So obvious, it’s funny–no one gets to Carnegie Hall without a ton of practice. It is usually the most ‘talented’ performers who practice most diligently. The talent onstage in Carnegie Hall is, as much as anything, a talent for practicing. A love of the hard work and focus that it takes to master one’s craft.

Rob McNamara writes in Integral Life about ‘The Necessity of Practice.’ Practice, notes McNamara, is preparation. What we are seeing and hearing onstage at Carnegie Hall is a performance informed by preparation. It is the preparation that elevates and defines the quality of the performance.

Everyone has a Carnegie Hall, a place or ideal they’re trying to get to. A vision for the future. And then, quite often, something happens. We get sidetracked. Distracted. Too busy to practice. We stop off at the Carnegie DELI and call it Carnegie HALL. Our ego tells us we have arrived. That’s when the unproductive patterns–sameness, repetition, redundancy, stagnation, smugness—set in. That’s the point where our performances become cyclical, begin to repeat themselves, and our audiences get bored, and begin wondering why they paid their money.

McNamara defines the act of practicing as ‘Engagement.’ The GameChangers Orchestral Model™ identifies six practices that generate productive outcomes in the world. Engagement is one of the six. The other five are:

Heeding (listening, paying attention, observing actively). In the Orchestral Model™, this practice precedes Engagement. As the social media doyenne, Sally Falkow, (@sallyfalkow) says, “You don’t go right up to people having a conversation at a party or social event and just start talking. First you have to hear what conversation is about, and then can you be part of it, and engage with people in a meaningful way.”

Learning. What is revealed to you as a result of your interactions with others, and with your environment? How does your network inform you? How do you turn learning into solutions? All this takes practice.

Creating. How does what you do make a difference? How does it make you unique? How do channel creativity toward innovation?

Performing. What are your criteria? What is your Carnegie Hall? Is it a seven or eight digit number? A place? A whale of a client? A standard you have set for yourself, or that others have set for you? How does your performance differentiate you?

Deciding. How consistent are you? What values do you represent? How clear and shareable are your decisions? What themes are important to you? Who and what influences your behaviors? If your deciding practices are weak, Big Trouble soon come.

Performing and Deciding are what we call the core practices. If you are not good at these–if you don’t have a clear vision of where you’re going, or if you are indecisive and wishy-washy along the way—the rest of the practices will not matter, because you’ll be too busy zig-zagging toward a mirage, rendering meaningless decisions in service of illusory goals.

So call the whole thing Engagement, yes, definitely! Practice it! Be engaged! Be present! Pay attention! Notice! That’s a good first step. Then refine your practices into the six different areas of the Orchestral Model™, like an athlete working on muscle groups or a musician working through different progressions.

And when call comes from Carnegie Hall, you’ll be ready.

I was struggling with my scenes in this week’s class, then had a little breakthrough in the last scene I did (we do dozens of scenes per class). The difference came about when I began by listening instead of thinking.

“Listen, then think,” says Miles. “Don’t try to make sense of the situation. Interact with it by listening.”

Here’s what happens when you think first instead of listening first:

You begin having a conversation about what’s in your head instead of about what’s in the scene. And because neither your scene partner(s) nor your audience can hear what’s in your head, you’re having a conversation with yourself, which distances you from the scene instead of engaging in it. You’re having a conversation with yourself.

Here’s what happens when you listen before thinking:

You can use your intellect to serve the scene (by doing something smart that propels the scene and makes your partner look good) instead of letting your intellect use you (”I am the smartest person in the room and here’s proof”). You’re having a conversation with reality.

Thinking is the ego talking; Listening is the world talking.

Listen. Then Think. That is the order of the opportunity in any scene you’re in.

Katehi

The old games are exactly that. Old. And like anything old, they lack sap, spine, vigor. In many ways, the Occupy Wall Street movement calls this out. Saturday’s Silent Protest against the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda Katehi, is one of the best ways yet of #OWS demonstrating the impotency of old games.

Here’s the scene breakdown:

A day after the notorious on-campus pepper-spraying incident, the UC Davis protesters have the idea of  creating dialogue with Katehi, by forming a stage between the Administration Building and her car. (Note that no one is out front taking credit for this idea, it doesn’t belong to anyone. Ownable ideas are typical of an old game; shareable ideas are typical of a new game.) The stage is a hundred yards long, a catwalk extending the length of the theater, lined by hundreds of students sitting on the ground in order to effectively elevate the stage.

In forming this stage, the protesters change roles, from ‘Quad Occupiers’ to ‘Silent Audience.’ It doesn’t take them much time to do this. There’s no ’spin’ of a story being told or sold, no research to back it up, no ‘official position,’ only a simple intuitive agreement to keep their mouths shut for the duration of the scene. Game on. ‘Silent Protest’ is the name you can give the game. The reality of the scene emerges from the focus on this game, this agreement. It is the absence of protest that will make the protest so dramatic.

After 3 hours of what must have been a lot of hemming, hawing and phone-calling by her team about ‘how to handle it,’ the scene finally begins when the Chancellor enters, accompanied by a couple of non-speaking ‘extras.’ She is lit dramatically by the glow of cameras—-eyes of the world—-tracking her across the stage. Her delaying has made this a nighttime scene, which is even more dramatic, the darkness creating a heavier silence. By taking the stage without a script, i.e. nothing in her head, Katehi is exposed as someone with nothing in her heart. She’s got nothing. Because —-

The script won’t be ready until tomorrow!

The silence of the audience is remarkable.  Its discipline is impressive. No one breaks. The silence is marred by a few unable-to-resist journos whose subdued questions as the Chancellor nears her car only underline the otherwise-completeness of the silence.

Here is what gets revealed by the scene: The Chancellor cannot speak for herself. Her heart is closed, her emotions as frozen as the mask of solicitude frozen on her face. She is afraid of saying the wrong thing. Her institution’s students intimidate her. There is no dialogue between player and audience, between administration and student, between authority and autonomy. No dialogue. Just an old game, getting called out for what it is. Empty.

The protesters didn’t have to say a thing. All they had to do was create an environment in which the old game of ’script and control’ would be displayed in all its inadequacy for the world to see.

'A Captain of Industry' by Graham McKean

I don’t think it’s a matter of anything ‘taking leadership’s place.’ What are we going to do, remove the word from the dictionary? Are we all going to wait around for someone else to make the first move? (Oh wait, that’s what happens now.) What leaders can do is adapt to a business environment that is different than the one that shaped the textbook definitions of leadership. This environment moves faster, with more, and more fleeting, opportunities for a generation of restless, tech-savvy players entering the global workforce. To prosper in this environment, leaders and the companies under their guidance must adapt. This is not a one-time only thing, adaptation is not a new program that that can be taken off a shelf and ‘acquired.’ It’s a way of life.

We call this new model of leadership Flexible Vision. Naturally it is informed by the principles of improvisation, among them:

Take care of yourself first. This is a phrase popularized by Chicago improvisation master, Mick Napier. It doesn’t mean be selfish, as in ‘get your golden parachute packed, and don’t worry about where the plane is going because you’re jumping off before it gets there.’  Not that. It means come prepared. Have a take. Be someone. Stand for something. Rock your style. What your style is doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not you rock it.

Begin with listening. How can you contribute to the conversation if you don’t know what the conversation is about?

Follow the follower. This is a Viola Spolin concept. The narrative was going on before you entered the scene, and it will continue after you’re gone. Don’t ‘try to make things happen.’ Connect with what’s already happening.

Let go of status. In the old leadership models, status followed a person from scene to scene. If you were the CEO that was your role, and you played it in every scene you were in. This model forced a lot of managers into a mode of pretending to know more than they actually did, to feign authority in subjects with which they were not familiar, just to preserve their status. These ‘false narratives’ are a big inefficiency in any organization clinging to old leadership models. Improvisers, by contrast, change roles and status freely from scene to scene. Though your title is ‘The CEO,’ your roles can be ‘Student,’  ‘Fearless Explorer,”Arbitrator,’ ‘Cheerleader,’ etc. Adaptive leaders adjust their role and status to fit the scene, not the other way around. And the higher a person’s rank in the company (however that is gauged), the more adaptive that person can be, because the range of roles he or she can play is wider than that of a lower-ranked person, e.g. a new employee.

Give gifts. This is the phrase improvisers use for supporting one’s scene and one’s fellow players. In improvisation, giving gifts is the most productive move there is. Those who do it most consistently? Those are our leaders.

'Made for Each Other' by Graham McKean

]]> http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2743/feed 0 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2626 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2626#comments Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:03:22 +0000 admin http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/?p=2626 Over the past three and a half years at GameChangers, we have gone through Cirque du Soleil-like contortions  to explain improvsiation and its value to business in the Networked World.

We have defined it as “A process for producing consistently positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances.” We call it “serendipity by design.” “A game, a theme, and an exploration.” “Collaborative problem solving.” “Acting on environment and letting environment act on you.” Listening, Learning and Transformation.” “Agility + Ability.” “Freedom within Structure.” “Creating a cosmos out of chaos.” “Openness to opportunity.” “The Big Yes-And.” “Flexible Vision.” “How Tina and Amy Got Their Grooves,” and “Not comedy.”  Among others.

Leave it to Steve Jobs, interviewed in The Pixar Story, Leslie Iwerks’ 2007 feature documentary, to phrase it with the assured elegance of an Apple design.”Unplanned collaboration” is the phrase he uses.

“We wanted a place that would encourage unplanned collaboration,” said Jobs in describing the design of Pixar’s new studio. He repeatedly cites this this as the architecture’s objective.

He didn’t connect this phrase to improvisation, per se, but it’s as good a definition as we’ve heard. Improvisation is unplanned collaboration. And even though it’s unplanned, it’s all part of the design. In the architecture of improvisation, you fully expect to run into someone unexpectedly. When you do, you are prepared to exchange information, find an agreement, and build a scene together or continue one that had begun earlier. You expect that others might jump into this scene with you, and you are prepared for anything they might add. Through this process, in thousands upon thousands of such unplanned increments, each filled with its own unique potential to be productive, you move your narrative forward.

It’s hard to imagine a better case study for the value of improvisational design than Pixar’s studio, or a better model of what it means to be a GameChanger than Steve Jobs.

Jobs also said it took ten years for Pixar to make any money. We’re just going to ignore that one. Play on.

I’m doing a photo essay on Western Avenue for a client of ours. In walking Western yesterday, I had all kinds of rewarding encounters. A street poet named Ron shared a poem he wrote, called Shine that was amazing; a restaurant owner grilling chicken on the sidewalk shared stories of his adventures in the real estate biz; a beauty shop owner opened the door after hours to pose for a photo; a kid showed me his python; another kid getting a tattoo showed me his cool shoes–PF Flyers, a brand I used to wear when I was a kid!; a clothing entrepreneur named Prince confided his strategy for pumping up slow sales; a dude named Noon and I had a half-hour discussion on privacy issues, the school system, the prison system, and the relations between the police and the people of South Central–all because he wouldn’t let me take his picture.

No matter how deeply we dive into virtual worlds and other dimensions of reality, walking around and having conversations with folks is still the best way to learn something you didn’t know.

As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

I.  Story

Watson and Crick

We create and share stories as a way of interpreting our experiences and making sense of the world. Stories turn chaos into cosmos. Our ’story sense’ guides us through life. Stories are the basis of community. They energize our relationships. Shape our careers. Filter our music. Impact everything from our spiritual beliefs, to the schools we attend, to the products we patronize.

It is through stories that we assign meaning to objects and events.

DNA, for example, became meaningful on a global scale in 1953, in a story told by scientist-storytellers Watson and Crick in a brand-new, double-helixed protein-based language. Before 1953, scientists knew the DNA story existed, but they didn’t have the tools to see it, the language to describe it, or the storytellers to make it mean something to the masses.

The discovery of DNA—as with any kind of breakthrough in human consciousness—poses an interesting ‘tree falls in the woods’ question. Before we tell a story about something, does it have meaning?

Was DNA ‘meaningful’ before 1953? Definitely. Had to be. Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid was doing its thing before we had the words to describe what the thing was. So if we weren’t telling stories about DNA, how was its ‘invisible meaning’ expressed?

II. Narrative

Here is my theory: Before it gets expressed as a story (and after, too) meaning resides in narratives.

A narrative is a flow of events connected to a theme.

A story is the conscious structuring of events to elicit meaning.

Before anybody ever put the letters DNA into a meaningful sequence, there was this theme, call it, ‘What Are We Made Of?’—a theme as old as the first time a mother wondered what made her babies look different from one another.  Any and all events connected to this theme comprise its narrative.

Before DNA came into being, its meaning was already present in the ‘What Are We Made Of?’ narrative.

Before 1953 and the birth of the DNA story, this potent narrative produced such meaningful artifacts as Mendel’s genetics experiments with pea plants, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings’ offspring, X-rays, ancient Egyptian seeds that had been placed in fermenting yeast to alter their growing traits—and the musings of every mother who ever wondered what made her babies look different from one another.

A narrative connected to a meaningful theme like ‘What Are We Made Of?’ has transformative potential.

We need this distinction between story and narrative because thanks to the internet, we have the tools to experience and the language to express meaning as never before. Things that meant something before the internet don’t mean as much now. And things that didn’t exist two years ago mean a lot today. We live an an Age of Meaning, and narratives, as the ultimate source of meaning, are ultra-important to our understanding of the networked world.

How narratives live in networks will a huge factor in how we connect and engage with one another, how we make sense of, and transform, the world in the 21^st century.

III. Artifacts

In addition to stories, narratives deliver meaning in all kinds of other media—memes for example. Memes are not stories, but are important to how we connect with one another in networks. A hamster eating popcorn and a dancing baby are not stories. A rumor is not a story. A headline is not a story. A link isn’t. A tweet isn’t. A status isn’t. A sales transaction, in and of itself, isn’t. Yet these forms and many others can, like stories, hold meaning and therefore they have value. We call stories and all the other meaningful media generated by narratives ‘artifacts.’

Artifacts are memorable, shareable expressions of narratives.

The popular meme of a hamster eating popcorn is an expression of a narrative with a theme we could call ‘Loveable Pets.’ We smile at a dancing baby because it’s a quick glimpse of a narrative with the theme ‘Precocious Children.’

All narratives contain enough meaning to generate a practically limitless quantity of artifacts. What hangs in the balance is the quality of the narrative. Does it inspire or repress? Is it productive or reductive?

IV. Narratology

Our ability to store and experience narratives in networks has opened a new era in the ‘narrative sciences’–filmmaking, journalism, theater, business communication, publishing, branding, education, gaming, etc.—that mirrors what happened to the science of physics in the early part of the previous century.

‘Narratologists’ today are discovering, like Einstein’s community of physicist friends did, that stuff is connected in ways we had not previously had the ability to imagine. Networks abound with invisible and non-linear (the U.S. military calls them ‘asymmetrical’) relationships that have the potential to mushroom in a heartbeat into massive manifestations of energy with the power to create and destroy worlds.  Conceptual worlds. Virtual worlds. Physical worlds.

The distinction between story and narrative is also important because in a networked environment, it is increasingly difficult, perhaps impossible, for any one individual, organization or agency to script, and control stories and other artifacts efficiently. That is how business used to get done. When the number of communication channels were finite, ‘script-and-control’ models were optimal. This is no longer true. Your network’s appetite is bigger than what you can feed it purely in the form of scripted-and-controlled content.

Continual co-creation is essential.

V. Script-and-Control vs. Continual Co-Creation

With an infinite number of channels available to us, narratologists can put new, more flexible story strategies into play. In this environment, ‘co-creation’ models are optimal. Continual improvisation and collaboration are required. In the new narrative-focused models, the emphasis is not on authorship, but on participation. Communication is not a matter of control, but of liberation.  Only a co-creation model can generate enough meaning to satisfy a robust network’s appetite.

A big reason Walt Disney decided to give up filmmaking to focus on his new theme park in Anaheim (coincidentally right around the time of Watson and Crick’s DNA discovery in 1953) was that, unlike his films (”Snow White” had a jiggy couple of frames in it that bothered him the rest of his life), the theme park would, in Walt’s words, ‘always be in a state of becoming.’ With the opening of Disneyland, Walt Disney got into the co-creation business.  Together, Disney and the guests at his theme park explored a narrative you could call ‘The American Dream.’

Since its opening in 1953, Disneyland has hosted over 600 million visitors, and it’s safe to say that most of those guests have generated artifacts in one form or another that depict ‘the American Dream.’ It’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. It it’s a Small World after all.  It’s an actor’s life for Me!  And a pirate’s life! And a Bug’s Life!

Over the past 56 years, the content Disneyland paid for—in the form of photo shoots, television programming, cast performances, etc.—is Dwarfed by co-created content. Google lists ‘about 58,000,000’ search results for ‘Disneyland.’ How much of that do you think Disney paid to produce?

As Viola Spolin (coincidentally born in Chicago just like Walt Disney), said of improvisation, advice Disneyland and its guests have taken to heart, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

How much meaning can we liberate from a narrative in the form of stories and other artifacts? is a question we should ask ourselves, in one way or another, at the beginning of every working day.

V. Characteristics of Stories and Other Artifacts

They unfold in linear time, with a beginning, middle and end.

They are designed.

They are made for sharing.

They are repeatable.

They are authored.

They have texts.

They tend toward genres and formulas.

They are inhabited by a finite number of players.

They are iterative.

The provide context and structure.

They are mappable in conceptual, physical and/or virtual geography.

They are hierarchical. Characters and objects in them gravitate toward high or low status, events toward high or low importance.

They are ‘causative’ in two ways:

1)  Everything in a story happens because of something else;

2) They can cause predictable emotions and reactions.

In the sense that they are causative, artifacts are Newtonian.

VI. Characteristics of Narratives

They have no beginning, middle or end.

They have infinite beginnings, middles and ends.

They are not bound by time, space or geography.

What is observed of them changes depending on the observer.

They can occupy two or more places in space at the same time–they happen here at the same time they’re happening across the room or the planet.

They are generative.

Themes are the ‘glue’ that hold them together.

They resemble the playing of a game by a vast number of players (think of the artifacts generated by a popular MMORPG and you get the idea) more than they do the dynamic between author and audience.

A narrative is non-causative, that is, everything is related, but how and why things relate depends on the environment and the players.

They emphasize thematic consistency over literalness.  There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to explore a narrative.

Narratives are quantum phenomena.

VII. What’s the future of narrative?

In a complex communication environment, narrative, and the artifacts it generates, are the best way to resolve complexity, and in fact, this is what Gen Why? kids do extraordinarily well.  Their sense of narrative is unprecedented, and their personal narratives are the stars they steer their ships by.

In an interesting post on filtering, Tim Kastelle and John Steen explain that there are five kinds of filtering: Naïve, Expert, Network, Heuristic and Algorithmic, and, further group these five genres of filtering into two categories, Mechanical and Judgment-Based. That’s How we filter. Narrative is What we filter. Most people give no more thought to how they filter than Grandma gives to the air filter in her car. What they think about and act on, the way Grandma steered her Cadillac to a particular destination, is narrative.

The science around all this is still in its infancy. You can see glimmers of it in transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks, social media, alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.

As to what the future of narrative is, it’s a trick question, because there is no future to narrative.  Narrative happens in the Now. It is the world as we experience it in this second. This heartbeat. This breath.

The Future and the Past belong to stories. The Now belongs to narratives.

Like Disneyland, narrative is always in a state of becoming.

VIII.  Ze Zen

We are spider-like, connecting our webs and heeding their vibrations.

We are dowsers, feeling for the tug of an invisible stream.

Everything is a coincidence. This is not a coincidence.

When the story is ready, the storyteller will appear.

Here’s the Truth in this scene: With the coming of the cloud, there’s going to be so much new information coming online all the time that the invitation is to stay comfortably lost in it all, rambling on about our own stuff without really listening. Ever. We’re full of it. Just like these guys. Truth.

So what are we listening for?  For the game we can play together. From a productive game will come a narrative that makes sense of it all. But only after the the game has been played.

Later, when people ask, we can look back and say, “That was our strategy.”

Meanwhile, I sort of agree with the caption on the video: ‘The best strategy is one you don’t understand.’ Funny. True.

I know you are busy with your lives and your careers and such, and you know I’m not one to meddle or nag.  Live and let live, that’s my motto.  But as your Mother I’ve got to tell you that your behavior lately has been hurtful to me, and to the rest of our family. You seem to have forgotten that I am a living, breathing being, with real feelings. And right now my feelings are hurt. Badly.

I held you in my arms.  Fed you.  Gave you a nice home. Helped you grow into the people you are today. I guess I have failed, because the people you are today have wounded me.  I want to scream.  Sometimes I do scream.  Of course you don’t hear me, you only hear what’s coming out of your own mouths. How about listening for a change?

I made it possible for you to get an education, so you can do whatever it is you do for a living (I still don’t understand it!???) and yet you take me for granted.  Like I am nothing to you.  This is the treatment I deserve?  This is your response to a lifetime of love?

I do not ask for your thanks.  A Mother’s job is a thankless one.  I accept that.  Spare me the holidays.  Show me some appreciation, that’s all.  I will not be ignored! I will not go gently into the night!!!

How about I cut off your inheritance? You have no idea how close I am to doing it.  You’ve already blown through most of what I intended to leave you, anyway.  Take, take, take, and never give back, that’s you.

If you’re not going to show me respect, I promise you I’ll start taking back what’s rightfully mine.  How did you like it when I took back that piece of Japan last month? That hurt, didn’t it?  You felt that, didn’t you?  It is just the beginning of where this thing is headed unless you get your act together.

At one time, the family owned a million or more varieties of apples, did you know that?  What are we down to now?  Six?  Seven?  It took me ages to save up my precious minerals collection.  You walked off with it, and you’re not bringing it back, you think I don’t notice? It took me 10 million years to build the family oil business, and you’re going to blow through it in a couple of measly centuries?  Some nerve.  Frack me?  No, frack you!!!

The Dodo was my favorite tsotchke , you probably didn’t know that, did you?  Of course you didn’t, because it’s always all about you.  I loved that animal, it made me laugh every time I looked at it, and then you broke it.  I miss my Dodo.  It was one of a kind.  It cannot be replaced.  Too late for an apology.  Don’t even try.  I’m not forgiving you for that one.

Mustard gas?  That any children of mine would make such a thing is one of my greatest heartaches.  Agent Orange?  First of all, I resent like hell that you named it after one of my favorite fruits.  Second, I still have a rash in Southeast Asia, one of the most beautiful parts of my body (one of the few I have left) because of it.  Asbestos?  Awful stuff.  Zylon B? If only it were the bad science fiction it sounds like, instead of the awful reality it was. Still gives me nightmares. And then to top it all off, you take innocent little hydrogen, and turn him into a weapon?!! Honest to Gaia, where do you learn such things?  Who are your friends?

Chernobyl?  Nuclear reactors and vodka? That was a bright idea. First, you poison me with  radiation, then you invite tourists to see the results?  Why?  So you and your kids can laugh at the featherless geese?  Have the geese not been humiliated enough?  (Yes, they have!)

Is anyone ever going to take responsibility for the mess you made in Bophal? Someone did it, and someone is going to clean it up, and we are going to wait right here until that happens, I don’t care how long it takes. And if one of you doesn’t own up to it, all of you will.

How is that cancer thing working out for you? Nobody had cancer before you brought it home, we didn’t even know what the stuff was. Now we can’t get rid of it. What’s the matter with the genes I gave you?  Nothing is ever good enough for you, is it? You’re weaving a tangled web, that’s all I can say. What are those hard red things you call tomatoes, anyway?  The corn was just fine until you came along. What is so bad about four teats on a cow? Why must you try to make six? Stop meddling with my DNA! It’s my responsibility. Keep your noses out of it!

Another thing—my air conditioner isn’t working. Why? Because I have you for children, that’s why. You broke it with your incessant smoking, and I don’t see you offering to fix it. Fine! Tell the police they’ll find my body in the kitchen, propped against the open refrigerator, where I went to get one last breath before my lungs turned to ash.

My water!  What has happened to my beautiful water? I turn my back for a minute, and you’ve dumped so much of your crap into it that all I hear is complaints from the other family members. The dolphins and whales won’t shut up about it. The salmon don’t spawn like they used to.  The octopi are pissed.  I’m not even going to go into what the plants have to say. I’ll say it for them. Thanks for nothing!!!

Have you no idea how much pain I am in?  I’m sick.  Last year I had a leak in my gulf that didn’t let up for months, and my turtles and birds are still hurting.  I get the cold sweats.  I cry for no apparent reason, until I can’t cry any more. The doctors don’t know what’s causing the vomiting, which I do with awful regularity.  My nausea is the only constant of my existence.

You have hollowed me out.  Drained me.  The only feelings I have toward you are angry ones.  Maybe venting like this is what it will take to get your attention, or make me feel better anyway.

Don’t make me lose my temper!  The last time I lost my temper, I killed the dinosaurs, you know.  That was me.  Boom!  Just like that. Gone in a heartbeat. It was an accident.  The Creator slugged me and I slugged back, and the poor dinosaurs got in the way.  I am not a cruel woman, as you often claim (don’t tell me you don’t, I’ve read your diaries!!!)  Anger can be a cruel thing, though, the reason being you never know who’s going to get hurt by it. The dinosaurs happened to get caught in the middle of a quarrel between me and the Creator and that was that.  You do not want a repeat of that scene, I promise you.  Or maybe you do.  Maybe we’re going to find out.  That’s how angry I am.  Your behavior is a slap in my face, and don’t think I won’t slap back. I will. Promise.

You’re the only species that has made a practice of killing your own kind, did you know that?  The rest of the family are disgusted by this. To make matters worse, you glorify it in your games and your stories like it’s a good thing.  I hang my head. When I think that children of mine are doing this, I want to die. I do.

You cannot leave your spent rods and your empty drums and your plastic gyres lying around the house like it’s the morning after a frat party and not expect to suffer the consequences!

You cannot not pump me full of your potions like I’m some daft heiress you’re poisoning for her dowry and expect to get away with it!

You cannot not take what is mine and pretend it is yours without waking up someday to the reality that you are a generation of thieves!

Here’s an idea for you.  Leave!  Move out of the house!  If this is the way you’re going to treat me, take your smokestacks off the roof and your jet skis out of the driveway and get out!  The rest of us can use the room. The coyotes would be happy to have your bedroom.  Do you think the trees care whether or not we have cable?  Probably not.

You are my Children, and this should not have to be our relationship. Truly, though, I am at my wits end, at a loss for what to do about the horrible way you are treating me.

Please do better.  There’s still time to heal these wounds, but not a lot.

Love,

Your Mother

‘Happiness’ seems to have peaked in 1820.  The next few years will determine whether it’s making a comeback, or continuing its downward trend.  Relative to the results of other queries, this is a smooth curve, which suggests that we can only see the change in frequency over long periods of time.  We don’t notice that ‘happiness’ is less frequent from one year to the next, but it is.

You can also plot multiple comma-separated words or phrases on an Ngram.  In this graph, we see that ‘good’ (blue line) fluctuates over time, while ‘evil’ (red line) is constant.  This suggests that if ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were investments (which in a way they are) good has more upside, while evil offers a low but predictable yield over time.

But then there’s this:  ‘Virtue’ is the blue line; ‘Vice’ is the red.  No doubt about what sells.

‘Improvisation’ shows a steady upward curve, with spikes up and down in the last 7 years.  Based on the 200-year trajectory, we are due for an even bigger upward spike in the near future.  Let’s ride that wave!

Here’s the Ngram link. Play with it!  NGrams are useful for observing how ideas fluctuate over time in terms of their significance and meaning.  When expressing your brand’s narrative, it is wiser to invest in trajectories than it is to take positions.  What’s trending today on Twitter is a position.  The events that led to the trend are its trajectory.