How to be Happy


    We can call ourselves "Partners in Sin". I'll need your help thinking of creative and fun ways to be a sinner. Kinky sex would be a start, I think, along with living together, shirking debt, and evading "responsibility" by running away together to Newark, New Jersey to hawk pork-o-dogs to busy commuters, kissing each other after each and every ketchup squirt. Then we could stay together for life and never have kids or a dog named Ralph, but we'd sure have lots of pork-o-dogs. Right before we were about to die of extreme old age (jog 8 miles a day until 95 years of age, then BAM, life's over), we'd hike the Pacific Crest Trail back from New Jersey to Washington and visit all of the weak, unhappy people who are just like us except for one thing: they decided to climb the corporate ladder instead of an elm tree, and life just went downhill from there.

    A simple thing like that is what decides your fate; you have to be able to identify it and say THIS is what I must do to live a life like that smiling 95 year-old who just kissed his lifetime companion with the passion of a young lover meeting his bride for the first time, THIS is what I must do. The secret to a happy life could be anything from a job at the Nordstroms perfume bar to a hairy man on a Harley here to take you away from your bills to see the world, or possibly Pennsylvania instead, he doesn't know. If you're lucky, you'll know your harley-man when he comes and ride off into the sunset, looking and marveling at each little yellow stripe on the Pennsylvania highway and knowing at last that this road of roads leads to that smiling old man, and this is what you wanted all along.



    Notes from Kate

    This was written by my friend, Justin, to his then-girlfriend.

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