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

by Nick Offerman

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.

The notion of getting together as a community to remind ourselves why we shouldn’t behave like animals is a fucking great idea.

It’s all the other shitty parts—like when priests tell you who to vote for in a presidential race, because they’re personally opposed to a woman’s right to choose—that irk me. That’s where church crosses my line. When the clergy get too big for their britches,

The holy Bible. This “good book” is a book of fairy tales. What? Yes, folks, for a fairy tale, by definition, is a fictional story that contains some sort of supernatural creature or occurrence. The Bible is chock-full of both.

It is not a book of rules for the citizens of the United States of America.

the glorious result of some very open-minded thinking on the parts of our forefathers (and the ladies advising them)

I, too, am endeavoring to be a nice person. The thing that makes me mad is when a person suggests that I CANNOT be a nice person or live a life of goodness WITHOUT reading the Bible and attending church.

Wash it down with your whisky of choice, preferably a single-malt scotch. My two favorites are Lagavulin and the Balvenie, but I won’t turn my nose up at Talisker, Oban, Laphroaig, Ardbeg, and many more. The Glens. Caol Ila. Dalwhinnie. Cragganmore.

When people ask me questions relating to my “manliness,” I like to remind them that I am primarily an artist as an actor, writer, and woodworker.

I’ll tell you how I pick people to work with me, and I get this from my dad’s teaching of fundamentals. I just give a prospective apprentice a broom and tell them to sweep. The quality of the job they do tells me a great deal about them. Attention to detail, willingness to go the extra mile, pace, fastidiousness, or lack thereof.

A pubert is simply a teenager, usually male, experiencing puberty so virulently that he is hallucinating perverted sexual fantasies all the livelong day. Hence pubert.

On occasion the performer would tear up and the auditorium would be profoundly moved by the recounting of the youngster’s attempt at shoving his/her religion down some poor stranger’s throat at the mall.

“Always maintain the attitude of a student.” When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in,