In my unrelenting effort to make enemies and alienate people, I am starting, today, a Running Thesaurus of Offensive Quotations. It’s been called “Error Messages” to suggest it does not fear contradiction or indeed, wrongness. Truths are paradoxes, and almost every point worth pursuing can be turned constructively on its head.

Still: I make no bones of the fact, dear reader, that I am a truth-hunter, a girl who needs and wants to identify larger axioms, general insights, be they damning or inspiring. (I prefer the inspiring ones, but the damning ones can clear a lot of brush too.) I’m a girl who is not loathe to say “should”—partly because I was brought up on Emerson and Samuel Jonson, both of whom talk like oracles a lot of the time–and I enjoy that. Partly because I was not brought up in boarding school and “should” is simply a way to say “hey!” to me: Hey, think about this for a sec.

I am always needing to take myself by the scruff of the neck like that. Fatigued most days by my five floor walk-up, beloved disabled toddler, debatable lifestyle habits and  impractical jobs, I need to yell to hear my own inner voice sometimes. So let’s yell. Or rather: talk clear, assume authority, and see where the chips fall. Like Whitman, we are all large, we all contradict ourselves,  we all “contain multitudes.

When we are happy, we almost instantly ask ourselves if we shouldn’t be worried about something, but when miserable, we rarely recall what might merit our joy. It’s a bias in our nature that would be better reversed.

Most crises are never resolved; they are simply forgotten.

Sex should be the overflow of an internal reality that has become too powerful to contain, not an exercise as regular as eating healthy cereal in the morning or doing cardiovascular exercise after work. It should be transgressive and therefore somewhat irregular. When it grows regular as clockwork or diet, it becomes emotionally suspect and slightly absurd.

It does not make you a better person to have died. Existence is an endless game of musical chairs. One day everyone sits down between the chairs: saint and sinner, you and me. A mean and petty person who dies is still a mean and petty person. Death is democratic, not merit-based–and not sanctifying.

One must never be afraid to give away one’s trade secrets. Hearing them only helps those who are already practicing them anyway. If we used a thousandth of the good advice we owned and believed in, we’d all be superstars.