How to Have Fun in the Apocalypse
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When I quit freelance journalism, I thought, “If I’m going to write for not enough money, it might as well not profit an evil media conglomerate who's going to make me email beg for every $300 check I’m owed.” So, in a wildly counterproductive pivot, I started flushing all of my thoughts, takes, and observations down the IG toilet to help make Mark Zuckerbob richer, for free, while his platform rotted my soul and thumb joints instead. If I really want to be a writer when I grow up, I have to insist, to myself and others, that my work has value. So I now ask people to spend $6 a month on my work and promise to work very, very hard to give people something each month that will make them laugh or feel a little more OK or at least be worth as much as an oat milk latte. You can subscribe here.
Here is a sample of Post 1
How to Have Fun in the Apocalypse, Suggestions 1-50:
Have a party where you dress all your friends up as Jesus Christ. Make a sexy playlist. Put everyone’s name in 2 different hats. One hat is “gets the lap dance” the other is “gives the lapdance.” It’s a competition. Make the prize good.
Game: Grief: If someone you love dies, cry until the snot is pouring out of your face. Instead of blowing it into tissues, collect it all in a small jar. Write “Dear [name of person], this is how much I love you.” on the jar to motivate yourself to cry out the maximum amount of snot. The crying is the point but a secondary bonus is that you can show everyone and act very serious about it and watch them try to react compassionately.
Adopt a rescue animal. Spoil the animal rotten. When the animal dies, you might have to make a snot jar for it. But you won’t regret it.
Tell your friends when you are sad and ask them to come make collages with you and tell you funny stories about their childhoods.
If you are feeling cheated out of a 401K and single family home remember how expensive water is about to be and think about how this time will look like the Obama years in retrospect.
Get on a boat whenever possible.
Take a walk and take one full hour to draw the 17th building or house you pass.
Game: Solo Scavenger Hunt: Team up with a friend and make each other scavenger hunts. Make sure some of the items require talking to strangers. Here are some of the things my friend Tarah put on one for me once when I was sad: microcosm of humanity, you--an abstract representation, has yellow and you like it, symmetry in a pleasing way, why is it there? (but also why not?), something blue and absurd. Take a walk alone and complete your scavenger hunt. As you walk, take pictures of the items with your phone. When you have both completed your hunts, share a meal and show each other the pictures.
Get off social media. Try it for 10 days.
Find a single leaf and write a list of 100 characteristics of that leaf.
Buy a big rolling garbage can and a few pairs of rubber kitchen gloves. Make a playlist of music you can dance to. Get your friends to dress up in matching outfits. Possible themes are: aliens, Spice Girls, cowboys, Miami Five-0. Get a decently loud speaker. Then go around your neighborhood picking up trash together. Alt version: you buy a bunch of garbage cans, hire a marching band, and make it a whole trash collection parade.
Masturbate even if you aren’t horny at first.
Remember that long after humans are gone, the earth will regenerate itself, and many new forms of life will come into being.
Game my friend Gina taught me: Blackout Poems: Print out a page from anything––the bible, a scientific study about fungus, a recipe, a technical manual for a lawnmower. Then take a black marker and use it to black out words until you have a poem. You can do this alone or with friends.
If you feel lonely, get off social media. Adopt an animal if you haven’t already. Google “how often do people feel lonely?”. Read W. H. Auden’s poem “Leap Before You Look.” Think about how humans are hyper-social mammals and how feeling excluded from the pack gives us anxiety because it makes us feel like we’re going to die and how you’re not really going to die right now. Write some people you know and tell them what you admire about them out of nowhere. Don’t wait for other people to invite you to do things or hang out.
Self. Adhesive. Googly. Eyes.
Get a tree identification book and learn about all of your tree neighbors.
Draw 10 different ways aliens might look.
If you do something you’re really truly embarrassed about, tell all of your friends about it, each separately, so you have to repeat the story over and over.
You have to have to have to have friends. This will mean forgiving people for disappointing you. It will mean tolerating things you don’t like or love about them. It will mean compassionately withholding certain truths. It will mean doing things you don’t really want to do that much with them and for them. It will mean checking in on them and listening to them even when you are tired. It will mean finding it in yourself to celebrate their successes and joys even when they are things you want and don’t have.
Dance to 4 very different kinds of music and pretend you are an amazing dancer for at least 10 minutes.
Spend time with your grandparents while you can. Spend time with other people’s grandparents. Spend time with anyone old who will let you hang out with them.
Game my friend Avi Lessing made up: 4 to 1: Pose 4 possibilities to someone that they would love, then ask them to rank these possibilities worst to best. Then 4 possibilities they would hate. Use everything you know about this person to make them have to give it a good think. Examples (but it’s more fun if you tailor it to the person): 1. You wake up tomorrow and you can speak 5 languages, you wake up tomorrow and have olympic-level athleticism, you wake up tomorrow and you are an expert computer coder, you wake up tomorrow and you can talk to dead people. 2. You get $20,000 to keep, you get $50,000 but you can only use it to make a donation, you get $60,000 but you have to invest it in starting a business, you get $100,000, but you have to donate half to the DeSantis presidential campaign.
Adopt a pet snail and make its living quarters an elaborate diorama or various dioramas. Possibilities: the oval office, a night clurb?, heaven. (Take good care of the snail.) See Snail World for inspiration.
Get in a tub whenever possible.
Leave your house without your phone and take a 2-hour walk. If you can’t walk, sit outside.
Go to a museum and do one-minute drawings of 40 paintings or a 40-minute drawing of one painting.
Try to forgive your people, especially your parents, not for them but for yourself. Holding anger is like having diarrhea. It makes having fun very difficult and if it comes out at the wrong time and place, it makes a mess. This is a hard one that might take your whole life. Your line of progress might make loop de loops. It’s a keep trying one. You don’t have to tell them you forgive them. If it helps, you can secretly dip their toothbrush in the toilet.
Get some colorful clay or play-dough and make sculptures of your friends as animals. You can give them to your subjects or display them in your home.
Let all of the heinous violence and destruction and suffering break your heart real good at least once a day.
Stay hydrated.
Pee in the shower.
If you have a vulva, put a little target in the shower, and try to learn to pee standing up.
Game my friend Ivan Cash made up: Camera Roll-ette: everyone sits in a circle and passes their phone to the left. Then everyone scrolls through each other's pictures without looking until someone says STOP! Then everyone shows the picture they stopped on.
If you miss someone: make a playlist of songs about missing someone. (Missing someone is the #1 song plot, so there are plenty to choose from.) When you are alone, sing along to all of them loudly. Pull up the lyrics if you have to. Pretend you are in the music video and make the music video as dramatic as possible.
Make an ongoing list of authors, books, poems, musicians, albums, songs, directors, movies, artists, and works of art that you love. Revisit work you love every few years, and make notes on your list about how your perception of it changes over time.
If you don’t like or are mad at your family but you still want to or have to hang out with them, do activities that aren’t meals or sitting around and talking. Examples: go to the movies, go to a flea market, do a crossword puzzle together.
If you have a penis, draw a little face on it. (See point 16.)
If you can’t adopt an animal, sign up to foster one.
Think of something that would be a nice or helpful surprise for someone you love and do it for no reason.
Go outside with your phone and put on the recording app for 15 minutes. During this time, make a list of everything you hear. Then go inside, listen back to the recording, and see if you can add any sounds to the list. You can also do this with a friend and compare lists.
Email everyone you know and ask them to reply to you with their most embarrassing story. Ask permission to use these stories anonymously. Or set up an anonymous submission form. (You can do this on Google Forms.) Make a compilation of the stories. Maybe illustrate them even if you are bad at drawing. You can give them out as gifts.
Ask every couple to tell you how they fell in love. Ask them what they love most about each other. Ask best friends the same.
Spend one hour trying to draw a perfect circle. When the hour is up, spend the next hour trying to draw a different facial expression inside each one.
In assessing how you’re doing, remember to factor in that life is hard, painful, and exhausting even when you’re not trying to do anything hard.
Watching a lot of TV is OK but don’t make it the only thing you do besides work.
If you hurt someone, say you’re sorry.
If you are waiting around in a public place with other strangers, draw a picture and ask the person sitting next to you what they would caption it. Then thank them and write that caption under it, so they feel like they helped you with something.
Keep an ongoing list of things you are proud of yourself for.
If you ever have the chance, feed a horse a carrot.