Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.
life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.
I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don’t agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.
The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.
It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn’t look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy – I mean Jimmy as the character.
Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don’t leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.
After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.
