Life Is…

By someone else on March 15th, 1995

Life is shit. Life is shit and dandelions. It’s not good and bad, not truth or untruth, not Heaven or Hell, it’s shit and dandelions. Shit is real, it makes things grow, but it sucks. It’s shit. Gross, disgusting, evil, twisted, and absurd. Absurd whenever it takes itself to be anything more than shit, and that’s why I hate it. But life’s dandelions, too. I don’t mean roses and white lace, dandelions are children with food on their faces, cartwheels and trampolines, finding rainbows, puddlejumping on rainy days, pina coladas, and snowdays. Life is nothing serious. Nothing at all. Nothing worth taking seriously, nothing worth dying for. It’s only worth living for.

Everything serious exists because I can recognize that life is shit and dandelions both. If it was either one or the other I could respect myself taking nothing seriously, but it isn’t, it’s both. Since I see that it’s both, I have things I have to take seriously, things that are worth dying for. Love… My concept of self… And all my morals are almost that important.

Notes from Kate

This was written by Chris Konkel, someone I knew in college.

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How to be Happy

By someone else on October 1st, 1994

We can call ourselves “Partners in Sin”. I’ll need your help thinking of creative and fun ways to be a sinner. Kinky sex would be a start, I think, along with living together, shirking debt, and evading “responsibility” by running away together to Newark, New Jersey to hawk pork-o-dogs to busy commuters, kissing each other after each and every ketchup squirt. Then we could stay together for life and never have kids or a dog named Ralph, but we’d sure have lots of pork-o-dogs. Right before we were about to die of extreme old age (jog 8 miles a day until 95 years of age, then BAM, life’s over), we’d hike the Pacific Crest Trail back from New Jersey to Washington and visit all of the weak, unhappy people who are just like us except for one thing: they decided to climb the corporate ladder instead of an elm tree, and life just went downhill from there.

A simple thing like that is what decides your fate; you have to be able to identify it and say THIS is what I must do to live a life like that smiling 95 year-old who just kissed his lifetime companion with the passion of a young lover meeting his bride for the first time, THIS is what I must do. The secret to a happy life could be anything from a job at the Nordstroms perfume bar to a hairy man on a Harley here to take you away from your bills to see the world, or possibly Pennsylvania instead, he doesn’t know. If you’re lucky, you’ll know your harley-man when he comes and ride off into the sunset, looking and marveling at each little yellow stripe on the Pennsylvania highway and knowing at last that this road of roads leads to that smiling old man, and this is what you wanted all along.