Sometimes I Don't Mind

So the amazingly funny @peterbyrnes and I did a PowerPoint slide deck on the Apocalypse for y’all.  We hope you like it and tell ALL of your friends that they should check it out - just kidding, I am way to modest to pimp myself out.

The End of the World Seems To Be Happening a Lot More Often Than It Used To

Most of the time when someone says a person on Twitter is “underfollowed” it’s annoying hyperbole, right?  That isn’t the case for Bob Friend.  It blows my mind that someone with as many hilarious tweets as he has is still under 1000 followers.  And if you drink beer, it’s an absolute shame if you aren’t following him!  So here’s my request.  Read the 10 tweets below.  Check out his Favstar page, star some tweets, and if you laughed a couple of times, either retweet this or give him a personalized recommendation.  Do it now.  Or as Bob might say during a standup performance, ‘midget please!”

1. Anyone have cheat codes for Scientology? I can’t get past the Xenu level.

2. Every time I go to Walmart, I feel like I’m entering a Redneck Death Star.

3. I’m drinking home made beer which means I just leveled up from alcoholic to craftsman.

4. Going to a liquor store that has several hundred different beers. If I’m not back in a week send pretzels.

5. There’s no way Bin Laden used his wife as a shield. Any man stuck in the house with his wife for 5 years would intentionally take the bullet.

6. If I masturbate to a video of myself masturbating am I metabating?

7. The new Bud Light bottles allow you to write your name on the label. If you need to put your name on it you’re not drinking fast enough.

8.  I treat Twitter like it’s my job. Which means I hardly do it and I’m usually hammered when I do.

9. I listened to the new Nine Inch Nails CD 5 times before I realized it was was actually an MS Office disc.

10. I keep an emergency beer hidden in the fridge. One beer left in the fridge qualifies as an emergency.

So I wrote a work blog about the exciting new Haircut Club I was asked to join and was underwhelmed with.  You can read the whole thing here.  But here’s a little snippet.

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How many clubs do you belong to? I’m not talking about the health clubs to which you pay a monthly fee so you can feel guilty for not attending, nor do I mean book clubs or even beer or cheese of the month clubs (Christmas is coming in case someone wants to get me a gift). I’m talking about marketing clubs. I don’t know about you but I have a giant box filled with cards for Frequent Flyers, car rentals, grocery stores, pet stores, bookstores, wholesale shopping and a myriad of other bits of plastic that are supposed to give me volume discounts and rewards. If future generations learn how to convert plastic back to oil, my club memberships could probably fuel my car for a year. Most likely the next club I will join will be a club club which will manage my club and rewards cards. With the advent of following brands on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, I don’t think I really need more inclusivity when it comes to interacting with brands. I hardly spend enough time talking to my wife, why do I need even more communication with my brands?

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Before the movie Wall Street crushed the last few moments of American glory into a dusty mess that needed to be swept up and placed in the garbage can, I had a few years of life.  Although I was born 1974, after my parents’ generation thought they could make the world a better place, I was alive and cognitively complex enough to understand that just a few short decades later that generation had changed.  As a child, I was deemed too young to watch the post-apocalyptic movie The Day After, yet in high school viewed Duck and Cover with an analytical eye focused on the naiveté of our elders —knowing full well there was nothing we could do to survive the coming nuclear apocalypse pending from Cuba, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, or any other global monster of the week. 

As part of the tail end of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, in many ways I wanted to drop out of the dream.  I didn’t want the white picket fence, the 2.5 kids and the same job from college graduation to retirement.  I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew that wasn’t it.  We didn’t really get any guidance or advice; instead we were lazy slackers, disaffected youth who didn’t care about the world.  Never mind that we spent our childhood watching the last fleeting moments of America promoting a better society all the time taking a few bucks under the table to change the very fabric of what we thought was the way to live.

Anyway, one of the things that I always believed to be true (call me a Pollyanna) was that Americans were always working to make the pie bigger.  From our origin myths to today’s immigrants, we wanted to do everything we could to make our country better, stronger and richer than just the year before. 

Somehow though, we culturally decided that instead of working for a bigger pie that it was more important to get a bigger slice of the current pie.  And all the ice cream to boot, because who doesn’t like pie a-la-mode?  Instead of working to make America a great place for everyone, we decided to give it away like a kid trades away his entire lunch for just one tiny sliver of pie.

But I got tired, as many people of my generation did.  Rational arguments, thoughtful discourse and meaningful discussions about how we wanted the world to be were quickly drowned out by talking heads, talking points, and talking without listening.  Sound bites and digestible news.  Don’t like what you hear, dismiss it and move to another channel, or website, or blog or Twitter account.  Somehow, the perception of copying and pasting an all-caps Facebook status became the new civil disobedience and we if didn’t “Like” it, we just passed on.  Everyone started yelling but nobody was listening, and quietly over a cacophony of moral stances on nothing of value nothing changed, or, indeed, things actually got worse until we reached today. 

It became tiresome.

Now we have an opportunity.  A chance to make things better, but we probably won’t.  A lot of us have joked and mocked (or on Fox News talked about the “Loony Left”) the Occupy Wall Street protestors because they have no clear and true agenda, because they don’t have talking points, because they don’t have solutions.  They want to “further the discussion.”  Frankly, that’s what this country needs right now.  We have so many people drawing lines in the sand and saying, “I will hold the country hostage unless I get exactly what I want,” just like a three year old at Target throwing a tantrum right before Christmas.  If you’ve never witnessed the sigh of exhaustion from a parent during this moment, you aren’t following politics today.  Everyone from Washington DC, to the dog catcher in the smallest municipality in the country has decided that screaming irrational ideas rather than trying to solve real problems is the only way to get a political job in this country.

We need problem solvers and not babies in adult diapers.

We need people who are willing to admit that their uneducated beliefs on a topic shouldn’t carry as much weight as someone who has been considered an expert for the last twenty years.

We need people who aren’t tired and beaten down by life, who aren’t so tired of critical thinking that spouting the day’s newest inane outrage isn’t all the effort they can give us.

We need journalists who care about objectivity rather than regurgitating the latest press release.

But most importantly, we need people who care about making this country better again, by admitting they don’t have all the answers but will ask people to help who can.

Think More, Do More, Do Better, Do Good.

That’s what we need in our country right now.

If you want to diametrically frame the Occupy Wall Street movement as a liberal opposition to the Tea Party; then you probably had the experience but missed the meaning.  If you look at it with a critical eye and ask “what could we be doing better as a nation, as a people, as someone who thinks they are a world leader” then you probably ready to stop the train and get off this ride.

I just made my first ever flowchart in Visio!