David Boles: Human Meme

Contracts codify relationships. Many of us have no idea how to write a relationship, or how to save the human condition from a legal crumbling. Yes, you can, and must, write your own contract. Know the steps. Memorize the parts. Own the project whole by remaining fair, calm, and intrinsic.

You grow up hard, and cold, in Nebraska. Expectation is high for any person born in the flatlands. Loyalty is demanded, and tested. Responsibility is pleasure. You learn the hard way how to behave, and how to live up to the opportunity around you. Here's a story about wisdom teeth extraction, a radio show, and the hard-won lessons of living up to the inescapable fact of becoming who you are before you know what you were meant to be.

Don't listen. Talk. Talking to yourself is more important than listening to your gut. Talk to soothe. Talk to win. Talk to conquer. Talk to vanquish all fears. 

Shakespeare knew we were flawed in the dark. We think we know, we think we see the light -- but we are always, and already, burdened by now knowing, but with the full understanding of that in which we do not know. 

Write it and forget it. That's the right advice to follow when you are an active writer. Danger lurks in the past. Know the present through being where you stand. Your writing will be better for the knowing. 

We don't know what we do not know until we ask. We ask and answer about the mysterious health benefits of coconut water; the excellence of the Nike Training Club; the great work of sleep doctor Matt Walker, and more!

We are not our futures; we are only our past. How, then, do we test time, and efficiency, and the promise of productivity from the bliss of the abyss? Malcolm Gladwell does not accept the idea of using timed tests to determine success; but so many programs for the Gifted in public schools require an exam that values time management over the purely creative thought. Here's a True Crime story that nixes a future for the want of a single point -- to make the point.

Close your eyes. Jump a timeline. Live a new life inside the life you are already living. We appear in multiple realities of our own choosing. Which experience do you wish to make your main reason for being? 

Why are the disabled used to shame the average-bodied into better behavior? Does the armless archer serve as a better cudgel of reckoning than exercising to preserve your health? Why are the accomplishments of the Disabled held up as an outlier inspiration to an empty nation?

Your life always belongs to you. There will always be others who try to bend your life into theirs -- but in the end -- you must defend your right to live your life with consequences you create, and not be burdened by the sins of the other.

We pay too much to play! The software subscription is out of whack. If you want to get any sort of interesting work done, you're going to need a never ending Adobe, Office, Google and Apple subscription! Where will the madness end? Will we ever again be allowed to own what we pay to create?

We write to see what we do not know. 99% of writing is thinking, staring, meandering, and daydreaming. Only 1% of writing is actually inking words to pixels and paper, and only other real writers know that; the rest of the world is wondering why we aren't "writing" as they write a grocery list or a traffic ticket in real time.

Democracies fall apart without a shared moral core. If the idea of a Democracy has no set of impenetrable values set alongside it, the whole matter will fail into the ash of a great idea without execution.

Taste is trained, not inborn. Through those we admire, we learn how to influence the world with grace, aesthetic, and taste. Listen to the lessons of jeweler Fred T. Witt, movie star June Perry Levine, director Marshall Jamison, professor Howard Stein, and editrix Hilda Raz, for inspiration into the next. 

How do we handle the treacherous in genius? Can we still celebrate Michael Jackson's music, while full well knowing of his violation of groomed children? Do we cast out Elizabeth Holmes from society for being a lying, but lost, visionary?

How can an entire state be "self-deprecating?" It isn't possible, and so here is the "2018 Private History of an Advertising Campaign That Failed" -- as one Nebraska Tourism slogan gets sloughed off for a second slug line that spills better, bites funnier, and fills the heart with more than a fart.

People live to take our money. The Long Con. The Short Con. The Street Con. They all have one objective, to suck you in and rip you off. Learn how to spot these cons, and how to defend the sacredness of your pocket. 

The big lie is there is no Liberal Media. There is only Conservative Media. All big media companies are conglomerations that kneel to power, and only serve their mercurial political masters; and that means the rest of us need to figure out how to divine the truth as it stands, not as it is presented to us for forced consumption. 

Who guides the hands of the Dramatist? We know every Dramatist is a Determinist when it comes to creating characters, but who, or what, is controlling the mind of the thinker who creates worlds, and destroys universes? Predestiny is for dying characters! Free Will is for the initiated -- and the triggered!

We look forward, only to fall back. For all our future progression, we keep failing backward into the pit of what was, and the dusk of what never shall be. We are kept down by our incapacity to hold on to what was once won; stuck between the bee and the sealing wax.