Cicala Pomeridiana Winter is fast approaching, and winter is a time for giving up. It’s not fair that Mother Nature gets to die while you have to work all day with wet feet, then leave in darkness with only dinner to look forward to, and after dinner, nothing. Winter makes you wish you were dead, although actually dying isn’t likely what you mean. Usually all you want is to sleep for four months, then wake up to find that another you has lived through the winter, and now the real you can spend all summer drinking cucumber water and eating peaches. Unfortunately, there’s only one you, and if you want to see the summer, you have to survive winter. Less unfortunately, you can do so in a meditative half-state akin to trudging across the ice in a snowstorm with your eyes fixed on the ground in front of you. That’s not such a bad way to live, compared with dying. You know that feeling you get when you eat too much, and the only thing that can temper the guilt for even a second is more food? Or when you start staring and can’t stop staring, can only move your head so that your eyes aren’t aimed at someone’s crotch? Your whole life can be that. You can become useless without ever having to feel bad about being useless, provided you find the right nonsense to ensconce yourself in. So here are some good ways to give up on life without having go through all the agony and hassle of killing yourself. Make a dress out of a duvet and never wash it Life is full of tasks you can never be done with. Having to do something over and over again without hope of completion can feel like eternity sometimes, which is almost as bad as death. Thanks to our liberal democracy, few of us have to push boulders around anymore, but we still have to make the bed, get dressed in the morning, and do our laundry. If you combine these tasks into one thing, though, it makes for a very warm day. And when you have no one, your own filth can feel like the womb. Spend half of the rest of your life inventing your own country, and the following half writing its history When kids are dissatisfied with the world around them, they imagine their own worlds. There’s a whole film genre about the worlds of dissatisfied kids. I don’t like those movies because I resent having to care about other people’s kids. If you become an adult and you’re still dissatisfied with your world, you should go whole hog and invent a new one, right down to the details. It doesn’t have to be a cool, vividly realized world, either. It can be a terribly realized world full of characters no one else would want to know. It’s your world, just like your dinner is your dinner, and if your dinner consists of Tofurkey deli strips and cottage cheese, that’s no one else’s business. Once you invent a world, you should write its history. That way when you die, the world you lived in won’t have to die with you. Maybe some people want the world to end with their death, but I think that’s sick. Devote yourself to solving problems no one else thinks about Do you ever wonder how many pores you have, or what happened to all the hair elastics you ever lost? I don’t, but I could if I wanted to. Any question can become a problem if you think hard enough about it. You use the same parts of your brain to think through problems with no practical consequences as those with profound and far-reaching ones. When those parts of your brain are in motion, they suck up energy from other parts of your brain, so if you choose a problem with no resolution, your world can funnel into just that problem. You’ll never have to worry about anything else, except supplying energy to your brain. Beer nuts are really good for that. Become a stalker Solving problems is one thing a brain can do. Another thing a brain can do is become obsessed with something or someone, which is also a good way to pare down your world to just the essentials. Thinking exclusively about someone else’s life is a great way to give up on your own. Just remember: keep it to yourself and try not to freak them out. Live and let live. Wear vibrating underwear everywhere you go Sometimes life is a struggle between needing to think about stuff and wanting to think about sex. That’s because sex is the best mental vacation. If you wear vibrating underwear, you can become like Jimmy Buffett. Distill all the tastiest elements from food and only eat them When George Costanza gave up on life, the first thing he thought about was “eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery.” George had the right idea, as he often did. Cheese is the best part of pizza, so why settle for pizza when you can just have cheese? Furthermore, why settle for cheese when you can ingest milk fat mixed with salt, or spring for an Indian dinner when you can carry ghee around in a water bottle? Draw a spiral for the rest of your life The spiral is a noted pattern in nature. It symbolizes the dialectic and can be used to hypnotize people. If you draw a spiral, you can hypnotize yourself. The great thing about spirals is you can draw them forever. You’re going to run out of paper eventually, so I would recommend doing this on a beach. Unfortunately, the beach is frozen.
