Don’t just sit there, frittering your life away with such humble chores as processing mortgage applications or auctioning off sad commercial real estate.

Don’t sell your soul to Satan in return for a big, fat, stupid bonus from State Street or Fidelity.

No, boys and girls, the opportunity is here for you to shed the anchor of convention, to rip off that buttoned-down shirt, to heave those wingtips into Boston Harbor, to dump that pearl necklace and design a colorful tattoo for your fashionably skinny butt.

The word is out. Worcester wants to be cool. The city fathers will make it worth your while to plop yourself in downtown Worcester and be very, very cool.

The city’s Economic Development bureaucracy has fists full of money waiting to be thrown at new or existing businesses that are way-cool in an artsy-craftsy, creative, performance-art, tofu-restaurant kind of way. Imagine it, if you dare. A bureaucracy empowered to decide who or what is cool – and reward them with money, after they fill out a 65-page application in triplicate, vowing to be cool for the rest of their days.

Come on. You know you want to do this. You know you’re really cool. And how hard can it be to stand out in a creative, sensitive-artiste way, when we’re talking about Worcester? That’s the point. This would be like exploring Antarctica – looking for just the right neighborhood, just the right kind of business, to transform Worcester into something approaching Austin, Texas (Motto: “Keep Austin Weird”).

The grants are going to be awarded twice each year, which means that if you miss the cut the first time around, you’ll have time to grow a pony tail (if you’re a guy) and improve the inventory of drug paraphernalia in your retail shop.

Planning To Be Cool

There is precedent, of course, for this kind of subtle encouragement of the cool ethos in cities and towns with more factories than tanning salons. It’s been years now since Northampton transformed itself from mildly awful to reeking with prosperous coolness, after the town put out the welcome mat for every gay person with disposable income within 300 miles of Provincetown.

There is disagreement among urban planners and developers and just-plain-folk as to how much the heavy hand of government should be involved in transforming a neighborhood or city into something cool. Some of the urban economics persuasion argue that once a neighborhood gets sufficiently shabby and cheap, the artists and poets and starving newspaper columnists will move in and do the dirty work themselves. Others favor a more precise and planned approach.

Worcester seems somewhere in the middle, with modest financial reward to creative sorts, who presumably will be left alone to find the muse.

What is often lost in this kind of dreamy wishful thinking is the realization that a dull, earnest, low-key middle class might be what is most needed in the former factory towns of this world. Many cities have worked overtime to create high-end downtowns, with enough cops and high enough rents to keep out the riff-raff; and to encourage the kinds of funky neighborhoods that Worcester envisions. But what of, as urban scholar Joel Kotkin wrote in the journal, The American, “the power of plain vanilla,” the “potential of less glamorous neighborhoods that can attract the middle class and people with families.”

The late, great urban thinker William Whyte, who offered up optimistic cures for urban woes, advocated narrow streets and wide sidewalks – to cram as many people as possible, on foot, into urban centers where they would work and play and shop and, presumably, find cool things to do in places such as a new and improved Worcester.

In any event, I’m here to help. If you want to cash in on the Worcester financial love fest for cool entrepreneurs, here are some things to consider:

Don’t send them a PowerPoint proposal. A video would be good, or, in the alternative, hand written with a quill pen dipped in ink on parchment.

In-person interviews for the money should be chanted in a modified rap-music kind of way, with lyrics in the spirit of: “Worcester, Worcester, can’t be beat; I want money from that government teat.”