Chu The Cud

Tony Soprano is a narcissistic, violent, lying, self-serving sociopath who betrays nearly everyone who loves him and yet, we root for him.

Why?

Because we’ve been emotionally manipulated to see complexity as justification, and dysfunction as depth. It’s not storytelling anymore, it’s psychological engineering.

What does it say about society today?

It says we’re desensitized to cruelty and numb to moral consequence. We admire power, even when it’s grotesque, because we’ve been trained to conflate dominance with success, and charisma with character.

We don’t really like Tony. We like the fantasy of getting away with everything. Getting our way.

We like watching someone break all the rules without paying the real price. That’s the seduction.

How does it all end with Tony? We will never know.

No resolution. No confirmation. No redemption. No retribution. Just silence.

Because if Tony dies in front of us, the illusion breaks.

If he lives happily ever after, the moral debt is ignored.

But by not showing us anything, the writers trap us in our own projection.

And now Reality TV?

That’s not reality. That’s low-cost behavioral manipulation, a carnival of dysfunction that feeds voyeurism, numbs empathy, and lowers the collective bar for dignity.

Enjoying the name calling and fights. This generations, Friday Night Fights.

It’s a breeding ground for mediocrity and manufactured outrage, where the stupidest, loudest, most abrasive voices are rewarded with screen time.

This outrage gets clicks and shares, and clicks feed algorithms, and algorithms control what we see. Your attention is the product.

We keep watching, because we’ve been programmed to from childhood.

Because distraction feels better than introspection.

If people stayed entertained, you don’t have to keep them thinking. They do the thinking for you.

What Tony Soprano reveals, beneath the gabagool, prosciutto and panic attacks, is that his character believes we’re not rooting for him…

But he’s wrong, we are.

We’ve outsourced our moral compass to writers’ rooms HBO and Netflix queues.

And the compass isn’t broken.

It’s been purchased long ago with your soul, to consume the poison we consume everyday.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Why did you want to become a Freemason?

Networking? Riches? Fame and Success? World domination?

This is why a waiting period for prospects is a must. Six months minimum.

There should be no shortcuts as patience is one of our virtues. We shouldn’t encourage the mentality of instant gratification to gain membership.

We are not a product to be consumed; we are a path to be traveled.

When our brethren built Kings Solomon’s Temple, did they cut corners to get it built quicker?

However, in California Freemasonry, you are not required to give back the long-form proficiency, just the obligation. A choice that has backfired.

Membership in the Masons of California has declined significantly, dropping from a peak of over 244,000 in 1965 to approximately 80,000 by 1990, all the way down to around 40,000 today.

Long-form or full-form proficiency is not a formality. It’s not busywork.

It’s the backbone of Freemasonry.

It’s a test of character.

A man who truly knows his work doesn’t just recite words, he embodies the Craft.

He lives it. Breathes it. Becomes a pillar others can lean on.

In life, we all return to certain moments, and for a Mason, the memory work, the teachings, the discipline, these become a compass when we need direction. If you can’t be bothered to learn them, how will you live them?

At a bare minimum, that should be required before advancing in the degrees.

You are a representative of this ancient fraternity.

What does it say about the Craft if a Master Mason can’t answer basic questions about Freemasonry?

What does it say about the candidate that doesn’t care about understanding what he just experienced in the ritual with his guide?

Can you explain the point within a circle? The Three Great Lights? The working tools of each degree?

If the future of Masonry relied on your knowledge to rebuild it, do you have the ability and could you do it?

Or did you just memorize a few lines to get your next degree, never thinking twice about what you swore to uphold? I’ve seen many who have.

It isn’t a race to the top. it’s not a race at all.

Freemasonry isn’t about titles. It’s about transformation.

It’s not about the SWAG we can wear on the outside when we become a Master Mason, it’s about what is inside that makes us a Mason.

We’re not here to make men comfortable and lazy.

We’re here to make men better.

Do the work. Know the work.

Lead by example.

Be the Mason, future Masons can build on.

-Robert Anthony Meyers

2 time Past Master

North Hollywood Lodge No 542

c 2024 Chu The Cud

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If someone had told me that love was this painful, in the end, I would still want to experience it with you. 

– Broken Hearted. 

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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It’s great to see people finally breaking away from the brilliant idea that if you share one thing with someone, you’re expected to fall in line with everything they say, especially when that “unity” is peddled by the professional bamboozlers.

If it doesn’t make sense, it won’t unless you close your mind to reality and common sense. 

You know the type, those who wear victimhood like a crown, demand handouts like it’s a virtue, and call anyone who disagrees a bigot, a traitor, or whatever label’s trending this week. It’s not about justice, it’s about power. Their political careers depend on guilt-shaming the productive and gaslighting the skeptical.

And when you fight back with facts and truth?

They spin you as the villain. 

If you’re not with us, you’re against us and need to be eliminated through all means. 

They accomplish nothing but more division. Their real talent? Using freedom of speech to bash that very freedom, proof that liars love the First Amendment, right up until someone else uses it.

Political correctness and groupthink don’t build strong societies, they’re just communism in a Republic with a manicure.

The political pick pockets of our society.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Don’t let perfectionism prevent you from following your dreams.

Your big ideas deserve more than endless planning sessions. Someone less qualified is already doing what you’re afraid to attempt.

Stop obsessing over making them flawless and polishing your pitch before you make the first clumsy move.

While you obsess to make it perfect people with half your talent is making strides on trash. 

Make the jump, the water is fine. 

c 2024 Chu The Cud

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There was a time…,

not so long ago…,

when television wasn’t just background noise or a solo binge. It was a ritual. A communal pulse. A rhythm that united households, neighborhoods, even entire generations.

Whether it was The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Seinfeld or Cheers, the screen would glow and the world would hush. You didn’t watch alone. You watched with friends. With family. With everyone you knew, at the same time, embraced, gasping, laughing, yelling at the screen.

Now, television is scattered across streaming services, dropped all at once, designed for consumption, not connection. Everyone’s watching different shows at different times, on different devices, two devices at once and nobody’s talking about it the same way.

Even networks know it’s over. They’re canceling shows left and right, bleeding money trying to find their footing in a world that no longer gathers around the glow of a TV at 8 p.m.

Because the truth is,

We are all in our own worlds and the social aspect of the little things we share together are disappearing.

And that’s what’s been lost. Not just the shows, but the shared experience.

The anticipation. The arguments. The laughter in the room.

The sense that, for one hour, we were all experiencing the bond together.

Maybe progress means convenience.

But nostalgia reminds us that convenience rarely brings connection.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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The dichotomy of jumping from synopsis to synopsis,

promises never kept,

believing it was you and me against the world until I looked around and found, I was alone.

Another restart.

Unfulfilled dreams stare back from the mirror, and the umbilical cord still wrapped around my spirit, grounded, unable to fly.

Freedom was, Friday nights with the boys, with the kind of laughs that eventually echo through a police sirens haze.

But even that feels borrowed.

Hollywood in name only becomes a mirage with glossy edges, made up hallucinations of reality as not all massages come with happy endings.

Inspiration from The Stranger, offering a whistle that inspired something from younger days.

But if that moment had truly happened, I wouldn’t be here.

I’d still be there, lost in the masquerade that even poetry struggles to describe.

But I’m alive.

So giving up isn’t an option

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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From the opening scene, it was clear Opus would live down to its overinflated name. The word opus implies a masterwork, this film delivers the opposite: a scattered, bloated mess trying desperately to mean something.

Written and directed by Mark Anthony Green, whose résumé includes being a GQ Magazine writer and podcaster, his only previous directing credit is a short film titled Trapeze, USA. So naturally, someone handed him $10 million to make this incoherent, self-important attempt at suspense-horror. That figure probably doesn’t even include marketing.

The real mystery? How this script, riddled with plot holes and intellectual posturing got greenlit. Did John Malkovich and Juliette Lewis, both Oscar nominees, lose a bet? Or were they just cashing a check?

Malkovich, miscast as an aging rockstar releasing a long-awaited album, seems to sleepwalk through the role. No depth, no tension, no reality. Just a hollow performance in a hollow film. As for Ayo Edebiri, who plays lead character Ariel, I watched to see what she’d do outside The Bear. Sadly, she delivers a near-identical performance, offering no new dimension.

The plot, if you can call it that: The rockstar invites a curated group of people to his compound to hear his new album. Upon arrival, their phones and laptops are confiscated. Soon after, guests begin dying, apparently so Ariel can write a book about it. Why? Something about how society moved from leaders of brute strength to Ivy League credentialed manipulators. Then it spirals into a lecture on junk media, divide-and-conquer propaganda, and the collapse of cultural standards.

There could have been a story here. But instead, we get a confused mix of pseudo-intellectual ramblings and wannabe social commentary buried in a film with zero emotional investment.

And a Sundance Official Selection 2015? They sold out decades ago to the same people that would give them the time of day. A place for young artists to showcase their talent.

Opus is less a work of art and more an expensive vanity project dressed in philosophical $10,000,000.00 mumble.

Where did they spend the money?

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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Is that all that there is?

A generation of women were told decades ago, “You can have it all” by feminist leaders.

They could have,

Career. 

Children.

Independence. 

Sexual liberation.

Happiness.

World travel and romance.

Brunch with bottomless mimosas and the meaning to life.

Gloria Steinem handed out empowerment advice like candy, and Ms. Magazine practically yelled from the rooftops:

“You don’t need a man, you need ambition!”

Six-figure jobs, one bedroom apartments with no natural light, a cat named Simone de Beauvoir, a tiny dog in a bag named Luna and a therapist on speed dial.

These daughters of ambition, traded their pumps for sneakers to climb the corporate ladder, dodging monogamy like it was gluten and turned “self-care” into a full-time job.

Prophetess, preaching the gospel from the altar of Ms, Sojourner, Sinister Wisdom, Heresies, and other men hating magazines dressed in liberation for their younger counterparts looking to brainwash the recruits.

Consistently bashing the patriarchy, saying they could do it better, not realizing the irony due to most of the modern conveniences they enjoy, even their maxi-pads were created by men. They also benefited from the education system which was created by the same people they loathe.

And yet, here they stand and protest, on streets they haven’t paved and bridges they didn’t build. They flush toilets they didn’t engineer, posting selfies and anti-men rhetoric from satellites launched by the very minds they now scorn.

But now, mid-40s, two houseplants dead and many relationships ghosted, they’re sitting in traffic on the way to their hot yoga class asking themselves…

“Is this all there is?”

Because somehow, “liberation” started to become the same as exhaustion.

She were promised freedom. A freedom found in a romance novel.

What she got was the privilege of paying rent in the echo of her own footsteps and assembling IKEA furniture alone with a bottle of Chardonnay.

And having a panic attack in aisle 5 at Target…legs shaking, alone with her service animal.

Always ready for a fight, arguing about a dollar overcharge or an unspoken word, as she’s looking to release frustration of broken promises from empowerment slogans she said over and over while marching in lock step.

Now, she knows how men have felt for decades.

Overworked.

Overstimulated.

Underappreciated.

And quietly wondering…

Is this all there is?

“Am I just… a resource?”

Congratulations, they now have his salary, but also…

his stress level,

his cholesterol,

his health issues,

his spousal payments,

and surprise, his dreaded existence.

She got everything she asked for as reality has set in. 

And somehow…

She still feel like something’s missing.

Maybe fulfillment wasn’t hiding in a job title and it’s large salary.

Maybe it wasn’t in the yoga retreat in Sedona.

Maybe it wasn’t in the third Master’s degree or the yearly retreat to wine country. 

Maybe it was in the things she rolled her eyes at and told to avoid by a feminist mentor.

Family.

Connection.

Faith.

Quiet.

Commitment,

But hey, don’t worry.

There’s a podcast to help.

A YouTube life coach who swears it gets better after the planet Saturn finally stops clashing with Mercury’s retrograde.

Just keep swiping on TikTok for answers you refuse to implement.

And in the end, it wasn’t feminism that failed.

It was the leap into the unknown, with certainty where there should have been humility, conviction before comprehension.

The belief that she understood, before she ever truly knew what it was she were stepping into.

The fine print and warning label on modern life, that one needs reader spectacles to see.

That small line at the bottom of the ad that said:

“Happiness sold separately.”

So here we are.

Tapped out.

Disgruntled.

Divorced.

At odds,

but side by side.

Burned out.

In the drive-thru at Starbucks.

Alone.

Forgetting what it was all about and wondering the same damn thing:

What happened?

“Is this all there is?”

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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In today’s attention-deficient culture, we’ve even lost the tolerance for waiting to be entertained.

A moment of silence? It’s met with anxiety.

We no longer sit with silence, we scroll through it.

We scroll through dopamine hits like junkies in denial, calling it “productivity” when it’s just well-disguised panic.

Multitasking the multitask. 

One screen isn’t enough; the TV murmurs in the background while we thumb through a phone, while a podcast is playing on the computer,  playing different distractions, neither truly seen.

We are addicted to the flicker, not the substance.

To be still is to be uncomfortable. To focus on a single thought, has become unbearable.

We’ve not only lost patience…

We’ve become impatient with impatience itself.

This isn’t efficiency, it’s erosion.

c 2025 Chu The Cud

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