Jack Handy - Life, like lawndarts, can kill you.

I'm just back from Vancouver, BC and an excellent visit with Eddie and Melanie. They are enjoying the wild and free life, supported by hard work, true love, and craigslist rss feeds. They truly have taken to the "Bloody your hands" lifestyle. They are taking the initiative and moving ahead. Soon they will leave BC and head South.

Eddie tells a analogy of their way of "traveling". He says, when he was a younger guy he would move around like a paper airplane. It travels a long distance and then lands on the surface, he says. It also is easily effected by the wind and is often unpredictable. The paper airplane is like the tourist that never gets away from the tourist traps. This type of traveler never gets to see the real place- never meets the real "people" - only other tourists. (It sort of begs the question if these people are just tourist on EARTH, tourist with their WHOLE LIFE, but I digress...)

But now he wants to live life like a lawndart. A lawndart travels with purpose and when it lands it penetrates and finds firm footing. Melanie points out that if it lands on your foot or head, you can sue, because lawndarts are illegal - good point, Mel! The lawndart style is going to find the goods. It cuts through the crap of superficial surface living. It breaks through... down to the soil, where life grows. It's not always 'pretty' down there with the slugs and worms and dirt, but it's the real life. And you can't have the flower, without the fertilizer.

So whether you are a paper airplane or a lawndart, 'adventures in living' is hard... and it's not a game. To illustrate the point I asked Jack Handy (of Deep Thoughts Saturday night live fame) to write a piece to really describe it. Thanks to Betsy Devine for the link.

"This is not playtime or make-believe. This is real. It'’s as real as a beggar squatting by the side of the road, begging, and then you realize, Uh-oh, he's not begging."

...

"You go skipping and prancing through life, skipping through a field of dandelions. But what you don't see is that on each dandelion is a bee, and on each bee is an ant, and the ant is biting the bee and the bee is biting the flower, and if that shocks you then I'’m sorry."

read more from The New Yorker: Shouts and Murmurs

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