Illustration by Danny Elchert
In my parents’ house, there is no Bible. There is Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. My kin, like Cactus Ed, proclaim themselves “not atheist, but earthiest,” quoting John Muir and Rachel Carson with the zeal that other families reserve for scripture. My dad, without a second thought, tore down his garage to put in more garden; when my aunt turns over a rock, she can tell you the Latin name of every squiggly-wiggly that runs for cover. My mom’s always sending me newspaper clippings on my sister, who spends her days fishing rusted beer cans out of rivers with her bare hands and marching around in a sandwich board for the sake of the ducks or the duck grass.
And me? I recycle. That’s about it. In my family, I am the eco-blasphemer. The loser. The kid who might as well have become a dope dealer or an Amway distributor. My husband grew up in the suburbs, in a subdivision he describes as “so cookie-cutter, all the houses developed the same crack in the dining-room ceiling.” He spent his summer days watching MacGyver in an air-conditioned house, two-fisting Twinkies and Kool-Aid. He still loves hot dogs, video games, long meandering drives, new things crackling under plastic shrink-wrap, drive-through pizza, heated car seats, long showers, movie popcorn, swimming pools and gadgets of every sort. For a few years, I used my proximity to him to engage in a sort of amnesia that led me to believe that I, too, had grown up eating Twinkies and watching MacGyver, rather than mournfully looking at our broken TV, then spending the day in the creek behind our house, collecting leeches in a dirty Mason jar I’d found under the back porch.
The problem with growing up earthiest is that you never escape the guilt—a black, searing, insomnia-inducing guilt that only a 19th-century Calvinist could understand. So back in March, when I stumbled on a New York Times article called “A Year Without Toilet Paper,” I found myself reading it over and over again.
Laugh if you like at the title. To me, it sounded like grace: It described an experiment being undertaken by Colin Beavan, a New Yorker who rechristened himself “No Impact Man” and blogged about voluntarily giving up electricity, plastic, a car, buying new stuff—anything that would make an environmental impact—for an entire year. His blog’s subtitle describes the project thus: “A Guilty Liberal Finally Snaps, Swears Off Plastic, Goes Organic, Becomes A Bicycle Nazi, Turns Off His Power, Composts His Poop and, While Living In New York City, Generally Turns Into A Tree-Hugging Lunatic Who Tries to Save the Polar Bears and The Rest of the Planet from Environmental Catastrophe While Dragging His Baby Daughter and Prada-Wearing, Four Seasons–Loving Wife Along for the Ride.”
That did it: This guilty liberal wanted to snap. To go no-impact. To assuage my own conscience. Why something like this suddenly seemed easier than standing up for the rights of duck grass, I don’t know. What I did know is that even if No Impact Man convinced his Prada-loving wife to go along for the ride, there was no guarantee I’d be able to convince my MacGyver-watching husband. Perhaps that’s why I volunteered to go no-impact for a month and then write about it; I could tell Thom, Hey, it’s my job! We have to do this! So I got the green light to write it. And then I forgot to tell Thom.
2.
“So … are you guys going to compost your poop?” a co-worker inquires brightly at an after-work happy hour.
“I beg your pardon?” Thom says, choking on his beer.
“It’s OK,” I say. “We’re going to do this in September, when it’s not too hot or too cold.”
After recovering his breath and receiving a full explanation, Thom nods and smiles, smiles and nods.
“Actually,” he says as we drive home, “this whole idea fills me with dread.”
In the end, we compromise: The A/C, off. The lights, out, except for the bare minimum. The aquarium, on. The fridge, on. I’d take public transportation and ride my bike, Thom would continue to drive—and eat hot dogs. I’d be eating organic and local (the closer it grows to St. Louis, the less gas required to get it to the store) and vegetarian. Both of us would try not to buy anything new, or use anything made of plastic. Packaging was avoided at all costs: instead of toothpaste, we used baking soda (the box is recyclable). We’d continue to use the washer, cold water only, hanging things to dry. I’d be taking cold, three-minute showers. Coffee was out. I switched to a slightly stale bag of leftover loose tea, brewing it in a porcelain strainer. And no, we didn’t venture into the brave world of humanure (I personally prefer the more poetic Japanese term, “night soil”) or give up toilet paper—but we did switch to the recycled kind.
“So, is it like when you’re Jewish, and it’s Saturday, you have to ask someone to come in and light your stove?” my friend Curtis asks, regarding the turning on of lights. Other people react with horror: “Why are you doing this to yourself?” Another asks, “So, does this mean you’re going to live in a hogan and dig up grubs for dinner?” Even my father, after going on a 45-minute screed about the “political boondoggle of ethanol,” recoils after I inform him I’m going to ride the bus. “That sounds pretty exotic,” he says. “Don’t you have any college students who could do that for you?”
Strangely, the opening night for the environmental documentary The Eleventh Hour is August 31, the night before The Experiment begins; it seems like the perfect prelude, a way of getting fired up about a month ahead. I skip getting anything at the concession counter, though I should probably be celebrating my own private Mardi Gras with a king-sized box of Dots and a bucket of soda, prior to 30 days of eco-Lent.
As expected, the film is extremely depressing: brownish-green water gurgling into lakes from rusted drainage pipes; footage of bloated corpses floating through New Orleans; polar bears, rooting through burning trash in a landfill. My eyes are so swollen from weeping, I can hardly keep track of the last third of the film, when we’re told how this can be our generation’s finest hour. I’m all fugue by the time the credits roll.
“I’m going to make a sequel,” Thom whispers as the lights come up. “I’m going to call it Eleven More Hours.”
“Shut up!” I whimper. “That’s not funny.”
I run to the bathroom to blow my nose, unwilling to continue the conversation, to dignify that with an answer.
But at exactly midnight, it’s Thom who powers down the A/C, turns off the lights, opens the windows.
3.
The next morning, when the alarm goes off at 7, my head is thrumming like I’ve scraped my brain against a splintery board, and my hair sticks to my face with sweat.
In the bathroom, I turn the light on, then remember: There’s sunshine outside! Swack, it’s off. I sprinkle my toothbrush with baking soda and stick it in my mouth. Pleah! My face winches up but I keep on brushing, filling my mouth with the taste of … Bisquick? Margarita salt? Some sort of poisonous mineral with a long, Latin name? I comb my hair out, minus the blow-dryer. And no makeup, either. Now I am afraid to exit the bathroom. I feel exposed, like I’m about to walk around in the world without pants.
Earlier that week, I’d answered a Craigslist ad and purchased a really swell used bike from a Chinese grad student named Jai, who couldn’t stop smiling—not in the risus sardonicus manner of a bank teller, but beatifically. Later, Thom picked up a bike off Craigslist, too. The woman had emailed that she’d “only rode it but once.” Then, when Thom showed up, the woman had a hard time pushing it down the driveway, because the front tire was so banged up it was practically scalloped. Unfortunately, this did not make Thom any more enthusiastic about biking to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning. Thanks to Suzy-Mae’s bike, that would have to wait until next week, after he’d wrenched off the front wheel and replaced it.
Using Curtis’ Jewish Sabbath logic, Thom suggests we drive to the farmer’s market. With my hair sticking up like pinwheel spokes and my head throbbing from caffeine withdrawal (coffee doesn’t grow within 100 miles of St. Louis, so it’s off limits), I give in.
“OK,” I say, swallowing my guilt.
We roll the car windows down to cool off, but it doesn’t do much good.
My cowlicks flutter in the wind, sticking to my sweaty face. We know we’ll have to return straight from the farmer’s market to the house so the food doesn’t spoil, so we go to some yard sales first—we can buy anything we want secondhand, and it’s a nice diversion, since we can’t watch TV, go to movies or buy new stuff. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but the only thing I find is a fancy coffee press. It’s only a buck, and it doesn’t require electricity. Too bad I can’t drink coffee for another month.
By the time we stop at the farmer’s market, it’s afternoon. I’m starving. I opened the cupboards this morning with the strange realization that everything inside was off limits; now I make do with one of the last two organic apples, the tiny bruised-up ones that other shoppers bypassed.
Back in August, I hadn’t anticipated food being such a problem. If there’s one thing my parents actually pounded into me, it’s gardening, and in our tiny backyard, we planted cherry tomatoes, Dr. Wyche’s yellows (their namesake was a circus man, who developed a very fine heirloom tomato by fertilizing his plants with elephant dung—now there was a guy who could appreciate composted poop!), beefsteak tomatoes, rosemary, basil, bell peppers, hot peppers, huckleberries, lettuce, radishes, string beans and cucumbers. By September, the lettuce plants had produced exactly one salad, and our leggy cherry tomato plant had choked out everything but the huckleberries, which were in a separate plot—and still green. It became clear that the cherry tomato would become a staple of my diet—which, actually, it already was.
4.
On Sunday, I head out into the heat to harvest some tomatoes. Mosquitoes swirl through the thick air, and before long, my arms look like dot-to-dots that don’t really add up to anything no matter how many lines you draw, but I keep picking, filling up two big paper grocery bags and a colander. Thom’s on the back porch with a multitude of wrenches, swearing at Suzy-Mae’s busted bike.
My plan today is to brew up a huge batch of tomato sauce. What I will do with it—it’s tough to find pasta made from locally harvested wheat—is still in question. I am ready to eat it like soup. I spend hours washing, cutting, throwing tomatoes in a pot and admiring my new mosquito bites.
By the time Thom comes back indoors, his face is as red as the tomatoes. Do I want to go to Schnucks to get a bus pass? My paring knife is clattering in the sink before I can think twice; Schnucks runs the A/C at meat-locker temperatures during the summer.
In the five minutes it takes me to buy my Metro pass, Thom disappears. Where the hell did he go? I find myself pacing through the store, furious. My knees are black from kneeling in the garden. My hair’s sticking up. I’m sweaty. My head hurts. I’m dizzy. Not even the balm of the air conditioning soothes my temper. I just want to go home. It turns out he’s starving, too.
“Do you want to share some chips?”
“I can’t eat chips.”
“What about some cookies?”
“I can’t eat cookies.”
“Is there anything here you can eat?”
“No, not really.”
Oh, if only the metaphorical chill in the car were a blast of A/C! I’m already missing the subzero of the grocery store. Thom pulls over at a 7-Eleven and buys two hot dogs and a gallon of soda pop. I go home and eat a bowl of cherry tomatoes.
5.
Over the long weekend, I acclimate not just to the baking soda but the heat and the caffeine headaches, which were almost unbearable at first. I’d slapped ice packs on my head, hung off the side of the bed, hoping to get more blood to my brain. I finally break down on Sunday night and drink some coffee … and the guilt is worse than the headache. But this brings an epiphany: guilt is the force that will sustain me through The Experiment, even if I starve to death or catch a staph infection off the bus handrails along the way.
On Tuesday, I wake up at 5 a.m. on the dot. I brush my teeth with baking soda. For some reason, the taste isn’t horrible anymore; it’s almost grown on me. I take a cold three-minute shower and, with a wet head, walk to the bus stop so I can be there by 6:20.
People avoid public transportation because they have to get up too early to catch any bus. I had to get up early for a very special reason: the Grand Bus. Legend has it that there was a man who lost the tops of his ears to frostbite rather than board the Grand Bus. Also on the No. 70, a passenger once punched the bus driver out cold (luckily, another passenger steered the bus to safety). When you take the Grand Bus, you get there early, because you know there probably won’t be room for you on the first one that comes along. Even at 6:20 a.m., it’s so crowded I can hardly find a place to stand, let alone sit. People are sneezing and snuffling and yawning. The normal rules of social engagement, which dictate that you do not touch your neighbor, disappear in such crowded quarters. I have to transfer to MetroLink; my stop is right alongside the train tracks. This morning, there are coal cars rolling by, creating a sort of Eastern European je ne sais quoi. I’ve brought along A.E. Hotchner’s King of the Hill. As it turns out, Hotchner’s memoir of growing up in St. Louis during the Depression, eating grass and chewing on road tar in lieu of gum, makes for appropriate reading.
The walk to work from the MetroLink is uneventful, other than that I notice the ice-cream factory on the side of the road has a vaguely chemical smell, like a urinal puck, which only makes me glad I can’t eat ice cream until October. I’ve cleverly arranged all of my interviews and meetings to cluster around the MetroLink line, so that I don’t have to drive. I have my lunch tucked into my shoulder bag: apples and goat cheese. It seems almost bucolic, like something a Swiss philosopher would eat.
Once I enter the building, though, my heart drops. I’m looking longingly at the elevator, realizing that I have no choice but to mount five flights of stairs to get to our floor. When I make it there, I sit in the stairwell, trying to get my breath back. I’m afraid I won’t be able to wheeze a cheerful good morning to the next person I see. And my carefully laid plans to function without a car are dashed: It turns out I have to go to the Art Museum for an interview. The museum’s PR lady offers to give me a ride. Embarrassed, with flashbacks of high school, I beg off. “I can get there on the MetroLink, no problem,” I tell her.
Actually, I get off at the wrong stop and end up jogging up Art Hill in 90-degree heat. By the time I make it to the lobby, I have sweat stains under my arms, and the humidity has given me a head like a seeding dandelion. The other journalists are in heels, with perfectly coiffed hair. The suave French artist we’re here to interview looks like he’s stepped out of a copy of GQ. I smile, sweaty, glad at least I’m not wearing mascara and don’t have raccoon eyes, even if I smell like a horse stall.
By the end of the week, my bucolic feelings about goat cheese and apples have disappeared. Why can’t these goddamn hippies go buy a cow? I wonder during a particularly cranky moment. Then I catch myself. I am lucky to live near the little grocery store on Morganford, which carries mostly local food; without it, and its goat cheese, I’d be eating wads of grass—or, good lord, photographs of Salisbury steak, cut out of old magazines—like the young A.E. Hotchner, who starved his way through the Depression. I get up and go for a walk to clear my head when I realize I have actually wondered if it’s still vegetarian to eat a magazine spread of a Salisbury steak.
6.
The next Saturday, we get up early to go to the farmer’s market. Thom talks up the awesome shocks on Suzy-Mae’s bike and offers to let me ride it. Halfway down the alley, though, I realize it’s making a horrible scraping noise. The brakes are too tight.
“Here, I’ll ride it,” Thom offers, fiddling with it for a second to loosen up the calipers.
We breeze along Grand. I could get used to this; I even forget about my frizzy hair. We cross Arsenal and head into the park. Hey! This is a lot better than a car, I think, then notice that Thom has taken a sharp right and has shot out into the middle of the soccer field at an alarming speed, his feet dragging across the ground as he bounces into chuckholes and over molehills.
“______!” he yells.
“What? I can’t hear you!”
He gets off, wheels the bike back to the sidewalk.
“The brakes went out,” he informs me.
We wheel our bikes to the market, lock them up and shop anyway. We ride home carefully—avoiding hills—and before we can get our bikes to the porch, it starts to rain.
7.
One of the important components of The Experiment is the Worm Bin. Forbidden by our landlady to maintain an outdoor compost heap, we must figure out a way to deal with kitchen scraps, especially since the majority of our food (well, my food) was unprocessed, and required the generation of lots of vegetal offal. Luckily, two years ago, my mother-in-law gave us a worm bin, which sat in the garage, gathering dust, just like my old bicycle, which had flat tires and morning glory vines growing through the spokes. We save up newspapers and cardboard, and though we don’t manage to get the bin going before September 1, we sneak the kitchen scraps into a corner of the yard, hiding them under some mulch.
The preferred worm in the business of composting is the red wiggler, though one friend has had success with wax worms—when he decided to go vegetarian, he gave them an entire package of frozen chicken thighs, and they’d eaten them down to the bone in a weekend. Choosing to go the less grisly route, we stick with red wigglers from Paul’s Bait and Tackle on Chippewa.
“We’d like some red wigglers, please,” I tell the teenage girl behind the counter, who looks at me quizzically; I don’t look like an outdoorsman. She sets a blue plastic container on the counter.
“Well, actually, we’d like all your red wigglers,” I add.
Snapping her gum, she stacks up four containers. Will that be enough? It will have to be; I’m not mixing in wax worms, which Paul’s has plenty of. They’d probably slurp up the wigglers like spaghetti.
For the next two hours, as the worms patiently wait in their little blue containers, Thom and I sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor, shredding newspaper, wetting it down, shredding some more. We carry the bin, which now feels as if weighs 75 pounds, down to the basement, prop it up on bricks, and set the worms free in their new home, hoping they like cherry tomatoes.
8.
Once again, I’m the passive passenger—cheating, in a way, but I haven’t touched a steering wheel in three weeks. We’re back to combing yard sales for fun on the weekend, which has the added benefit of reminding me that bright new things quickly begin to look like trash: Absizers still in the box, spy thrillers with broken spines, cheap framed prints that fade even when they’re not hung near a sunny window.
Later, at the Goodwill (which has great air conditioning!), I spot something odd in glassware. There, among the jumble of Goonies milk glasses and chipped ceramic candleholders is what appears to be a beautifully constructed piece of drug paraphernalia: a 15-inch glass cylinder, with an alchemical-looking vessel inside it. Upon closer inspection, I see a clean white wick poking out of the interior chamber—it’s a lamp! I force myself not to dance in the aisle, as I realize this means I can read after sundown.
The man at the cash register looks over his glasses at me when I set it on the counter. He picks it up and turns it around in his hands.
“Looks like somebody gonna have a party.”
“It’s a lamp.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, see, there’s a wick in there.”
“Right. That’ll be $2.”
“It’s a lamp, really.”
“Uh-huh,” he repeats, wrapping it up in swaths of newspaper.
Thom laughs when I show it to him, though at home, he Googles it and triumphantly points out that it’s a hand-blown Wolfard oil lamp, which retails for $104.95.
We decide to test it out. Using a modified bendy straw (yeah, it was plastic—but it was already in our kitchen! It was 5 years old, at least!) we fill the interior chamber with olive oil, pull the wick up with tweezers and light it with a birthday candle. BWOOF! A 4-inch column of flame jets up, burning pure black. Taken aback, we watch the wick burn down in less time than it took to fill the thing and light it. A sickly column of black smoke billows through the top; the evil smell that results will linger in the house for days. Eventually, Thom consults the Wolfard site and learns that the wick stays low in the chamber; it’s the oil that burns, not the wick.
Now we have no wick. Thom again consults Google, learning that Archangels in Maplewood carries them.
“You mean the little pink ones?” the clerk asks us. I have no idea what she’s talking about. Harp music plays over the PA system and she’s surrounded by Russian icon paintings of Jesus and Mary. I’m trying to explain the lamp to her without using the word “bong.”
“I have one of those big oil lamps, the kind—well, uh, it’s glass, like a cylinder, right? And there’s sort of a, uh, chamber inside it.”
She nods, calmly, pulling out a drawer and producing a tiny manila envelope, producing a handful of new wicks.
“Monks make them out of mop heads,” she explains.
“That’s great,” I say. “They’re recycled.”
She laughs at me. “Well, no, they don’t use the mops first. They just cut the threads off new mops.”
This time, we’re careful to keep the wick way down. It works like a charm. There’s nothing like reading A.E. Hotchner by candlelight, especially when your stomach is grumbling and he’s waxing poetic about eating grass.
9.
About halfway through the month, The Experiment is starting to visibly wear on Thom. He drinks beer alone; he’s forgone the TV, though I’ve told him he can watch it, even though I can’t. We find ourselves sitting in the house, staring at walls. We eat separately. He’s tired of chauffeuring me around. I tell him I have read more books this month than in the first 8 months of this year. He seems unimpressed and tells me that he feels like he’s had a vague, dirty flu all month. To be honest, it’s beginning to wear on me, too.
When the alarm goes off in the morning, I hope I’ve caught a real flu, so I won’t have to board the Grand Bus. The MetroLink, which is calm by comparison, has also become a terror: There’s a beat cop there who’s taken a shine to me. “I see you,” he told me one morning on the platform, “sitting there, lookin’ good on the bus.” I wave my wedding ring at him, thinking, You are a liar. No one ever looks good on the bus! I cheat on the eating thing here and there—I’ll admit to a few fistfuls of cheese popcorn at work, but I swear I never broke down to the point of resorting to the candy machine in the basement, a near miracle. On the weekends, I ride my bike, which is delightful, but there’s only so much bike-riding one can do. The house is too hot. While visiting friends and attempting to explain this crazy undertaking, Thom suddenly bursts out, “The only way to not have a footprint is to not have a foot!”
Then, one morning near the end of the month, I find him pulling on my sleeve. He doesn’t say anything. I follow him to the kitchen window. He points: There, around our bushy blue flowers, the ones that haven’t been choked out by the huckleberries, are four—wait, five—hummingbirds, zooming up and down, gathering nectar. We stand at the window, transfixed. “I saw them from the bathroom window,” he tells me. “One of them hovered by the screen, and looked at me.” It’s amazing what can happen when you turn off your air-conditioning—and I don’t mean heatstroke.
10.
Halfway through The Experiment, I bump into my friend Sara, who helped spearhead St. Louis Slow Food. If there’s anyone who understands eating local, who understands this environmental stuff, who won’t chide me for avoiding candy bars and long drives through the country, it’s her. I proudly tell her I’m eating only local food. She stares at me.
“Why the hell would you do that?” she asks. I reel.
“It’s pretty much impossible, anyway,” she says. “What are you going to prove by being miserable? What good is life if you can’t enjoy it? This shouldn’t be about going off the deep end.”
I think about it. I sure do miss beer. The coffee, not so much; but having the choice to drink coffee, or not, I miss terribly. Abbey—even Cactus Ed!—concurred. “Do not burn yourself out,” he warned. “Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast ... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.”
Of this I am sure: Even without a desk calculator, the Grand Bus would’ve killed me long before my time. But it’s now two months later, and I still keep the lights off in my office; I light it with two little lamps, when sunlight doesn’t suffice. The worms, miraculously, survived, and are still eating our watermelon rinds and parsley curls. My bicycle has not gotten the use it should, but I still take the stairs unless I’m irreparably hung over—one day, while sprinting from step to step, I looked up, not winded at all, and realized I was on the sixth floor (I work on the fifth). I made it through September without buying anything new, if you don’t count the lamp wicks, and haven’t bought much since. Our AmerenUE bill went down from $119 to $37. Though I still feel nerdy doing this, I take home soda cans, plastic bottles, cardboard to recycle. Even my doubting Thomas has come around; the other day, he got all excited about a zero-energy house in Dwell, and I haven’t smelled hot dogs on his breath for weeks.
Despite the miseries of those crowded, early morning bus rides, and fights with Thom, and losing so much weight my pants fit me like an old man’s, something changed in me during September. One morning, while walking from the MetroLink, I passed the canal that runs through our industrial park. Down in the muddy water, among the trash and debris, there were yellow flowers sprouting, along with some weird Missouri version of bamboo. What had attracted my attention in the first place was the quacking of ducks: two drab females and one male. Cars drove past, their drivers probably thinking I was insane, peering into a ditch, goggle-eyed, but I was overcome by a terrible sadness, flooded with childhood memories of the canyon where I grew up. Maybe there wasn’t any prime-time TV in our house, but there were always mysteries, comforting and upsetting both: orphaned baby robins in Kleenex nests, who died in the shoebox houses we made for them; the glittering snakes that wound through fields of wild oats; the family of beavers that loved building dams right over the grate where the creek emptied into a giant drain, which never ceased to piss off the park ranger. There are no beavers in my neighborhood—but there’s a mockingbird that wakes me up at 3 a.m., imitating the alarm of the hypersensitive luxury car across the street. A posse of gray cats, who spook under cars, a family of raccoons that like to tumble into our dumpster, weird sprouty weeds that come up through the cracks in the asphalt. Turning off my television and my computer, walking, riding my bike, thinking about everything I put in my mouth—it made me miserable, at least at first. But it also kept me awake to the world. And only while awake does one notice ducks swimming in a trash-strewn canal, or spot hummingbirds outside a bathroom window. And there it was: that mystery that marked my childhood. It shook me by the shoulders, hard. And suddenly, the thought of smothering the world with the exhaust huffing out of my tailpipe, or the shrink-wrap and candy wrappers I toss, became impossible to bear. It’s not earthiest guilt; that’s a cheap emotional atonement that lulls you into thinking it’s OK to keep slurping coffee out of Styrofoam cups and buying cheap dresses disposable as paper towels, provided one feels bad enough about it afterwards. The mystery says, have your coffee; but stay awake. Keep your brain in your head, your head attached to your body, your body active and alive. Take your heart out of the safe-deposit box. Be happy. Watch the ducks. Demolish your garage. See what’s under that rock. Pull some beer cans out of that stream with your bare hands. Just wake up, and you will outlive the bastards … even if you die first.
