“THE OUTLAW’S HANDBOOK: A Guide to Staying Wild Against All Odds 1. Learn, god damn it, and never stop learning. Develop an insatiable hunger for knowledge, different perspectives, for facts and figures but also for piece of beauty that touch some great unnamed force inside of you. (More on that later.) Learn to loathe the idea that you’re being deceived, learn to love the sensation of your assumptions being torn into tiny little pieces. Everything from here on out is pointless if your mind is in chains; besides, a stupid rebel is as good as dead. Pay attention; wildness does not equal thoughtless and impulsive. Question. Think. Wonder. Read. Devour everything they’ve ever told you and tear it all apart looking for the truth. 2. Discover the core of your being and recognize it for the beauty that it is. In all likelihood some part of it will make life more difficult for you, but if you can’t embrace it anyway, you are already a corpse walking. Sometimes, late at night, or maybe just during a passing daytime moment, you will realize that how you act is not who you truly are. This is terrifying; your authentic self has the capability to decimate your ability to coast along through life doing as you’re told and being who you’re expected to be. If you let it have its way with you it can tear you to pieces, rip away everything you thought you knew about the world. 3. Let it. 4. Listen, “normal” is just another word for “coward” there isn’t a soul on this planet who truly is who they’re told they should be. Wherever you’re born, you’re assigned a role and you playact as best you can -those who forget their lines are pariahs. Those who point out the script are revolutionaries. Those who follow it to a letter have lost their humanity. But remember, no one really belongs there. Everybody is weird. You are not alone. 5. When you’re ready, come out of hiding. You can do it little by little if you want. Disagree, talk back, be strange. Make your own costume, write your own dialogue, throw in some improv. If you’re not being heckled, you’re not doing it right. 6. Embrace the stares, the awkward silence, the nervous laughter of people around you -the dead walking, they who sleep without dreaming, who live their lives in perpetual fear of an imaginary threat but will call you the lunatic- no matter how painful it may be. Eventually you will become something that they can’t control no matter how much they whisper and scorn. 7. Run. Listen to that quiet insistent hum in the back of your mind that you’ve been repressing for so long you forgot it was there, and run away from all of this. Get out into the wilderness, run through the hills, get scratched up, get dirty. If you climb a tall hill and look down at the ground around you, the sight is yours. If you fall down and scrape your knee, the blood, the pain is yours. No one told you you may leave your tracks in the mud or drip your sweat on the thirsty ground or scream into the trees with no one around the hear you. You have to only answer to yourself and the laws of nature for all that you do. Out here you understand: you can do anything your body and mind allows. 8. When you’re ready, return to us. Come back to civilization, the land of do-as-you’re-told. Know that, despite what we all say, you own yourself here as much as you do by yourself in the woods. People will tell you you don’t -that just for existing, you owe them work, taxes, obedience. You must fit yourself into the mold they’ve assigned you, squeeze and force yourself smaller, larger, or thinner; cut off the pieces that don’t fit, build fake prosthetics to fill in the spaces your soul won’t -and if at the end you feel more constructed than human, well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it? How dare you exist as a being your own shape and size and form when they need you to be only one thing, one easily-manageable and predictable worker, voter and taxpayer who believes what they’re told and never steps out of line, has their lines memorized to a T and is petrified they’ll be found out for the parts of them that are only a mask. 9. It’s too late. You know better now; you’ve tasted freedom, and you can never go back. You can never wear your mask as well as someone whose skin has never met fresh air. You can never say your lines as well as someone who is still terrified of being wrong. You will never belong to anyone but yourself, ever again, no matter what they say. 10. And oh, they will say so much. They will call you criminal, degenerate, loser, trash, waste of space. They will hate you for being living evidence that all the sacrifices they’ve made in the name of winning this vicious little game were not, in the end, necessary. The confined cannot abide the existence of the free; they will hunt you to the ends of the earth. 11. Run, again. Run because you have to, because it’s your only option, because that’s what you’ve become: a lone renegade fleeing from the wasteland that civilization has become. Men armed with badges and guns kill the defenseless; the sick and needy are left to suffer because they didn’t buy insurance; people starve while others hoard more than anyone could ever conceivably spend; rich countries refuse to give asylum to immigrants from less fortunate backgrounds; people work their lives away just for the privilege of staying alive; we hate each other for arbitrary reasons and deny that it is happening at all; and all of this, we’re told, is the best way things could ever possibly be. We’re told to celebrate deaths on some other continent, we’re told that history shows we are the best that our species has to offer. It’s all a sick joke and the punchline is that you once thought this was an acceptable way to live. The play you’re in is a vicious one and you can’t stomach your lines anymore. You run and you run and you run. 12. Mourn for the death of who you once were. So what if you sometimes had a stabbing, longing feeling that there was something monumental and vital out there that you had lost, that you desperately needed back? So what if you always had a vague sense that something was missing, that you were stunted in some way? At least you felt content. At least you felt safe. Now you can never feel safe in this world again. 13. Get angry at us, at all of us. Even if we weren’t the ones running the show, we went along with it, didn’t we? We let it happen, didn’t we? All of the horror and hatred, the violence and poverty and evil in the world -we just sat by and let it happen. It’s a world gone mad, you decide, a world full of selfish assholes who want nothing more than to sit around and eat fast food and watch the damn TV. Well, fine. Let us have our ivory towers. You want no part of it, no part of us. 14. 15. 16. 17. Remember when you used to be so afraid of the dark? Of outside, of the unknown? Remember when to be Other was a fate worse than death? It’s hard to imagine feeling that way now. It’s like the whole world happened to a different person -you aren’t the same you who sat around and idly and killed time, always preparing, always waiting for something that never quite arrived. You’re different now. 18. Breathe in deeply and smell the pine trees, the smoke of a campfire, the night sky. You look up into a starry night, an endless and beautiful universe full of endless and beautiful wonders. Maybe even other living, breathing, thinking beings, somewhere out there, waiting for a chance to say hello. It really is, you decide, a beautiful world. 19. Forgive us. We’re all just doing our best, doing what we were taught was right. We all feel that same aching longing that you once did. We just need a little help to learn what it means -a little help from someone who’s been there, someone who has had the courage to disagree with what the world told them they were. 20. When you’re ready, come back home. We miss you, we need you. Come back home.”
