Life Plan #350

Songs Your Cover Band is Going to Need to Learn Before the Gig on Sunday if They Don’t Want to Get Booed and Not Paid the Forty Bucks They Were Promised by the Club Manager, Who Totally Has a Reputation for Skipping Out During the Encore So He’s Not Around to Pay Up When the Set is Over and Then Not Answering His Phone For Three Weeks:

Free Bird
Mr. Tambourine Man
No Woman, No Cry
American Pie (special request from the manager to keep it under six minutes)
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
Yesterday
Louie Louie
Ring of Fire

Life Plan #349

The average human releases 63 quarts of tears over the course of a lifetime. Ninety-eight percent of this liquid is wasted, either saturated in snotty tissues or scrubbed into the sleeve of a sweater. The other 2% is consumed after trickling into the mouth.
If you are looking to reduce the liquid your body produces, here are some tips: don’t fall in love. Don’t get a puppy. Don’t even look at puppies. Don’t watch Shirley MacLaine movies. Don’t have any friends who might one day make you proud or give you a thoughtful hand-knitted present. Drink cold water and frown.

Life Plan #348

buy car drive car like car spill ketchup on carpet
take care to take car to mechanic
race car wax car polish car
drive car to edge of lake for a picnic

crash car repair car make love in car
find ticket on car tune up car
spin car around parking lot, 7-11, 4:00 a.m.
scrape car against the lip of the garage

put car seat in car baby in car seat
drive car slowly brake car, stop
change tires on car
watch miles on car
change color of car
miss old color of car
sell car go home

Life Plan #347

Living in a commune in 2009 is way different than living in a commune in 1960. We’re not a bunch of free-loving hippies. Most of us take baths every day. Hardly any of us do drugs, or if we do, we do it quietly and with class. No smashing guitars or painting smiley faces on the insides of the tea cups. Really we’re just looking to form a large family. The larger the family, the less often you end up washing dishes on the Chore Rotation Wheel. Did you think of that? Your room already has a lamp in it.

Life Plan #346

Solid plan: Do enormous amounts of research and find a job that best suits you in Kentucky. Put on your best Skype interview outfit and get the job. Research the best moving companies and compare their ratings. Wrap your tchotchkes in newspaper.

Squishy plan: Get bored of your job and drive to Kentucky. Have trouble finding a parking space once you get there. Be cranky and tired because you drove for ten hours. Circle the block and turn on your hazards while you run across the street to Subway to ask for an application. SUBWAY IS CLOSED ON SUNDAYS?? WTF??

Life Plan #345

Tonic is a concept of musical theory which represents the first note and tonal center in a musical composition. It is also the stuff you like to mix your gin with, and the very reason you fell asleep in the parking lot and missed the first half of that concerto and then tried to saunter onstage halfway through and perch your violin on your shoulder like you didn’t even know your hair was tousled and your fly was down. Fired, dismissed—whatever. There’s still the part-time teaching gig at Juilliard, even though the dean there is always up in your business.

Life Plan #344

Life is vaguely decent, mostly boring, before a routine colonoscopy at age 64 reveals a malignant tumor in your ascending colon. Your doctor estimates you have one more year. “I’m sorry,” he says.

You stumble home, wandering in to a car dealership and buy a Benz-SLR with your suddenly useless retirement fund. Then: Parisian summer, Kopi Luwak for breakfasts, Damien Hirst’s sketchpad. You watch your balance drop to nothing. Finally, you feel ready.

One morning the doctor calls, a pinch in his voice, to say it wasn’t a tumor after all, but a common fatty deposit. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Life Plan #343

Good qualities in a professional Manhattan skyscraper window washer are bravery, lots of bravery, good balance, patience, upper body strength, even more bravery, and a natural defense against vertigo.

Professional Manhattan skyscraper window washers must be able to leave the philosophical part of their mind on the ground. They mustn’t let the swirling clouds distract them by encouraging such thoughts as “When I say ‘I love you’ to myself, who is the I and who is the you?” Thoughts such as this induce a feeling of dizziness that can cause the thinker’s boots to tremble and his scaffolding to collapse.

Life Plan #342

A dice inspector is the guy who is in charge of counting the dots on the dice to make sure they are properly imprinted upon the cube. He also rolls each die across his palm, slowly, in circles, to inspect the weight, the shapeliness of the corners, the clarity of the dots, the smoothness of each of the six sides.
This guy works in a small windowless office in the back of a casino. There are plastic plants on the desk. He takes his job very seriously.

With gambling, after all, it is dangerous to leave things up to chance.

Life Plan #341

Part of the appeal of living on a farm was that there would be a vast and heroic landscape, no one for miles. It was always a personal goal to flop down in the grass and start rolling, and keep rolling until grass filled your ears and you stopped to lie under a spinning sky, satisfied the edge still wasn’t even close.

And the porch swing, with the plaid cushions.

Then came the neighbors: the cross-bow incident with the sheep, the restraining orders. Only then did you see how quickly five acres can become a fishtank.

What will happen next?