eVeRyONe ELsE iS DoiNg iT So WhY caN't wE?

You know how it is. You're happily reading a book or a newspaper or a cereal box and you suddenly hit a phrase that leaves you convulsed with laughter or disgust or a profound sense of "hey, yeah...dude!" and of course your first reaction is to shout the phrase from the nearest mountaintop only if you live in Memphis there aren't any so you have to make do with a riverbluff but then you get arrested for loitering and being a public (as opposed to private) nuisance and it nearly ruins your whole weekend.

So you see the dilemma?

Ah, but now you've found the double-you-double-you-double-you, and the world is your unsuspecting oyster. You can spray your fantabulous collocation of clever quotables across miles of bandwidth and nobody can make you shut up! Millions will admire you, adore you, honor you with parades and other forms of mass public demonstration. You might even get email!

So anyway.

Don't let the outward neatness of this particular page distract your attention from its essential chaotic bioluminescence. I've tried to omit the trite and oft-quoted, in my continuing attempt to avoid cliches like the plague.

Follow me, my brave and bandy-legged coots...this mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.

[Regarding the American Coot]
"Gregarious....Dabbles, but also dives from the surface. Taking off, it skitters; flight labored; the big feet trail beyond the short tail."

(Roger Tory Peterson, "A Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies")

"It was a silver cow. But when I say 'cow' don't go running away with the idea of some decent self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence."

(P.G. Wodehouse, "Weekend Wodehouse")

"There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues."

(Thomas Merton)

"It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it....We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus."

(Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek")

"I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, 'This must thou eat.' And I ate the world."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"It is interesting to consider what can be achieved by placing just a single fold in a sheet of paper."

(Eric Kenneway, "Complete Origami")

"My husband, T.S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in, the driver said: 'You're T.S. Eliot.' When asked how he knew, he replied: 'Ah, I've got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, "Well Lord Russell, what's it all about?" And do you know, he couldn't tell me.'"

(Valerie Eliot, letter to the London Times)

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

(T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding")

"'We're going on a long explore,' said Pooh."

(A.A. Milne)

"The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching....The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world --- if only from time to time."

(Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood")

[To his daughter, upon viewing a raindrop with his microscope]
"Come here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rainwater!....
They swim! They play around!"

(Anton Leeuwenhoek)

"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose, no good to nobody, no good for nothing....I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work."

(Woody Guthrie)

"I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me?"

(Beck, "Loser")

"Hello, babies! Welcome to Earth.
It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded.
At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here.
There's only one rule that I know of, babies ---
Godammit, you've got to be kind!"

(Kurt Vonnegut)

[And, no, I am not making this up.] "Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

(Pat Robertson, 1992 GOP Convention)

"I have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."

(Rebecca West, 1913)

"The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them."

(Edward Abbey)

"The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, and it may be the homeplace to which we will someday return....Scientists report that no other creature on earth dreams as much as the human fetus. If the fetal brain has had no experience, if its newly formed mind is a tabula rasa, what then does it dream about? Do we imagine that the tiny swimmer's dreams are dry?....That the mood is other than oceanic?"

(Tom Robbins, "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas")

"We need the tonic of wildness,
to wade sometimes in marshes."

(Henry David Thoreau)

"When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience....It probably doesn't matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life's many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are."

(Diane Ackerman, "A Natural History of the Senses")

"One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label."

(Annie Dillard, "Teaching a Stone to Talk")

"In my sleep I dream incessantly of birds."

(John James Audubon)

"Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tze, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly....Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

(From the works of the Taoist, Chuang Tze)

"There can be no understanding without love."

(Dorothy Richards, "Beaversprite")

"Let it be me
(this is not a fighting song)
Let it be me
(not a wrong for a wrong)
Let it be me
If the world is night,
Shine my life like a light."

(Indigo Girls, "Let it Be Me")

"Sometimes I need to apologize.
Sometimes I need to admit that I ain't right.
Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut, or only say hello.
Sometimes I still feel I'm walking alone."

(Green Day, "Walking Alone")

"Hurtful expressions should never be used,
Not even against an enemy;
For inevitably they will return,
Like an echo from a rock.

(From the Tibetan Doctrine, 'Elegant Sayings' of the Lamas)

"All the bridges that you burn
Will come back one day to haunt you.
One day you'll find you're walking,
Lonely."

(Tracy Chapman, "Bridges")

"I'm calling from the diner,
the diner on the corner,
I ordered two coffees
One is for you.
And I was hoping you'd join me
'cause I ain't got no money.
And I really miss you
I should mention that, too."

(Ani DiFranco, "The Diner")

"You know, I'm the only one in this family who has no problems," Zooey said. "And you know why? Because any time I'm feeling blue, or puzzled, what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and --- well, we iron things out together, that's all."

(J.D. Salinger, "Franny and Zooey")

"I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And I know and love my own people too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man."

(Edward Abbey)

"The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

(William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell")

"Power warps because it involves joy
in domination; also because it means
forgetting how we too starve, break
like a corn stalk in the wind, how we
die like the spinach of drought,
how what slays the vole slays us."

(Marge Piercy, "The Common Living Dirt")

"I am become death, shatterer of worlds,
Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom."

(God speaking in the "Bhagavad-Gita", repeated by J. Robert Oppenheimer

upon witnessing the first nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico.)

"'Don't you want to join us?' I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. 'No, I don't,' I said."

(Franz Kafka)

"The happiness of being with people."

(Franz Kafka)

"I'm OK,
I'm starting to get over the urge to kill somebody
and into the urge to...rock.
They are so close, really, on the food chain.
You know, it's like rock-n-roll, axe-murder...
Um, so anyway...
[starts strumming guitar, giggles insanely]
Oh...you guys look so funny, all bouncy!
No, don't stop! You were like, so cute.
I mean, I hate to be the only funny bouncy one here."

(Ani DiFranco, live intro to "Out of Range")

"While love is unfashionable
let us live
unfashionably.

(Alice Walker, "Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems")

"Not to like little children, or find them interesting and enjoy their company, is no crime. But it is surely a great misfortune and a great loss, like having no legs or being deaf and blind."

(John Holt, "How Children Learn")

"I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature."

(Edward Abbey)

"'Do you think that I have a problem?' Ignatius bellowed. 'The only problem that those people [in Charity psychiatric hospital] have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of society fearful. Every asylum in the nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.'

"'Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked.'

"'Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr. Becnel one of the martyrs of our age.'"

(John Kennedy Toole, "A Confederacy of Dunces")

"Target cotton swabs address a wide spectrum of uses."

(Label on Target store brand cotton swabs)
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"For external use only."

(Label on Eucerin brand moisturizing lotion)

"Fits dispenser! It fits in almost all standard roll holders."

(A key selling-point for Charmin brand toilet paper)

"Most present-day practitioners of origami believe that it is wrong to destroy any part of their material (the original paper square or rectangle) by cutting it. They believe that any alteration to the paper should be made by folding alone....

"There is a school of origami, however, which allows cutting in the form of incisions. Its adherents accept that one should not discard any of the original material, but they have no objection to cutting into it. They would probably maintain that the original square or rectangle is not really being destroyed in this way."

(Eric Kenneway, "Complete Origami")

[33. Use Cloth Diapers]

"This is a tough one --- not because there's any question about what we ought to do, but because it's hard to give up disposable diapers. A recent poll, for example, showed 87% of Americans prefer them.

"....Remember, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Better to alternate between cloth and disposables than to use disposables exclusively....

"Cloth diapers don't absorb moisture the way disposable diapers do, so you'll need diaper covers to act as a shield between the diaper and the rest of the world.

(excerpt from "Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth")

"Squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am 32 flavors and then some
I am beyond your peripheral vision,
So you might want to turn your head
'cause some day you might find that you're starving
and eating all of the words you said."

(Ani DiFranco, "32 Flavors")

"'Oh no. No, no. Not wrong. I've never known you to be wrong, Bessie. Your facts are always either untrue or exaggerated, but you're never wrong --- no, no.' With much delight, Zooey wet his razor and began to shave."

(J.D. Salinger, "Franny and Zooey")

"I believe in the future
I may live in my car
Keep my radio tuned
To the voice of a star."

(Paul Simon, "The Cool, Cool River")

"....You must be completely satisfied with the performance
of this product, or your money back."

(The Arm & Hammer Laundry Detergent Guarantee)

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