Ours is a world where growing innovations promote shrinking attention spans; where - all too often - the cure is dreadfully worse than the condition, and where as a result, attorneys will offer you a free consultation to discuss the matter in greater vicious detail. An apparent step-child of our own laziness, we have somehow managed to slide backwards along our evolutionary timeline, devolving as we devour and devalue every social milestone that once held us aloft as legends in our own minds. We blame instead of believe, hate instead of hope, and sellout instead of sacrifice. We reflect a society that has truly lost our collective way, and it would see we couldn't give two tin shits to find the roadmap we so deeply need.

Our navigation is now based – not in the celestial bodies we hide in the smog – but rather in the torrents of lies we tell ourselves… the “truths” we have become so ignorant to believe. Guilt is assuaged with gluttonous greed as wisdom gives way to wanton welching or our collective word. We are letting ourselves down by letting our children down… and we let them down by throwing their children away. And perhaps worst of all, we do this while sitting back and placing blame on anyone or anything dumb enough to move into our firing solution. First come, first saddled with blame.

While specifics of innovative detail may differ, this underlying trend of reversion is not anything new to our collective existence. Far from it. Humanity has plodded through time and space in rough, overlapping circles (ruts?) that – from time to time – derail our soul train and throw us from the tracks in a twisted array of myopic madness. It would seem that the only pain and disgrace of this impact and the tragedies it brings is sufficient to stop the regression – if but for an instant – and grant us with a collective moment of clarity much like those experienced by savage drunks as they piss themselves one time too many.

...to be continued...

Another notch on the belt, another ring around the tree… whatever your cliché of choice may be, the fact remains that a new year is again upon us. It is the time when resolutionites resolve to change their wicked ways… when the prognosticators prognosticate and debate our collective fate… and when the masses curl up in front of the tube, tuned to whatever “Best of last Year” programming suites their immediate social itches. For me however, there seems something inanely hallow in participating in such endeavors (though I must admit to doing so in the past) and as such, the beginning of my 2013 seems rather lackluster as far as perceived importance or significance. The irony here, friends… is that this could not be further from the truth.

I look to 2013 not as a new lap on the same old track, but rather another mile to travel in the race that few wish to complete. There need not be summation, nor prediction, nor listless resolutions made for public notoriety and private assuagement in 2013. What is ‘needed’ for me this year, is simply an unfettering drive to keep that metaphorical foot on the pedal regardless of the road hazards that jump into frame. How is this any less cliché than the aforementioned weight loss pledges and preposterous predictions? Well, perhaps it isn't… but at least this one is MY cliché.

All day I've had one of those sound-bite-perfect famous quotes rambling in my mind - “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get” (Dale Carnegie) – and I felt obligated to include it in this forum (as it no doubt incendiated this post). What strikes me most about Mr. Carnegie’s words is learning how to attain both success AND happiness without compromising those things that I “want”. Is this even possible? Or does attaining one in fact preclude the other? I have known plenty of “successful” people who were anything but “happy”… but thinking back, I would be hard-pressed to find a truly “happy” person who considered themselves unsuccessful in life.

Alas I digress, lest I drive the wrong way down a road of semantics. This rambling seeks not to point out solutions and answers, rather to incite the questions that must be asked – or at least that I must be asking myself – as I gear up for 2013. Food for thought, or thoughts for food… the end very rarely justifies what it means to get there… and with that, dear friends… ‘tis time to move along to something completely different.