11 Ways to be Average

see counter response here:  The Average Life

Freddy and Jason Forever

great art

"Great art is when you come across an object and you have a fundamental personal one on one relationship with it and you understand something you didn't already understand about what it means to be alive.  


That is why people with loads of money want to possess it.  
That's why it's worth so much fucking money.  
But it isn't.  
They want to possess it. 
But you can't.  
Throw money at art, you get nothing back.  
You die."


-- On the Way to Work by Damien Hirst, Gordon Burn


more Hirst

Enjoy Yourself

song by Louis Prima

I Am So Starving

I Am So Starving

BY BRITTANY BIRNBAUM

Oh, my God, I am so starving. I swear, if I don't get something to eat in like two minutes, I am going to die.

I cannot believe how completely famished I am. Why do we have to wait for Tyler to get home from soccer practice? I want to eat now. It's almost 6:15.

I didn't even get to eat lunch today. Erica and I had to sign up for kickline tryouts at noon. We got to the cafeteria way late, and we weren't about to stand in line with the sophomores. All I had was a Twix and half a bag of Fritos. Plus, the stupid machine was out of Diet Coke.

No, I did not still have those carrot sticks left at lunch. I ate them all after second period. Duh.

Did you hear that? I can totally hear my stomach making these weird growling noises. I think I'm going to faint.

Please, please, please let me eat now so I can go up to my room--I have a ton of people to call tonight. It's so lame how you make us all wait to eat dinner together. Erica always gets to eat by herself in the living room with the TV on.

If we're going to wait this long for Tyler, he has to load the dishwasher. I did it last night, and it was totally nasty because you made that lasagna, and I had to scrape all the gunky cheese off the pan.

I am so totally starving. You know, it's against the law to treat your kids like this. You could get thrown in jail by the social-services people for this kind of abuse.

Oh my God, what are you taking out of the oven? Is that, like, salisbury steak? I could seriously puke just looking at that. You actually expect me to eat that? Yeah, right. Like I'm really gonna put that in my mouth. I'll be in my room if I get any phone calls.

Ugh. I swear, I could just die.

Counterpoint

I Am So Starving

BY KITUM ASOSA

My God, I am starving. If I do not find something to eat soon, I will surely die.

Hunger consumes my life. My young body is hunched and weak, as if I were an old man. Some days, I pass the time by counting my bones.

I would walk 100 miles through the desert to reach a handful of millet. The sight of a sparrow carcass would make my mouth water, if only I were not too dehydrated to salivate. I have not eaten a full meal since the last rain, which caused a few precious patches of field grass to sprout. Soon, there will be none of us left.

I am so very, very hungry. I grow thinner and thinner, as my body starts to digest its very self. The last thing I ate was a small lizard. This was nine days ago. I gave half of it to my only remaining brother. I did this to return a favor: Last month, he discovered a piece of tree bark and shared his bounty with me. Unfortunately, my body was so unaccustomed to food, I was soon doubled over in pain, as a flood of liquid shot from my bowels. Ever since then, my rectum has protruded from my anus. My lower intestines have begun to push their way out, as well.

They say it is almost the new year, but I do not know if I will live to see it. My stomach is swollen as if I were pregnant. I joked with my brother about this yesterday, rubbing my bloated belly and calling it "my little one." My brother did not laugh. He lowered his head and cried.

My legs are like sticks and my eyes nearly sightless. I am careful not to allow myself to daydream about the harvest feasts of my youth, for my weak heart might race and burst in my chest. Those who are still alive have taken to swallowing dirt and rocks in an attempt to stop the hunger pains. Oh, God, why are we made to suffer so?

My only distraction from the constant, gnawing hunger is the chill that runs through my bones. Even in the sweltering heat, I am cold. Perhaps I will soon die of pneumonia. This would finally quell the pangs of hunger. I long to live, but, even more, I long to die.

SOURCE:  http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-am-so-starving-vs-i-am-so-starving,11541/

obey, consume, repeat.

I'm Not Dead Yet.

My father was initially diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2000 or 2001. His doctor gave him six months. He went home, curled up on the couch, and stayed there for two days. On the third day he sat up, announced to his wife "I'm not dead yet" (probably not in the Monty Python voice), and proceeded to play guitar, watch football, and get drunk.

Through several months of treatment and testing, his cancer went into remission, and he lived - happily and healthily - until new tumors were discovered in 2008.

He died early Christmas Day, 2009. Less than a week before his death, he was performing with his band at a local pub - just as he had for all his adult life. He never stopped doing what made him happy, and when he passed he was surrounded by people who loved him, loved being around him, loved the person he was and the person he inspired others to be.

His last words to me were "What are YOU so worried about?" as I helped him back into his hospital bed. He never stopped joking around.

He fought cancer with hope. He didn't hate what his life had become. He didn't spew bile about the illness all the time. Yes, he bitched occasionally - he had every right to. Yes, he had days where he was in pain or couldn't eat. Yes, the treatments were often just as bad, if not worse, than the effects of the cancer itself. None of this mattered to him though. He just enjoyed his life, as much as he possibly could, until his time was up.

He was probably the strongest person I will ever know, and it's not because he was strong in the face of cancer. It's because he had the courage to live his life the way he wanted.

We're all dying right now. Every one of us. I could die tomorrow. You might feel robbed of the vague promise of longevity, but really you've been given permission to infuse your life with all the joy, enthusiasm, and reckless abandon most people wistfully reserve for their retirement.

You don't have to wait for the right job, the right person, the right season, the right place. You've been granted the right to live your life the best way you can, right now. And there are thousands of people here cheering you on.

So, do the things you've always wanted to do. Or just do the things that make you happy. Fill your time with enjoyment and appreciation. We should all be living our lives this way, because we could die at any moment.

Be kind to yourself, stay hopeful, and love what you have. My thoughts are with you.

Source:  http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hrte6/iama_24_year_old_who_just_received_a_death/

Old person responds to a young person's plea: "My friend just died. I don't know what to do."

by GSnow

Alright, here goes. I'm old. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not. I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gorged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see.

As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

Source:  http://www.reddit.com/r/Assistance/comments/hax0t/my_friend_just_died_i_dont_know_what_to_do/c1u0rx2?context=3

Sitting is killing you

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

When he died, his wife commissioned this sculpture as an expression of her love for him

Sculpture by Peter Schipperheyn, "Asleep"

Source:  Mt Macedon Cemetery in Victoria, Australia

How to Write Your Own Kick Ass Obituary

Let's be honest, most obituaries are not all that good. The worst part about them is that you are never around to read your own obit and see what a great person you were. Here are some great ideas if you want an exciting obituary that everyone will enjoy reading. As a bonus, you can get even with the people that made fun of you in high school and make a few bucks.

1. Write your own obituary

It is imperative that you write your own obituary or have a trusted friend do it BEFORE you die. If you do not, your Aunt (who has her own blog and fancies herself as a “writer”) will type it up and it will suck and you’ll be stuck with an awful summation of your life.

Once you do finish writing your own obit, make sure you send a draft copy out to all your family and friends so that they can miss you while you are still alive. They will then have the opportunity to pay to be included in the obituary (see section #5) or pay to be excluded from the obituary (see section #8.)

2. Don't give them the satisfaction

Most people will suggest you start off an obit with the person’s name, the date they died and how they died. I suggest you start off with “You are not going to believe this!” or “Guess what that fat f*ck Bob did now” or “You were right.” Don't include your age so that your friends don't get the satisfaction of outliving you.

3. Doug who?

No one knows you by your real name so why die by that name? Nicknames that were used independently of your name go in quotation marks in the middle of your real name.

Robert “Stacks” Gutfruend

Joan “Cookie Monster” McCreedy

Nicknames that were part of your job or the reason you went to jail go before your real name:

“Handsy” Jim Handland

“Luscious Diamond” Tina Ralph

“Tea-Bag” Bill Billingsworth

Or if you don’t want anyone to know you died, just post a fake nickname.

John “Two-Sack” Christopher

If you didn’t have a nickname in real life, make sure you make one up or tell your obit writer your suggestions before you die. And don’t post your middle name. We’re not monogramming a sweater here.

4. Rhyming and haikus make for great obituaries

I suggest trying them together.

You smoked like a fire

Now you're atop a pyre

No flowers please, Thanks!

5. No one cares

No one cares about who died before you or how many cousins you have that are still alive. If your relatives want in your obit, charge them $5 - $10 a mention.

No one cares where you went to school or where you earned your associates degree. List your favorite bars or hang outs. People are more likely to remember Johnny “Cantaloupes” Mullroy from the bowling alley, rather than a graduate of Lancaster High School class of 1988. (Go Gales!)

6. People like excitement

Don’t die of cancer. Die of a space borne alien parasite.

Don’t die in a car accident. Get hit by a meteorite.

Die a hero (stolen from Royal Tennebaums) "Died Tragically Rescuing his Family From the Wreckage of a Destroyed Sinking Battleship."

And do not fail to give a reason for why you died or people will assume it was from something embarrassing. Everyone knows that a non-mention means "bled to death from a masturbation accident."

7. Get donations now

There are services that will “loan’ you a lump sum of money now and get that money back when you die through the "Please donate to" charity suggested in the obituary. The loan companies have names like, “The Amerikan Heart Foundation” and “The Redd Cross” and “Amway.” At the bottom of your obit, have money sent to them in lieu of flowers. If you can’t come up with enough donations to cover your loan, they will take your suit/dress, coffin and body parts to make up the difference.

8. Let those jerks have it

An Obituary is the perfect time to get back at all the people who have pissed you off your entire life. Being dead is the perfect cover for a lie or to let out a really stinky truth. Here are a few examples:

-I never loved you (insert family member’s name here.)

-Coach Rogers touched me on my pee pee after baseball practice.

-I had herpes. Now I have worms.

-Aunt Tina, I was and always will be a Red Sox fan.

-My G-mail and MySpace password is clicktowin34. Go ahead and read my e-mails, honey.

This is also a perfect opportunity for relatives to make “pre-donations” to be excluded from this portion of the obituary. For $10 now, Uncle Bob won't get outted. For $50 neither will your Uncle Lou whom you found with Uncle Bob.

Here is my Obituary, just so you know:

Doug “Holyjuan” Messerschmit

Well, you can all stop placing your bets. Doug is dead. You won’t see him at B-Hampton’s or at Skully’s anymore, but you can see him Ray’s Funeral Home this Wednesday from 6 – 8pm. The parts of his body that were not destroyed when he dove on top the improvised nuclear device and thus saved the city will be on display. HolyJuan liked to dance poorly, drink quickly, tell the same stories and flirt with the ladies. He owned two bowling shirts and 12 pairs of Converse. He is survived by his parents ($20) and one sister ($5.) Donations can be made to the American Kancer Society and my brother used to stick Legos in my butt while I slept.

Source: http://www.holyjuan.com/2007/07/how-to-write-really-really-good.html

Happy New Year: Live a Good Life.

best product review EVAR!

original link

i'll be dead soon

stay or leave

Stay or leave

I want you not to go

But you should

It was good as good goes

Stay or leave

I want you not to go

But you did

So what to do

With the rest of the day's afternoon hey

Isn't it strange how we change

Everything we did

Did I do all that i should

That I coulda done

Remember we used to dance

And everyone wanted to be

You and me

I want to be too

What day is this

Besides the day you left me

What day is this

Besides the day you went

- Dave Matthews Band

Absence

Until recently, one could actually achieve absence. One could go somewhere and be gone. The traveler would send postcards. The postcards would have pictures of beaches or statues. They would be eagerly awaited and gratefully received. Absence was simple. It was an absolute condition, soon relieved by presence. Presence was also an absolute condition.

No more.

Now absence and presence are contingent and variable, matters of degree and form. A person may cease responding to e-mail and achieve a sort of absence although he or she remains in place. Or a person may go to India and yet be as present as always.

A version of us is always present. We are over-connected. We spy on each other from afar.

The quality of our absence is thus degraded. Absenceness is a precious resource we are fast running out of. Soon there will be nothing but presence. We will wish we could go away but will not be able to. The pain of constant presence will be too much for some to bear; it will be a torture like that of sleep deprivation. There will be a rash of virtual suicides, in which people disconnect themselves and appear to be dead. We will have virtual funerals for them. This will all come in time.


- by Cary Tennis

Only after the last tree has been cut down

Only after the last river has been poisoned

Only after the last fish has been caught

Only then will you find
you cannot eat money.


- Cree prophecy

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

- By Lev Grossman, Original Article Here.

The proper length for an obituary for Kurt Vonnegut is three words: "So it goes." This one will do what Vonnegut never did, which is go on too long.

"So it goes" is a phrase from Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. It's an expression the Tralfamadorians — a race of four-dimensional aliens — repeat whenever somebody or something dies. It expresses a certain airy resignation about the inevitability of death. Vonnegut — who died Wednesday night at the age of 84 from injuries suffered in a fall — had the Tralfamadorian attitude. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was 12 or 14," he told Rolling Stone last year. "So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me."

Vonnegut was born Indianapolis in 1922, the son of an architect. His early life shows the kind of aimless lateral peregrinations of someone who was in the process of inventing a kind of person that hadn't really existed before. He put in a mediocre stint at Cornell before enlisting in the army in 1942, in the teeth of World War II. Shortly afterward — and within a year of each other — two events occurred that would prove to be formative for Vonnegut. In 1944, on Mother's Day, he came home on leave to discover that his mother, an unsuccessful writer, had committed suicide with sleeping pills. In December of that same year Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war. On February 13, 1945 Dresden was leveled in a massive Allied bombing assault so intense it created an enormously destructive firestorm. Well over 130,000 people died. Vonnegut survived by hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse.

Perhaps because he began his writing career fully disillusioned, Vonnegut's view of the world changed very little over his five decades as an author. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952 and set in a spiritually empty, hyper-mechanized future dystopia. (Vonnegut mixed literature with science fiction long before it was cool.) His most famous novel — his personal favorite, and the one that deals with most directly with the Dresden disaster — is Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of one Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck in time": Billy experiences the events of his life in random order, including his own birth and his own death. Understandably, this imbues him with a weird, almost redemptive fatalism, which is echoed by the narrator, who is Vonnegut himself. "There would always be wars," he writes, "they were as easy to stop as glaciers... And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."

Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike — he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.

Vonnegut struggled with silence and depression — including a suicide attempt in 1984 — but in all he managed to publish 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays and five works of non-fiction. His last book, Man Without a Country, a collection of essays published in 2005, was a surprise best-seller.

Although he died a literary celebrity, lionized by the culture of which he was so unsparing, Vonnegut was always drawn to outcasts and failures in his writing: criminals, the deformed, the exiled, the damaged, the insane, anyone who no longer had a stake in repeating society's familiar lies. The cast of Cat's Cradle includes one of those outcasts, a midget to whom Vonnegut gave the title speech:

"No wonder kids grow up crazy," the midget says. "A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's..."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

School Lawn

From a display at Reed College, Portland, OR. Each white flag
represents six dead Iraqis since the beginning of the war, and each red
flag represents a dead US serviceman. Statistics come from the Lancet
survey of Iraqi mortality since 2003, published October 2006

Each Individual Counts