Nick Meador Rotating Header Image

Essays

The Value of Waiting to Write About Personal Experience

Nov 20th, 2012
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

Please feel free to share or re-publish the following essay with credit and a link back here, according to the Creative Commons license.

(Photo by Dave Hull, used with CC permission)

In mid-2012, after a couple years of fairly consistent and productive creative writing activity, I almost stopped writing altogether. I suddenly began to feel that my perceptions were changing too rapidly to make any concrete statements about my personal experiences. Even some pieces I wrote in early 2012 started to feel embarrassing, while many essays and stories I composed half a decade ago had become totally unrecognizable as my own work.

At first I thought the lull in activity was due more to my recent move to a new place, combined with my difficulty covering basic life expenses. These have surely made it harder to get back to work on my first book manuscript after a life-shattering illness in 2011. But another reason for the delay is that I’m testing my budding personal philosophy – laid out in my manuscript in abstract form – for effectiveness in the applied realm of real life. And this year, at least, my perceptions have seemed very untrustworthy – my beliefs, constantly in flux. So I began to wonder if I would ever be able to write anything again.

(more…)

Funding My Existence: An Introduction (video)

Nov 13th, 2012
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

In this video I talk about the inspiration behind a project called Funding My Existence, as well as intentions for what it could become. See the script below the video, including a section that was cut from the video itself.

Hi, my name is Nick Meador, and I’m here to introduce a great new website called Funding My Existence.

I came up with the idea in the spring of 2012, shortly after moving to Boulder. (more…)

Finding Value in the Rejects of the Job Economy

Oct 15th, 2012
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

Funding My Existence — a project I’ve been working on since spring 2012 — is picking up momentum! As I wrote on the project Facebook page, “Funding My Existence is an online community intended to help people ‘make a living’ if they’re willing to share the fruits of a creative life. We hope this will help bridge our entire civilization into the future we’ve always envisioned.”

H+ Magazine just published the second article describing the project, titled “Future of Work: Finding Value in the Rejects of the Job Economy.” Here’s a short excerpt from the essay:

Unless one is capable of staying in what our society has deemed a ‘normal’ state of consciousness for 20-40 hours per week week after week, one cannot ‘make a living.’ I for one agree with Fuller’s argument that no one should have to make a living. If the time and energy required to pay bills and feed ourselves prevents us from actually making the changes and progress that we envision in the world, then we are in trouble and we have also lost our link with America’s founding mission statement to guarantee ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’ to all.

If this project speaks to you and you’d like to be involved in its development, feel free to join the Funding My Existence: Advisory Team Facebook group. Please also take a look at the first FME essay from April 2012.

Funding My Existence

Apr 6th, 2012
by Nick Meador.
6 comments

Please feel free to share or re-publish the following essay with credit and a link back here, according to the Creative Commons license.

It appears we are living at the dawn of a new era. Throughout our culture we see signs of change, progress, and evolution. A “Creative Class” is on the rise that — with the help of the Internet and other related technologies — will reportedly transform our entire socio-economic system.

And yet, at the same time, something is amiss. Much of this so-called Creative Class can only prosper by finding work within the current corporate infrastructure, resulting in very little actual creativity or innovation. The very ones who might create the necessary change in society must expend their time and energy worrying about “making a living.” Those who can keep a job have to sacrifice ideas that contradict the wishes of bosses and the company’s stockholders.

(more…)

Satire: Democracy’s Most Unexpected Enemy

Jan 4th, 2012
by Nick Meador.
8 comments

A 2009 study found that people tend to interpret ambiguous political satire according to their own views and self-image. This has enormous implications for satirical programs mocking democratic behavior, produced by media conglomerates that support Internet censorship. (The following is an essay that I was not able to place with a magazine, but still wanted to share with the world. Feel free to re-post on your blog or website, in accordance with the Creative Commons license. Just give me credit and link back here.)

“The revolutionaries of any decade will become the reactionaries of the next decade, if they do not change their nervous system, because the world around them is changing. He or she who stands still in a moving, racing, accelerating age, moves backwards relatively speaking.” – Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (1)

On Thursday, December 1, 2011, Stephen Colbert addressed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill currently under consideration in U.S. Congress, on his late-night political satire program The Colbert Report (pronounced “Cole-bare Ree-pore”). Fight for the Future, a group coordinating the push against SOPA and Protect-IP (a similar bill being considered; the “IP” stands for “intellectual property”), says that such a bill would allow the government to shut down websites for any copyright infringement, while making it a felony to stream copyrighted content without permission. (2) According to PCWorld, the government could also restrict access to foreign sites with the help of Internet service providers (ISPs), or block advertising and payment services from working with the sites. (3) The result, as anyone with a cursory understanding of the issue can predict, would be a drastic reduction our free speech rights and possible damage to the DNS system upon which the Internet depends.

(more…)

Excerpts Galore

Nov 13th, 2011
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

Pieces of my manuscript-in-progress are suddenly scattered all over the web, so I wanted to provide an update in case you’ve lost track. The third excerpt that appeared in Beatdom issue 9 is now online at their website.

A shorter version entitled “Kerouac: A Psychonaut in Denial” just appeared on Reality Sandwich this week. If you’re not quite ready for the long version, you might want to check that one out first.

As a reminder, the fourth excerpt appeared on Reality Sandwich in September. And I’m happy to announce that the fifth excerpt will be published in Beatdom issue 10 sometime in the next month or two. For more information about my book, please visit nickmeador.org/madness.

Reality Sandwich Runs My Next Book Excerpt

Sep 21st, 2011
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

On September 19, the web magazine Reality Sandwich published the fourth excerpt from my book-in-progress. I titled it “Doublethink and the Mental Construction of Reality.” It’s actually the third excerpt to appear on their website, but the fourth overall. The third excerpt overall appeared in Beatdom Magazine earlier this summer.

Because I condensed a 22,000-word chapter into a 3,900-word excerpt, it’s a pretty heady piece of reading. And because I had to take it out of the context of my book, it’s mostly abstract information. However, those who read this and the Beatdom piece together will likely notice many important parallels. (more…)

Essay in Beatdom Magazine

Aug 5th, 2011
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

The literary magazine Beatdom was kind enough to publish my essay in their ninth issue. Titled “Death Within a Chrysalis,” it’s the third excerpt (technically more of an outline) from my upcoming book. My piece looks at the influence of psychedelics on Jack Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” style, and how he suppressed that fact because it would potentially detract from his reputation as a visionary writer, both in the public sphere and in his own family.

The print magazine is available for $11.99, shipped anywhere in the world–and it will soon be offered for digital purchase as a PDF (probably cheaper). (Update 8/18/2011: Beatdom issue #9 is now available for free download as a PDF. The print magazine is $9.99 USD, plus $2.00 for US shipping or $6 for international shipping.) Below is a preview of the essay!

At the turn of the 1960s, Jack Kerouac found himself in a profound state of limbo, representing the climax of an existential crisis that predated his life as a published author. He had been looking for an “answer” to his problems since his early twenties, yet for a variety of reasons his dilemma remained unresolved. Then a 35-year-old Jack became famous in an instant when On the Road was published in the fall of 1957, and this led to the total disruption of his already chaotic life. (more…)

Un-Doctrinate Me

Jun 14th, 2011
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

The following is an essay that I was not able to place with a magazine, but still wanted to share with the world. Feel free to re-post on your blog or website, in accordance with the Creative Commons license (just give me credit and link back here).

The 2007 documentary Indoctrinate U argues that administrative bias at American universities is hindering free speech, education value, and even human rights. But by framing the film within the context of bipartisan politics—whether that was or was not intentional—filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney fails to explain the full nature of the problem and, therefore, to suggest viable action points. Because the film unknowingly makes generalizations and misevaluations, it can help us understand how we all do that on a regular basis.

To explain what I mean, I’m going to run through the generalizations that I made, consciously or unconsciously, while watching the documentary. But first, a moment of disclosure. Since about the time the War in Afghanistan started in 2001 (when I was 18 years old), I considered myself a “liberal” or a “Democrat.” My affiliation was unofficial, involved only two instances of voting, and was inspired more than anything by my disgust over the actions of the “conservative” or “Republican” leadership then present in the country. Furthermore, I didn’t even fully realize my “liberal” bias until 2010, when I finally transcended my own worldview and was able to look at it critically. Now I generally consider myself non-“reactionary”—not so much “liberal” or “radical” as simply opposed to any kind of “anal territorial” politics that seem to have set humanity on a course for disaster. (more…)

Second Book Excerpt on Reality Sandwich

Mar 29th, 2011
by Nick Meador.
No comments yet

Today the web magazine Reality Sandwich published a second excerpt from my upcoming book All These Serious Faces Will Only Drive You Mad. I created the essay from a portion of my second chapter. The piece is called “The Not-So-Comfortable Concentration Camp,” which is a slight spin on a phrase that Betty Friedan used in her book The Feminine Mystique. Her book helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s that demanded more rights for women in the home, the workplace, and elsewhere in society. (more…)

← Earlier Posts