Things That Might Make Mark Happy or Are at Least Worth Trying

1. Polenta cooked with chicken broth, prosciutto or bacon, parmesan, and plenty of red pepper. And eat with good steak and kale or collard greens, also cooked with butter and a bit of bacon until they caramelize a little bit.
2. Drink with Rogue Yellow Snow Ale or whatever IPA is bigger, pinier, and has more yeasty goodness floating around in it that I don't know about.
3. Feed also children in like manner, minus the ale. Instruct children to inquire about your childhood. Tell the happy stories and stories of near-death. And stories of being caught up into other people's stupidity and desperation, and imply that this sort of thing, although clearly not to be tried in the modern childhood, and you mean it, seriously, almost always ends well.
4. Listen to J Roddy Walston and the Business.
5. Listen to the Black Keys.
6. Listen to Neko Case's last two albums, the ones where she begins to talk to animals and restore the image of the Goddess. Talk to animals yourself.
7. You are now ready to read Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. You really have to wonder a lot about the nature of Betonie's particular ceremony and of ceremonies in general. And you have to think about the way you map the universe onto your own geomorphology, climate, plants and animals.
8. Take a look at Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy.
9. Take more photos. I like your photos.
10. Watch "Le Quattro Volte". You were right about "Life in a Day". It's sort Human Truth Lite. But I still loved it, or like medium loved it.
11. Get outside and walk. It makes you feel better.
12. Buy beef bones, veal ideally, read the section on beef stock in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Make your own stock. The house is so chilly anyway, you might as well cook something. Salt to taste. Mmm, yum.
12. Maintain low-level, non-draining contact with a broad circle of people who help you think and feel. Be careful not to listen yourself to exhaustion.
13. Consider going back through bits and pieces of serious theology to see if it makes more sense now that you can sort through things, bring them into your own focus. You're not an angry reactive punk anymore: there are compensations.
14. Notice the center of your desires and the edges.
15. Get hugs. Give them, yes, but also get them. Feel them. No words or meaning, just hugs.
16. Consider writing the story of a ritual, or the story of how a ritual came to be and how it ordered the experience that called it up. Do experience and ritual shape each other? Is that just obvious?
17. I love you, friend.