May you all live in the other seventy percent.

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A great strategy from Richard Siken.

I was sitting with my friend Chris the other night, outside, at safehouse, drinking hot chocolate and enjoying the novelty of wearing a coat and sweater. “It’s gonna get cold,” he said. “I know,” I said, and then we were quiet for a while.

“You know what’s funny about being cold?” he asked, rhetorically, because he knows I’m from Arizona and don’t know anything about being cold. “When you’re cold, you’re not all the way cold; you’re just thirty percent cold.”

“Yeah?” I said, not really impressed with his Midwestern epiphany.

“The trick is,” he continued, “to live in the warm parts. You have to live in the other seventy percent.”

– Richard Siken, Spork magazine, Winter 2001-02