Always read the room.
The easiest way to impress the world is with an expansive vocabulary.
If a street performer catches your attention as you walk by you owe him a buck. If he makes you stop you owe him more. Feel responsible for your city’s entertainers.
Go for more walks and give more flower bouquets.
Decide to want to do a bit of everything, say yes, and follow through.
Animals were bred by plants to eat their seeds and defecate them in new places… that’s pretty much the reason why we’re here.
Be your best friend and favorite vice, and refill yourself when on empty.
Don’t ever find yourself telling strangers how they should be spending their free time.
Remember that everything you think you know is relative, anecdotal, circumstantial, and anthropocentric.
Teach yourself to like a lot of different things, or, better yet, everything.
Books tend to come to you not a day too late nor a moment too soon, and help you to know just how to reorient your life. Go to the library often.
There is no greater trophy than a fully read book sitting on your mantel.
Do not trust anyone who doesn’t tell you when you have spinach in your teeth.
Having heart is always smarter than clever selfishness.
Never miss a chance to laugh at the century.
Remember you are a background walker more often than a protagonist.
America did not intend for you to climb the ladder and kick it out when you got to the top.
You cannot please yourself pleasing everyone else.
We get to have our equal and opposite reactions.
Things never fall easily into open, uncalloused hands.
A hundred triumphs in a thousand days is enough to hope for yourself.
Volunteering first gives you a valid excuse for whatever the outcome.
Stare at leaking sunset water color skies and ticking clocks, and gradually lose fear of your inalienable right to death.
Return the social favor of orgasm.
Be responsive to full moons.
Aesthetic is a pulse: art creates itself and with careful introspection you cannot help but tap it.
Always be reinventing yourself with limitless inner vigor so that everyone forgets your momentary incompletenesses.
There is a picturesque immortality exploring scenic tourist spots and remaining forever in strangers’ tourist photo albums.
Remember that each day and every day we’re all just rough-drafting it.
By feigning genuine confidence, you can conquer.
Taking breaks from your hobbies and passions is not a crime because you must live a little to find something new to say.
Never give in to superfluous whataboutism.
If the only manner in which you can defend your fortified opinion is pedantic repetition that all opinions are equal, you should start listening more because you’re talking for no reason.
Be an unfussy person.
Do not in anyway assist in constructing wildly unwalkable cities.
Respond to your haters and all hate mail in comic sans because pedantic trolls don’t deserve a thoughtfully curated font.
You don’t have to do anything, and certainly not everything.
Do not become obsessed with various hobbies and schemes of recreation with such gusto that the gravity of conversations at dinner parties you go to get sucked inward not unlike the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Ideology can never be poetic because art only flows from the private to the public and cannot be reversed like ideologues would prefer.
Remember when life has been a series of conveniences for you that it could just as undeservedly be nothing but defenestrations and stair-falling.
Always defend reality against conspiracy theories.
Learn to appreciate sipping things pleasant on the nose.
There is no regret like a deathbed keen for years you gave up on trying something worthwhile.
Success in life for most people is hastened proportionally with knowing when to shut up.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, Spoutible, or Post.News to interrupt your daily doomscrolling with Dada news, and follow me here on Medium for more of my comedy or become a Medium member to support me and your other favorite writers.
Check out my poetry book Cabaret No Stare, available in print and on Kindle.
Also check out my book “Satire In The Trump Years: The Best Of The Halfway Post,” available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
And check out my comedy portfolio, my Dada news portfolio, and my portfolio of prose poems.
The Halfway Post 