Appendix: How to Be Normal

(I posted this once back on my old Patreon site, but it otherwise hasn’t seen the light of day. It was going to be the conclusion of my second book, an essay collection that came out a year ago. Since the title of that book, How to Be Normal, makes it sound like some sort of advice manual, I thought I would, for the last couple of pages, try writing in actual advice-giving mode. What were some true bits of life advice that I had not seen elsewhere in a book of this type? I tried to come up with some, and to phrase them in a way that would be funny or interesting. My editor argued that this didn't really fit with the book I'd written, and we were trying to keep the thing at around 40,000 words, so I decided I agreed with him. The resulting group of aphorisms is now like the best kind of deleted scene on a DVD--pretty good on its own, I think, but bloats more than it adds in context. Here it is! The first section, with the book recommendations, did stay in the final mss.)