. And kiss your creation goodbye on the instant it’s born.

Every story starts in medias res. The figured wheel turns and we see the revolution in part. Let a thousand errors bloom! Ride into the guns of staid tradition. Fall on your face and stand up laughing at all you’ve learned.

Drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead. Yesterday falls that tomorrow may rise. Teeter on the brink of that vast mad abyss, and should you fall know that the bottom rises to greet you.

Ascend the Throne, Claim Your Crown, And Declare 2009 “The Year Pork Bellies Had No Future”

Citizens, we cannot begin a newer world until we are done with the old.

This is a world of staid conformist toadery, where lickspittles and Communists of every kind run rampant as though the circus were in town and they’d just been given advances on their allowance.  People seek to dispel their demons with fairy dust concocted by chemists, when the answer stares them in their self-bloodied faces: live well! Live like there’s no yesterday! Live wild and weird and free, like the wind in a dead porcupine’s quills.

We of the Collective have found that opportunity knocks but once before heading down the hall to that guy with the lazy eye and the cookie-crumb-crusted gut. Does anyone want to see that sublime beauty in the arms and on the lips of that slovenly beast? No, of course not. So while there’s still a “Vacancy” sign lit over your grave, get up off the sofa and answer the next time she knocks. Maybe clean the place up a bit – polish the turtles, wax the candles, sharpen the radio. Freshen the pepper in the grinder and grind the good salt for a change.

Carpe that Diem, citizens! You only live once, and you can’t be Sean Connery’s butler. The Hooters Girls aren’t coming to save you from your sloth, and there’s no Chippendales Peace Prize just because you got the high score on “Pac-Man vs. Qbert”. You won’t win the heart of that delicious young man down at the pool by fading into the background behind the wallflowers and discarded Toblerone wrappers.

The future belongs to those who understand and embrace the absurdity of all existence without trying to fondle it. Risk is as illusory as any other certainty: it is a cup of bitter tea that packs on the pounds as fast as pure lard. If you want to run the race, strap on your shoes and step toward the finish line instead of staring down your fellow Wikipedians over the history of “Knight Rider”.

Your destiny is no more than the end of the path you’re walking – there’s no map to mistake for the territory, there’s no prophecy worth more than the quatrains you wrote to impress you tenth-grade girlfriend. Carve the message in every tabletop, tree trunk, and treasure chest you see. Burn these holy words on the inside of your eyelids to flash their hot neon truth at you every instant, waking or sleeping: make your fate.

Make this your year!

In Case of Water Landing, Apply Liberally to Face and Teeth

Citizens, this is not the time for timidity.

There are weighty issues afoot. The economy, civil rights, terrorism, the environment, the inexplicable popularity of Charlie Sheen – the stakes have never been higher. And there are still millions on millions of people whose minds are starving for the surreal.

The White Linen Pants Collective believes that we would all benefit from a greater sense of the surreal. Worlds spin around us in empty, pointless majesty. All that lives is born to diet. Surrealism is existential bravado in the face of repression, senility, and an endless parade of Adam Sandler movies. Practice it daily like a monk doing penance for a life misspent as a libertine.  Living weirdly is its own reward.

Go to a cafe and teach the tables Spanish. Invite a turtle to lunch. Fly a kite by moonlight. Kiss your flashlight goodnight. Write a movie script about a day in the life of a matchbook in your kitchen drawer. Wear your top hat and tails to the high school track meet.

Live, citizens! Live!