Author Archives: diestl

I grew up in Rhode Island. Small towns, real winters, Christmas traditions that actually meant something. When I moved to California in 2000, I didn’t expect to find anything that reminded me of home. But every Christmas season, my wife and I would visit Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica, that stretch overlooking the ocean,Continue reading “The Revolution Will Be Streamed.”

Ode to my father.  Before he ever built anything with wood or steel, my father built his life with small, honest work. As a kid he shined shoes on street corners, set up bowling pins in the crash of the alleys, and swept floors in a garage, just to hand a few crumpled bills andContinue reading “They Took It All and Couldn’t Break the Man”

During World War II, sacrifice wasn’t a slogan, it was a way of living. Meals were smaller, cupboards were thin, and no one believed the world owed them comfort. People didn’t complain; they adapted. They understood that resilience wasn’t optional, it was survival. Today, a delay in SNAP benefits and people claim they’re on theContinue reading “Discipline to Distress”

As a Freemason, I’ve heard the word legacy more times than I can count, from brothers in the fraternity and from the men who knock on the door hoping to join. They want to leave a legacy. Of what? But legacy isn’t what most people think it is. I walked away from a career inContinue reading “Legacy”

Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad went viral, the kind of viral that feeds on outrage. A few seconds of denim, beauty, and wordplay turned into a cultural food fight about race. Then piranhas ate it up like Kobe beef. I felt it was manufactured then. It wasn’t about jeans anymore; it was about meaning, or theContinue reading “Manipulation gone wrong”

Are you walking around unconscious, meticulously brainwashed into believing you’re awake, while following the choreography of a collective sleep? Your eyes, tracked and patterned, already predicted by those who know what activates your gaze. Does that make you conscious? Or just a well-trained reflex, scrolling up and down the feed of illusion? What makes youContinue reading “The casino envision”

You can’t control your thoughts or fears. You can’t control your actions, so you see a therapist and take their prescribed advice and pharmaceuticals, because you believe without their perspective on you, you’re just a lump of clay in the corner. No wheel. No drivetrain. Waiting for someone to tell you what to do, whatContinue reading “Clay in the minefield”

You wanna be a writer? There’s an app for that. Screenplay, novel, memoir, just feed it your fragments, and it’ll “find your voice” for you. You wanna be a musician? There’s an app for that too. Type a mood or idea, and it’ll write your song, chords, lyrics, and emotion on demand. You wanna sing?Continue reading “Losing our essence”

Imagine living a life so empty you spend it listening for a slip, a stutter, a pause, a mispronounced breath from someone you claim to despise without properly vetting. Waiting for that gotcha moment to post, to prove, to perform your hypocritical outrage for an audience of Pavlov dogs, salivating at the sound of another’sContinue reading “To click or not to click.”

Feelings have their own intelligence, monitoring the rhythmical pulse, a message. Vibrations shake when shackles break, control awakened, a fight-or-flight reflex on autopilot, unknown. Fire tempers, focus… the mind returns to assess the mess, that warrants investigation. What shakes first is never the earth, but the soul. c 2025 Chu The Cud All Rights Reserved