I recently suspended my Facebook account upon reading more and more reports of its collusion, if not willing complicity, in undermining the 2016 election cycle, not to mention the unending sale of my interests, my online purchases, and my internet habits to the ad tech industry, an industry which now knows what we’re doing online and by extension what we do offline, which includes who you email, what shoes you are looking for, what news you’re reading, or app you’re playing while sitting in a stall at the airport vainly searching for some privacy — privacy which we freely surrender to ad tech without really knowing we are, mostly because the AGREE box we have to check to proceed to buy Q-Tips or use an online service, a box that comes at the end of 43 or so paragraphs of impenetrable copy in ALL TYPE is designed to overwhelm us and wear us down so we’ll just say, yeah, whatever, I just want to buy some Q-Tips already. But I digress.
Facebook is good for some things, mostly to keep track of what my family and friends are up to, however important, inane, incredible, or ridiculous. Aside from that, it’s little more than an echo chamber of shared belief and interests with few meaningful exchanges with colleagues or family members whose political predilections either frighten, terrify, or depress me. I, for example, post stories from the NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, and Atlantic Magazine — my sources for news, a list that Steve Bannonwould call elitist/globalist swamp stewards and Trump just callsfake news. Of course, he calls any news fake that he doesn’t agree with. He’s proven himself a serial philanderer, habitual liar, andignorant narcissist. Yet he’s president, and we’re stuck with him until we’re not. I suppose a democracy always gets the leaders it deserves. The list of how Trump will leave office is relatively long, probably an indication of hope rather than likelihood. I got into several spats with friends and family about Facebook posts and have decided that arguing with beliefs is a useless undertaking. My reposts from the Times or Post are mostly reviewed by those who already believe their import. The emerging science of how people will attach more securely to beliefs clearly proven to be based on falsehoods is still in its infancy. Consider the old saying: you have a right to your opinion but not to your facts. It’s futile to assume there is any set of agreed upon facts. Of course, it doesn’t require much insight to understand that belief is territory beyond the borders of fact simply because belief is the outright suppression of facts at worst or surrender to some higher purpose at best. Take the belief system that came with being a Catholic born in 1952: the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of Christ, the ascension of Mary into Heaven, life after death. None of these things reside in proof or fact, only in belief. And for those who do believe in them, or in any other number of believers in the truths of Islamism, Mormonism, Hinduism, or Rastafarianism, to name but a few, I say well, if it’s working for you, making your life more fulfilling and death less alarming but not getting in the way of how I choose to live, which is without all these truths, I say go for it. Live and let live, with a decided emphasis on let live. Don’t ask me to make my decisions on your beliefs. Of course, there are some things which we all have to agree to: we shall not kill, abuse children, torture animals, or find pleasure in the suffering of sentient beings, and the like. The list is fairly short. The finer points of what we disagree about and why one’s beliefs wanders into to troublesome territory is what civil discourse, the legislative process, is really for. Abortion is a good example of this problem, being one that rests on fundamental belief versus fundamental right. However we resolve it, there will be a sizeable group of people who will be unhappy with the outcome. And with this extended regression, I return to Facebook. I guess knowing what others believe based upon their posts is basically a healthy thing. It informs me of many people’s willingness to place belief before fact, to choose falsehood before demonstrable scientific truth, to assume one’s values are, or should be, universal, rather than particular and insular. This disparity accounts for the marvels and the horrors of the 20th Century — a time of astounding scientific and human progress that rode alongside an era of unmatched human violence, cruelty, and suffering. It’s what separates us from the beasts — a separation that will either move us forward as a species or consign us to the fate of the dinosaurs. Who’s to say? If Facebook is an indication, I find no solace there. Yet, maybe one post will find one soul ready to admit, hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. Which is about all I can hope for. ©2017 John Hofmeister
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I’m an old creative director and copywriter. Which in this business might mean I’m about 45, in my early 50s at the outside. But I’m older than that. So old in fact that I don’t get direct mail from AARP anymore. Probably because I’m a member. They’re pretty good at scrubbing their lists. I’m also old enough to have Medicare, which as a freelancer, makes the whole healthcare shopping nightmare a bit less onerous. So what kind of advice could I possibly have for young creative professionals?
It’s this: be kind to people as you ascend the ladder, get promoted, and make big money — because you never know who you will meet on your way down. And for many, if not most, there will be a down — or a way out or a way on to something else — where every kindness shown finds its way back to you. The ad business is ridiculously unkind to seniors. There’s always someone coming up through the ranks who’s cooler, more with it, more tuned into the cultural zeitgeist than you are. It’s not that you stopped paying attention or that you aren’t tuned in. There’s nothing rational about kicking old creatives to the curb. Well, it isrational because it’s about money. That kid coming up the ladder is hungry and will do what you do for less — usually lots less. And in this business, like any business, it’s money that matters. The young turk’s ideas will have a certain je ne sais quoi about them — and in advertising it’s only natural to rush to the new, and new by definition is not old and it’s certainly not improved. It’s just novel. You’re in a business where no one knows why some things work and some things don’t. It’s subjective and generally a crapshoot. It’s like when clients ask for something that will go viral — as if anyone knows what the feck is going to go viral. Being kind to people means taking some interest in their worries and fears, being honest with them about their talents and opportunities, and accepting them for what they are rather than what you want them to be. In my experience, people don’t change much. Time will sand their sharp edges — it just doesn’t remove them completely. And finally, remember that sucking up has its advantages. Everyone likes to hear nice things about themselves, especially bosses. But saying nice things to colleagues and subordinates is really just a form of sucking up when no one’s looking — because it doesn’t get you much until you’re coming down the ladder, but it will get you something eventually if nothing other than admiration. Being liked is a gift that gives lots back over time. You might not race to the top, but you won’t plunge to the bottom. And even if you do, they’ll be commiserating souls looking out for you. Hardly anyone will take this advice. If they do, it’s probably because doing these things is already part of their nature — or they acquire it slowly, well past its expiration date. They say that youth is wasted on the young. Advice generally shares the same fate. ©2017 John Hofmeister Returning from a trip to the grocery, I saw sign for a new preschool. The name of the school itself is beside the point, since they all have names like Bright Beginnings or Smart Start or whatever bit of alliteration struck the founder’s fancy. Or they settled on something that sounds erudite, you know English, like Essington or Leicester or Swadlincote, followed by the word Preschool, offering a vague promise of delivering a learning environment the Bronte sisters would die for.
What delivered the LOL moment for me was the descriptive line under the school’s name: Organic Preschool. I imagine we may soon see Gluten Free Kindergarten, Low Sodium SAT Preparation, Non-GMO Hot Yoga, or whatever bit of foolishness invades our linguistic deep structures. Why a preschool would even need a descriptor seems a bit baffling to me, but then I might actually want to know what the feck organic schooling might be. I can infer I suppose. I’m sure there’s a soporific rationale behind all of it, leading to the yawning that comes right before the fee structure that wakes you the hell up. I recall a book cover I saw at an off-beat store some years back. It had a big stylized burst: 100% Cholesterol FREE Guaranteed! This bit of irony made me smile. Clearly, the author knew that not everything merits ballyhoo. ©2017 John Hofmeister An eclipse is coming. We've been warned about how to look at it, get special viewing apparati, etc. Some poor soul without reliable access to social media will not hear the warnings and burn his retina. Most likely even that won't happen. Yet, the eclipse may manage to eclipse Trump tweets. For a day anyway, seeing as how he might want to rain fire and fury on North Korea or CNN or the failing New York Times.
Still, the coming eclipse made me think about our connection to the universe. There was a time when a solar eclipse would strike fear and terror into ignorant hearts and minds, those who didn't know what caused it — that it was a natural phenomena, however irregular it might be, like the sunrise but on a different schedule. Personally, I think the event merits a nod, but I have no particular interest in being in the best place to see it. Hell, it might be cloudy. And wouldn't that be a drag? I'm not rushing off and booking a plane ticket or driving to the best viewing spot. But were it to happen where I live as I made my way back from the grocery store or as I walked my dog around the block and found myself bathed in unsettling darkness at midday, it would certainly catch my breath, make me wonder, and connect to those unknowing souls who had wondered what it might mean or portend. Give me a bit of a shiver. If nothing else, an eclipse reminds us of how small we are, how ridiculously tiny our plot of the universe is. But our little planet is the only observatory available to us. So we may as well enjoy the show and sit back. And wonder. ©2017 John Hofmeister Advertising. Its practitioners rank right up there with members of Congress and used car salesman. Maybe I should say rank right down there. Why that is so isn’t hard to figure out. I imagine it’s because its practitioners are as varied in competence and degree as one finds in most professions. Take lawyers for example. Hate for lawyers goes way back. But when you find yourself in trouble with the cops, who ya gonna call? But as to advertising, its practitioners are invested heavily in touting their own worth. This is best evinced by the plethora of advertising award competitions. Anyone familiar with the practices of any profession recognizes that each has its own self-congratulating societies. The movie folks have the Academy Awards and the Cannes film festival and whatnot. Entertainershave almost as many award competitions and shows as there are fans, or so it seems. I’m sure bankers have their own self-love banquets and awards. As do accountants and plumbers and bartenders for all I know. Googling pretty much confirms that if there’s a profession, there’s an award to be won for practicing it. It’s only natural. Who better than your peers to decide if what you’re doing is better than what other people who do what you do have to say about what you are doing? If nothing else, the syntax of the last sentence is perhaps some cause for doubt as to the value of winning. But for sheer desire, ad creatives hanker after a big time ad award for reasons as varied as career advancement to insecurity — or both. Yet advertising is curious in the number of its award competitions — and within each competition there is a disciplined parsing and restricting of categories, making it possible for the hosts of these competitions to collect fees for entering and the entrees the ability to stab at more chances to win. Every ad competition worth its salt comes with fees for entry. Some require winners to pay extra for the trophies used to adorn their lobbies. Only fair I suppose. Hardware isn’t free. All this brings me to reflect on the worth of advertising competitions. I have won a few awards in the business. I got into the ad game late — I was 41 years old when an agency gave me a shot at this crazy business. This in itself is pretty remarkable, as ad agency creative talent is generally between 23 and 35, after which they become irrelevant, mostly because they are “clueless” and aren’t connected to what’s happening. It’s hard to find an old art director or copywriter, and by old I mean someone over 40 as I’ve written before. None of this is an excuse for not winning one of the premier awards, just a nod to the ridiculous hours young creatives give to their craft, generally at the cost of a personal life, if by personal life one means doing something totally unrelated to work like spending time with your lover or kids or fishing with fishing buddies. But I did get to do ads that ran in two Super Bowls and one that made noise on the national evening news. But noise and attention, you know, actually selling stuff your clients hire you to do, is generally beside the point when it comes to advertising competitions. There are some that take actual revenue increases based on an ad campaign’s impact. But mostly, it’s a competition judged by people who make ads for a living. Back in the aughts, the agency that did Burger King’s work won a bunch of prestigious awards. But the work didn’t move the needle. Didn’t steal share from McDonald’s or Wendy’s. It pretty much appealed to the gang who already like eating at Burger King. Sour grapes! my ad brethren and sistern will say. True enough. I’m well past caring too much about winning advertising awards to advance my career. My god, I’m 65 years old — hopelessly clueless. What I care about is crafting words and pictures that will help my clients sell stuff. Get noticed. Raise money. Win customers. Yes, sometimes wickedly clever ads can do that. But sometimes, it’s not too complicated. Someone is thinking about sampling a new craft brew. They notice an ad for a local IPA. And the ad tells them that craft brew X is the bomb because it’s triple hopped, crafted in small batches, and has a killer ABV of 11.6. There's a headline to alert you to what the hell the ad's about. There's a killer logo that says THIS IS COOL. Etc. You might not see it in the One Show Annual or Communications Arts Ad Annual or hogging press time at the Cannes show for advertising. This is going to run in a local rag or get some local Pinterest traction. And you already have an interest in craft brews and find ads about them likely to pique your interest. So, what you will find is an ad from someone selling a local craft brew to someone who wants to try something new and commerce ends up serving the two. I can write witty, clever ads and brand stories and heartfelt appeals. And web sites and blog posts and what have you. I can also cut to the chase and help you move your needle. What do you want? I’ve done both. So, why should you believe this? Here’s a sampling of what people say about my talent, skills, and abilities — direct lifts from my LinkedIn profile: “Quite simply, the best writer I have ever had the joy of working for or with.” “I trust John. I trust him to identify holes in strategy and process. I trust him to exceed creative expectations while delivering projects on time.” “Very focused on the task and asks extremely thought-provoking questions in order to get at an important insight that can make the difference in the brand communication.” “Brilliant Creative Director. Excellent mentor. Solid manager. His clear direction made projects seem simple.” “John is the kind of [creative] guy that agency account managers like to have by their side when they walk into a room full of Brand Managers.” “John is that rare combination of savvy business thinker and creative genius. His right and left brain are equally developed — giving him the ability to listen to a business problem, ask the right questions, devise a smart strategic approach, and deliver creative solutions with amazing results.” These testimonials were all freely given. I imagine anyone in the business could find colleagues to say much the same for them. But this is advertising. And I wanted to shout my value and give you a sense of why you might want me to write or develop concepts or tout your brand’s value. Interested? I’m at john@jhofmeister.com and will pick up at 614-266-4210 unless the line’s busy and someone else has called me first. ©2017 John Hofmeister Freedom.
Few things are more sacred to Americans. But the freedom I am talking about here is freedom from cancer. According to current forecasts, cancer will rob the freedom to live from over 595,690 Americans — and more than 1,685,210 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed. Yet these numbers don’t speak to the thousands of lives saved by new treatments and improved detection methods. They don’t count the many mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers who discover that freedom is sometimes nothing more than the simple gift of spending more time with loved ones. More time fulfilling dreams. The chance to walk a daughter down the aisle. The joy of coaching a little league team. In years past, many of you have donated to my ride to make the world free of cancer. And this year, my fifth year as a 100-mile Pelotonia rider, I am asking once again for your support. As a member of the Limited Brands Peloton, all my donations are matched one-for-one — so when you donate a dollar to my ride, the Limited kicks in another dollar. Help me get to $5000. I only need another $220 to make that happen. To donate, visit pelotonia.org/hoffy. If you’ve donated to other riders — wonderful! If you have other treasured causes (don’t we all?), I get that. But if you have a bit to spare, consider it matched! And help bring freedom to patients and families fighting cancer. Have a wonderful 4th! And consider what freedom from cancer means to so many. “A woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.”
— Virginia Woolf, 1929 Coming from a family of 7 siblings, I had to wait until my 3 older sisters flew the coup before I enjoyed a room of my own. I didn’t need one to write fiction. But having one when my girlfriend visited was pretty crucial. My time having it lasted a little over a year at which time I headed off to college and found myself once again sharing a room. This experience informs my natural distaste for open office environments — supposedly the great democratizer of business relationships where the CEO — or president or whatever title the top dog has — mixes in with the plebes who make less, usually way less, by having a desk and work station out in the open with his or her many charges. This arrangement has been a boon to the office furniture industry. For most of the rest of us, it’s yet another fad that is supposed to supercharge creativity or make people more productive or help everyone feel like their part of one big happy family with no bossy parents. It does none of those things. Often, quite the opposite. I recently posted a story about what a ridiculous waste of productivity and effort these open spaces have proven to be. This story was no surprise to me — I always knew that having a space of one’s own, a door to close, a space to think, did more for my productivity than any harvesting that might come from life in a cubicle farm or “open” work environment. What did surprise me was the popularity of the post itself — now exceeding over a 1000 views, about 2 times as many as anything I ever posted on LinkedIn. Clearly the story touched a chord with LinkedIn members. An overwhelming majority of those views were outside my contact network — many coming from regions dominated by tech based companies, a group that, along with their ad agencies, preached the egalitarian joy such work places deliver. It was an idea clearly abrogated by the difference in apparel and accessories worn in — and cars driven to — these open environments. Pretending that the top dog is just a member of the pack is nothing but a shallow pretense. There is no fool foolish enough to believe otherwise. If businesses truly wanted to encourage a democratized workplace, they would provide everyone with a semblance of privacy, if not actual closed-off spaces. Imagine how much love and loyalty might be generated at an agency or company where everyone had a personal space, even a room with a door? Some sharp cookie will figure this out (if they haven’t already) and easily steal the talent from all those places whose open work places are just opening doors through which their employees can leave. ©2017 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. — Karl Marx
Childhood, too rich for the old and too tepid for the young, perfectly mirrors the nature of desire, for it is in childhood that much of what we want is shaped. And for most of us, our dreaming, our ability to imagine, slips away unnoticed until it disappears altogether. We are encouraged to believe that the fancifulness of childhood is a lovely state, but one which must give way to facts; and with time what makes up our little lives finds new meaning as we come to realize our parents are not gods, our teachers, no saints. Few things are as fungible as memory. And the many links to our past available to us in the early years of the current millennia only serve to make it more so. The photos, the letters we write and receive and keep (a rarity I imagine), and the terabytes of video we capture can displace or reinforce, as the case may be, our memories of what happened to us. Stories we hear as we grow, descriptions of scenes we played parts in, events we assume have the surety of fact, these are all colored by what we want to believe or take for granted as real. And the detail, the truth, gets filled in with photos or the way an older sibling recalls it. Invariably, chatter at family gatherings over the holidays infect the reality of the lives we actually lived. Such is the case with me and my siblings. We are a curious amalgam of American beliefs. I have sisters who are fervent evangelical Christians and sisters who are devout atheists, if by devout you mean committed, fully practicing by how they live and what they say. My only brother, two years my junior, left us for reasons I can never really know, taking his own life a few years short of 60. If he was anything, he too was a nonbeliever, and like me, never took to the religion we were raised in, that being Catholic. It’s difficult to know when one sheds the religion of one’s parents (when such is the case). I started the process in high school, perhaps sooner, as I never much cared for all the ritual and bromides that came with being Catholic: the denial of sexuality (adolescent sexuality especially); the accountancy ledger of sins committed and time served in purgatory; the harsh and capricious judgment that fell to those who had sinned but failed to make a full confession, so if they got struck by a bus on the way to confession, well, they were warned. I also never quite got the business side of it, or perhaps I did, as it seemed but an extension of the accountancy ledger already mentioned. Our parish issued individual boxes of donation envelopes, which we were encouraged to use when they passed the collection basket. Since I attended an affiliated parochial school, I got my box there, perhaps during religion class or what passed for homeroom, that being the taking of attendance and tweaking of ears belonging to the noisy and unruly. Anyway, each of us, our parents included, had a box of envelopes sufficient to cover all the Sundays and holidays of the year — basically, any official day that a good Catholic would find himself at mass and ready to redeem his faith and underwrite the parish’s fiscal needs (I used the masculine pronoun because, well, it should be obvious — if not, you’re not too familiar with Catholicism). So, on every Sunday, and for us that commenced with a noon mass because our Dad liked to sleep in (and ruin my playtime, just saying), we prepped for our weekly rites by getting out our envelopes and putting in a quarter or dime or whatever Dad doled out to us to put in them and surrender to the ushers, devoted souls who carried a basket with an enormously long handle that let them reach across ever pew for every donation of the faithful. I’m guessing they found ripping open our envelopes and shedding them of coins a tiresome ritual that got in the way of efficiently filling the coffers. Maybe they accepted it as duty, one of many. Who knows? It was made a bit less onerous when they added perforated lines to the envelopes that simplified tearing the damn things open and harvesting their contents. What I took from being a Catholic, including my run as an altar boy schooled in the old Latin mass, was mystery — the mystery that came from the music, an unfathomable reach that touched my soul. When I served 6:30 AM mass, a ritual observed in a parish of perhaps five or ten thousand, there were usually about 25 of the faithful, old people mostly, a nun or two from the nearby convent, and an organist, a young man who managed to fill the boredom with beauty. He also had the curious gift of making Latin hymns sound like the whisperings of heaven. I would later take these memories and come to see that creative natures need a place to live and find connection to the mystery of being, the mystery that fills a night filled with stars or the comfort we can’t account for when we see an infant’s smile or a bitch nursing her litter. This brings me back to where I began. Does my recollection of being a boy raised Catholic fit with what it was to be Catholic back then? How much of it reflects my later day interpretation of those days serving as an altar boy, and what, if anything, it means to believe? Can one really shed faith never owned? Does our commitment to faith or lack thereof reflect the curious infusion of what makes us either believers or souls striven to some other course, a course no less free of faith, faith in things larger than ourselves? Religion, it seems to me, isn’t about where we go after we die, but how we live now. Over the years, I lost interest in tracking my relationship to eternity and my place in it, but with the approaching close to my time here, I sometimes think about the other side of the divide. Nothing I might recover from my childhood or life since then has called me to be reborn or subscribe to any number of faiths that promise a personal afterlife. I do, however, find myself in awe of the universe, the light from stars now dead still filling the night sky, the eternal mystery that is eternity, and the watch found whose workings suggest a maker, but whose winding raises an infinite height to every leap of faith. There is a certain pleasure that comes with hunt-and-peck typing. For someone like me this is hard to admit since I can bang out sentences in qwerty faster than I could write or at least knock out in longhand that I might be able to interpret tomorrow. My longhand has deteriorated steadily since 5th grade, and my cursive devolved into a mixture of printed letters and curlicues that paid experts would be unable to decipher in Federal Court. And with my introduction to the typewriter, anything I scratched out today with a pencil just goes straight to runic inscrutability.
Hunt-and-peck forces you to slow down a bit. In this way it’s a bit like writing in longhand — the effort to compose is knocked back a smidge by searching for keys that your 10 digits know well but your thumbs need to coordinate with your eyes and poke upon. Eventually, if not already, there will be novels whacked out by thumbs. I imagine the plasticity involved in human brain evolution has already yielded an entire generation of thumbsters whose attention spans have adapted to the digital syncopation. I still fight with spell check and those damn algorithms always guessing at my next word choice. I know which ones I want, thank you very much. Anyway, slowing down some means considering the words on the page, screen actually, and what might follow them. And typing with thumbs makes it a bit more difficult to edit, something that’s easy enough when you can see a window of type and rely on your every god-given digit. But reducing the entry points from 10 to two — well Proust would have gone bananas. Poor Willy Faulkner and Jimmy Joyce would have gone for whiskey, rum cake, and Irish coffee. And we’d be out an awful lot of incredible sentences. But those fellas wrote in longhand. Joyce would spend a day looking for a single word. Really. So now at night, before the TV programming that leaves me bored and listless, I pick up my iPhone and poke out some words. A handful that I can save and mail to myself and then embellish on a keyboard that spans the width of my hands, rendering posts such as this. Don’t get me wrong, I love my opposable thumbs, but at heart I am an equal opportunity deployer. ©2017 John Hofmeister. Find more posts at jhofmeister.com/musings. What is left to me? Having turned 65 I have to be realistic. My mom died at 76, my father at 80. So by all accounts I have some hope of landing in the middle. But then I have done all the things baby boomers do to stave off the inevitable and have gone to great extremes to defy gravity, the pursing of skin, the drooping of muscle. I took up cycling about 10 years ago. Mostly because I was sick of buying bigger pants with each passing season. That and harboring a fear that I’d get fat like guys who love beer generally do. An old friend once told me, yeah, after 35 you put on a pound a year and then you die. I didn’t weigh myself at 35. Maybe it’s buried in the medical records the insurance companies are using as I write to screw me out of benefits. I have a light frame and my BMI is iffy, but no one who knows me would call me overweight. But insurance companies don’t give much credence to how you look. They have charts and calculations, all designed to chart ways to screw you. Luckily I’m on Medicare so their best efforts to screw me and take my money will be somewhat limited.
We all approach our end times differently and alike in our own ways. An atheist by discernment, I have no hope of an afterlife. Not that I wouldn’t want one but the ones I’m familiar with are either too vague to be desired or too boring to be endured. Eternal happiness seems on the surface a great thing, but hey, it’s our nature to get bored with repetition. And praying forever is as close to having a stick in my eye for eternity as I can imagine. The other thing I wonder about is the prospect of experiencing the world without a body. Not that I love my body, but it’s all I’ve got. It’s gotten used to eating and drinking and sweating and shaving and bathing and seeing and hearing and touching. These are all things that having a body makes possible. Of course, having a body also makes it possible to get burned or develop stage 4 cancer or starve or get poison ivy. It’s the trade-off that comes with being a human being. Life without a body would be something else altogether. It might be freaking awesome. But it might be a bad acid trip, too. Who’s to say? I am (or was) close to several souls who have passed to the other side. My mom, some close friends, my only brother. None of them have contacted me about what awaits at the next station. I sort of think that they’d try to let me know about what I might do while alive to make my time in the great hereafter happier, or at least less horrifying. But like most of us who aren’t talking with any regularity with the dead, I haven’t heard from any of them. The fear of oblivion drives a great deal of belief I’m sure. But for me, oblivion is a return to where I was before I arrived — before I was suited up with DNA and muscle and bone and fiber. I have no more fear of where I am going than of where I once was. So, what keeps you from being a wicked soul who would rape, pillage, and murder, you ask? A fair question I suppose. But it belies the simple human understanding that most of us wish to be treated as we would be treated. With kindness. With sympathy. With compassion. These aren’t hard things to understand. And you can sew them into all sorts of religious dictates as your religion requires. But in the end, we wish to be treated as we would have others treat us. And for the aberrant souls, the sociopaths with damaged lives and sickly DNA sequences, they will always be among us. Life is not fair but random. Life is all we have. The unfolding mystery of being stretches out before us. What we make of our time is ours to shape and own and accept or reject as our souls require. ©2017 John Hofmeister |
John HofmeisterWhen I'm not writing for clients, I write about things that interest me. Quite of bit of satire, a genre that has become increasingly difficult to work in since reality has become such a farce. Archives
February 2023
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