Blow kisses to the oak trees and sparrows and elephants and weeds.

Enjoy saying "no!" but don't make it the wellspring of your vitality. Be fueled by blood-red yeses.

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

What worn-out shticks are blinding you to the blessings that life is conspiring to give you?

You're alive because of love. You're made of love.

Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: "I don't know."

Will you have the stamina and inspiration necessary to dream up bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems? Do you realize how demanding it will be to turn yourself into a wildly disciplined, radically curious, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, ingeniously loving, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss?