14 Lesser-Known Cures For The Winter Blues

1. Lay yourself down on the Earth and just freeze. Do nothing and then do sub-nothing. Let each of your vital organs turn to ice as you GTFO this mortal coil.

2. Write a 4,000-word think piece on why the sun should never set, print it and send it up on the next rocket launch. Instruct the crew to drop the think piece on the sun when they’re a few million miles away.

3. Eat twenty times your weight in chestnuts and descend into a tricked-out hole fifteen meters below the Earth’s surface. Harvest the energy from your fat for six months. Emerge dirty and happy shortly before taxes are due.

4. Buy a winter coat that transmits inspirational quotes to you transdermally.

5. Enjoy a one-night stand with Helios, a Greek god who is currently based in Brooklyn. You can find him alone on the dance floor at Cielo in the Meatpacking District on Saturdays. He’s the one in the shimmering snapback. When he leaves in a gilded Uber drawn by fire-darting steeds, jump in the backseat and ask him to take you to the stars.

6. Have some tea.

7. Make a bootleg star that is nearly as big as the sun. Pour two cups of molecular hydrogen, one cup of helium, an ounce of carbon and a dash of extra virgin neon into the bowl of a stand mixer. Beat on low, stopping when the mixture is smooth, iridescent and moderately radioactive. (Don’t worry if your skin begins to melt—that means it’s working!) Bake until plasmatic.

8. Weave a dream catcher out of a shredded bathing suit, eagle feathers, and shells. Hang it above your bed.

9. Choreograph your own sun dance, trademark it, and build a global fitness empire to popularize it as a zesty new form of vaguely ethnic aerobic exercise. Raise $15 million in startup venture capital and hire a branding and identity firm tout de suite.

10. Go ahead and eat a space heater. The best space heater to use for this is the Vornado 1500-Watt Portable Vortex Heater, but you can honestly use whatever you have. Pop the plastic casing with an oyster knife and slurp the tungsten filament inside.

11. Listen to the blues while petting a blue jay and staring at a blueprint, all as you nod blankly at a financial analyst’s advice on blue-chip investments. You’d think this would only make you more blue, but Blue’s Theorem states that these effects will cancel each other out.

12. Eat only foods that contain the word “hot” or bear an image of the sun, solar flares, anthropomorphic fireballs, whimsical devils, suns wearing sunglasses, and/or sunglasses on a middle-aged felonious cheetah.

13. The US Department of Energy has a spare sun underneath the Smithsonian headquarters in DC. Go there at six, after dark, and ask the guard to take you to “big tuna.” Perform the password (you have to sing Gershwin’s “Summertime” into a supercomputer) and he’ll lead you down a narrow subterranean corridor to a diamond-paneled room. There, in a carbon-boron alloyed cube, is a sun. You’re only allowed ten minutes.

14. Fly 66,000 miles an hour—you’re already doing it—on a rock in space toward a day when the sun will set after 8 p.m. Please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and your tray table is in its full upright position. 

This post was originally published at Human Parts on Medium.