Jacob's Manifesto

Hi. My name is Jacob. Sometimes people call me Jake. On occasion, people call me Mr. Evans. Sometimes, they just refer to me as, You or Dude or Bro. The point is what's in a name or a pronoun anyway?

So, I guess a couple of weeks ago I got an invite to contribute to Manifesto Zine and so I've been writing a manifesto. I didn't know what to call it, so I'm just calling it Jacob's Manifesto. Is that stupid? I don't know. Sometimes writing is kind of like talking to yourself. Anyway, here is some of my rough manifesto writing.

1. Manifestos are supposed to be declarative, but there are too many doubts to declare anything. Besides what can one say with any real level of confidence in this day and age? One could say the following with some certainty. This is Jacob's Manifesto. Jacob is a man. Jacob usually writes, but on occasion he also eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, and dates neurotic women. One day Jacob will be dead and the problems of relevancy or readership will not matter, if indeed they ever did.
2. It's sometimes really hard to walk down the street as a human being. One must imagine that dogs do not have this same problem.
3. Ask yourself, what isn't human? Make a detailed list of your findings. Make a concerted effort to not be any of those things. It is not enough to say, be human.
4. Even though one doubts and nothing is certain, it's still important to have opinions and beliefs. They help lend narrative and meaning to what would otherwise seem to be a random and possibly meaningless existence. That being said, be careful about what you believe. Sometimes, a belief says more about you than it does about the actual world.
5. Also, go fuck yourself.
6. Most things in this world are worth loving. Unfortunately, one spends the majority of one's life loving things that are not worth loving.
7. Broken glass is more beautiful on the street at night than it is on the kitchen floor.
8. It is a commonly held misconception that focusing on one's career is a virtue. This contradicts a primary truth of existence: we all die and we all die sooner than we want.
9. Having facial hair is not a lifestyle choice, it's actually a product of testosterone. This has been a great cause for contention and confusion as of late.
10. No matter what happens, don't fuck your roommate.
11. Eat some raw foods, some cooked, and some fermented.
12. I can't stress this enough, just as suburbanization was toxic for America, so is gentrification. Moving to a city and then proceeding to transform it into a sterile mini-mall full is hardly the answer. Pushing the lower and middle classes into the suburban wasteland created by American industry and fed into by the great white flight, does not solve the problems of class inequality, crime created by the needless prohibition against drugs, or the lack of education and social services for all but the elite.
13. Everything is fiction. You are living a story. You are living in someone else's story and you live on after death as a story to be told, remembered, and retold. The only thing that's true is the observable and the repeatable. 1+1=2. Everything else is fiction, even that which resembles the truth.