CHAPTER 27:

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says “I’m possible.”

—Audrey Hepburn; actress, icon, fabulist

My grandmother on my mother’s side lived to be one hundred years old. Nana

was as WASPy as they make ’em: prissy, reserved, able to avoid confrontation

with the skilled precision of an F-16 pilot. For as long as I can remember, she

always looked exactly the same. She was eternally adorned in a cardigan, pinned

together at the top by an antique broach, her pink lipstick and sparkly brown

eyes shining through a face-full of wrinkles that erupted in a series of “oh dears”

every time she laughed.

CHAPTER 26:

DOING VS. SPEWING

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson; fearless writer/poet, highly-skilled

spewer and doer

I have a friend who had the word “Duh” tattooed on the inside of her upper arm

in homage to the fact that all of our big ah-ha moments are no-brainers; “Fear is

a choice!” “I am lovable!” “Don’t worry, be happy!” Every time she high-fives,

or lifts her arm to see if she needs a shave, she gets reminded of how often the

sublime lies waiting in the obvious.

You know countless of these truisms of which I speak, you’ve heard them or

thought them a million times, but when they finally sink in and you “get it,” they

suddenly become earth-shattering news.

CHAPTER 25:

REMEMBER TO SURRENDER

Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life and see how life suddenly starts

working for you, rather than against you.

—Eckhart Tolle; author, channeler, high priest of being present

Imagine yourself sitting by a window, looking out at a garden on a lovely spring

day. You see birds and bees and butterflies merrily flitting about, when all of a

sudden, the most beautiful butterfly in the world catches your eye. Its stunning

turquoise wings make your heart explode, its joyful flight makes your soul sing,

its metamorphosis from wet wormy thing to creature of soaring beauty fills you

with inspiration. Suddenly you leap up, overcome and crazed with a fierce

desire; it must be mine mine mine!

CHAPTER 24:

MONEY, YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND

I worked for a menial’s hire

Only to learn, dismayed

That any wage I asked of Life

Life would have willingly paid.

—Anonymous

Many years ago, Los Angeles was hit by a relentless rainstorm the likes of which

I’d never seen in my life. It rained for what seemed like forty days and forty

nights, nonstop and hard. Rivers overflowed. Houses slid down hillsides. Bad

hair wreaked chaos throughout the most image-conscious city in the world.

This was the kind of rain you didn’t want to be driving around in in anything,

let alone a twenty-three-year-old junker convertible with a leaky roof, no grill, a

back window that was duct-taped shut and a front tire that went flat every three

days.

PART 5:

HOW TO KICK

SOME ASS

CHAPTER 23:

THE ALMIGHTY DECISION

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always

ineffectiveness. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then

providence moves too.

—W.H. Murray; explorer, mountain climber, committer

The story goes that when Henry Ford first came up with the idea for his V-8

motor, he wanted the engine to have all eight cylinders cast in one block. I have

no idea what that means, but apparently it was a tall order because his team of

engineers was like, “Bitch, you crazy!” He told them to do it anyway, and off

they grumbled to toil away at it, only to come back and inform him that it was

impossible.

CHAPTER 22:

THE SWEET LIFE

It’s great to be here. It’s great to be anywhere.

—Keith Richards; Rock God, connoisseur of life

I’ve got a cat who’s twenty-two years old.

I’ve also got a dad who’s eighty-seven.

The cat and my dad share the same superhero power: They both have the

ability to make me pay lots of attention to them and be nicer to them than I am to

anyone else. Anyone else not staring down the barrel of their impending

mortality, that is.

CHAPTER 21:

MILLIONS OF MIRRORS

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

—Eleanor Roosevelt; activist, feminist, superhero, longest-serving

First Lady of the United States evah

One of the most staggering things about other people is that they provide us with

valuable, and often alarmingly intimate, information about who they are as soon

as we meet them. If we pay attention, we can pick up on the major clues they’re

sending out through their body language, their appearance, their lifestyle, their

actions, their interests, their words, how they treat their dogs, the waitress,

themselves, etc.

CHAPTER 20:

FEAR IS FOR SUCKERS

We tiptoe through life hoping to safely make it to death.

—Unknown

When I lived in New Mexico, a friend of mine took me to this cave she’d heard

about up in the Jemez Mountains. “It’s more like a big hole in the ground,

actually,” she said, “but I hear it’s pretty cool.” She didn’t do a great job of

selling it, especially when she got to the part about how we’d have to crawl

around on all fours the whole time, but I wasn’t really listening to her anyway.

Caves don’t interest me, no matter what size they are; I was only going for the

road trip and the hike through the mountains and this great burger place that I

discovered the last time I was up there. The cave was just a necessary part of the

trip, like stopping for gas.