What Am I Even Doing With My Life

When you've dedicated your life to words, it’s important to go out eloquently.

Ernest Hemingway: “Goodnight my kitten.“ Spoken to his wife before he killed himself.

Jane Austen: “I want nothing but death.“ In response to her sister, Cassandra, who was asking her if she wanted anything.

J.M Barrie: “I can’t sleep.”

L. Frank Baum: “Now I can cross the shifting sands.”

Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul.”

Thomas Hobbes: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap into the dark,”

Alfred Jarry: “I am dying…please, bring me a toothpick.”

Hunter S. Thompson: “Relax – this won’t hurt.”

Henrik Ibsen: “On the contrary!”

Anton Chekhov: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.”

Mark Twain: “Good bye. If we meet–” Spoken to his daughter Clara.

Louisa May Alcott: “Is it not meningitis?" Alcott did not have meningitis, though she believed it to be so. She died from mercury poison.

Jean Cocteau: "Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking towards me, without hurrying.”

Washington Irving: “I have to set my pillows one more night, when will this end already?”

Leo Tolstoy: “But the peasants…how do the peasants die?”

Hans Christian Andersen: “Don’t ask me how I am! I understand nothing more.”

Charles Dickens: “On the ground!" He suffered a stroke outside his home and was asking to be laid on the ground.

H.G. Wells: "Go away! I’m all right." He didn't know he was dying.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "More light.”

W.C. Fields: “Goddamn the whole fucking world and everyone in it except you, Carlotta!" “Carlotta” was Carlotta Monti, actress and his mistress.

Voltaire: "Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies." When asked by a priest to renounce Satan.

Dylan Thomas: "I’ve had 18 straight whiskies…I think that’s the record.”

George Bernard Shaw: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Henry David Thoreau: “Moose…Indian.”

Without me, you’ve got nothing.

Ark. Written by Ehud Lavski. Art by Yael Nathan. If you like it, please share.

The Jellybear Incident of 6th Grade

It’s the sixth grade. Somehow, I had come across a catalogue for the store they bought all the school store crap from. You know, the smelly erasers and dumb keychains that they sell for like a buck apiece. So I somehow got this catalogue, and little old entrepreneur me was like “I should buy something from this and sell it at school for an absurdly high price to gain basically pure profit.” As sixth graders do. So I bought two huge tubs full of these keychains called Jellybears. This is what they look like.

So I bought a metric fuckton of these assholes for about 20 cents a piece. I start selling them at school for a buck fifty. Like I said, pure profit. 6th grade me was brilliant. I broke even in like eight seconds of me whippin these bad boys out at school. Saying these are were a hit is an understatement. They were like a home run triple, or some other sports metaphor. People are buying this shit at lunch time, between classes. Shit, one girl even admitted to selling the ones she bought off me around her neighborhood for like five bucks. I was happy to be the middleman, but I digress. The point is, not only did I gain entrepreneurial skills, I also made a pretty penny. However, a month into my brilliant business, I get a call down to the office.

I had never been called to the office before. I was such a goody two-shoes you wouldn’t believe. This was in a school that boasted like two fights per week. The ratio of cops and administrators to students was like 1:3. And there were 1700 people at this school. That’s a whole lot of authority figures for a whole lot of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. And here I was, reading large pretentious books and wearing polo shirts, with a gigantic backpack and in an advanced math class. I was, and still am, a lame weeny. Just wanted to put that in perspective.

Anyway, I was called down to the office that day. Literally shaking in the huge chair they had for me, facing down the terrifying vice-principal, she pulled out a Jellybear.

It was the DIVA one, if I’m not mistaken. I was then given a good lecture about how I’m not allowed to sell things on campus without explicit permission, yadda yadda, the whole spiel. Except I felt there was something fishy about the whole thing. Maybe it was how she held the Jellybear in her hand, perhaps it was the way she confiscated the rest of them. 

After asking around with the intense gossip network of middle school, I discovered the real reason the administration confiscated the Jellybears.

They had reason to suspect I was filling them with vodka.

They had reason to suspect that I, the tiny, stupid haired, braces-clad sixth grader who played a tuba bigger than she was was the head of a sophisticated alcohol distributing cartel in which I punctured and drained the goop from cute keychains, refilled them with straight vodka with a syringe, sealed them off with no trace, and sold them around school.

I’m not sure if I’m flattered that they assumed me capable of that sort of espionage, or insulted that they thought me dumb enough to sell middle schoolers straight vodka for A BUCK FIFTY. 

Kim Jong Un Would Really Hate For You To Watch This, Which Is Exactly Why You Should