As a youth, my hair was routinely massacred by Adventure Barbers. A couple of middle-aged gents operated a lucrative gig on the outskirts of my community. No matter what style you requested, you always got short back and sides. School…
The dirty secret of side-hustle culture is that if your life is already crammed with stress and chaos, your creative hustle isn’t going anywhere. You can romanticize the beauty of the escape plan all you want, but creativity needs oxygen.…
Brad was flushed with rage. The veins in his forehead pulsated. “I can work for a tyrant, but not a narcissist who needs a performing monkey.” Brad resigned a week later, found a great job at a competitor’s firm, and…
“You will listen to your corporals. Their instructions will give you a better chance to survive.” I reckon the other rookies scoffed at those words, like I did. I was fresh out of university, and conscription had caught up with…
Kris Kristofferson released that song To Beat the Devil. It boils down to not believing that nobody is listening. That stuck with me. We do still listen. But not the way we used to. There was a time when a…
Carlson was in his early 60s when he passed away, surrounded by filth. I saw a few photographs of his lodgings shortly before he passed away. The general consensus was that this man just didn’t care anymore. He couldn’t care…
THE HUNGER FOR MEANING Scrolling while your soul starves. It’s important to me to remember that people also experienced existential crises in the 80s. One of my schoolmates committed suicide. He stared out of the window one day, just before…
You won’t change the world. You light a fuse in blue-collar Joe who’s had enough. He burns down what you couldn’t torch. You guard the embers. You wait for the next spark.
I needed to get scammed a little, at least once in my life. It didn’t lead to financial ruin, or personality death and public evisceration. Crawling back from that scam transformed into a brutal course. Real Life 101. That heinous…
Promotions that feel like punishments. “Congratulations. You now get to drown with a better title.” Glen emerged from his military career as a Major. Nice dude. He was surprisingly “unmilitary” in bearing. We reminisced about trivial shared experiences like inedible…