SUSTAINABLE CHAOS by Richard Kadrey
SUSTAINABLE CHAOS:The Art of Getting Danger, Beauty and Madness back into Your Life by Richard Kadrey
Intro: The Joy of Utter Chaos
I used to be a full-time freelance writer. Now, I have my first job in 12 years and it's reminded me of one of life's little secrets: Work is easy. Life is hard.
When I say life, I mean a good life. A life you want to wake up to. A life that contains the two most overlooked basics of existence: Danger and Beauty.
Sustainable Chaos is what I call putting creative randomness and excitement back into a life that's on the edge of becoming Dangerously Adult and Serious. Beauty and Danger can be the cure for this syndrome.
When I say Danger, I don't necessarily mean activities that break your bones or leaves you with enough scar tissue to carve bookends (but I'm not against physical danger, either). The kind of danger that's essential, however, is the kind that comes wrapped around a surprise. The kind of danger you feel when you don't know what 's coming next. You used to feel this way all the time when you were young. Remember? It was exciting. It meant you were on the edge of an adventure.
Beauty I don't need to explain or justify. Beauty is its own reward. But it can come in unexpected shapes. Flowers and great paintings are beautiful, but so are mad things. Active volcanoes spewing lava are beautiful. Abandoned factories can be beautiful. The cracked floor of a desert basin. The bleached bones of a long-dead steer.
Beauty and danger go together. this book contains simple ideas and suggestions on how to inject creative chaos into your life, while still keeping a regular, ordered life intact.
Be bold. Seek out danger and beauty. Embrace chaos. Be reckless with your desires and your dreams. Would you rather end up on your deathbed and realize that you should have gone to India?
You probably have a vacation coming up. I hear Bangalore is great this time of year.-RK
Adopt a persona and write your lover letters as that character. Invent adventures and mysterious travels. Send postcards and souvenirs you find in flea markets and antique shops.
Encourage your lover to adopt a persona of his or her own.
Create art-small subtle pieces or absurd large ones-and leave them in public spaces to be discovered. Hang them like Christmas ornaments from trees in the park. Tape them to bus shelter kiosks. Tack them up on bulletin boards in Laundromats. Leave art in train and bus stations.
Cultivate decadence. Drink to excess. Eat well. Take Ecstasy with a beautiful stranger. Do not do these things every day. That's a habit, not decadence.
On the weekend, trade errands with a friend whose life resembles you're the least. Attend parties as them. Let them attend parties as you.
In Paris in the 30s, the Surrealists played this game: While still in Paris, they'd go for long walks using a map of another city, such as Berlin, just to see where they'd end up. Do this in your town. Use a map of a you've never been to, but want to visit. Katmandu. Moscow. Paris. Any map will do.
Remember the persona you created so that you could write exotic letters? Don't stop at letters. Check into a hotel and stay in character for a weekend. Go on a date and seduce your lover while in character.
Go out with a friend as your new persona. Dress appropriately. Speak as your persona would. If the persona is foreign, speak their language or invent a language of your own and use it. Make your companion translate for you.
Change your appearance in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Dye your hair. Wear colors you'd never wear. Do you wear penny loafers or high heel pumps? To go a Harley shop and buy the biggest bike boots you can deal with. If you work in a junkyard, wear a suit to work. If you usually wear suit, wear leathers.
Get a group of friends and make guerilla raids on all night ATM kiosks (or other semi-public spaces). Stage raves for only one or two songs. Bring a DJ. Bring lights. Take over the space! Then split before the cops get there and stage another micro-rave across town.
Get some heavy boots, gloves and a good flashlight. Explore forbidden public spaces. Subway tunnels. Skyscraper roofs. Train yards. Abandoned warehouses. For inspiration and tips, check out www.infiltration.org.
Part of the point of religion is to give us rituals to mark the passage of the year. Invent your own rituals. A picnic at midnight on the solstice. Fireworks on the day of the first frost. Eating nothing but candy every February 29th. Go to the desert and dress like a clown on Elvis' birthday.
Travel widely and randomly.
Go some place new. An unknown city or country. Choose the place irrationally. Throw a dart at a map.
Train your cat to jump on a globe. Do not study or read about the place until you get there.
Visit a live volcano. Nothing will wake up your sense more than knowing that you're walking on rock that was bubbling lava just two hours earlier.
Create theme parties. Friends and I invented the Emotional Outburst Party. The theme of the party is every lousy break-up and lovers' spat you ever had. The main activity at the party is being ridiculous, playing games badly and staging fights. The fights always end with both people throwing drinks and food at each other. Feel free to scream "Asshole!" or "Bitch!" at each other. It just adds to the faux drama.
Of course, we also encourage tearful reconciliation and random making-out. You need to stage this party somewhere that you can hose down the next day.
This one usually requires a small group: choose a friend on her birthday kidnap her and take her somewhere they've always wanted to go. If they're straight arrow, take them to a Rave or a strip club. If they're party animals, take them to an ossuary or some isolated wilderness and introduce them to silence.
A variation on this idea is to stage a UFO abduction. The kidnappers will need matching jumpsuits and masks. OR, lacking that, tin foil antennae and hatching sunglasses.
Make your own piñatas. Give them the faces of personal enemies or public figures. The boss who fired you. the lover who dumped you for your best friend. Jesse Helms. Madonna.
Bring the piñata to a party and let people beat the thing to death. Don't forget to fill the piñata first. Be creative. Candy is a good choice, but if you think a politician is on the take, fill the piñata with chocolate coins and play money.
When you're at a toll plaza, pay the tolls of the next 10 people behind you.
If you're single, write a personal ad. But not a regular ad. Display your personality. Make it arch and uncompromising. Reveal yourself. Don't just list your favorite movies.
"I love girls with green hair who carry razors in their boots. I don't want to take you to the movies. I want to break into warehouses and dance the meringue among the broken industrial equipment..."
Find an abandoned car. Each day as you pass to, decorate it. Toss flowers inside. Stick your favorite pictures under the windshield wipers. Glue junk shop Barbies to the roof. Remind your neighbors that anything can be art.
Attend a sex party or go to a sex club (there are listings in your local paper or on the web). If you don't have a partner, bring a friend. If you live in a city, these parties aren't hard to find. Maybe it will change your life. maybe not. It's as important to know who you aren't as who you are.
Traditionally, birthdays last one day. This is a rip-off. Plan your own birthday party, make it utterly yours. Spread different celebrations over a week. It's your birthday. Claim it as your own. Be mad. Be unreasonable. That doesn't mean be a jerk. It means be creative!
Invent ethnic foods for non-existent groups. Invite friends over for a dinner of your imaginary recipes.
Flirt. Cultivate crushes. Send flowers. Write love letters. Buy your crushes small gifts. Nothing too big. The idea is to be charming, not creepy.
Tell all your sexual secrets to someone you trust. What you've done. What you want to do. The moment you say these things out loud, they are less intimidating. And you'll find that they're easier to make real than you first imagined.
If you don't have any mad sexual secrets, invent some. Steal them from books, movies or songs. The sexual lies you tell will be as revealing as the truths.
We all need to be reminded that we're alive sometimes. A way to do this is to put yourself in physical danger. Skydive. Bungie jump. Go to a shooting range. Learn to kickbox.
Take a trip, but take nothing with you. Find what you need when you get there.
Collect old technology, knives and/ or animal bones. Decorate with meat hooks and barbed wire, heavy velvets and lace. Leave Christmas lights up all year. Collect safety glass from the street. Smashed glass looks like diamonds when you pile them in big bowls.
Buy some used luggage from Goodwill. Fill the bags with toys, candy, flowers, animal bones and found photos. Abandon luggage in airport carousels or bus stations. Imagine the people who will find it.
Get tattooed. Make the commitment. Endure the pain.
Forget Disney Land and Paris. Vacation at freak sites. The Corn Palace in South Dakota. The Garden of Eden in Kansas. Take a road trip down Route 66. Visit an alligator farm.
Camp in the desert or deep woods. Bring tuxedoes and evening gowns. Eat your meals this way. If you can't leave the city, wear your tux and gown to the beach and have a catered dinner there. Better yet, an abandoned warehouse. Find out if your city sponsors tours of the sewer system. Make it a formal affair.
Use your computer to create fake traffic tickets. In place of the violations fill the ticket with poetry or a very short story. Leave them on cars at night.
Read underground zines. Read crank literature and conspiracy theories. Invent your own and publish them.
Create an art movement. Stage your own shows. Write a manifesto. Attack other artists and movements. Encourage them to attack you.
Go to Burning Man, a mad art and anarchy festival in the desert. Learn more at www.burningman.com.
Crash parties boldly. Tell people you're with "Bill."
Make art recklessly. Give it to your friends. Exhibit it in little coffeehouses and tiny galleries. Send it to little independent and underground zines. It's easier to get published, to become an artist, than you think.
Travel by train. Don't fly. Don't endure travel. Embrace the act of travel as part of the experience.
Do what you love, but do it slower. Make meals and window-shopping last for hours.
Steal other cultures' holidays and celebrations. Have High Teas. Celebrate Revellon. Release floating candles to appease the Hungry Ghosts.
Learn a useless skill. Taxidermy. Ice sculpture. Blimp piloting.
Take up an instrument, but play it incorrectly. Find brand new sounds in a guitar or an organ or a didgeridoo. People will want you to play in their bands. Your sound will be all your own.
Invent rumors, superstitions and old wives tales.
"Never eat vegetables from a murderer's garden."
"Never step into a bird's shadow."
"Bathing on a Sunday brings good luck, showering bad luck."
Listen. To 78s. To traffic noise. To the wind. Put your ear to the wall of a parking garage. Listen to the ambient sounds coming through the walls. Listen to the subtle sounds in the cacophony of buses, jets and industrial air conditioners.
Give mad gifts for no reason.
Create a mix tape or CD for your funeral. Update it as needed.
Collect abandoned Christmas trees during the first week of January. Get as many as you can. Get your friends to help. Take them to the beach or the desert and have a bonfire. Sure, it's probably illegal but it smells great.
Hide packets of flower seeds in your hand when in the park. Drop the seeds along the paths.
If you're more ambitious, spell out words in the seeds, knowing that your message won't be seen for months.
Keep a dream journal. Learn lucid dreaming. Fly in your dreams.
Barter weirdly. Wine for plants. Drugs for out-of-date maps. A dream journal for old love letters.
Put notes in bottles. Confessions. Tall tales. Love letters. Release them into rivers and the ocean.
If you have a DVD player, set the audio for a language you don't understand. Watch the Wizard of Oz in French. Star Wars in Japanese. Casablanca in Spanish.
Read comics. They'll remind you of your younger self, when you were less self-conscious. And the best comics are fine things. They walk a strange line between literature and film.
Buy old wallets at Goodwill. Fill them with art, love poems, quotes form your favorite book, found photos, toys and candy. Drop them all over your town for people to find. You can extend this idea by including a party invitation in the wallet. Take over a warehouse space, invite your friends and let in anyone with a found wallet.
Throw a party, but don't attend. Have a nice dinner somewhere else while your friends party in your honor. Hide a videocam somewhere in your apartment to record the proceedings.
A variation is to go to an internet cafe and attend your party via a webcam. Pretend you're the Wizard of Oz and order people around. Don't forget to leave your computer on and in a prominent place, so people will notice when you dial in.
When stuck at the airport, have yourself paged by people with famous or ridiculous names. Ivana Hugandkiss. Nelson Mandela. I.P. Freely. Steven Spielberg.
Go to a toy store and buy one of those microphones that makes your voice sound like a robot. Call friends and claim to be Stephen Hawking. Order pizza that way. Try phone sex.
Go to an expensive restaurant, but bring your own plates and cutlery, preferably a complete Hello Kitty dinner set.
Dress in a single color every day for a week. Everything should match, from underwear to shirt to coat. At the end of a week, everything you wear should be a different color.
A variation on this is to buy two weeks worth of the same clothes. Wear them until people around you start looking at you funny.
Declare your home a sovereign nation. Invent a flag and a national anthem, preferably something up-tempo and with a lot of made-up words (feel free to invent your own language; keep it simple; use the Smurf Rule and simply insert made-up words in the place of random nouns and verbs).
Send a letter of secession to your local paper. Invent a national dress. Nehru jackets and leiderhosen. Tuxedos and hip-waders.
Bring one of those Deli number dispensers to work. Don't answer anyone's questions until they take a number.
The text screens on most current cell phones will hold just enough characters to complete a haiku. Send someone a poetic text message.
Cut all the eyes out of the photos in your magazines at home. When people ask about this, tell them that you don't like how "The spirits in the paper stare at you."
Whenever someone calls you at home with a survey, start giving them your own survey. Perhaps the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a sort of personality survey often given to people to diagnose mental illness. You can find copies of it on the web.
Buy a second-hand pair of pants at least three sizes too big. Stuff the pants with packing material or foam to fill them out. Ask everyone you meet, "Do these pants make my ass look fat?"
If you take public transportation to work, carry a TV remote with you. hold it up to your ear and talk into it. Say angrily, "These damned cell phones never work!"
Become an urban archaeologist. Explore the ruined warehouse, peers and abandoned buildings or farms where you live. Buy a camera and document what you find.
At work, cover your desk with foam padding. Explain to people that you're getting ready for "the big one."
Get rid of all the regular lighting in your home. Light everything with lava lamps.
Write a book like this.
Intro: The Joy of Utter Chaos
I used to be a full-time freelance writer. Now, I have my first job in 12 years and it's reminded me of one of life's little secrets: Work is easy. Life is hard.
When I say life, I mean a good life. A life you want to wake up to. A life that contains the two most overlooked basics of existence: Danger and Beauty.
Sustainable Chaos is what I call putting creative randomness and excitement back into a life that's on the edge of becoming Dangerously Adult and Serious. Beauty and Danger can be the cure for this syndrome.
When I say Danger, I don't necessarily mean activities that break your bones or leaves you with enough scar tissue to carve bookends (but I'm not against physical danger, either). The kind of danger that's essential, however, is the kind that comes wrapped around a surprise. The kind of danger you feel when you don't know what 's coming next. You used to feel this way all the time when you were young. Remember? It was exciting. It meant you were on the edge of an adventure.
Beauty I don't need to explain or justify. Beauty is its own reward. But it can come in unexpected shapes. Flowers and great paintings are beautiful, but so are mad things. Active volcanoes spewing lava are beautiful. Abandoned factories can be beautiful. The cracked floor of a desert basin. The bleached bones of a long-dead steer.
Beauty and danger go together. this book contains simple ideas and suggestions on how to inject creative chaos into your life, while still keeping a regular, ordered life intact.
Be bold. Seek out danger and beauty. Embrace chaos. Be reckless with your desires and your dreams. Would you rather end up on your deathbed and realize that you should have gone to India?
You probably have a vacation coming up. I hear Bangalore is great this time of year.-RK
Adopt a persona and write your lover letters as that character. Invent adventures and mysterious travels. Send postcards and souvenirs you find in flea markets and antique shops.
Encourage your lover to adopt a persona of his or her own.
Create art-small subtle pieces or absurd large ones-and leave them in public spaces to be discovered. Hang them like Christmas ornaments from trees in the park. Tape them to bus shelter kiosks. Tack them up on bulletin boards in Laundromats. Leave art in train and bus stations.
Cultivate decadence. Drink to excess. Eat well. Take Ecstasy with a beautiful stranger. Do not do these things every day. That's a habit, not decadence.
On the weekend, trade errands with a friend whose life resembles you're the least. Attend parties as them. Let them attend parties as you.
In Paris in the 30s, the Surrealists played this game: While still in Paris, they'd go for long walks using a map of another city, such as Berlin, just to see where they'd end up. Do this in your town. Use a map of a you've never been to, but want to visit. Katmandu. Moscow. Paris. Any map will do.
Remember the persona you created so that you could write exotic letters? Don't stop at letters. Check into a hotel and stay in character for a weekend. Go on a date and seduce your lover while in character.
Go out with a friend as your new persona. Dress appropriately. Speak as your persona would. If the persona is foreign, speak their language or invent a language of your own and use it. Make your companion translate for you.
Change your appearance in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Dye your hair. Wear colors you'd never wear. Do you wear penny loafers or high heel pumps? To go a Harley shop and buy the biggest bike boots you can deal with. If you work in a junkyard, wear a suit to work. If you usually wear suit, wear leathers.
Get a group of friends and make guerilla raids on all night ATM kiosks (or other semi-public spaces). Stage raves for only one or two songs. Bring a DJ. Bring lights. Take over the space! Then split before the cops get there and stage another micro-rave across town.
Get some heavy boots, gloves and a good flashlight. Explore forbidden public spaces. Subway tunnels. Skyscraper roofs. Train yards. Abandoned warehouses. For inspiration and tips, check out www.infiltration.org.
Part of the point of religion is to give us rituals to mark the passage of the year. Invent your own rituals. A picnic at midnight on the solstice. Fireworks on the day of the first frost. Eating nothing but candy every February 29th. Go to the desert and dress like a clown on Elvis' birthday.
Travel widely and randomly.
Go some place new. An unknown city or country. Choose the place irrationally. Throw a dart at a map.
Train your cat to jump on a globe. Do not study or read about the place until you get there.
Visit a live volcano. Nothing will wake up your sense more than knowing that you're walking on rock that was bubbling lava just two hours earlier.
Create theme parties. Friends and I invented the Emotional Outburst Party. The theme of the party is every lousy break-up and lovers' spat you ever had. The main activity at the party is being ridiculous, playing games badly and staging fights. The fights always end with both people throwing drinks and food at each other. Feel free to scream "Asshole!" or "Bitch!" at each other. It just adds to the faux drama.
Of course, we also encourage tearful reconciliation and random making-out. You need to stage this party somewhere that you can hose down the next day.
This one usually requires a small group: choose a friend on her birthday kidnap her and take her somewhere they've always wanted to go. If they're straight arrow, take them to a Rave or a strip club. If they're party animals, take them to an ossuary or some isolated wilderness and introduce them to silence.
A variation on this idea is to stage a UFO abduction. The kidnappers will need matching jumpsuits and masks. OR, lacking that, tin foil antennae and hatching sunglasses.
Make your own piñatas. Give them the faces of personal enemies or public figures. The boss who fired you. the lover who dumped you for your best friend. Jesse Helms. Madonna.
Bring the piñata to a party and let people beat the thing to death. Don't forget to fill the piñata first. Be creative. Candy is a good choice, but if you think a politician is on the take, fill the piñata with chocolate coins and play money.
When you're at a toll plaza, pay the tolls of the next 10 people behind you.
If you're single, write a personal ad. But not a regular ad. Display your personality. Make it arch and uncompromising. Reveal yourself. Don't just list your favorite movies.
"I love girls with green hair who carry razors in their boots. I don't want to take you to the movies. I want to break into warehouses and dance the meringue among the broken industrial equipment..."
Find an abandoned car. Each day as you pass to, decorate it. Toss flowers inside. Stick your favorite pictures under the windshield wipers. Glue junk shop Barbies to the roof. Remind your neighbors that anything can be art.
Attend a sex party or go to a sex club (there are listings in your local paper or on the web). If you don't have a partner, bring a friend. If you live in a city, these parties aren't hard to find. Maybe it will change your life. maybe not. It's as important to know who you aren't as who you are.
Traditionally, birthdays last one day. This is a rip-off. Plan your own birthday party, make it utterly yours. Spread different celebrations over a week. It's your birthday. Claim it as your own. Be mad. Be unreasonable. That doesn't mean be a jerk. It means be creative!
Invent ethnic foods for non-existent groups. Invite friends over for a dinner of your imaginary recipes.
Flirt. Cultivate crushes. Send flowers. Write love letters. Buy your crushes small gifts. Nothing too big. The idea is to be charming, not creepy.
Tell all your sexual secrets to someone you trust. What you've done. What you want to do. The moment you say these things out loud, they are less intimidating. And you'll find that they're easier to make real than you first imagined.
If you don't have any mad sexual secrets, invent some. Steal them from books, movies or songs. The sexual lies you tell will be as revealing as the truths.
We all need to be reminded that we're alive sometimes. A way to do this is to put yourself in physical danger. Skydive. Bungie jump. Go to a shooting range. Learn to kickbox.
Take a trip, but take nothing with you. Find what you need when you get there.
Collect old technology, knives and/ or animal bones. Decorate with meat hooks and barbed wire, heavy velvets and lace. Leave Christmas lights up all year. Collect safety glass from the street. Smashed glass looks like diamonds when you pile them in big bowls.
Buy some used luggage from Goodwill. Fill the bags with toys, candy, flowers, animal bones and found photos. Abandon luggage in airport carousels or bus stations. Imagine the people who will find it.
Get tattooed. Make the commitment. Endure the pain.
Forget Disney Land and Paris. Vacation at freak sites. The Corn Palace in South Dakota. The Garden of Eden in Kansas. Take a road trip down Route 66. Visit an alligator farm.
Camp in the desert or deep woods. Bring tuxedoes and evening gowns. Eat your meals this way. If you can't leave the city, wear your tux and gown to the beach and have a catered dinner there. Better yet, an abandoned warehouse. Find out if your city sponsors tours of the sewer system. Make it a formal affair.
Use your computer to create fake traffic tickets. In place of the violations fill the ticket with poetry or a very short story. Leave them on cars at night.
Read underground zines. Read crank literature and conspiracy theories. Invent your own and publish them.
Create an art movement. Stage your own shows. Write a manifesto. Attack other artists and movements. Encourage them to attack you.
Go to Burning Man, a mad art and anarchy festival in the desert. Learn more at www.burningman.com.
Crash parties boldly. Tell people you're with "Bill."
Make art recklessly. Give it to your friends. Exhibit it in little coffeehouses and tiny galleries. Send it to little independent and underground zines. It's easier to get published, to become an artist, than you think.
Travel by train. Don't fly. Don't endure travel. Embrace the act of travel as part of the experience.
Do what you love, but do it slower. Make meals and window-shopping last for hours.
Steal other cultures' holidays and celebrations. Have High Teas. Celebrate Revellon. Release floating candles to appease the Hungry Ghosts.
Learn a useless skill. Taxidermy. Ice sculpture. Blimp piloting.
Take up an instrument, but play it incorrectly. Find brand new sounds in a guitar or an organ or a didgeridoo. People will want you to play in their bands. Your sound will be all your own.
Invent rumors, superstitions and old wives tales.
"Never eat vegetables from a murderer's garden."
"Never step into a bird's shadow."
"Bathing on a Sunday brings good luck, showering bad luck."
Listen. To 78s. To traffic noise. To the wind. Put your ear to the wall of a parking garage. Listen to the ambient sounds coming through the walls. Listen to the subtle sounds in the cacophony of buses, jets and industrial air conditioners.
Give mad gifts for no reason.
Create a mix tape or CD for your funeral. Update it as needed.
Collect abandoned Christmas trees during the first week of January. Get as many as you can. Get your friends to help. Take them to the beach or the desert and have a bonfire. Sure, it's probably illegal but it smells great.
Hide packets of flower seeds in your hand when in the park. Drop the seeds along the paths.
If you're more ambitious, spell out words in the seeds, knowing that your message won't be seen for months.
Keep a dream journal. Learn lucid dreaming. Fly in your dreams.
Barter weirdly. Wine for plants. Drugs for out-of-date maps. A dream journal for old love letters.
Put notes in bottles. Confessions. Tall tales. Love letters. Release them into rivers and the ocean.
If you have a DVD player, set the audio for a language you don't understand. Watch the Wizard of Oz in French. Star Wars in Japanese. Casablanca in Spanish.
Read comics. They'll remind you of your younger self, when you were less self-conscious. And the best comics are fine things. They walk a strange line between literature and film.
Buy old wallets at Goodwill. Fill them with art, love poems, quotes form your favorite book, found photos, toys and candy. Drop them all over your town for people to find. You can extend this idea by including a party invitation in the wallet. Take over a warehouse space, invite your friends and let in anyone with a found wallet.
Throw a party, but don't attend. Have a nice dinner somewhere else while your friends party in your honor. Hide a videocam somewhere in your apartment to record the proceedings.
A variation is to go to an internet cafe and attend your party via a webcam. Pretend you're the Wizard of Oz and order people around. Don't forget to leave your computer on and in a prominent place, so people will notice when you dial in.
When stuck at the airport, have yourself paged by people with famous or ridiculous names. Ivana Hugandkiss. Nelson Mandela. I.P. Freely. Steven Spielberg.
Go to a toy store and buy one of those microphones that makes your voice sound like a robot. Call friends and claim to be Stephen Hawking. Order pizza that way. Try phone sex.
Go to an expensive restaurant, but bring your own plates and cutlery, preferably a complete Hello Kitty dinner set.
Dress in a single color every day for a week. Everything should match, from underwear to shirt to coat. At the end of a week, everything you wear should be a different color.
A variation on this is to buy two weeks worth of the same clothes. Wear them until people around you start looking at you funny.
Declare your home a sovereign nation. Invent a flag and a national anthem, preferably something up-tempo and with a lot of made-up words (feel free to invent your own language; keep it simple; use the Smurf Rule and simply insert made-up words in the place of random nouns and verbs).
Send a letter of secession to your local paper. Invent a national dress. Nehru jackets and leiderhosen. Tuxedos and hip-waders.
Bring one of those Deli number dispensers to work. Don't answer anyone's questions until they take a number.
The text screens on most current cell phones will hold just enough characters to complete a haiku. Send someone a poetic text message.
Cut all the eyes out of the photos in your magazines at home. When people ask about this, tell them that you don't like how "The spirits in the paper stare at you."
Whenever someone calls you at home with a survey, start giving them your own survey. Perhaps the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a sort of personality survey often given to people to diagnose mental illness. You can find copies of it on the web.
Buy a second-hand pair of pants at least three sizes too big. Stuff the pants with packing material or foam to fill them out. Ask everyone you meet, "Do these pants make my ass look fat?"
If you take public transportation to work, carry a TV remote with you. hold it up to your ear and talk into it. Say angrily, "These damned cell phones never work!"
Become an urban archaeologist. Explore the ruined warehouse, peers and abandoned buildings or farms where you live. Buy a camera and document what you find.
At work, cover your desk with foam padding. Explain to people that you're getting ready for "the big one."
Get rid of all the regular lighting in your home. Light everything with lava lamps.
Write a book like this.
Comments
nothing beats hiding inside my shell, away from light >:D