Marie Taunts Renard, Who Bakes a Tart and Marries It Instead

Citizens, we live in perilous times.

Certainly this is no news to most of you. Murders with massive agendas kill in the name of deities who reject their mayhem. Your money is worth less than half of what it was even a year ago. A year takes 37% more time to end than it once did. Feet are shorter, meters thicker, and Buckminster Fuller is spinning in his icosahedral crypt. Or so we are told by the Fourth Estate, standing athwart the doorway of Truth with arms sternly akimbo. But is it the way in or the way out? Time may tell, but few speak her language.

All the more reason for us to reject what we have been told to accept as reasonable. When logic falters and truth’s hard bright flame flickers against the swallowing dark, the sensible seek the senseless. Look beyond the teachings of the dead, and find your own truth in what your eyes see and your hands touch. The creaking in the walls is the cry of shifting foundations. 

Our world is the thinnest sugarpaste shell of illusion over the hard bitter nut of a reality only the ice-veined dare face in full. Berate the baker if you like, but the bill’s paid and it’s yours in a pink box taped shut.

So what do we do, we skimmers? We dance. We make sport of our lives on the tension between the concrete and the inconceivable. We learn the grace to dip our toes in the depths when we must and slide on fine hairs over the thin film that shields the abyss. We tell our lovers how very beautiful and loved they are, and we kiss them as though death were moments away.

 

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!