Fifteen ways to unleash your inner anarchist and overthrow the tyrant that holds you in check.
1. Burn your “World’s Best Barbecue Chef” apron. Organize a seance or a luau.
2. Cancel your subscriptions to Maclean’s and The National Post. Subscribe to a French surrealist magazine or blow the cash on a glow-in-the-dark Buddha.
3. Head down to the library and take out every book you can find on a single esoteric subject. Learn everything you can about the history of the ferris wheel or the life cycle of the cockroach.
4. Instead of going to Blockbuster on Friday night for a copy of The Last Samurai or Mambo Italiano, find yourself an independent video store and rent a good Bollywood film or a copy of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander or Chaplin’s Modern Times.
5. Diversify your music collection. Browse through used record stores for recordings by Jah Wobble, Charles Mingus, Edith Piaf, Hank Williams. Pour yourself a gin martini and listen to them back-to-back.
6. Make a promise with yourself to get your nipples pierced on the day that you retire.
7. Take out your daytimer and make a weekday date with yourself to do something you would not ordinarily do. Drive out into the country to pick mushrooms or wild strawberries; take mid-week tango lessons; have a naked picnic in the living room with your significant other.
8. Copy out sections of Moby Dick on handmade Japanese paper and nail them to your kitchen door.
9. Spend one day each week exploring one of your five senses. Start with smell – walk around smelling peaches, pipe tobacco, low tide and black tea.
10. Reconcile yourself to the fact that, like the rest of humanity, you’re likely one part John to two parts Ringo.
11. On a hot summer night, turn your house inside out. Move the couches and chairs out onto the lawn. Rent an old projector and watch your parents’ home movies on the wall of the house. Watch your sister riding a tricycle nine feet high.
12. Get over your fear of being stared at by walking through the mall with mismatched shoes.
