An aphorism a day is my prescription for a happy, healthy mind. It is a prescription being filled with enormous verve and humor by guerrilla aphorists Nick Didkovsky and Charles O’Meara, at their quaintly titled but delightfully subversive site Aphorism of the Day. Didkovsky (a guitarist, composer, and software programmer) and O’Meara (a guitarist, drummer, composer, and registered nurse in psychiatry and behavioral health) have been friends since the late 1970s. Didkovsky founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve and is the principle author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language. O’Meara performs Irish traditional music and is presently working on an album with his instrumental jazz-rock band, Forever Einstein.

When they are not performing or recording music together, Didkovsky and O’Meara are composing brilliantly banal, profoundly pointless aphorisms. In the grand tradition of absurdist aphorists like Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret (see152 Proverbs Adapted to the Taste of the Day)

No one goes swimming in a deep forest.

and fictional 19th-century Russian aphorist Kozma Prutkov

I do not fully understand why many people call fate a turkey, and not some other bird more similar to fate.

Didkovsky and O’Meara are at work in the highly specialized field of aphoristic parody. Unlike other contemporary parodists, like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, whose humor is primarily satirical, Didkovsky and O’Meara write in a more farcical vein. Every 24 hours, the Aphorism of the Day site sports a gauzy image of a sunset or a mist-laden field with a hyperbolically obtuse aphorism plastered across it. Today’s inspirational saying, for example, is:

The sound of the turning page is like a fool urinating on money.

The sayings skewer the feel-good platitudes and greeting-card wisdom that populate so many desk-top and appointment calendars. They are guaranteed to raise a laugh, and an eyebrow. Go to Aphorism of the Day for your daily dose. In the meantime, here are a few Didkovsky-O’Mearisms to tide you over…

Look over your shoulder. If you see clouds, you are a giant.

Laughter is not heard where the cheese has become inedible.

Keep your gun but give the bullets to your enemy.

One hand invites the other.

Freedom is like a sack full of chains.