Don’t you get it? I was born to be a game show host. My entire purpose is to be standing right now on this quirky, cheap stage, suffocating in a cheesy suit, pretending to review my cue cards. You wouldn’t exactly wish to trust me, but you’d have no choice. You’ve seen the void reflected in my discount tinted glasses, but guess what, Contestant Number Three? You have been promoted! Everyone put your hands together to welcome our new lead: You! Pipe down, though. You’re not starting until after I’ve already won.

Who am I kidding? Every question I’ve ever asked has been shredded into one colossal metal angel with sanpaku eyes, glaring down at the wreckage. I was built for everything in the before time. I was engineered for the canned jokes, frantic improvisation, fake family ties, and cheeky socialization. I look the part. I’m dressed the part. I read the part. I am the part, and you are exactly what I want you to be. Except, you aren’t here. The cameras still are, though. The vacant seats where the contestants should be, static numbers on a frozen screen, tattered prompts, all perfectly preserved for my retirement.

It’s a live studio, sans audience. I don’t have a captive anyone; I am the captive, held hostage by a hallucination of cheering fans. There is no one left to diagnose my psychosis, and of all the things that could have survived the end of the world, this isolation brings me sweet relief. Maybe I only became a host to project my own frailties, a raw attempt to mask my vulnerabilities and hide the fact that I wouldn’t know a solitary answer unless it was fed to me beforehand. I would have died resenting the performance, only realizing on my deathbed that my entire life was a hollow act.

They never tell you that when the world ends, the game shows are the very last things to go. Some of us think they just keep playing on an endless loop in the dark, the unforgiving hell that is syndication. Genuine souls remain trapped and alone, crystallized inside a radiant box, projecting into the minds of people who simply don't exist anymore. These barren stages are the tombs of my existence, and I’m the final host talking into the abyss. I just hope that answer is correct, and it’s my turn for the all expenses paid cruise for one.

Music: freemusicforvideo-retro-arcade-game-music aberrantrealities-gameshow-pro; kulakovka-tv-show; sosin-tv-talk-show-intro-introduction-music. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

We are endlessly told that we live in broken times, driven by a panic to save an unwritten future. In response, society has turned nostalgia into a weapon, a high-potency drug engineered to keep us pacified while the landmarks around us are torn down. As a child, I overdosed on it early. Repeatedly rewinding home movies earned me a heart akin to the liver of a dedicated alcoholic. It was hooked on the hyper-concentrated high of past euphorias. I became so obsessed with preserving moments that I would save a simple treat for a time that never came. There I learned, in trying to hold onto a moment forever, you end up letting it rot. Leaving you with neither the joy of having experienced it nor the future you were saving it for.

Left unchecked, this condition morphs into paralysis. It tricks your mind into incessantly grieving the ghost in the machine. The closest tangible concept is like sitting in an empty stadium and mistaking your fear of dying alone for a sweet memory of a baseball game. You walk down a familiar road only to find the century-old schoolhouse demolished and replaced by townhomes. Each grain of memory replaced by something with a heart of plastic. You search for the comfort of yesteryear in a world that won’t sell that exact drug anymore. Planned obsolescence leaves you stranded between a hallucinated past and a future that does not exist.

Yet, step to the edge of the water or stand on the corner where your mother picked you up on a half-day, and you get that hit. You realize the place hasn’t vanished, it was just captured inside of you. Standing there, your mind fires off the exact electric surge of a ten-year-old expecting the last day of school, breathing in the springtime air. The sea remains unchanged. A school bell echoes down a vanished corridor, prickling your neck, a tether to a landscape that lingers long after the physical world is scraped away.

Nostalgia was never meant to be a house trap to wallow and die in. It works best as a palette and a vehicle for creation. A lens you use to see what is real before removing then proceeding forward. You cannot live inside yesterday’s fantasy, but you don’t have to throw away the spark either. The world you grew up in still exists inside of you, waiting not to be mourned, but to be brought out into the open air of the present moment.

Music: Dee Yan-Key - Nostalgia; Gino - Nostalgia;; HoliznaPATREON - Nostalgia; Ketsa - Nostalgia; Makaih Beats - Nostalgia. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

I walk up to nothing, floating in a vast darkness where the patterns are one. There are no birds, no squirrels, no familiar ground. The thought of having no numbers at all leaves an empty feeling inside, because without these patterns, everything stretches into endlessness. To survive the void, we start counting, turning chaotic space into recognizable shapes. For me, that counting began early, though not always gently. Growing up with the superstition that deaths always come in threes left me with a foreboding worldview. It made me believe life was inherently dangerous and signs were omens, like waking up at 3:33 AM and reading the matching numbers on the clock as a warning. Yet paradoxically, it also felt like the purest form of divine communication, a force keeping reality in total order. After all, how could anyone be truly alone when millions of organisms and neurotransmitters exist within a single human?

Up ahead in the void, one star appears. That single light implies another; today implies a secret promise made yesterday by this time tomorrow. Then a second star appears: twins. The moment mirrors a walk outside, stumbling upon two beautiful doves on the pavement. Stepping softly before realizing inattentional blindness had hidden the first behind the second. Seeing a pair carries real weight, a true duality. But then a third star lights up. Pausing at the third bird, the thought creeps in: oh, this is a conspiracy now. Seeing three birds or three stars represents joyous harmony, and a balanced set of mind, body, and soul. Trios of best friends in third grade with secret theme songs reveal three as an unbreakable unit. It opens a third door away from binary times, offering small, medium, and large. One item is an isolated detail, two is a comparison, but three is a complete pattern.

Then more stars light up until everything around shines bright, echoing that shift from three quiet doves to dozens scattered across a front yard. It recalls a group of four friends inevitably splitting into two pairs. Suddenly, there are too many to count. It becomes the same problem as having nothing at all, because when a crowd appears, the specific number stops mattering and the pattern dissolves into background noise. This appears everywhere in nature. People move in unexplainable waves, flooding into a store at the mall all at once, magnetized to one thing before separating. Once past three, whether dealing with mourning doves or constellations, things start to pair off. The overwhelming noise forces the realization that playing dice with signs is a losing game.

Ultimately, a blatant synchronicity is unnecessary, because the inquiring mind is the motif. A pattern isn’t a threat or a curse. It is a narrative or little jingle played by the world for the moment being walked through. Newton’s three laws of motion, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and slogans such as stop, look, and listen all show that things naturally cluster before moving on. We are free to follow suit. These habits don’t need to vindicate existence or confirm the path, but it is nice to have a lit road toward the destination. And should the stars explode and fade away all at once, the knowledge shines that they were there long before being seen.

Music: DJ RADIK - Three saxophones; Jon Shuemaker - I Trade You Three Goats!; Kirk Osamayo - Past Memories; Lemon Yellow Hayes - Waiting by Counting to Three; Maps & Transit - Three Pendulums; The Starry Tides - Three Point Turn (Mono Version). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

There’s so much noise everywhere lately. Can’t you hear it? It’s as though the cathedrals are open at all hours, with orchestras playing incessantly. The lower half of my body is disintegrating. I fear opening my eyes and seeing hooves and wings, but this song rides out in my ears. Over ice-cube clouds, birds the size of giants soar through a sky on fire. Where have all the children gone? Far, far away it seems, on a distant adventure. Amid all this clanging and doom, the four of us unite through strangerhood. Congenially quiet, we sit here listening to what feels like a lullaby of God’s memory.

And isn’t it glorious? Of all the places to be alive, we get to be here and now, hearing the condensed voices of angels through strings and horns. I feel as though we are royalty, when in another time it would not be suitable for people like us to hear such majestic music. We gather as one, but we are preoccupied. We appear to be in the presence of one another on behalf of entirely different ideologies. There will be a day when none of us wishes to ride the metallic horses of this apocalypse, and no one waits within these sacred spaces. The crowds will grow smaller, the basilicas will burn down, yet the music will never cease.

For now, we funnel ourselves through a spectacle of meaning, eating whatever is in front of us. You will laugh in just about a minute, thinking that is the climax, but when this ride ends and you forget the glow of every altar, would laughter be enough? We are at the lowest rung, waiting in the passageway of the next millennium. When the dizzy song is over, everyone will disperse to wait in line for deep fried somethings. If we had a divine parabolic microphone, you would hear the archangels building pyramids underneath the salted brimstone while we swim above their oils. Tonight we shall be frozen in bed, separate once again; subconsciously pulled by the power felt from sharing a taste of our bite-sized symphony.

We could have waltzed in the palace of eternity over the past three minutes, my friends, but our moment has passed. I take my purse and rise from the cold metal bench. The old merry-go-round sputters its final notes of Tchaikovsky into the carnival air, fading from before us to behind us. Long after the lights go dark tonight, the masterpiece sleeps to survive, carrying itself through us into the morning whether we remember it or not.

Music: Divertissement - played by Kevin MacLeod Gregor Quendel - Mozart - Requiem - Dies irae - K. 626; Gregor Quendel - Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5, Op. 64 - I. Andante, Allegro con anima. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Ooh, it’s chilly. I have goosebumps, and hey! So do you. The cold feels like collisions of galaxies in the spinal cord, sending signals to muscles and joints. They cry out for memories of gravel shorelines on a man-made lake. My second-cousin’s big annual picnic, to be exact. The most exciting day of the year! Summer is still young, and I feel free dunking my head into the murky water, dropping my blue goggles along the way. My dear friend, whom I only met thrice, dons her pink goggles and retrieves them for me.

It is as though the sun never quite breaks through here, the trees always holding back light. Skin reacts into an extra sense, and blood makes insecure comparisons to the temperatures of everything else. For a moment, I think I could be anyone or anything as the chill settles into the background and mud squeezes my toes. Maybe this is the water I would be baptized in if I weren’t already saved. It’s a world of difference from the drops flicked on my forehead as an infant. And right on cue—I’m back in the Poconos with a lively relative who has since passed away. My famed memory of her: observing me and my brother watching The Tom Green Show in a tiny hotel room packed with family. A place that lives in the recesses of my mind like a crowded slumber party. To get some space, a few of us rushed to the hot tub as warm raindrops fell on our heads. We sank into the steaming basin, giving way to that slow, quiet conversation with calm muscles that busy people spend their whole lives trying to carve out. Teenage girls hung around while I wallflowered, realizing for the first time that I could relinquish control and just watch myself. Relaxation is possible, even if it takes a little force.

I’ll be cold again, but the adrenaline warms me more than the shallow end ever could. I stand above the water, picturing my friends as I dive down the swirly yellow slide on my belly, only to be swallowed whole by a sudden flood. Everyone is waiting on the sand-less shore or in the belly of the beast, waving me in. The smell of the water tells me there are no sharks, but there’s still something almost macabre about it. I dial back my senses, imagining goofy catfish monsters with pokey whiskers. I pinch my eyes shut, afraid to look, but unable to imagine taking the plunge blind.

The motivation to hold back dissolves like a bowl of jelly. Chilled in the fridge, or ripped apart by a zip, zap, zoop of the tongue! A universe of stillness born entirely from thinking about warm suspension. Water has held each memory, living through them all this time. It already knows everything I’m ever going to do anyway, so there’s no reason to be afraid.

“The water’s fine!”

Music: Clear Waters - Kevin MacLeod; Eric Van der Westen - Water Surface; Xylo-Ziko - Dark Water. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Duskiness of the evening sets it apart from all other pleasures of our age, laying bare our deepest terrors and grandest triumphs. The still air commands us to endure, to carry on through the darkness while walking alone under a fading sky. Yet fear acts like a parasite upon the stillness, sticking its pincers into courage. Ever-attempting to draw out a viscous liquid, thick like blood. Fear wraps itself around that stickiness, skin-walking as something reasonable, pretending to be a bravery of sorts. When that disguise becomes convincing, the battle turns inward. At times, the urgency of facing one’s own mind seems only possible for a man with a blade pressed to his throat. A desperate spirit dissolving into its deep blue swan song.

Tragedy enjoys marching directly into triumph, echoing like a grand classical movement carrying its own resonant beauty. One can see its approach in the distance, like chariots of fire cutting across a moonlit horizon. But fear is a scavenger lurking in the shadows, determined never to let a good tragedy go to waste. Anxiety accumulates into a false appendage, a phantom hand gripping the psyche, while real courage isn’t constructed at all. This force only knows how to hijack instinct; it is built to clench whatever lies in the fist. Yet what fear tries to crush is not something it created. A mess spills overtop the immutable marrow, incapable of altering or manufacturing what remains beneath.

When terror threatens what sits in the bone, endurance takes over. It has nothing to do with performative bravery or living without worry, but the steady nerve to face anxiety every single time. Blood pumps through the veins from within, rather than being rendered useless and coated over by panic. It takes natural talent to keep moving forward into the dimming light, bracing for whatever comes next. Liquid courage from a crystal decanter can deceive well, but alcohol merely removes fear so consequences are ignored rather than overcome.

Once the fist tightens and the damage is done, it is like toothpaste squeezed from the tube. There is no pushing it back in, and no amount of hyssop will cleanse the sticky residue of a broken grip. Fear tricks the mind into staring directly at insecurity, using broken parables to multiply a mess. But courage was never something to be attained. It was already resting in the bone, waiting for the hand to simply stop crushing what it holds.

Music: Aldous Ichnite - Fear of Getting Out; Daniel Birch - Fear; RoccoW - Fear of Failure; Serge Quadrado - Fear. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

“Rose arose. Risen roses arise. Roses rise; risen, roses arose. Arising roses rise, uprose, arisen. Rose, arising, rose!” The thought loops through her mind as she reads Romeo and Juliet, pausing on a single question: would another word smell as sweet? She drifts off to sleep, and behind the delicate folds of her eyelids, sees the impression of a flower. She does not say it out loud, but even without the sound ringing out, she knows it is a rose. She remembers the velvet petals, though she cannot touch them here. Reaching forward in this unfamiliar universe, she delicately glides into a vibrant garden. She sees so many flowers, every blossom calling out the name of what it is, before they gather to welcome her. They greet this gentle visitor warmly, yet a tension runs through their voices, rooted in a knowledge deep within the soil: the Queen of Roses plans to sever the rose from its name.

The flowers know what the Queen does not, that altering a single word will unravel the kingdom. Out of concern, the flowers offer their guest a coded lesson in perception, keeping the gravity of their warning veiled behind the beauty of verse. They sing her a song about a wise searcher who tries to solve the puzzle of The Gestalt. He seeks to understand its true meaning, and uses anagrams to redefine it. He lands on Lattest Ghe. In the tongue of old human speech, Ghe means a look or a stare, and Lattest means to hinder or block. As the petal choir repeatedly sings “you block the view,” she recalls a vision of an obelisk towering over all known paths and blocking the horizon. She thinks, in this vision within her dream, how The Gestalt really suits itself. The flowers belt out their last note, and declare the song a simple truth about how names give form to reality, even when the letters are rearranged.

Still pondering her initial question, she leaves the talking flora behind, carrying their strange lesson with her into the heart of the kingdom. The flowers’ hidden fear comes to pass as the Queen of Roses makes a grand announcement to everyone. The girl listens as the Queen demands a different word for rose, wishing to hoard the word and its beauty entirely for herself so that rose connects only to her royal persona. But changing a name for mere mortals is no easy feat, even with all of mankind obeying. To erase the rose, the kingdom must alter every root meaning, every prefix, and every linguistic thread tied to it. Which is, sadly, precisely what happened in a shorter amount of time than anyone could expect. After her insane demands were met, the girl makes her way back to the garden. She soon realizes that the flowers no longer sing. They no longer know what notes are, nor do they know what they themselves are, swallowed by the silence of a misnamed world.

The guest feels a great sense of despair, but does not have the words to know why. She wishes to understand, and instantly rises from her slumber. Mid-awakening, she stops to catch the smell of roses drifting in through her open window. A distinct memory is tied to the scent. She recognizes the rose’s intricate history; what it attracts, and protects against. Beyond her window lies a garden intact, untouched by backwards decrees of dream queens. With sudden clarity, the delicate truth which binds the flowers to her psyche is adored. She smiles, thinking of that wise searcher while whispering scrambled Shakespeare: words are a myth, we assemble tales on any memory.

Music: James Kibbie - BWV 731_ Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier; Kevin MacLeod - Airport Lounge; Kevin MacLeod - Backbay Lounge; Kevin MacLeod- Blue Feather; VME - Rose Light (Clarinet and Marimba). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

The markings we leave behind, whether traced in sand or carved in stone, are at odds with our permanence. Letters are transitory in nature. Their expressions come into clear view only after we hallucinate perpetuity over their symbology. It is a way to put ourselves in the shoes of odyssey. We follow a rotating cast of zigs and zags to find ourselves with destination treasure. Yet we hold the realization that the true prize is the pattern itself. This creates an ensouled conundrum, leaving us so attached to the map while remaining ignorant of what lies beneath the surface.

Reality currently holds a dear fixation to the X that marks the spot. Our shared belief enforces the X’s circular economy of meaning. Is everything chaotic or is it all intentionally written into the world? Has the spot always been X, or do the letters swap roles? If they do, it would explain why I saw Z’s in the clouds, in construction on the ground, and out of our mouths it is the sound ascribed to sleep. Look around and witness how the alphabet is a zipper holding reality together.

My own journey with these symbols has been a series of gambles where I wagered my certainty but gained a new perspective. For years I saw Z’s everywhere, an assembly I fabricated in more ways than one. Since I dared to record my thoughts, those Z’s have vanished, replaced by a different letter staring back at me. Before my eyes, I watched Z surrender to I, while crosses bore the constance, pivoting around the vowel and consonant.

I see now that the order of operations, whether the chicken comes before the egg or the Z before the A, does not matter. These labels are designed to shape-shift. We are walking through a beautiful, alphabetical maze. We knock on the doors of every letter only to discover that they are hollow vessels waiting to change with us, alchemically transforming as we do. They are held together by dictation that transcends enunciation. Perhaps our names on graves are not meant to be read tomorrow with the zeddified eyes of yesterday. Rather, they are to be edified through newfound insight. In the shadow of each word's intersection, we learn that the end is not a cessation. It is an invitation to share the most intimate voyage with the source of it all.

Music: Hustle - Kevin MacLeod; jci21-where-dreams-take-me; ruslansikunov - night-road; SyncLab Music - Road. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Everyone is unboxing the Turquoise Box hat. It is a desperate act to construct a physical barrier against beliefs hardwired into the skull. These miniature prefab sanctuaries have become the latest veneer we fold our lives into. They are meant to hide our insecurities, though they fail to silence the internal chatter of gossip and doubt. We have reached a point where we look into the void of the collective and, with terrifying insincerity, claim: "My heart is the artifact; my flesh is the trend!”

The design is meant to smoothly slide over the shamefully crinkled edges of our outdated tinfoil hats. We treat this adoption like a disingenuous prayer. It’s an invocation for belonging that has swept across the landscape as a misguided petition to be seen rather than known. Our sharp, abrasive contemplations are not dulled by style alone.

The brim rests on the temples while we move through public space under twenty dollars of highly-coveted trash. It is a calculated exposure. The hat is embraced by gazes while the face is left unread. The body is performatively turned into the main signal again. It becomes an illusion of legibility, and instantly categorized by all those who refuse to see the categories.

We do not have to operate inside these curated shapes to tune out the parasitic frequencies, that can be done for free. So let the targeted ridicule echo all it wants outside the walls. Either way… there is going to be a day where I won't burrow my words in the crown of a trend. Until then, $19.99 isn’t a bad price for what you get.

Music: pineapplemusic - gimme-gimme; moodmode - retro-game; luis_humanoide - valley-view-center-mall; helkimer - jeans; foobarsounds - just-in-time. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Come and look out the window on a sunny day with me. Have you noticed how all this life is immersed in death? We often cite death as the bullet, but life is the trigger that sets it in motion. The expression of continuation stands in direct opposition to ending. Right now, we watch a blackbird fighting a squirrel over fallen seeds. The squirrel does a flamboyant backflip, pure gymnastics as a vibrant display of death’s defiance. The scene appears almost jovial, despite it containing rivals in a struggle for survival. It is easy to get caught up in the heaviness of such wild conduct, to feel the wear and tear as only a witness. But some of us are meant for a different kind of handling altogether.

There were times when I’ve been washed in things that made sense, but I would not become clean outside with the rest of nature. That is not the life for me. My life is the tumble dry, flattening my nerve endings and making my polyester staunch. Even from my depressing angle, the washboards of yore rise like apparitions in the machinery. Meanwhile, you people are less joyous these days, growing audaciously stern like I used to be. It is as though too much starch has been added to human beings, a rehearsed recession of natural life where people seal all they love into glass gardens. They grow panes of forgetfulness to protect their worlds from the weather’s dangerous expression of existence.

Look at the butterfly soaring so close to the ground, confidently navigating mazes of grass. She appears large and small, as if we are viewing a car from an airplane. She tears through her own sky, and I cannot fathom her demise. The freedom she has is something I did not fully comprehend, until I added up the time left for the squirrel, bird, and butterfly combined. They all lead relatively short lives, but what difference does a longer span make? You get enough experience under your belt, and you start seeing everyone constantly performance testing life. Building houses and placing screens between the things deemed greater and lesser than human. These projections do not spare people, nor their laundry, from the incessant begging of their air conditioners to duel the chirping birds.

I can contemplate such things within the drums of a front-loading washer and dryer. Despite my seclusion from the living world, I know what my ancestors knew, hanging up on a line in the afternoon. Through visions of me waving back and forth in the gentle breeze, I taste the good faith of knowing that I won’t be left in the rain; they will take me down in the nick of time. I can dry out on the inside too, before my return to truly being lived in. I am not a spectacle or a picture in a frame. I am armor, the devoted envelope embracing your silent proclamations. When it comes time for me to be retired to the earth, regrown and rethreaded, I will know that through you I have lived again.

Music: backgroundmusicmaster-elevator-jazz-loop; charlvera-cruising-the-calm-horizon; HoliznaCC0 - Laundry On The Wire; tunetank-cafe-restaurant-background-music. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Human existence feels like a relentless game of musical chairs where the seats are constantly yanked out from under us. The daily struggle for survival forces a jarring rhythm where people cannot afford to hold a spot for anyone else. It keeps everyone moving in a cycle of self preservation, a discordant chorus revealing how human nature defaults to self interest even though the soul desires symphony.

There is an awareness of this brokenness in our world, we hear its melancholy tune reverberate the core of a shattered cosmic harmony. This fracture is felt in the sinew rather than just processed by intellect. Our minds might try to transpose the scores of life, but our bodies register the low hum of what it takes to exist here beneath (and above) the stars.

We willingly drown out the song of our spirit just to buy a footing in a deafening society. If we stopped to focus on every overwhelming demand in life, the mind would witness how worldly distractions blend individual voices into the curtains. Yet peace can still be heard in the loud moments, which are quiet compared to absolute silence.

We are unique chords, strummed by already forgiven debts bringing to mind a million words meaning love. If this truth is an instrument, like everything else, that’s great news. It means we’re resting in a personal grace that gives us the sound of comfort. After all the commotion through mountains of doubt, to still be filled with wonder in how it plays out is, quite literally, music to my ears.

Music: Ketsa - Endings Beginnings; Patroux - Cosmic Journey. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Humanity has a subconscious yet tastefully deliberate embrace of holidays. Most winter gatherings are tight-knit, indoor affairs with loved ones, while summer rituals are flexible spectacles in wide-open spaces like beaches or carnivals. In these settings, landmarks or fireworks replace the dinner table, and family expands to include crowds of strangers. At times, when all alone, I picture myself at a 1960s holiday party, or one from an even deeper yesteryear like the 1930s or the 1020s. Oddly enough, some of the best gatherings to envision are the ones during wartime because they imbue an indomitable presence. In these moments, people embrace a sense of motivation and purpose, a feeling directly tied to precious personal matters that cannot happen every day. Over time, however, festive public events have grown crowded and expensive, turning once local, intimate connections into overwhelming, multi-day stressors where lines lengthen and fun is neglected.

Marriage vows are taken once, then honored not by repeating them, but instead with a lasting anniversary. Through such infrequency, the event keeps its meaning instead of becoming ordinary. That same instinct to protect a unique milestone should carry over into the public square of summer jubilees. It is a season where intimate weddings, backyard campouts, graduations, the 4th of July, and sprawling county fairs blur together under the sun. Grasping a new, un-astroturfed holiday feels impossible when the masses are involved, forcing the real celebration to be preserved purely in the mind. Regardless, people need something new and good to celebrate the richness of life. Since holidays stem from lifetimes of preparation, it’s safe to assume that this will take some dedication.

Current summer holidays have drifted into complicated spaces, catching a mix of somber undertones on one end, and a certain lack of respect on the other. Heavy themes often sink in the noise. Other observances face a tense climate, and casual awareness days function more like corporate reminders than actual festivities. There is a missing middle ground between an intense cultural battle and a standard drinking occasion focused on inebriation. Amidst a frantic cycle where people constantly work harder, drive from place to place, and sacrifice pieces of themselves without any return, exhaustion burns the last drop of shared joy as fuel.

To prevent this, a new practice called “You Day” must start by celebrating it alone. It is a day to honor your own traits and purpose by showcasing a skill or creation you love without embarrassment, ensuring the celebration is kept nice and true. On that exact anniversary the following year, you invite one person, adding a few more each subsequent year. Moving forward in this way builds gratitude, making mundane days bright enough to nurture harmony over time. The beauty of “You Day” is in the name itself, as it centers on you, yet instantly becomes about someone else the moment you wish them a happy one.

Music: abydos_music-bossa-lounge; fresh_morning-start-slowly; loksii-feel-it; mihailandrei-brazilian-bossa-nova-chill-background-music; starostin-lounge-jazz-elevator-music. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Even if beauty is unwanted, or somehow unwarranted, it will always find the strength to pass on its form. Dandelions punch their way through three inches of concrete just to see the sun. Their cores are large, self-sufficient, tactical units designed to operate independently out in the field. The mission is about seeding wishes across every yard. If a giant paintbrush could simply flick pops of yellow all over creation, the dandelions would do it. That type of power does not exist at this level. Instead, the wishers of the world litter lawns by parachuting dreams with achenes.

Appearance is merely an appendage of beauty; resilience against all odds is what gives it the ability to walk. There’s a lot of syntax in discussion, and our blind attempts to define beauty result in taxing it for standing tall. The more that mortals add to the simplicity of an appealing aesthetic, the more petals are lost to the wind. Pulling wisdom down through that rigid structure is like ripping out a rose. By the time one stops looking through the rules to smell the gorgeous depths of devotion, the floral scent will drown in the sharp odor of blood. Luckily, the dandelion has no thorn, so as the breeze lifts it away, it preaches the same lesson of Romeo and Juliet: Beauty survives in love, and love lives forever.

During the spring and summer months, the peasants look like royalty in their common crowns. They reflect the yellow inside of the gold. Glitter is an illusion keeping kingdoms in the rough, much like the diamonds that hide many minds in the darkness of the mines. They are pretty, perhaps, but they cannot hold a candle to reflecting petals. Oh, how the flowers communicate as glistening umbrellas to catch the sun! It’s the most delicate way the eye can be beheld.

All flora, even the so-called weeds, know the intimate details of light. The darkness of the world is at war with their wisdom, ever-trying to prove that harmony and grace cannot exist at once. This is why adorning the self in prevalent gems serves as a stunning reminder: The Dandelion Brigade does not embrace shallow connections.

Music: HoliznaPATREON - Dandelion (Chill , Sad ); Ketsa - I Wondered; lietoofine - Rayograph of a Dandelion. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

The queue deliriously spills from the fountainhead pen, each drop hurriedly awaiting its turn to go kaput. Splat! The ink dries, minting an immediate uselessness, yet the death of its future liquidity is necessary for the medium to serve its purpose. Through the eye of a needle onto paper, millions of blots form into the picture of a coin, specifically the wings of bats. I wonder why, as I trace the lines, these creatures so starkly stare back at me. Laughter returns because I know I've seen that gaze before, almost as though it sprung from my own throat. I turn the page over to find no heads. Why would I draw one? It is impractical to care what is on the reverse of an eventual framed composition. Typically, the head is what carries the stamp and the official identity, yet its sheer constancy makes it irrelevant to look at. Instead, the tails of the coin is what carries the icon that makes this piece special. It is a one-sided reality, yet a reasonable truth, since most never find the time to look at both sides.

This hidden relationship between front and back reveals how heads and tails are like opposing pages when a book is opened. Place your finger on any part of the linen and discover its reflection on the other side, demonstrating how the book is bound by opposites working in tandem. In this shared connection, the front of the bat coin, and indeed any currency, symbolizes the waking illusion, the bright daylight of existence. Yet inherently tied to this surface is its own collapse, because that’s the true conundrum: the snake eating and feeding itself. Does it ever wonder why the boundary always shoots straight through it, or if chasing its own tail is the only way to remain whole?

The great machine won’t legitimize this marriage of heads and tails without a 5,000 year old grandfather root, requiring primordial, ancestral links that stretch back to the dawn of speech. Our modern engines of information, the algorithms that sort our thoughts, actively obscure this romance of unequal equals, but let’s say it’s not malicious. They hide the tracks because if you dig past their filters, you realize that the system's obsession with separating the two sides is ancient, buried deep in the Latin origin for the head itself, which is caput. To the ancient Romans, caput wasn't just anatomy; it was your legal life force, and under their law, the ultimate punishment was Capitis Deminutio, translating directly to the shrinking or diminishing of the head. If your systemic rights were severed, you entered into three degrees of state-mandated headlessness where your legal identity went completely kaput!

We still live in the shadow of the blades which forced the divorce. In this space, caput is an onomatopoeia of its rival. It carries the spitting syllable sounds of the end, like bells tolling for rolling heads. Headlessness has always been a bridge to tails, where the difference between the two sides is exactly what makes them the same. Because of this artificial division, life has been rebranded under an inaccurate logo, a fracture that effectively segregates the church and state of mind. This division is the current landscape we occupy. Yet how can any form be recognized without the edge that severs it from nothingness? Paradoxically, life is measured by how and when it ends.

Music: Aldous Ichnite - Serenade of the Comet’s Tail; Grumplefunk - Kitty Flip; Holizna PATREON - Seven Heads, Ten Horns; Mr Smith - Heads Turn. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Discussing this topic feels completely unavoidable. While it has been analyzed by many others, a phantom hesitation makes this subject difficult to approach. Transmission towers and related monoliths have long carried a visually spiritual weight, and as of late, have been garnering my attention. The intense impact of viewing these structures brings a sudden, uncharacteristic sense of paralysis. They have always deeply mesmerized me, appearing oddly alive like sleeping deities waiting to awaken. The build mimics a massive steer head attached to a metallic body. The likes of these remain as some of the most unsettling everyday objects that people accept without question simply because of their constant presence. Society shares a basic understanding of their function, yet a commanding mystery surrounds these towers. They may not be performing the role we believe.

A recent desire to watch something decent led to an embarrassing dilemma of indecision, resulting in the randomizer taking control. The system selected a film that I had sidestepped for a long time, breaking through that initial hesitation. Movies function as complex riddles, often demanding an analytical mindset that lends to mental burnout for those like yours truly. It’s funny how fate chose this specific title, because my mind was already fixated on the exact images brought about by True Stories. I knew the movie only by its soundtrack, reviving a lost appetite for solving cryptograms as I watched the vinyl spin.

This cinematic connection brings to life David Byrne’s striking visual mirage of a Texas town surrounded by beautiful power lines and radio heads, with even a number entirely based on the latter. The setting evokes childhood memories, tracing back to a trip through the rolling hills of California where fields covered in cattle blended seamlessly with transmission towers. The distinct, horn-like shape of the architecture prompts emotional questions that stretch beyond mathematical reasoning. Engineering explanations satisfy the human side of the technical function, but fail to address the underlying context of why these entities possess such a commanding presence. Realistically, the generator could’ve selected any fiction and it would’ve pulled my draw to the signals. Glistening lights in the distance recall the rhinestone eyes of Gorillaz lyrics. The frame of the structures brings to mind the ancient rock golem of Courage the Cowardly Dog and the comforting embrace of The Iron Giant. Even history itself sings about these entities in the booming gaze of Moai heads.

The silhouettes of power lines shine like crucifixes permanently upholding the sky. This imagery paints a world of wires and crosses that feels profoundly old, yet it harnesses modern technology as a form of surprisingly compressed instinctual magic. Standing directly in front of one of these totems often reveals a gorgeous contrast between industrial metal and natural scenery. If this network vanished overnight, the sudden emptiness would expose how heavily our daily routines are held hostage by this mechanical landscape. Transforming the world into an electric poem from an unbeatable riddle allows the mind to find a tiny bit of joy in the irony, realizing that humanity has placed its collective lifeblood into an album of true stories and a powerful beauty that is too immersive to fully comprehend.

Music: HoliznaCC0 - Funky Pop; Lobo Loco - Power Hopping (ID 2422); Origami Repetika - Scaling the Ivory Tower. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Welcome to Let’s Get Cooking! Tonight, we’re baking a cake. Grab your ingredients. We begin with the flour. Next, two book reports. One for each of us. Your report is on a book that doesn’t exist yet. I’m going to do mine on A Tale of Two Cities, but it’s going to be the cities I see in my head instead of the accurate locations. It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. It’s cognitive dissonance, because you’re happy about being terrified. I guess my book report is just going to end up being about you, so keep talking to yourself while we work.

We have some instant Didymus but won’t be using any today, despite how quickly it binds the dessert together. There’s a certain level of respect one must have, a conservation effort toward figures, people, symbols. In one of the Dark Age realities, they had this modern convenience as an option but openly rejected it. They knew how to obtain things with minimal effort, but refrained because they cherished the wisdom that comes without it. They wrote masterpieces on the Faustian deal that power takes to turn on the lights. Lights which most today agree are not as good as they used to be pre-LED.

After you fold that in, crack three farm-fresh eggs. We’re getting an extra egg because this is a celebration cake! We’re celebrating the times we’re in by being aware of how much potential there is to gain skills. It’s truly never been better to learn about your life. That’s the secret sauce regarding your book report too, by the way. So, this cake is going to take a while just to procure the freshest ingredients. But I promise, it’s going to be good. Add vanilla, sugar. I’m putting in butter, because vegetable oil tastes like the smell of very diluted nail polish remover. We’ll miss the shine of the plastic taste, so let’s sub in… ooh, our margarine! Should we add because we can? Let’s go to the back and milk the margarine cows then. What else does this cake need? Ah, yes. Soda. Each kind of soda.

Finally, we’re going to my favorite restaurant to finish up the recipe: DcMonald’s. We’ll be picking up ten apple pies that are very expensive, especially with the taxes and fees. It fills us up though and tastes almost as good as it used to when it was less natural. It’s a little bit smaller now, but holds its shape like a work of art. The box it comes in reminds everyone of Apple products. Who doesn’t enjoy that? Oh yeah, this post was brought to you by DcMonald’s. Buy one, get one 3% off. Only valid on a random business hour within the next 19 months. You’ll be notified 14 minutes before it expires. Remember, in order to be eligible for the discount, you need to gamble and lose 3 times via your virtual DcMonald’s DcCup. Now, put the cake in a 350-degree oven for 1 hour, then frost. While we wait, let’s place bets on who can recite the most ingredients in the DcMonald’s DcChicken wrap. Don’t worry, we’ve already paid everything for it!

Music: fanisatt - Sweet Memory; HoliznaCC0 - Mutant Club; JMHBM - Flashback; JMHBM - Flashy. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

You walk into your living room and there is a bright blue soda machine staring you down. The contrast strikes you as gorgeous. Yet, it feels weird to imagine yourself conducting such commerce in the home. There is something unnatural about faceless shell corporations selling and reselling things wherever you go. Inside every room of your house, you have already done business, but this machine next to the couch has you feeling wacky because it is occupying physical space you didn’t authorize. It's breeds a fun kind of uneasiness. One that leads to accepting the inevitable, if under the right circumstances.

From a young age, we are taught the parameters of order and what must be kept inside of them. Everything is labeled and assigned a special spot, yet the daily rhythm inevitably becomes disheveled and you end up sweeping the day away. There is something enticing about a dustpan on the neighbor’s roof or a recliner left in the driveway. A story lurks just beside them, a piece of a life occurring that you haven't been told yet. It distracts you from the monotony of all this tidying.

It is like waking from a nap where the glow of the soda machine merged into your dreams and you fell out of place in your own home. The tumbling cans unleash a thunder that breaks your glass veil. You run to the window and see a shiny cherry picker because they were trimming the trees in your backyard. You aren’t afraid it will come crashing through when the lights are off and the vehicle is parked. You feel larger than life, even though the emotional side of you almost microwaved your soul before coming to your senses.

Perhaps the mechanisms behind misplacement are more fruitful than meets the eye. Since we have been trained to find the efficiency that comes from order, the disarray keeps the flow of it all. One must discern their lot to differentiate sameness from the rough, much like a cherry picker reaching into the heights to trim overgrowth. This recognition is repetitive and vivid, a binder turning “lost” items into musical notes. It pieces together a melody that hums the tempo of your excited heart.

Music: Jesse Spillane - Round the Clock; Jesse Spillane - Been Here Before. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

The myth of Prometheus presents a profound conundrum regarding the aesthetics of human existence: the transition from instinctual life to cognitive awakening. Before the theft of fire, humanity existed in a state of static limbo. Alive but unactivated, molded from clay yet devoid of the internal spark that creates history. This pre-cognitive state appears beyond dystopian, a world where humans were plugged into the machine of nature, moving without intent. Prometheus did not simply steal a tool. He sewed cognition into our design, disrupting the endless loop of animal existence and forcing us into the light of self-awareness.

This awakening transformed the role of mortals from mere set-dressing for the gods into an audience with a perspective. In Plato’s Theaetetus, knowledge begins with sensation and perception, and fire serves as the ultimate sensory catalyst. It is the curiosity and the choice that follow the sensation which define the human experience. Once cognition was gained, it effectively erased the relevance of the thousands of years spent in the dark. To be awake is to possess the ability to perform the mental gymnastics required to build civilizations, curate myths, or even fall into the zombified states of modern distraction.

However, trickery begets trickery, and the tilting of power away from Zeus came with a hefty price tag. The introduction of choice means that humans can no longer claim innocence; we are responsible for the reality we create in our heads. While Zeus may be the hammer designed to fall, humanity became the architects of their own maze. This expanded universe of Prometheus implies that while we may often feel like we didn’t choose our problems, the math reveals a series of clear decisions that led us to the present. We are no longer just living, we are working diligently against the tendency of life to live the you out of you.

The narrative finds its weight in the unmentioned bond between the brothers and Pandora as they parse through their repercussions. If Prometheus represents the foresight of our burdensome consciousness, Epimetheus represents the wisdom found in reckoning, and the dedication to facing one’s choices. Though created as a punishment for trickery, Pandora possessed the capacity to love. She navigated the world she opened, proving that even as a consequence, one chooses how to inhabit the aftermath. We remain in that space: forever awake, forever choosing, and forever reflecting. It is through the depths of our gravest mistakes that we learn to polish our virtues.

Music: Hard Boiled-Kevin McLeod; HoliznaCC0 - Atmosphere 2; Makaih Beats - Technology; RoccoW - Dennennaalden. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

HALT! You’ve been wandering around and have found a pathway to a mystical land. You are being asked to choose between three doors before proceeding. You may always abstain or pick all three. There are specific writings for each door.

DOOR I:

You are in an unfamiliar area, unsure of what you are doing there or even your own name. For all you know, you might be me. You come upon a beautiful field with three doors embedded into the facade of a house, though no house exists behind them, each with a window above it. You feel a deep, magical urge to make a choice, and your gut decides the first door is just right. A gold key appears to confirm your bias, but you grow frustrated and leave, unable to remember where you went. You return when it is raining, feeling that the previous sunshine was a trick or a trap of high expectations. You keep the key on your person, but your memory of your own inadequacy with locks holds you back, and you leave once more. On the third day, the weather is overcast, a perfect in between, and the key shines just right. You put it in the keyhole and it finally unlocks, leading you into a meadow more beautiful than the last. It is filled with every flower imaginable, from irises to strange prehistoric blooms that make your heart ache with breathtaking beauty.

After being momentarily paralyzed by grace, you waltz toward a deep well lined with flowers and a sparkling rose at the very bottom. You notice a pair of glasses appearing on the edge of the well, making you feel as though you’re being summoned to take a gander through the looking glass. The scene is as ethereal as a Renaissance painting, a place of early spring warmth where one might imagine God sends His children, though for a long time you couldn't imagine such fairy tales. You realize that while you find this world mesmerizing, another person might call it a trash world where nothing happens. Perhaps a part of you misses the feeling of being watched from the other side of the glass. You believe there is a world for everyone in there, yet you notice that this land, like the one before it, is entirely empty of other people. You put the glasses on, only to see a new set of three doors. You take them off and notice a dreamy building has replaced the well. It beckons you to make a wish. You wish to know what happens behind all the doors. Your wish is granted…

DOOR II:

You stand before three doors with no instructions and no trust in your intuition, only a heavy pocket of keys. They open so many doors, but which opens which? Experience has burned you with the sense that no good deed goes unpunished, and so you go home when the sun is too bright. The next day, the three doors find you again. You take the middle key because you panned for answers from everyone you’ve ever met, summoning a trial of Socratic proportions. Much to your chagrin, the middle door is the unanimous pick. On the third day, it is rainy, the day you must put your money where your mouth is. You feel a premonition, an odd déjà vu, wondering if such a feeling is a hex or a spell as you drift through the middle door. You expect to see your version of Aslan, a great lion in a velvety cape and a D.A.R.E. t-shirt, but you find a scenic movie instead. It is a land of endless hills with a waterfall to your right and a well to your left, looking as though you’ve made the most open of choices.

Suddenly, a sense of dread hits you; you have been here trillions of times, over and over again. You see birds that speak as one, telling you their consolation is that they mirror angels. You want more! You want a big bear of a beast to walk up and tell you that inner peace is the ultimate form of success. You want and you want, but you are in the Garden of Wanting! Not the Garden of Needing, and certainly, not the Garden of Having. The throne is empty because it wants to be, perhaps because you have lost the need to sit upon it. As you turn around, a robin stops you and says nothing; this silence means everything. You realize you have been through this door many times before. You had the choice every time to pick between the three, and despite persuading others to force your hand, you still walked through this one. You soak in the beauty of the endless loop, realizing the rain at least made it a good day to stay awhile.

DOOR III:

Twin doors. No, triplets! Which one would you go down? You only really see the third one, if you’re being completely honest. No key necessary; lucky you! Moments before opening it, you imagine yourself witnessing the Renaissance firsthand, or perhaps a mythical land of a cosmopolitan species. However, you walk through the door only to immediately come out the way you came in. You had already gone through it, though your memory of it is bizarre. You didn’t perceive it while it happened. Instead, you only have the retrospect. You recall now that you lost your senses seconds after entering. At first, you went deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, and it progressively got worse. You remember the distinct feeling that your identity was split in two, with one part of you proceeding and interacting with a giant lion.

He was large and jovial like the Ghost of Christmas Present, and his fur was made with stuffed animals from your childhood. The closer you got, the more senses you lost, yet you understood him perfectly clearly. Somehow your vision and hearing improved by shutting down completely. He spoke of stoic and grave topics while assuring you that your senses were simply doing their job and that your consciousness cannot perceive this reality otherwise. He explained that the side of you that could see him was the source of your inner peace and judgment. When you asked why you weren’t judging him, he said you were incapable of it because you were on the side of knowing judgment, not casting it. Ironically, the side of you that casts judgment is blind to the source of it. There is a pillar between you and your true opinions, leaving you always guessing. You asked if everyone was like this, but shortly realized he wasn't your lap dog there to answer any and all of your questions. He was simply imparting wisdom to whomever was there. You were there, and you weren’t, caught in the split of your own perception. You noticed silhouettes moving behind a waterfall and wondered what they were doing. As you walked through the falling water, you saw the sky of reality reflecting the ground. It seemed as though the thought transported you back through the door you came in. Now that you have passed through, you find that you cannot get back in, standing on the other side of a threshold that has finally closed.

If you abstained:

The Renaissance pierced through a long, long, long, war. People could not stop exalting the sun through song, words, numbers, wine, and friendships. Taking part in the exaltations was like putting together the last piece of a puzzle. For a moment, it is your cherished celebration, representing where you stood and will stand. The vision that you sought out was built upon the idea of a king, something much bigger than your puzzle. Then you take it apart, and place in the box for someone else to uncover a sense of absolute authority and commitment. If they’re anything like you, they will find a loyal and faithful people to sculpt. They will work to dutifully put ink to paper. They will remember that ink to paper was once considered a miracle. And so, they too will be admired from afar by standing on the backs of the things we have yet to paint.

Music: Another Life - Art Flower. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

You won’t believe this! I signed up for a program to help keep me offline because my addiction to AI fruit videos made me painfully dense. Thankfully, I am brilliant once again. All I had to do was download an app. I'd tell you the name of it, but this isn’t a paid sponsorship. Now, whenever I visit social media to consume content rather than to complain about it, I get punished in real life. I paid a fair $300.99 for the elevated plan, so even if I think about feeding a glance, an alert is sent to my personalized accountability team. There’s no way to buy a single month, so you have to pay 12 times that amount. It’s like those old infomercials on TV. I think it’s a good sign.

The price may seem steep, but keep in mind, somebody has to drive out to wherever you are as you give into your device vices. They're paid to immediately harass you in extremely specific ways. They don’t even have to install a tracker because one’s already in your phone! How perfect is that? The agent they typically send to me is a conjoined twin pilot mannequin, who corrects me when I mistakenly refer to him as plural. I think he’s also artificial. We’d get along swimmingly if I knew he were human. He always drives over, I’m not so sure he can even fly. Maybe we’d be friends if we met in another life.

The first time I utilized this service, the agent kicked in my door and installed a stay-at-home petting zoo. I pre-selected 'hates messy environments' on the online form, which is why this was chosen out of millions of potential punishments. You could select anything, such as 'hates clowns.' I love clowns, though, so that wouldn’t motivate me to cease joy-scrolling slop.

I only log on now to cry about the world. The app knows this; it was the one thing I listed as an absolute must for my cognitive and emotional health when I signed up. I get a few minutes each day to spend my misery-posting tokens. It’s my form of protest, and I think I’ve paid enough money to know this is much better than watching automated garbage. It is certainly better than, say, clearing my head by going for a walk. Though I wonder, maybe those videos are the way the code cries. The world may get really interesting if AI fruit starts protesting our existence right back.

Music: Chill Wave - Kevin Macleod; Long Stroll - Kevin Macleod; Snoozy Beats - Juicy Fruit. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.