Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Principles for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

I simply knew that I was peculiar and that I was a puzzle to those around me. I was also learning that this weirdness was a part of me that was not to be extinguished.

We didn’t have to do anything to have a good time. It’s an incredible gift to be able to make your own fun.

Then we added garlic and butter to mashed potatoes, and then we invented barbecue sauce, and that creation, gentle reader, finally seems worthy of a restful seventh day. If there is a God, no part of the Bible or Christian doctrine will convince me of his

existence half as much as the flavor of a barbecued pork rib.

It’s up to us to choose farm-to-table fare as much as possible until it becomes our society’s norm once again.

you cannot just blithely drift through life in your canoe whilst turning a blind eye to the bullshit going on around you.

When asked for advice at colleges, I always give this as my main tenet: “Figure out what you love to do, then figure out how to get paid to do it.”

If two people want to love each other and build a life together, I say more power to them. Let’s encourage solid, loving households with open-minded policy, and perhaps we’ll foster a new era of tolerance in which we can turn our attention to actual issues that need our attention, like, I don’t know, killing/bullying the citizens of other nations to maintain control of their oil?

When I am instructed by the all-knowing Jehovah to profess an ostensibly “equal” brotherly love within the same pages where I am instructed to murder my fellow man or woman for engaging in a love act, I can’t help but look elsewhere for guidance. I am choosing to enlist instead the book of my own common sense.

whatever your aeronautical style, your soaring has just that: STYLE! Whatever it is that makes you different, weird, unique from the others, it is that, if anything, which will see you prosper.

“Always maintain the attitude of a student.” When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in, as that person will wake up every day wondering when someone is going to throw a parade in their honor for being so smart.

as long as we are alive and kicking, we can be improving ourselves.

I have not discovered a greater treasure than a good teacher.

It’s truly amazing what a woman can accomplish when she’s chilly.

I feel like a crotchety old man saying this, but there is a great satisfaction in a drying rack full of dishes that cannot be found on Twitter or Scrambley Town.

Seeing sunlight dapple the leaves of a tree whilst a breeze plays across those same leaves, weaving endless permutations of imagery and soothing sound, is going to do you some good, is all I’m saying.