A father said to a son:
“All during their lives, on some days ordinary people feel they have lived too long,
while on other days they fear they will not live long enough  --
and only routinely dazed cows, when they hear the statement: ‘Go figure!’
will actually go try to.
What more valiant combatant can be imagined than man!
A warrior who, knowing full well the ultimate outcome of the conflict,
nevertheless fights on as though otherwise;
query: is this an accolade  --  or a pathetic commentary?
Who but cows faithfully tread to their fate believing they give their life for
the greater hormel-good of the herd while managing to overlook the lack of
a single hormel among them,
and someone asks: ‘But isn’t that unfair? --  life cannot be everywhere at once  --   ......hummmm.......Ah!  --  I see!   (never mind).
I love it when my own initial resistance to an idea turns into fresh insight;
what better fun than to live, die and be reborn by your own inner hand!’

Truly my boy, you have lived too long when you have become mentally complacent;
your sexual hormones have dried up, allowing certain dim witted neurons
to step forward and claim wisdom they do not possess,
but which now, your lower nervous system is too tired to dispute.

You have lived too long when you begin to think that: you have lived too long;
this means you have already died, and are now just simply: living-too-long;
stop it already!  --  either quit breathing and lie down in a hole,
or revive yourself again.
Good god man!  --   existing in a nether world is what originally drove you batty
when you were normally alive.
Assume the prone position and totally shut up about everything,
or else start walking again  --  THAT is the sign of the real rebel:
living internally against the grain of the apparently inevitable,
but never acknowledging what he is doing  --  even to himself.
Silence is not the, best policy  --
for the certain man it is the only one worth the price of its premiums.”
 
 

After having played in many bands,
danced in countless companies,
shown in studded galleries, and been published world wide,
one privately rebellious artist mused:
“If it was as easy as the plagiarists profess, it would not be worth my doing.”
There is no more difficulty in waking up to what is really going on
than there is sleeping through it,
but this is known only to the man over there, slipping out the theatre’s fire door.

Those who say that man’s special form of life is NOT a staged drama in which all men are forced actors are just still upset that they weren’t asked to contribute to the script.
(A fact to keep in mind: cows are rarely called on for this purpose.)
 
 

Something else useful to recall regarding creativity-in-the-city: cultural progress produces as much trash as art  --  look at man.
“Should I take that personally?”
     Does doing so, feel-right to you?
“There!  --  you did it again!”
Neural topography fact:
no matter how far you stretch it  --  you never get completely away,
(which prompted one man to sing: “Sometimes I feel like a chutherless mile…”).
A man whose rhapsodizing can help you untangle your feet from the normal morass of neural networking is always welcome to a picnic whether he has egg salad or not -
(okay, so he’s not, but he’s always welcome at his own private shindigs).

Anyone who can explain to the satisfaction of his peers how one city-thing
causes some other city-thing is certainly in his element,
(the man who actually knows what’s going on prefers one of the noble gases)
and someone remarks: “I must say:
I do not see what playing-with-words has to do with metaphysical transformation!”
    Sir, prior to any response to your comment,
would you repeat what you just said to yourself, non stop for
twelve hours, and then see if you need such.
“Hummm --   sounds like some sort of dirty trick to me.”
 
 

As he grew older (though he preferred to think of it as, “wiser and more mature”)
one man looked back over his experiences and offers his personal versified view of:

And one man says: “If it were NOT for the everyday, mundane demands of life,
how much more freedom would an intelligent man have to pursue his own
spiritual transfiguration!” and suddenly thought: “I don’t know  --  why don’t I ask one.”
(which gave his brother the blues for the rest of the day:
                                                             “O, nobody knows
                                                               the I’s  -- I’ve not seen…”)
and someone observes: “Look here!  --  I do not see how playing around with
the words of popularly known phrases has anything to do with a man’s
mental awakening!.................Oh!  --   we’ve already been through this  --  right!”
Caution: those who forget the past  --  are doomed to be free of it!
be forewarned, all you faux phenomenon freeloaders.

Notice: it is some form of art if it makes old men mad.
“Pardon, but are you referring to physical art in the external world,
or some type of intangible in man’s inner one?”
    Well it took you long enough.
Shortly after breakfast one morning, a father said to a son:
“The operational reality behind ordinary men’s binary-based concept of
what is real art, and what is not is this:
real art is what is expected  --  sham art is whatever’s left.”
      “Yeah, but you’re just using, art as a code word for ideas,”
and according to a quite unfamiliar scripture recently discovered in an aloof area:
“The tongue giveth  --  and the ears taketh away,”
which moved the lad to ask: “But why couldn’t it be the other way around?!”
     “Well boy  --  it took you long enough to come around.”
(Off privately on his own, one son reflected on the fact that although he lived
jammed right up against his father in their cramped quarters, he still sometimes felt lost-at-sea vis a vis the extraordinary journeys the old man recounted.)
 
 

Another thing about thoughts-&-feelings is that:
thoughts can conjure back up, via words, past events directly, whereas feelings cannot, but must rely on thoughts to get them started in such recollecting.
 
 
 And an important thing to remember to lead a normal life
is to not think about your feelings beyond what the thoughts that 
automatically appear in your mind have to say about them.
 

And one more thing worthy of note:
thoughts can tell feeling to "cheer up"  --  while nothing antipodal exists.
 
 

One man decided to believe he was dying –
just to see how long it took him to go a whole day without thinking about his dying.
Another example of why any teaching you can find that some men believe
will awaken you to what is really going on in life
cannot begin to match what you may make up for yourself.

“Pa pa, do you think, ‘match’ is used here as an understatement?”
     “My boy, you’re starting to get a real grip on the aviary nature of words:
       those who can  --  silently fly; those who can’t  --  publicly teach."
“Flying, you mean?!”
     “Son, just a mite more of this and you’ll be ready to either split from me  --
       or finally merge our partnership into a sole proprietorship.”
“Wake-up, you mean?!”
 
 

A certain scribe said to a visiting class of children:
"One neat feature of being an author is that you can either:
write about what you know about, or write about what other people have already written about,"
and as he stood to shoosh them from the room, added:
"And the triple neatness about the first possibility is that it is all but impossible."