🥸 A Bevy of Memorable, Often Humorous & at Times Even Deep Quotes from Sol Luckman’s New Memoir, MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND

Based on Current Human Behavior, Animal Crackers Should Be in the Shape of People

Sol Luckman

⛱ 🏖 🏝 Having just released my hot-off-the-press self-illustrated memoir, MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND, here on SLUUU first, I thought I’d take a moment to share some of the book’s textual highlights along with a handful of my paintings published therein. Enjoy!

“Surf too low and there’s nowhere to go but down. Surf too high and you risk being thrown to the sky. The true path is straight and narrow down the eye of the barrel.”

“Kicking an art addiction is a heck of a lot harder than going sober.”

“These days, living within the sandy shores of the small island that inspired this work, if I’m recovering from anything, I’m recovering from trying to recover from anything.”

“For the sonically challenged, the world would be much better indeed if architects and builders cared about noise pollution as much as profit margins.”

“You have to take things with a grain of salt on a small island.”

“I have nothing against cats, feral or otherwise, but I do tend to distrust people who care more about animals than people.”

“White-tailed deer are … numerous on the island—so numerous, in fact, they’re regularly culled to reduce the number of life-threatening collisions with vehicles. On this point I stand with the animal rights activists in insisting that tourists, not deer, should be culled to decrease accidents.”

“I particularly enjoy the great synchronized skeins of pelicans that fly above the waves in summer. How, being animals, they know how to write the letter V just so in the sky is anyone’s guess.”

“Maybe art’s just a mode of escapism, but I’ll take that. It’s certainly a lot cheaper (not to mention safer) than heroin. You can smack me up with art any day.”

“Inks don’t forget. But with enough coaxing, occasionally they can be persuaded to forgive.”

“As I’ve aged, I’ve come to prefer the idea to the reality of human company. Sometimes I’d prefer living on a deserted island.”

“Around here people don’t walk their dogs—dogs walk their people.”

“As one might say about sex, even bad bodysurfing is good bodysurfing.”

“Becoming one with the wave is about as authentic and personally harmonizing an experience as you can get in these phony days of Auto-Tune.”

“When it comes to internal contradictions, vegans don’t have brain farts; they have grain farts.”

“The next time you encounter a vegan chowing down on a freshly picked salad, understand that, from the salad’s point of view, this is a crime against nature.”

“Nothing, not an IRS audit, not even waterboarding, is worse than having country music forced on you.”

“There are far worse ways to die than bathed like a fetus in warm salt water. Personally, I pray I give up the ghost shredding A-frames, having just completed my artistic masterpiece, at the tender age of ninety-nine.”

“Occasionally, I encounter things in my own writing I don’t recall having penned, things that strike me as utterly foreign, as if written by a stranger. Sometimes a whole sentence or passage comes across this way; other times a single mysterious word leaves me wondering where it might have come from and what it could possibly mean.”

“The next time you glimpse what looks like lunch from a Mexican street vendor being windblown toward you on the waves, swim the hell out of there—fast.”

“We have almost as many stingrays as we do tourists overcrowding these shores—and they’re nearly as much of a nuisance.”

“I’m a nonviolent guy, but the next time some brainwashed Duracell trapped in the Matrix tells you that by curtailing our liberties the authorities are ‘just trying to protect us,’ please do yourself and freedom a favor by sucker-punching them in their lying jaw.”

“A nauseating display of statist brainwashing anywhere, Independence Day is especially trying on my small island. The entire landmass is littered with flag-waving tourists from North, South, East and West Jesus so unaware their country is a democracy in name only they wouldn’t know freedom if it bit them on their star-spangled asses.”

“Political correctness has nothing to do with fairness; it’s a weaponized psyop designed to induce people to let others do their thinking for them.”

“I sometimes feel that if we could avoid thereby sinking into a globalist totalitarian nightmare, aka Planet China, it would be a good idea for all the world’s countries to abandon Independence Days—which are textbook applications of the ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy used by our controllers against us—and create a worldwide holiday called Interdependence Day.”

“Tourists love to pretend they’re on island time, but any local worth his salt knows visitors to the island are really on borrowed time.”

“While some may enter island time in less than a year, others can take as long as a decade. I needed nearly three years to wash the stench of so-called civilization off me. I know people who have been here far longer and still reek of it.”

“The alligator gets all the glory, but in my opinion the mosquito should be the island’s mascot.”

“Perhaps it’s like cats and dogs: you’re either a wine or a beer person.”

“Tasting new liquors is comparable to exploring new color combinations. I tend to think of creating cocktails as a type of painting. After all, both disciplines make use of palettes.”

“Alcohol may or may not be bad for you, but there’s no question that it’s bad for people to be good all the time.”

“When all is said and done, it’s through belief that we construct the good, the bad and the ugly of our ‘reality.’”"

“Blind belief may well lend itself to destruction, but belief with eyes (and heart) wide open is the engine of creativity.”

“There are French doctors who prescribe surfing for a huge range of ailments—from mental illness to cardiovascular disease. I guess art isn’t the only ‘alternative medicine’ that can heal the mind and heart.”

“The island life—for all its legendary languidness in which nothing is supposed to happen but the slow sipping of piña coladas from a recumbent position—actually lends itself to movement and activity.”

“Based on current human behavior, Animal Crackers should be in the shape of people.

“Any death involving a wild animal, if you ask me, is a terrible way to go. To think that your demise will be forever the subject of tasteless jokes is unbearable.”

“The unintentional—and often comically frustrating—outcome of the island’s strict building and advertising regulations is that nobody can find anything because everything looks like everything else.”

“Unlike some other coastal destinations, such as Charleston which attracts hurricanes the way Myrtle Beach draws big hair and muscle cars, here the height of hurricane season was never a big deal. It was to be enjoyed just like any other season—with the exceptions of the tax and tourist seasons.”

“Ever since my late twenties, when I figured out that 1984 wasn’t actually a novel but a book of prophecy, I’ve hated to watch the news. Maybe you can sit through it, but I can’t stand being lied to about important things by coiffed shills for the Deep State with robotic inflections and shit-eating grins.”

“The drip-drip-drip of news of a hurricane approaching a home one has left behind is enough to make the most balanced person experience mental illness. I’d recommend a full lobotomy over that modern form of Chinese water torture.”

“Itinerant arborists are a special breed of redneck: backwoods guys with two-inch lower lips, full-size pickups and chainsaws who specialize in cutting down and chopping up trees for money in disaster areas. Since there are so many disasters these days, they stay pretty busy.”

“Bodysurfing is like life: you either learn or you crash and burn. Or sometimes you crash and burn and that’s how you learn.”

“Cellphones have proved themselves the technological equivalent of the opioid epidemic—and they do just about as much to establish clear lines of communication.”

“Alexa, if people rely on you to do everything for them, how can they ever learn to do anything for themselves?”

“Pretty soon, if the trend continues, kids will get out of school for summer vacation at the end of June and go back at the beginning of July.”

“Even surfing without a board can be an expensive habit—especially if you suffer, like yours truly, from an incurable wetsuit compulsion.”

“Being a Bohemian from way back, I’ve hung out around my fair share of drag queens—but never to my knowledge one whose alter ego clearly voted for Trump.”

“Repetition may work in sports, but it’s the death of art.”

“So many talented artists discover something they’re good at and people appreciate—and they do the same goddamn thing for the rest of their lives.”

“Being fake doesn’t make you an artist. It just makes you fake. And estrangement has nothing to do with acting strange. The weirder you seem on the outside, the more normal you probably are on the inside.”

“Snowbirds may seem docile, but they can be ornery old farts.”

“Perfectionism has always been my bane. I obsess about doing things perfectly and then, when flies enter the ointment as they inevitably do, I obsess about not having been perfect.”

“I gave up wearing ties—and for the most part, even collared shirts—nearly two decades ago when I grasped the disturbing implications of such patriarchal (and utterly useless) articles of clothing. Ties are fashion extensions of an age-old system designed to tie people down, just as collars are symbols of how the establishment turns its unwitting citizens into collared workhorses and guard dogs.”

“Given marriage’s abysmal track record, it’s astonishing how many couples still choose to tie the knot in this day and age. Speaking in purely Darwinian terms, if marriage were a biological species, the entire institution would have died out by now.”

“Fame, unlike intercourse, is definitely overrated. I realized years ago, before I published my first book, that if I had to choose between being, say, a legendary camera hog like Truman Capote (of Studio 54 fame) and a legendary recluse like J.D. Salinger, I’d be the latter every time.”

“We live in the Golden Age of the cult of personality, when not just our self-aggrandizing leaders but even the nobodies of the world think they’re somebody. Ever since the advent of photography, the art world itself has been guilty of judging not so much the art as the artist. The bigger the artist’s ego, the reasoning seems to be, the better the art. Art isn’t—or at least, shouldn’t be—about the artist. The artist doesn’t create so much as channel beauty.”

“There are hardly ever true barrels here, which means it’s a very rare thing indeed to get properly pitted. This fact I lament, loudly and often, along with my surfer buddies, to anyone displaying a sympathetic disposition.”

“If there’s one primary illusion in the human mind, it’s the foolish notion that stasis is somehow possible in a world where the very particles that compose atoms are in continuous motion.”

“Living on a quaint island in the Deep South made us feel special, chosen. It was as if we were privy to a secret known only to select members of a private club who drank sweet tea under swaying Spanish moss on warm subtropical evenings while enjoying the soothing sound of waves lapping sandy shores.”

“This is how we grow as individuals and as a species: not by arrogantly seeing ourselves as big fish in little ponds, but by humbly realizing—and allowing ourselves to be empowered by the idea—that we’re nothing but sardines navigating an endless ocean of change.”

“The only people who can be funnier than the tourists are the lunatic locals. They’re not hard to spot; the island is a magnet for visibly eccentric individuals. I can hardly go a week without encountering locals with a few screws loose proudly letting their freak flag fly.”

“How many more photoshopped images of Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix does the word really need?”

“Yes, I was still my same artistic self in certain key ways. I’d continue to proudly consider myself a diehard minimalist in a world of distracted maximalists. I’d go on believing in my heart of hearts that art frittering itself away in nonessentials is hardly worth the name.”

“It dawned on me I was having a conversation with the inner voice I’d heard many times before. Over the years I’d called it ‘inspiration,’ ‘guidance,’ ‘intuition,’ my ‘Higher Self,’ and many other names. But I wasn’t accustomed to thinking of it as just ... myself.”

Every morning when I wake up and every night before turning in, I repeat a prayer of thanks that I live here and not, say, someplace like Cleveland.

Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

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ABOUT SOL LUCKMAN …

A confessed beachaholic and obsessive cultural creative, Sol Luckman has thumbed his nose at mainstream values and society ever since he can remember.

Preferring hard play over a so-called honest day’s work, these days in the New Abnormal he spends his time on a new small island mostly bodysurfing, painting, and writing—not necessarily in that order and usually not all at once.

How while on permanent vacation he became a multi-award-winning and international bestselling author and prolific professional artist is anyone’s guess.

Possessed of a wonderful family, he eschews dogs and admits to his own rejection issues where certain other domestic animals are concerned.

Visit his official website at www.CrowRising.com.