Trusting in “The Absurd”

Take time to explore your story in a laboratory for the irrational.

An Adventure

We’re not going to make meaning here.

This is a pep talk of the absurd, the ludicrous, the incongruous, and the preposterous.

Sometimes you just have to bang on the trash cans with spoons, wear plaid knickers with a polka-dot turban, and toss a gewgaw on a thingamajigger and create a doohickey. You have to tap the wah-wah pedal of your brain, drive the interstate of your novel without a windshield, and relish in the zigzag joy and jubilant excess of it all. You have to trust in the usefulness of supposedly useless curiosity.

Purposelessness is not meaninglessness because purposelessness is an adventure

Don’t think of words as having any correspondence with reality. Words are objects, equivalent to a mouse trap or an elastic band or a Jew’s harp.

The semiotics of bafflement shall be your guide, just as light bends into a black hole, just as a compass twitches on a carousel.

Turn yourself into a laboratory for the irrational. Alchemy started with the “rational” belief that lead could be made into gold. And why not?
It’s time to be silly and contradictory and irascible. It’s time to embrace rascality and treat it like a religion (at least until the wash is done). Just because you don’t have a purpose doesn’t mean you won’t find meaning.
Fill your hat with orange juice, put a frog in it, and sip it with a straw by the pool.

Let lightning bugs shine on the crop rotation of your mind and plant rows of confetti.

Spelunk your way to the top of Mount Everest.

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