Carve Your Own Path

There are some great stories here, but none of them start: "So I was sitting at my computer reading..." And there's a reason for that.

No man ever conquered a nation by sitting in front of a computer.

No, those monuments in world history might have learned the tricks from books and whatnot, long before the internet came around. But what would history be like if Carl Marx spent all his time looking at German sheissen porn instead of starting revolutionary shit at bars? But at some point, saint and sinner, hero and villain, stepped out of their house and did something.

Come here for your daily sermon on the mount. Then, take a lesson from me, and take a chance in life. Go to Vegas, hit on a stripper, and live a story you can tell for the rest of your life. Just don't get hooked on crack. Or, at the very least, walk to the liquor store and grab a 40. Then take a different route home. Here's how to break the chains of bullshit and live a little:

1. Examine your finances: Can you afford to travel? Find a way. Can't afford even an overnight road trip? Scrape up the cash for a few rounds at a bar in town, but do not - under any circumstances - go to a familiar place. Pick a new strip club. Go to a biker bar (or, if you're a biker, a yuppy cocktail bar). The farther out of your element, the better.

2. Get out. Today. Call in sick. Don't come back from lunch. Break out of the tedium, the boredom, and just go. Escape the familiar.

3. Go where there are people gathered for some reason. Dive bar, street racing, Pentecostal faith healing, frat party... Then be the mongoose to their python. Revel in the attention. Duck thrown objects.

4. Make your presence felt. Take it a whole long-jump farther. Insult the hippie asshole ordering Chai, or anything else non-alcoholic or foofy sounding. Dance on the bar, or encourage a hot college girl with a good fake ID to jump up there and shake it. Do something patently "not like me." Bring small bills.

5. Assert yourself at work. Wear a sombrero, start a petition for a keggerator next to the water machine...stick up for what you believe in. Create something if you have no beliefs, like a new pagan god, and most importantly: Act.

6. Look at the drones, clones, and robots around you: Closely. Slaves to their jobs, their homes, their yards, mortgages, whatever. Think of what they don't do. You are defined as much by what you abstain from, as what you indulge in. Indulge yourself in their abstentions. Break out of the mold. That guy has way more fun...be that guy.

Take this perspective to the casinos, the concerts, the state fair, wherever you go, and live by the rules you decide for yourself. Then you'll be free in the land of the free. Then you'll start to live the kind of fucked up life you only read about here.

Then you should send those stories to me.