coda (or The Carpe diem Challenge)

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note: This is the FINAL installment of The Hermit with Davis Fleetwood. Please share this video with all of your friends and all of your enemies. For answers to your FAQ & what comes next, click this.

THEME SONG for the Hermit is “Rocket Red Chair” by Twenty Four Thousand Dollars. Visit their website and tell them how cool they are.

TRANSCRIPT

I’d like you to try something. The next time you have to go to work, call in sick instead. Okay? Spend the rest of the day today thinking about what you will do tomorrow. If after you’ve listened to me you still don’t have the cajones to call in sick tomorrow then at least do the neighborly thing and send this on to your friends because they need the permission to call in sick because they are depressed and they need to change radically and dramatically and flamboyantly and they need to change now.

Not you… you’re okay. Everything’s fine with you. You just go to work. Everything’s okay.

It wasn’t always this way. You were young once. You were 18– the world was your oyster. You were going to move into a city and sit in a cafe and mingle with other people who were going to change the world; talking about big things.

Okay, okay… If you’re a teenager and you’re watching this the world is your oyster. But– before you go out and crack that shell, go hug your parents. Thank them. Okay, teenagers so after you hug your parents, I don’t want you to call in sick or play hooky. I want you to go school and when you’re at school I want you to seek out your best teacher, look them in the eye and ask them say the following: I want you to tell them that they’re full of shit, and that they’ve been perpetuating a lie to you since– well, kindergarten.

I want you to ask them why schools are set up to reward obedience, submissiveness, and a blind respect for authority. Tell them that you think that if the cultural indoctrination machine that is your school taught people to think freely instead of rewarding students for being submissive, that perhaps we wouldn’t be in a situation where we are giving tax breaks to the rich, we are financing illegal, expensive and immoral wars of aggression

And then shut your mouth and listen, you little snot-nosed punk, okay? A lot of your teachers are pretty damned smart and you might learn something if you just shut up and listen. You just presented them with an opportunity to something much more interesting than whatever they had planned. And don’t be so hard on them; they just work in a suffocating system, okay? Hey, props to the teachers.

Back to adults, the working wounded. You’ve read the statistics: each generation that passes sees more and more of us mired in depression.

But not you. You’re okay. Go to work. Sit under the florescent bulbs. Answer all your emails. Acquiesce silently. Everything’s okay.

For everyone else: tomorrow- or Monday, call in sick.

And then what? Any of these ideas would have a positive butterfly effect on the world.
You could see an afternoon movie. Or you could fire off an email to Barack Obama. Or you can get sloppy drunk and call your high school sweetheart.

Do yoga. Wrap your naked self in cellophane and surprise your spouse with flowers. Or pass a binding resolution, for once in a way.

Start your novel. I mean, stop researching the damn thing and just start it. Or kiss a stranger. Apologize, cuz, we are all wrong once in a while.

Give $100 to a homeless person. Or come out of the closet. Or quit your comfortable and well paying job, adopt an alias and make videos in your basement for a couple of years.

Do something that does not fall under the category of “just keeping on to keep on.”

But you won’t do this. I’m sure that if you just keep going on with your regular routine, everything will be fine.

I mean, you read the papers, right?

Everything’s fine.