Do not always be of good cheer; sometimes act as if you are a possum. Throw rocks at children. Leap tall buildings, of course. Remain calm. Try to win. Be winning whether you win or not. Declare bankruptcy not quite with pride. Alternate the theories you entertain about all things. Investigate leather tanning. Learn to swim again. Steadily decline in all your strengths until that steadiness is your strength. Purchase a packet of indigo dye and place it so that you can regard it every day. Call your friend who walked the wire in the circus and ask about the shoes. Change the linen. Realize yet again that for a long time you had too much courage to kill yourself or even entertain it but that now you can entertain it but have too little courage to do it. Regret that you have never seen a real cotton field in operation or a cotton exchange either and that these wants are both unrelated to many other things you should have witnessed but did not, both of the sort you can imagine and, worse, of the sort you cannot even conceive you are so small and deprived. Locate, purchase, and construct an industrial-grade galvanized swing set in your backyard, and if you do not have a backyard in the backyard of someone with a child whom you can convince that you mean the child no harm.
Try to be the best you can be, and the worst. Prepare for Armageddon. Get to the bottom of baking. Imagine a conversation with Charles Manson. Try things. Invent something. Dilute dilute dilute the Dr. Bronner’s. Heap up the seconds. Take dance instruction, and step lively. Har’ to lee. Ponder NASA photos and wonder if there isn’t more wonder in them than you actually see. Run to the store.
Lecture the pets. Try all the doors and windows for fit and trim and of course security and attend anything found amiss. Give some thought to purchasing an incandescent lightbulb or two before they go extinct — would one in a very out-of-the-way place, seldom used, like the closet under the stairs, be so bad? Walk the yard looking for snakes without any thought of seeing one. Whistle for your dog dead now fifteen years. Clean the kitchen. Pay a bill or two, get the phone, and reach out and touch someone. String the hammock and practice the diagonal lie. If this does not come naturally to you, reflect on just how far you are also from ever speaking Spanish naturally, or speaking it at all, or speaking any language at all, and admit that you are a retard uncomfortable even in a hammock who will need the Language Fairy to come down and put a language under your pillow if you are ever to have a foreign language. Envision some new, cool colors all through your house and go to bed.
List the wounds you do not want, in order: head wound, genital wound, ass wound, spleen wound, eye wound, extremity wound, thumb smash, skin scrape, splinter. Decide that you have had enough surgery and can go the rest of the distance unaided or propped up by the knife. Fill out that exhausting questionnaire and take it to the will attorney. Have a little buzz on when you go in there. Rule out radiation therapy along with the surgery. It’s going to be the hammock and the perfected diagonal lie from here on in. Recall that frisky young whippersnapper Tennessee Williams whom you once so admired and still do. Recall that time you saw the 1 % play for the first time. In your mind sit again on those pale green wooden stools in that cafeteria and watch Allen and Bob play in front of where the dirty thick-plastic beige dishes went in with the spaghetti sauce on them. Recite: Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, oh oh oh. Call North Carolina and see about a dog. Decide that deciding it is too late to rescue yourself may be itself rescue, but concede this salvation-by-surrender argument may be fallacious if not outright childish. Recall the boy in the back of the car saying, when someone in the front of the car derogated Elvis for liking the party girls to keep their panties on, “Just what’s wrong with that!”
Hold your horses. Allow interest to compound, simply or whatever the other thing is. Do not have traffic today with a doctor. Read between the lines only; it’s easier than reading the lines. In the event that armed men of any sort enter the building, watch their feet closely. Try to recall the smell of caged mice, and the image of the child of yours separating the twist ties one by one until they made a fine large mess that had to be put in a baggie, and the same child picking back up the flowers dropped in the aisle of her grandfather’s wedding, and the same child telling you at age five, fishing, “Look, it goes under, and nothing! This is ruining my life.”
Inspect the phrase “resistant incoherence” as it pertains to John Ashbery, whose incoherence you have not so much resisted as found incoherently beautiful. Realize that you cannot take time out like this for reveries so private when people are expecting you to get on with the business of telling them what to do. So, people: get yourselves on with the business of doing what you need to do, and realize that sometimes in every life that will necessarily involve wasting a lot of time on fruitless pursuit of that which can be interesting only to you, and only in a way that at some point you will invariably yourself declare the time to have been spent pointlessly — have at it! If Helen Vendler writes “resistant incoherence” and you want to roll that around in your mouth like an unsatisfying little candy trying to suck off the — ant and put in its place — ed, leaving you a more satisfying “resisted incoherence,” because you resisted it, it is not resistant, it is incoherent, well this is your business and your business alone and nobody’s business but; yet even this improved candy is not that hot, what happened to the old horehounds that were so thrilling to pronounce as an adolescent, whore hounds! whether they were actually good to eat or not, but they were, were they not? And were they not heavy heavy sassafras, not resistant sassafras but sassafras that you resisted because it was too strong, as like, well, sometimes people get too enthusiastic about how well they think they make dressing for turkey and overload it with sage? Recall the time Charlie Geer freehanded the grits into the pot of boiling water on Cumberland Island, the time his uncle woke up on the rolling waterbed with his exgirlfriendJoanieloveofhislife on the other side of it being boinked by the new guy. Don’t ask people to go there. People, don’t go there, just accept that Holmes Geer eventually killed himself, that I then taught his nephew in school after having gone to school myself with the uncle, and that the nephew taught me you can freehand grits, resistant instruction.
Put your nose close to the barrel of your shotgun right after you’ve shot a clay and get a good snifferoo of that smoke — delicious. Do not put your nose over the end of the barrel or you will be in violation of Safety Rule No. 1. Tell someone today of some event you fondly recall in your life and do not sentimentalize it, or do. Mourn the loss of your rooster, your Silver Duckwing bantam rooster that did not weigh one pound wet who fought you until he realized you were using the fights to catch and pet him. He was named Yeehi and it is perhaps prudent not to name birds if they are subject to slaughter by even the airhead neighbors’ airhead dogs. Put up some signs that say No Dogs and let the airhead neighbors tell you they don’t think their dogs, while certainly smart, can read.
Consider getting a lawyer so you can call him and ask him to survey your entire situation and discover if you are good for successful litigation against anyone and suggest that you do not want to die not having lived a full life and sued someone. Perhaps your will could be adjusted to offer him a bonus as executor if he has already by the time of your demise successfully prosecuted a lawsuit on your behalf, but mention that he is not to take this to mean that you are uninterested in a posthumous lawsuit on behalf of your estate. Take a big load of clothes to the Goodwill; take everything you own if you can stand to do it. Go to Walgreens on your way back and get a toothbrush and a vinyl ditty bag. Keep it minimal from here on in. Tap dance on pea gravel in the driveway. Do not lament the loss of testosterone. Do not whistle so that others may hear you. If you get an opportunity to facilitate someone’s going to Alaska, seize it. If you can locate an old vacuum-tube clock radio, tune in a distant AM blues station if they still exist and listen to it at night with your hand on the warm plastic cabinet of the radio.