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The ritual imperative. Everyone should have one.
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Photo: Jondude on the roof terrace, the restaurant of the Danieli Hotel in Venezia, Italy, the home of the two hundred dollar lunch. Venice will be one of the first casualties of global warming. Go see it while you still can without scuba gear. Photo by Tom Carmen, noble friend.

 "In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manifesto

"If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it." - Jonathan Winters

There is no reward, only the expectation of one.
To hell with expectations. To hell with living for everyone else, to being what someone else expects of me, and to being less than what I feel like being.
I am finished with giving my power away.
I'm taking it back and am going to use it as only I see fit.
I am going to be what I want to be, do what I want to do, where I feel like doing it, and with whomever I feel like being with.
If I am not being treated with dignity and respect, that's not okay.
If I am not being spoken to and treated truthfully, that's not okay anymore, either.
If you don't like what I am or what I am doing, it's you that must adjust, not me.
I want some upside here. I want to get up in the morning without dreading it.
I want to feel alive, to be valued by others and myself, to have tremendous clarity about who and why I am.
I want to create what is important to me, using the talents and imagination that others have always claimed from me for an insufficient fee.
I want to enjoy the experiences that every day can, may or will present to me, and to enable myself to enhance those experiences as much as I can by applying my talents and imagination.
I want to belong only to myself, and to live my life to the fullest.
I am putting myself in charge of my life.

- Jon L. Adams
(With thanks to Dr. Phil McGraw, Jonathan Winters, Aristotle and Bankei)

NOTE: Everyone should have a manifesto. How can you not write the guidelines that determine who you are and what you will do? Start by making a list of your desires and end with a statement like this one. Print several copies, and hang them on your walls, mirrors, fridge, stash and dashboard. Read it again every day.
On Dead Language:
Tony Morrison, American novelist, from her speech after accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature...
"...a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like Statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, supresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

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