Learning.
Think big.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Sweat the details.
Be bold.
Stay hungry.
Stay foolish.
Love well.
Why do writers resort to this crude oversimplification as though the global marketplace was a caged octagon where only one product can stand victorious, its victim’s blood splattered across its touch-capacitive screen?
Is it because they watched Highlander too often? Boyhood infatuation with ninjas creeping into their manhood infatuation with toys?
Or is it because the overdramatization seduces us? Is the fault ours for letting our eyeballs linger over the term? Do we lap it up? Has our appetite for drama gone beyond real-housewife/contestant/bachelorette fights to imagining gadget death matches? As a species we are wired to get along and avoid personal conflict but we adore watching conflict among others, and we can’t help anthropomorphizing our machines.
Whatever the reason, I wish the stupidity would stop. The burrito was never a hamburger killer.
[video]
brother’s new bedroom door sign
These are the remnants of a cardboard and paper mache seahorse that we smashed to pieces on my daughter’s birthday. That was two months ago. We leave it hanging from the deck as a warning to other cardboard and paper mache animals that we will destroy them and eat their insides if they approach.
I remember a cardboard and paper mache donkey that made the mistake of grazing in our yard a few years back. I saw it from inside the house and picked up my Donnay tennis racquet - the kind Björn Borg used - and walked outside. I remember the donkey’s confused face as he glanced up at me - a look in his eyes seemed to say ‘qué?’ - and I backhanded his brains in. His head shattered and candy went flying everywhere. I surveyed the damage, distraught. There were no Skittles. Rolos, Smarties, Tootsie Pops lay scattered everywhere, but no Skittles. I had really only killed that donkey for the Skittles.
On the night of July 4th our six-year old sat on his bed and looked out his window and watched the fireworks go off above Lake Washington and sang the chorus from Katy Perry’s Firework over and over again.
We could hear him through a baby monitor that we still keep in his room because he occasionally suffers from night terrors.
We could hear his voice coming through the monitor, accenting the words of the chorus triumphantly as the fireworks grew larger. The sky got darker and the lights went boom boom boom and he sang louder and louder.
I don’t really like the song and he can’t carry a tune but it was the most beautiful music I’ve heard.
Hams.