Progress Note

Updated and tweaked every few years, never a complete work.

A reckless guide to restless living:

Become engrossed in self-help tips for those with self-destructive inclinations
Record them on Post-It notes posted close for consistent reference

Spend wakeless nights migrating between shallow online dating sites and

View all relationships as binary metrics for a cynic’s riskless digital gestures

Vacation comfortably in coastal Carolina timeshares year after year out of xenophobic fear yet condemn with friends the cultural appropriation of population’s desperate for consideration and commensurate representation, integration, and compensation

Get high on first-generation antihistamines chased with two-fingers of Tennessee whiskey, neat

Become a neurotic alcoholic fueled by chronic depression and exotic twist-tops

Consume excessive volumes of hormone-fueled GMOs and charcoal-based fast food

Infuse units of packed red, white, and blue patriotism to treat a crippling and anemic egotism

Maintain an educated disbelief rooted in rational hysteria and eloquently worded propaganda

Experiment with e-cigarettes but quietly confess the effect was far less than you expected

Measure a blood pressure rewarded with drug laced soapbox lectures but God help you if you

contract an infectious disease, bleed uncontrollably, or develop type II diabetes and

seek medical expertise that puts you deeper in debt than an elite four year college degree

Be gracious of stable hourly wages that permit your existence in pathetic career stasis

Resent your contentment but don’t dare attempt dissenting
Maintain a self-righteous niceness despite facing an endless mid-life crisis

Buy suits with snug fits not for style but from thrift

Assure your watch is modest, scuffed shoes polished, wallet consistently dishonest

Enshrine your mind with the mechanized nine to five grind defined by
daily commute driven daydreams stuck in neutral in perpetuity

Always be a work in progress aesthetic product of the counterculture

Believe career excellence is evidence of social worth and relevance

Be the body of the tie-clipped middle-class prick
Be the soul of the subaru driving cubicle-sick fool
Be narcissistic, materialistic, and pessimistic

Be apathetic, unsympathetic, and overly apologetic.

Oh well.

Sorry.