by Charles Marowitz
(Swans - January 15, 2007) 1- When being assailed by a telemarketer just as I am sitting down to dinner, instead of shrieking "Fuck off bitch, get a life!" and slamming down the phone, I will gently inquire whether they feel constantly invading the privacy of hard-working Americans is a fruitful activity for a grown-up.
2- Being reduced to an anguished paralytic by a lousy performance of a useless play, I will not flee the theatre hurling epithets at the heads of the performers but patiently wait for the first intermission before bounding out the side door hurling a tear-gas canister in my wake.
3- When my wayward laptop computer inadvertently trashes twenty pages of unrecoverable and deathless prose, I will refrain from chucking it out the window and will quietly sit down with the errant piece of mindless junk and lecture it on the on the dangers of attention deficit disorders.
4- At cocktail parties and similar social gatherings where I find myself riven with catatonic boredom, I will refrain from excusing myself by lying to the hosts that I must "wake up very early the next morning" and instead, lecture them on the damage to the hippocampus inflicted by tedious idiots whose brains, were they to be wedged inside a pistachio shell, would still rattle.
5- I will convert all the explosive animosities occasionally provoked by loved ones into heartfelt apologies -- until provoked into a new wave of explosive animosities.
6- I will desist from writing steamy and erotic love letters to Ann Coulter and signing them King Kong.
7- I will discontinue my disgraceful efforts to persuade John Hinckley, Jr. that, on those days when he has home leave from the sanitarium, he might like to brush up on his target practice by visiting the Oval office.
8- I will discontinue the spiteful practice of listing the number of times Charlie Rose interrupts his guest's attempt to reply to an over-elaborate question which contains between three and four interrogatory clauses.
9- I will seek psychiatric help because of my recurring dream in which Paris Hilton tries to strangle me with Brittany Spears' panties.
10- I will put a stop to the preposterous campaign I have been waging to persuade Angelina Jolie to adopt me.
11- I will try to average between seven and eight hours of sleep and try to coincide them with televised presidential addresses.
12- I will abandon all attempts to invoke the muse into inspiring me to write The Great American Novel and instead turn my creative efforts towards mastering the 5-line limerick, i.e.,
As a writer he struggled and fell a bit
Decided to try and rebel a bit.
Blank and untutored,
He found himself neutered
And knew that he'd always be celibate.
13- In attempts to keep my weight down, I will rule out all sweets and restrict myself to one cherry a week -- assuming, in this promiscuous age of ours, I can ever find a cherry.
14- I will conscientiously read the 903 pages of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations from beginning to end. Failing that, I will see the movie as soon as it appears.
15- In tandem with Ernest L. Mayer's resolution of January 1934, "There is nothing I will profess to know with perfect assurance -- not even the statement that there is nothing I profess to know with perfect assurance."
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