She is a far more talented musician than me. Fortunately, I am a far more opinionated hack than her.

A cynic, in my experience, is usually an optimist who’s been affronted by life more than they found tolerable.

In an insane world, only the insane remain sane.

We are the imprint of an active imagination. Sometimes imagined things take on a life of their own.

“Sit down, shut up, and listen.” For the first 16 years, of most westerner’s education, that’s enough to succeed. Then the diligent pupil either finds a job or starts graduate school, and our best and brightest are asked to have a creative thought. A world hungry for people with creativity finds itself chewing hulls that had the seeds of creativity threshed from them years ago. And so, the diligent pupil finds their self shocked that the mindless educational process of passive consumption and regurgitation that’s taken them this far is suddenly no longer adequate. We take a creature who has been selected for susceptibility to indoctrination and ask it to question and create. Our most prestigious workplaces and our highest institutions of learning are full of our most successful human livestock, those who were best able to sit down, shut up, and listen.

Perhaps you question my use of the term livestock. I would ask you to consider that, in a world where we attempt to quantify and commoditize human value, livestock is the only appropriate term. Our system is designed to identify the most compliant not the most creative.

The best and brightest were culled 16 grades ago when they wouldn’t sit down, shut up, and listen. Our best and brightest were sent to the office, put on a different track, prescribed heavy stimulants so that they could consume the intellectual silage that passes for academics in the feedlot we call an education system. They are branded as antisocial, stunted, incapable, disordered, before they leave the first grade. That brand sends them through the shoots to the principle, the juvenile probation officer, the probation officer, jail, prison. The trades for many are the only pro-social and intellectually stimulating option left once they’ve been branded as socially and psychologically uncooperative. Many of these people believe they are stupid or less than others. Success, in our system, has much more to do with how domesticated the chattel are than how talented. And so the passive are told they are brilliant, and the brilliant are told they are inadequate.