Author Archives: diestl

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

I gave her twenty-five years, my prime, my promise, my patience. Walked away from a career to raise children, to build a home, to be the anchor when the waves hit. And still, she threw it all away. Everything we built together, gone. At fifty-five, I was standing in the ashes, trying to start fromContinue reading “The unbroken root”

Once upon a time, cars were machines. Steel, grease, and human touch, not software updates and warning lights. If something broke, it was because a bolt stripped or a gasket failed, not because a line of code forgot its purpose. Back then, a recall meant something mechanical, tangible, a brake line, a seatbelt, a tankContinue reading “The recall of progress”

As I approach the midpoint of my life, I find myself trying to balance the pull between machismo and compassion. It’s a quiet fight, but not without passion. Letting go of the toughness that once defined me as a younger man isn’t easy. The old self resists, clinging to the pride and armor of youth,Continue reading “The transformation of my years.”

I’ve recently had the urge to go to the theater again. My first choice was Frankenstein, but it wasn’t showing anywhere nearby, and the few places that did have it only offered one evening show around 6:30 or 7:30. So I looked up the latest Leonardo DiCaprio film, which also wasn’t playing close by. Instead,Continue reading “Truth and Treason”