Wyatt+KK’s+Final+AmEx+2014+Speech

=Title of Speech= The Life Galactic

=Text of Speech= "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.  This planet has or rather had a problem, which was this: most

of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. And with that I would like to discuss futility.

I love my life. Like Jack Kerouac preachings “4. Be in love with yr life”, "6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind" "7. Blow as deep as you want to blow"

I guess what I am trying to say is that words will do you equal good and harm. But I really don’t care what anybody says about me, just as long as it isn’t true.

You can speak and speak and speak and convince everyone in your class that you are someone, and you are probably someone else - but I’d just like to point out that I don’t think anyone of you know’s anybody - because half of us hardly know ourselves.

Here are some things I know for sure though:

I have never read On The Road for any of you who know what that is, but I’m sure it would be really annoying to most.

I have read Howl! very many times though, my favorite passage is: “ who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”

If I could have dinner with any one person it would be Siddhartha Gautama, or The Buddha. I could be friends with any person it would be Bill Murray. If only.

I am the least modest person I know, and I am also the most handsome devil in this school - but I suppose that is a good thing. As my one of my muses once said “Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.” I have a similar feeling, of being myself.

I could never trust anyone who didn’t genuinely like Led Zeppelin. I could never love someone who hadn’t ever had a love affair with The Beatles. I couldn’t ever have fun with someone who when given the opportunity to sing, chose not to. Like Maude said to Harold: " Dear me, everybody should be able to make some music. That's the cosmic dance."

“The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”

Like I restated in the beginning of the year, and shall restate again: “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

And most of all nobody can be responsible for your happiness except for yourself - and in the grand scheme of things, unhappy people make the world worse, and happy people make it better. And the solution whatever it is, doesn’t concern little green slips of paper.

But all of that aggregates into something I also do know. It’s incredibly important to be honest - with yourself especially. I wanted to give you a heads-up on what I thought of the piece. Well, I was a little upset at first. I mean, obviously people are going to think I'm a showboat, and a little bit of a prick. But then I thought... that's me. I said those things, I did those things. I can live with that. You're a good writer, Wyatt.

So in the America I eventually might grow up in - I want to remain at least similar to how I am today - and I want everybody to know that things will be alright, and even if you are skeptical you should try and feel alright anyway - because all of it is a good story, just don’t read it too much - “ It's a documentary! It's all really happening!” - because you never know when, regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.”

=Cite Your Sources=

Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Harold and Maude A myriad of Salvador Dali quotes Howl Belief & Technique For Modern Prose