Socialism and Clickbait

A hot summer day and time to decipher my thoughts. Or try. Or write some flash fiction! It was a mild summer night. Not the type you would expect in the midst of a soul-melting heatwave during mid-July.  Nope. It was milder than that. .. Ok, enough of that . I had a notion and it's gone. It wasn't much of a notion. An inkling, perhaps. The new style of writing is to eliminate bulky text and keep the writer engaged with snappy one-liners. Is it working? Not even Russian bots are crawling this blog page anymore, which has me a little concerned. But back to making pretzels (in 3 simple steps, no less!): 1) Consider the pretzel. It's funny shape, it's salty, satisfying aftertaste. Are you considering? 2) Good. Next, strike all mentions of " that " from your text. Also, forget who you are for a sec. 3) Are you forgotten? Excellent! Now, onto something else. Making pretzels is an involved process, and with such an amazing variety of pret...

Here I go again on my own... Well, there it is. After more than nine months doing the at-home gig, I'm about to re-enter the creative slaughterhouse known as Corporate Officedom. What am I thinking? It was on a whim, a "look at this" email from my wife, that I applied for this position; a process I not only put off for a couple of days, but that I refused to take very seriously, even as I was entering the second gauntlet of on-site interviews. After all these months of applications and phone "screenings" and mindlessly pumping out freelance work to pay my half of the rent, I have received and accepted an honest-to-gawd offer to work for a faceless, money sucking company that offers bonuses and 401Ks and all kinds of perks that make the working man salivate and the perennial jokester just a bit more nervous. Being something in-between, I believe I may just have a complete and total nervous/midlife breakdown/crisis right here as I type. You never know. ...

I've had it. I mean, not just with, like, society and stuff (I definitely can't stand that whole "surrender your identity to your corporate overlords and consume yourself to oblivion" idea), but with certain key elements of it that are really gnawing on my last bone here. For example, I've had it with: Recruiters No, I'm not talking about the friendly local strip-mall marine stuck behind a desk who calls you six times a week during your final semester of high school. I mean, they suck and all, but at least they're out there harassing teenagers. Not being a teenager anymore, I can definitely get on board with that. I'm talking about the boneheads near and far who call me at 7pm on Friday evening to ask me "do you have time to talk?" about some blah boring ad agency/corporate middle management role and how low I might I willing to go to get the position that will inevitably kill what's remaining of my inner child, destroy my mar...