A rest in development

Among the most common of the corollaries attending that greatest of modern myths by which we hang our hats on our half-inch erections, the myth of Progress, is that asserting that with age comes wisdom, the most deadly of whose corollaries down its own fractal drop-down menu in turn is the popular nostrum to the effect that as one's age (or wealth) increases one becomes more Republican. 

In the general age-as-wisdom instance, you may take your pick in either comparing the United States of 2012 to its 1776 anteandunclecedent (hell, throw in 1620 and 1492 as well, see if I care), or the Greece of the Year Now with Periclean Athens. 

In the specific age > wisdom > GOP instance, I give you the names Gingrich, Santorum, Cain, Romney, Palin, Rove, Bush, Perry, Paul, Ailes, Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, Malkin, Ingraham, Levin, some of whom are capable of doing small sums and are indeed otherwise trainable to go on the papers the Koch Brothers, Crossroads GPS, Citizens United and Bush v Gore have laid for them with such tender solicitude; that the age of the median round-the-clock pantswetting viewer of the Fox News Channel, so the nation's faculties of Arbitron science tell us, now hovers somewhere round the period when Oasis first broke big - i.e., the mid-90s - where once she passed her days of yore and also mine gaily strewing petals and sewing togas while her prairie-reared grandmother crushed grapes with her feet with an abandon gayer still, is all you need to know to be persuaded to join me in the shower as I hot-blast off the last of the brummagem "adult" concerns of the Cable Age the better to find restored in the pink blisters resulting the prelapsarian joys and wholesome wisdom we essayed when our years, still in the single digits, assured us that the fateful commencement of the hardening of our soul-arteries lay still in that galaxy of the far, far future our teachers called Junior High.

Herewith, a few suggestions from a reader (and pro bono textbook author; phrases in bold refer to Activity Projects or other sidebars in the Teachers' Edition) who has kindly consented to have his essays in turning the spiritual clock back to those infinitely less-rancid Thrilling Years of Yesterday posted before a worldwide audience of just over two per fortnight:

1. Replace the bestselling highball/low-IQ-circuit offerings of the Book-of-the-Moment Club presuming to tell us Where We're Headed Five Minutes After Midnight with those telling us Where We Were Five Hundred Years Ago, or at the very least Where Our Car Keys and Glasses Were Five Minutes Ago.

2. Remedy your ignorance regarding world geography. 

Study the customs and social life of the Nations of the World, even those nations not mentioned in this hour's rewritten press releases from the State Department and the Pentagon read by shiny-lipped anchorettes (or cable "news", to use a term common among those diagnosed with severe deficiencies in vitamins and irony) in the furtherance of the agendas of the world's "persecuted" billionaires, and even those nations not at present with citizens being torched to ash by remote control in pursuit of those same agendas.

3. Replace coffee and tea with cocoa and chocolate milk, gourmet cheeses with store-brand Peanut Butter Cup ice cream, watching of successive presidential administrations on C-SPAN with watching of the Keystone Cops on TCM, and of members of Congress of both parties with those of professionally licensed clowns of both sexes (licensing criteria, as per minimum shoe-length, and size and ruddiness of prosthetic nose, vary by state, still the noblest Accords Civics-text fruit of our residual federalism), and daily blow-up dolls with weekly balloon animals.

4. Replace beer with ginger ale and wine with Welch's Grape Juice.

5. Replace all forms of jelly in the medicine chest not specifically designed to soothe abrasions with Welch's Grape Jelly.

6. If you smoke, play with matches instead, up to a pack a day and unactionably to be sure, catching a quick hit of the resulting smoke each time before heading back inside to the office. 

As an alternative, light sparklers and snake-discs, contact-inhaling as desired, with or without homemade cotton-ball "filters" in your mouth. 

Slim Jims, heavily pre-smoked for your enjoyment if not protection prior to rigorously-undertaken overpricing of a sort that is the envy of the entire snacks racket, also make a pretty country-fair cigarette substitute - you can even "light" them, after a fashion, after slicing them atop a homemade pizza drizzled with liquid smoke prior to flambéeing.

7. Spend less time on indoor rat-race pursuits, following instead the stirring and deathless neo-Thoreauvian example of that Man With Two Names We Can't Be Bothered To Google who in a musical shot heard round 1972 rode A Horse With No Name across America, and learn more about plants and birds and rocks and things, and, if you have time, sand and hills and rings, flies (with or without buzzes), and the sky (with or without clouds). 

Little Golden Guides are a good place to start, especially as gateway guides to the hard stuff at the graduate level. 

Click for prices, both by the book and by the bag

Speaking of college (says our reader in an extracurricular memo), I'm just sorry I sold my copy of one such primer for Youth at Risk of enlightenment to Larry in the next dorm room thirty very-odd years ago; much like last month's tattered Penthouse, it's now very hard - though thank heaven in each case not impossible - to come by, and if I had hung longer - hung on to it longer - the book, I mean, and in my case just the tiniest bit longer - I could have retired to South Berwick -  if not South Park - at least for a non-holiday weekend. 

8. Cut back on excessive driving and use the time and money saved on riding a bicycle.

8a. Cut back on excessive emailing and blogging by desktop-publishing your own miniature daily newspaper and delivering it by bicycle throughout your neighborhood mornings or afternoons and Sunday mornings. 

After tossing your free trial issue onto as many porches as time and the lactic acid levels in your stronger, porn arm permit, enclose in the next one a trick questionnaire promising a free subscription upon submission, and turn any disclosed fugitives from justice over to the local constabulary for the currently valid cash rewards and as a hedge against the next no-knock raid traceable despite anonymity to the cell phone of the good-for-nothing living next door/in the basement.

9. If you now carry a gun or knife, carry instead a concealed roll of caps in one pocket, and if, in a tense clash with a blackguard or other ruffian, you find it necessary to threaten him with the "bust"ing of a "cap" in "yo" - or "his" - "ass", carry a concealed hammer in the other pocket and a charming ceramic donkey-and-peasant tableau in the next other pocket, so that when push comes to bust, he'll know that 

You Meant Bus-t-iness and that the peasant with the donkey was him! in kitsch effigy. 

A slingshot and a small cap pistol, if you still have pockets - and caps, after the nasty scuffle above - left, might also be wisely included in your defensive ensemble, especially if you spend much time in the tougher aisles at Toys R Us, video games at Chuck E. Cheese, or and especially the more raffish of the pipe lines at PVCVS, The Drug Attic and Riot Aid.

It's not hard to make Candy - but she always pretends to be happier when it is and you are, or so we have read by flashlight c. 1977-

10. If you watch porn, switch to YouTubes of adults making and eating candy and/or opening presents and/or laughing while being tickled in moderation between restful naps. 

If the switch is too onerous at first, try watching as a halfway measure YouTubes of people doing each of those things in flesh-colored 1890s bathing suits while on their knees, tasting the candy as they go to affected paroxysmic swoons - the better to replace a Candy Samples known for her Him-a-layin' upper case with those of a more flatlander's and flatchester's lower case - with the men at the ecstatic grand mal finale of each scene, as in those when the identity of each unwrapped present stands revealed at the breathless last, firing with a pastry syringe jets of vanilla éclair cream across the room and onto a waiting tray of hot freshly-split buns.  

In like manner, fans of John Holmes not ready just yet to go cold turkey salami might switch from their accustomed schlongathongs to old 1961 Mike Wallace episodes of Biography devoted to Justices Holmes and especially Frankfurter, going furtively commando under black robes - or "freegaveling", in the after-hours juridical argot, while feigning possession of said pounding implements if and when caught in flagrante delicto in recidivist poundings of other sorts during the stages of early real-life withdrawal from depicted early withdrawals whose substantial penalties are tallied in money in the former instance and in money shots in the latter.

11. When next you find yourself in a personality conflict with a colleague, save the backstabbing office politics for the Christmas party and get things out in the open in the meantime by declaring, at the count of four, a Thumb War. Arm wrestling in more stubborn cases, leg wrestling in cases more mulish still, and even Indian Burns on occasion may also melt the ice, as will a blowtorch applied as a warning shot to the offending colleague's Coke, especially at the moment she in the driver's seat during an office lunch run takes it from the drive-thru clerk at McDonald's.

Language and content edited for use in public schools and in public-service announcements. Unexpurgated version for church use, the Voice of America and station breaks during Christian-station dramatic serials, especially those liberally punctuated by melodramatic organ cadenzas, on request.