The World is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while.

Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, ‘Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?’ And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, ‘Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.’

And we … kill those people. ‘Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.’ It’s just a ride.

But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride.

And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between Fear and Love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of Love instead see all of us as one.

Here’s what we can do to change the World, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of theWorld, which it would pay for many times over, not one Human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

William Melvin Hicks was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist and musician.

His material – encompassing a wide range of social issues including religion, politics, and philosophy – was controversial and often steeped in dark comedy.

Much of Hicks’ routine involved direct attacks on mainstream Society, religion, politics, and consumerism.

By January 1986, Hicks was using recreational drugs and his financial resources had dwindled.

However his career received another upturn in 1987, when he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield’s Young Comedians Special.

The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years performed about 300 times a year.

On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using drugs because ‘once you’ve been taken aboard a UFO, it’s kind of hard to top that’, although in his performances, he continued to extol the virtues of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms.

He closed the show with his soon-to become-famous philosophy regarding life, ‘It’s Just a Ride.’

I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961 in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always ‘awake,’ I guess you’d say.

Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place. All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books.

Thank God for all the artists who’ve helped me. I’d read these words and off I went – dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words – Vision.

On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having liver ‘cancer that had spread from the pancreas.’ One of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable.

I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. ‘Why me!?’ I would cry out, and ‘Why now!?’

Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions.

That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness. Amen.

I left in Love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, Love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.

Billy Hicks, a week prior to his death