Author Archives: diestl

Every major entertainment company operates under a code of conduct. Jimmy Kimmel knew that. Yet when ABC executives confronted him about his rhetoric following Charlie Kirk’s death, he reportedly pledged to double down. With his show already dragging in the ratings and losing money, it was an astonishingly reckless stance. Sponsors were prepared to walk.Continue reading “Freedom of speech narrative”

Social media is engineered to grab our attention, shred it, and replace what trash you just saw with new garbage. We don’t need that. The parasites who run it weaponize our focus to widen the divide, seeding outrage with insignificant drivel. I can’t understand how anyone lets these attentivores, these cultural cancers, move into theirContinue reading “The feast of futilism”

When you shut off all media, TV, social feeds, news apps, even the endless notifications, you cut off the artificial extensions of reality. What’s left is only what your senses encounter: the people in your presence, the conversations you’re having, the work at hand, the street outside your window, the air you breathe. Media, byContinue reading “Digital detox”

Fences were made to be climbed, an invitation, a whispered challenge of a dare. To step away from where life is manufactured through repetition. Whereas breaths are not so deep and mediated. Will the grass be greener? Step over and see. Regret is just a shadow, that fades with the sun. Mistakes are humans rulesContinue reading “Perceptual distortion”

Why do we try so hard to fit into a mold? Each of us carries a spark of uniqueness, yet we are told, conditioned, to believe there is one model of success, one shape of life we must aspire to. This is nothing but illusion, hogwash wrapped in authority. The “mold” is presented as security,Continue reading “Safe in Chains”

The vessel re-shapes itself, consistently through knowledge and experience. It avoids hypocrisy, and knows that contradiction is not a fracture but a mirror, a lesson whispered back through time. It does not hunger for affirmation, for its existence is its own justification. Stop searching for symmetry. Life was never designed to balance. It was designedContinue reading “The flexibility of balance”

Palm trees that grow in the desert, their roots tangled in shifting sands, drinking from wells the eye cannot see, stretching upward with a faith that heat cannot break. Each frond whispers a defiance, green against the repetition of dust, shade against the tyranny of light, a soft, living hymn where silence reigns. They areContinue reading “Palm tree”

A young man was murdered, assassinated, for nothing more than speaking, for daring to converse with those who disagreed. He leaves behind a wife and two young children, yet instead of mourning, many chose to celebrate his death. Social media filled with professional voices, teachers, doctors, engineers and others mocking his life, twisting his words,Continue reading “The road less traveled”

I honor what once protected me, and I bless what now frees me. So, brick by brick, I begin the work of independence. Each brick released, not wasted in anger, but representing a person who was an essential part of my life. Not rubble, not debris, but stones of memory and meaning. Wall built sheltering me fromContinue reading “The architecture of transition”

I just finished watching the Charlie Sheen documentary, aka Charlie Sheen on Netflix, and I couldn’t help but wonder what his real motivation was for doing it.  It starts with lots of super 8 footage of his childhood and little films he made with family and friends. Comparing the violence of his dad’s films toContinue reading “aka Charlie Sheen”