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Edgar Allan Poe, master American author and proto-goth innovator of the macabre, knew how to make the best of things.

In 1835, Poe, then 26, obtained a license to marry his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. They were married for eleven years, by all accounts a loving and respectful match, filled with true romance. One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, now known as tuberculosis, when she indelicately vomited blood while playing the piano.

Virginia lived another five years in a state of pallor, weakness and lingering sickness as she approached the grave. But Poe turned this horrific situation to a creative bent,  developing a theory that “the death of a beautiful woman” was the “most poetical topic in the world.” This became his touchstone of gothic writing, like his most famous poem, “The Raven” — exploring themes of death, sickness, and the ghostly lives of captivating young women who happen to be dead.

There are opportunities in the worst situations for a true SuperOptimist, and as old E.A. Poe said:  “To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!”

 The ritual of playing a joke or spreading a hoax on April Fool’s Day is all well and good. But the merriest of pranksters know that returning to the narrow confines of “good behavior” for the other 364 days of the year completely misses the point.

The wise among us realize that our foolish nature is something to be embraced — and as often as possible. Apple pioneer Steve Jobs urged on the graduates of Stanford with the mantra “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” The queen of show business reinvention, Cher, says, “Unless you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great.” Both agree that you must free the wild child inside you rather than timidly hide beneath a veneer of “respectability.”

So the question is, how will you embrace foolishness today? What pranks are you planning to shake up the status quo? What could you do tomorrow, next week, or next month that will have the office, locker room, or family den buzzing with laughter and conversation (after the shock wears off)?

Shouting “April Fool’s!” once a year is really not the best way to practice the art of foolishness, unless you do it on April 3rd. Or December 15th. Here’s to acting like Cher, or Steve Jobs, or your Uncle Dave, 24 hours a day…starting…now!

Even today, Cher is unafraid to act foolishly.

 

When you smile, don’t hold back.  Show as many teeth as you can.  See if the observer can count at least half your teeth when you beam at them.  A smile is infectious.  But rather than a nasty virus, you’re spreading mirth and merriment.*  And if you can smile even in the worst of circumstances, then you’ve truly mastered the secret to a happier life.

And don’t worry if you don’t have perfect teeth.* Many celebrities have incorporated their crooked smiles into eight-figure incomes. Kirsten Dunst, Steve Buscemi, and Ricky Gervais come to mind. “Are you havin’ a laugh?” They sure are!

Ricky Gervais: 'Before The Office I never tried hard at anything' | Ricky Gervais | The Guardian

*Even if you have poor dental hygiene, people will still return your smile, though they may back up a step or two. We recommend brushing and flossing and visiting the dentist twice a year.

Many birds actually enjoy bowling. You don’t see them at the local lanes much, because the owners of American bowling facilities don’t rent bowling shoes in sizes that small.  The key idea is this: no matter what rules or limitations are imposed on you, there’s an inventive way around that blockage to get some satisfaction, 99.9% of the time. Everybody should be able to engage in the kind of fun they want. But you might have to be willing to compromise, and participate without shoes. A refreshing change that airs out your feet. Win-win.

What if you weren’t confined to normal, safe, everyday ordinary thoughts? Maybe you’d be willing to take some risks and do something dangerous or something extraordinary.

Take Elon Musk: he spent $100 million dollars of his own money on developing rocket technology aimed at colonizing Mars in his lifetime. Better yet, he convinced his friends and the US government to pony up an additional $900 million to help build his new generation of SPACE-X rockets. Is Elon crazy? Yes. Will he get to Mars? Also yes.  There is no stopping Elon. Because to do something amazing, sometimes you have to leave all the usual dull Earthly rules and restrictions behind you and think like a Martian.

Sleep science is all the rage, along with bespoke mattress companies, open-cell, poly-foam pillow design, and the promise that melatonin will lure you gently into that good night, minus the hallucination and hangover of pharmaceuticals.  Yet your subconscious couldn’t care less about the new sleep sound machine you’ve configured to “relaxing rainforest.”

Once you start snoozing and the heavy REMs arrive, the dreams come forth in bunches.  Naturally, you’d prefer to be uncovering a treasure chest filled with gold doubloons, seducing the fairest of them all, and waving from an open convertible as the ticker tape alights on your shoulders along the Canyon of Heroes.

But think about it: waking up from pleasant dreams into the cold light of reality is much more difficult than bolting upright after experiencing a twisted nightmare. As you wipe the sweat from your temples and realize you haven’t actually lost a limb to a tiger shark, or been fondled by your father, you can be grateful that the day ahead won’t involve a flock of purple vultures feasting on your intestines.

So celebrate all dreams, especially the god-awful ones.  They can serve to give you a new lease on life.  After all, you’re not standing naked in front of your classmates from grade school minus the speech you were supposed to memorize.*

*This can actually happen if you don’t remember to dress properly in the morning. Please make sure you belt your trousers securely.

Bonus suggestion:  Don’t try to repress undesired thoughts before bedtime. They’re more likely to find their way into your dreams that night.  This according to a study at Goethe University, Frankfurt. 

Illustration: Dream interpretation of birth.

No one knows how much time they have on earth. We act as if we must take care of ourselves so we can live to be 100. But how many of us make it to that age? And do you really want to?

Maybe it’s time to wake up and reshuffle the deck. Starting with a piece of blueberry pie for breakfast. It’s not as deviant as you may think. Pie’s a pastry, after all. It’s meant for breakfast since it goes great with coffee. Plus wth breakfast pie, you have all day to burn off the calories. And what goes better with pie than ice cream? Add a dollop of vanilla with your pie; it’s no different than putting cream in your coffee.

“The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe 1869 novel “Oldtown Folks.”

Pie became so strongly identified with America by the 19th century that writers and journalists from both near and far declared Americans to be suffering a kind of pie madness. New Englanders, who were particularly prone to pie-eating, made good fodder for satire and good targets for scolding by increasingly health-conscious cookbook writers. As more Americans traveled abroad and became acquainted with European food culture, it became fashionable to condemn pie as food for the “rustic.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson found pie to be just such a pleasing medium, as his friend James Thayer recalled, describing a breakfast taken with Emerson and friends in the 1870s. Pie, Thayer reported, “at breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson’s weaknesses.” Emerson offered slices to his fellow diners, who one by one declined, prompting him to protest in humor, “but … what is pie for?”

The artist Paul Gauguin achieved his greatest success long after death, so who knows, maybe you will too.

At the beginning of 1903, Gauguin was living on an island in Polynesia and engaged in a campaign designed to expose the incompetence of the island’s gendarmes, in particular Jean-Paul Claverie, for taking the side of the natives directly in a case involving the alleged drunkenness of a group of them. Claverie, however, escaped censure. At the beginning of February, Gauguin wrote to the governor, François Picquenot, alleging corruption by one of Claverie’s subordinates. Picquenot investigated the allegations but could not substantiate them. Claverie responded by filing a charge of libel against Gauguin, who was subsequently fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Gauguin immediately filed an appeal in Papeete and set about raising the funds to travel to plead before the judge. At this time he was nearly penniless, very weak and in great physical pain. He resorted  to using morphine. He died suddenly on the morning of 8 May 1903.

Nobody thought too much of his passing, but one hundred and ten years later, Gauguin’s painting Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) sold for $295,000,000 to the museums of Qatar, as one of the most expensive art objects ever. Gauguin would be tickled pink.

Who knows what you’ll be worth after you are dead?

 

As Heraclitus said:

“It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.”

Just think, if we magically got whatever we wanted, we’d all be Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts. Imagine a world of 6 billion Brads and Julias driving their 6 billion Mercedes around from one gorgeous palatial mansion to another. The entire planet looking like Beverly Hills meets Fifth Avenue, and not a spot of grubby filth to mar the perfection. Not only that, but the tastiest food is zero calorie, zero carb; your IQ is over 200; your NASDAQ stocks are way, way up. And best of all, every one of the other Brads and Julias really, really loves you and it’s just the biggest love fest ever!

While this sounds appealing on the surface, such success would become an awful curse in short order. With nothing to aspire to, without any brass ring to reach for, humanity would soon sink into a death-spiral of laziness and decadence. The future of the human race would fall to nothing, an no one would care about anything except a nice clean bikini-wax.