Words thrown to infinity

Sometimes I feel that all the good words have been stolen and I’m left to pick up the scraps. Perhaps why that explains why I write so inconsistently and choppy, but I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just my fault. Probably is.

Below is a combination of those words that I wished were mine because though others wrote them, they make me feel that someone else is gazing into my life and charting it away word by word. They see my insecurities, my bitter hopes and unspoken malice, and they tear it all open in front of me. They feel as I do and I think what’s more important is that I must feel as they do all the same. I just can’t tell them as much.

So know that while you are reading the words of Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Ardery, Albert Einstein, Chuck Palahniuk, and all the others who I have not listed here but have undeniably influenced me, you are also reading me because I am a combination of them all. I am many. I am me. And I am infinite for I am their words.

Note: I have some transitional additions to the texts indicated by square brackets.

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Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here.

So it goes.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

[We came second]. We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished.

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

[Still,] there’s only one rule that I know of, babies – God damn it, you’ve got to be kind. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

[Know that] it’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

[Yet] this is your life and its ending one moment at a time. How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

[So instead, try]. Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.

[And while you’re trying in all you do, remember that] we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

[Because while] advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need, the miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.