Chu The Cud

I remember in acting class we were assigned a role to perform with two or more people. In the beginning, I noticed people highlighting only their parts with a highlighter. Just memorizing what they are going to say.

I worked with a director once who discouraged this process of memorization in a play and for good reason. When one memorizes only what they need to say, the other actors and audience members are being cheated. 

When cueing up to the last couple of words of the other person dialogue, you truly are not responding by listening. The process becomes robotic. A sound bite to recite. 

This has recently been going on in society also. People just don’t listen anymore. They are looking at you while preoccupied in an abyss of narcissistic chaos and drifting away mentally. 

They just want to talk and then talk over you. 

Once in a while during a conversation, throw in a made up word or phrase to see if the person you are speaking with stops you to explain that word or phrase. 

Is it because the smart phones have been covertly rewiring our brains? The looking glass skewing our perspectives and perceptions. Destroying our patience and creating a turbulent impatience to our attention spans. 

Digital devices have become digital babysitters for parents, offering entertainment and distraction for their children while they do the same. Communication as a family unit is diminishing since the inception of digital literacy. This is how the young are learning to communicate. 

Human connections and experiences are being lost. Communication is slowly disintegrating as texting and messaging are taking over and semantics are suffering the repercussions. Acronyms and abbreviated words are become commonplace in language. 

To focus and look into the eyes of the person you are speaking with is the key to communicating. Listening and recognizing the vocal patterns and reciprocating in kind.

Listen closely, learn, understand and focus on the what is being said. Write the whole word out in a text, it doesn’t take any longer. 

Put down the gadgets and communicate in person. Look at the person your speaking with. It’s so much better for you to see laughter than a laughing emoji or lol. 

Mentally, it’s a lot healthier for everyone. 

c 2023 Chu The Cud

All Rights Reserved.

Mother Nature you are indeed a remarkable force, what more can one ask of you?

You have created the trees and seas so that we could breathe fresh air while providing us pleasant water for nourishment.

You originated a climate we can live, move freely and prosper from.

You sprinkled assorted minerals into the dirt and atmosphere to fertilize so we can have substance and material to construct shelter from the vagaries of weather.

Everything essential for life and survival in our intricate balance of an ecosystem has generously been donated by you.

And what do you ask in return?

From it we came and so shall we return to it.

c 2023 Chu The Cud

All Rights Reserved

The seasons of the year haven’t changed for thousands of years. Like rocks. There are grains, pebbles, rocks and mountains.

The seasonal names, winter and summer have been around for more than one thousands years, however, the names of spring and fall/autumn are more recent, partly because these two seasons were viewed as secondary to summer and winter. Transitioning from one extreme to another.

Before there was autumn and fall, there was harvest. A time when farmers traditionally gather the fruits of their labor before the onset of winter and their agricultural activities decrease. It had a strong association with this important agricultural activity.

Spring was once called lent. When the snow melts, the days lengthen, the weather gets warmer and foliage begins to bloom.

When I was young the word lent for me was associated with Catholicism and Christianity. A calling for forty days of fasting, from Lent through to Easter and it happened during Springtime, I never knew the correlation of the two words other than one was a season and the others was a vocation.

The wording or labels don’t change what each season creates. Even if you lived in areas of extreme weather during a season. Winter in the south is never as extreme as winter in the north. If we were to change the name of winter to semyarnati, it wouldn’t change what it is. It would still be the same mildness of cold and extremes in the different regions.

Which brings me to the fact of words. Snow by any other names is still, frozen precipitation in the form of ice crystals that falls from the sky when the atmospheric conditions are cold enough.

Words don’t change that what they are. Bad was once a standard of poor quality and behaviors. In today’s world, it now can also mean exceptional.

Words are everywhere and ever changing.

Words cannot harm. Hate speech is just another’s inability to comprehend the wording without getting emotional. An emotional outburst is not about the words. It’s goes much deeper psychologically and has nothing to do with the words. It’s speech or talk or articulation, discourse, expression or just plain old communication. Take the emotion out and it’s only linguistics.

How one reacts is not the point of the statement but a fallout of an emotional reaction provoked by one’s inability to comprehend what was said without calmly acknowledging the semantics.

By putting that much emotional emphasis on a word or string of words, you are choosing to put yourself in a cage and losing the freedom to walk away unscathed.

You are in control so why let anyone inside your head to vandalize it?

c 2023 Chu The Cud

All Rights Reserved.

My life has always felt like the area between the holes on a belt or watch band. Never really comfortable. it’s either too tight or too loose.

We are who we are and learn to deal with our situations in life through being omnipresent with our encounters. The way to happiness is how we engage or don’t engage with these encounters.

We engage with our bodies to make them stronger. We engage with our diet and health to make us stronger. But do we engage with our minds to make them stronger?

Social Media has the capability to make our minds stronger, but does it? Or does it make us lazier and dumber and leading to shorter attention spans with a preference for immediate gratification and avoiding critical analysis.

We have become algorithms to sell products,. Whether it be, charitable, political, racial, sexual or commercial. That is its focus.

Having the world at our fingertips should provide an abundance of opportunity to be better humans toward each other but it hasn’t. It has the opportunities of gaining wisdom and understanding. However, it’s made us more untrusting, incapable, unstable and unhappy.

This addiction has created a significant, divisive, division while we voluntarily pay a fee to be part of it all. We must rise above it.

Like it’s forefather television, social media was created to control our minds, behaviors, thoughts and wallets with a ding, clicks and likes. Taking our attention away from the truly important things.

Ultimately, we have the power to choose how we interact with this technology, whether it be positive or negative. Choose wisely.

c 2023 Chu The Cud

All Rights Reserved.

I was an extra on the film Amistad while they were filming in the New England. I think Connecticut. Now I understand why when I was younger, I couldn’t understand why older people sometimes can’t recollect some things.

During lunch time there was a big tent full of tables and chairs so we could sit and eat. There were hundreds of extra there. I noticed after a couple days on set that all the different ethnicities where all sitting together eating lunch. Sitting only the with the same race that they were.

I got thinking that most people would rather sit with people just like them. It must be a comfort and a small sampling of why many people never leave where they were born.

I was always interested in other cultures since I was very young.

I went to Community College in my mid twenties and felt more alive then I ever been. I would meet all types of people for all over my state. It was here that I encountered my first gay friend. Being a straight man from where I grew up, that was a milestone.

I transferred to Emerson College in Boston and rented an apartment near Fenway Park. The diversity of people from all over the world were in Boston. My aliveness moved up a couple more notches.

I worked full time, went to school full time and had to put time aside for scene study meetings and a musical rehearsals. I never felt freer.

I went back home after I got my degree and would find work in NYC or New England to continue to learn and gain knowledge.

I decided to move to Los Angeles and engulfed myself in the differences of people and the great stories they had about where they came from. Worked on film/tv/commercial sets, at all the big studios and on location.

If I saw a homeless person, I would start a conversation with them. My fiends would comment to each other, “he talks to everyone.”

Later I lived in an apartment in a building that housed scholars and intellectuals from all over the world. It was sponsored by the Getty Museum’s Research Institute.

I met some very interesting people. One scholar who got the, “artist in residence title” knocked on my door. Now my wife at the time was the housing coordinator of this building so if anyone needed anything or had a problem, they would contact my wife.

I didn’t meet this gentleman as of yet. He knocked at the door and I opened it. He asked for my wife. I said hold on and walked over to her. I said, “some homeless guy is at the door asking for you.” She looked at the guy and whispered to me, “That’s the artist in residence not a homeless guy.” I replied, “ he looks homeless to me.” I met so many cool people.

I became a Freemason at a lodge that’s membership was very diverse. A group of men from all over the world whom I might have never met and learned about if I never opened the door to the lodge.

I’m very satisfied living in a melting pot of diversity and enjoy it. That doesn’t mean that we all agree on everything but we can come to an understanding of differences. I raised my kids that way.

If you rather hang and live with your own kind and that’s where you find comfort and solitude, that’s cool. I understand the differences.

The United States of America is a great country.

c 2023 Chu The Cud

All Rights Reserved.

Some days you can try to conjure up a topic to write about, whether it is a passion or just something that passively irritates you. It’s not easy to just do it. And it can become very exasperating when the library of your mind is elusive or checked out.

It’s a force that has to come together naturally. It could be partly inspiration, influence added with a cocktail of knowledge and experience. And most importantly, free flowing semantics and their ability to capture the reader’s attention, imagination and thoughts. What are the keys that unlocks the flow?

One is to get out and explore so you can experience the differences between you and you now. The taste of a juicy orange showering exuberance to your senses as you can’t wait for the next bite. The dehydrated, non-malleable orange usually gets tossed after a couple bites. That’s only one type of fruit that can stimulate and motivate your senses in different ways.

Consistently exercise your brain on issues you agree and disagree on. Create conversations with people of dissimilarity to open your mind to other people’s ideas, perspectives and experiences. You don’t have to agree but it will help in your own personal growth and understanding of other’s circumstances and how it affects them and you.

Finding subject matter, that sizable, dense log that feeds the fire inside or a talking point that flames the fire, creating an intensity of thought, while calmly finishing through with the passionate contemplation of the talking point. Read books and articles daily on subjects that inspire and immerse you to sit and read.

As I develop my writing and its subject matter, there are moments when I wrap things up swiftly and other instances I need an extended period to digest, meditate and contemplate it thoroughly.

Even if you’re not a writer, these life experiences will help with, savoir faire and also ameliorating your lifelong journey.

c 2023 Chu The Cud

All Rights Reserved

A lot of people ask me what the tag line, “Just the meat. No gristle” for Chu The Cud means. It’s a style of my writing.

Much of today’s writing comprises of 20 pages of fluff, colorful, flowery, adjective filler to tell you what they can and 1 to 2 pages. That’s the gristle. They stuff people really don’t want.

It reminds me of when we had to write an essay in school with a minimum number of words required. Adding numerous unnecessary “verys” and “ands”, while bypassing contractions.

I like to get right to the point and be concise, writing about the key points or “Just the meat” of the topic. If the reader becomes engrossed and wants to learn more about the topic, then they can go and do more research on the subject.

Brevity and focus can be quite refreshing and engaging than reading so much futile information in much of today’s disenchanting journalism.

c 2023 Chu The Cud

All Rights Reserved.