The action wherein a maple tree is set up to produce syrup is called "tapping." Interconected tubes run together, usually downhill to get a hand from gravity, leading to a collecting tank. Hundreds of gallons of maple sap is required to boil down into maple syrup.

Are you struggling to approach a creative task? Imagine how many trees inside your mind are required to fuel true creativity.

Your brain constitutes an entire experiental shared universe of thought. To achieve a higher creative plane, you need to learn to tap your memory. 

Teaching all the people who voted for Donald Trump that they did a bad thing is going to be a lot of work. I didn't want to have to do that work. That's selfish of me.

I rooted against selfishness. I hoped America's collective national identity could look upon evil and recognize it. You know, from all the stories they've heard, or from all the history they've been taught, or at least from the tyrants, living and dead, that aimed to conquer Westeros in Game of Thrones. I don't care where people learn about evil. You all should know what evil looks like, sight unseen. That is fiction's lesson, its gift.

I can never assume though. Now things have started to swirl. The sky literally turned red the morning Trump was elected.

We all have to go back to school.

I caught a look at People Magazine's cover while standing in line to check out at the grocery store. I don't blame Donald Trump's win over Hillary Clinton at the electoral college on middle America or economic anxiety.

I blame it on supermarket checkouts. I blame it on rumors. I blame it eight different types of gum, both the chewing- and bubble-gum variants. I blame it on Rolos with caramel on the inside and chocolate on the outside. I blame it on lines rocked to a standstill with nothing but US Weekly to artfully lead your brain to unhappiness. I blame it on the sight of $100 gift cards to Steam, PSN, iTunes, and Google Play dangling on hooks.

I blame it on the supermarket's death grip on our national psyche. 

Resident Evil 6 is Bad Movie: The Movie: The Video Game. It’s the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster avatar to an entire fiction-genre of trashy movie, squeezed into a greased-up video game sausage casing. It contains a challenging one-upsmanship that most games fear to wave genitals toward. Not Resident Evil 6, though, huffing with silvery machismo. It mutates each tendon, joint, and cell in its body to achieve maximum uniqueness from its contemporaries. Whether these mutations will protect Resident Evil 6 from the hard winters and blazing summers remains to be seen.

As of this writing, it’s been over 4 years since Resident Evil 6 was first released. Its sequel, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, is staged to be a first-person frightbox horror-crawl. Resident Evil 6 did not survive the winter.

The commute is a sacred American institution. Everyone's gotta work, except those who don't. Everyone's gotta leave the comfort of their homes, except those who don't. This is the undying commonality that assures all knucklhead urbanites and dust-chewing sons of the soil will have something to hate.

The telephone did not kill the commute. Email did not kill the commute. The year-3000 Jetsons-style video chat did not kill the commute. The commute will never die because it's the members-only club signifying solidarity and envy.

Multi-tasking has become the gold standard for the unconfident to demonstrate productivity ever since men started answering their own office telephones.

Tasks, past-times, and relationships have been hammered into paper-thin metal sheets slotted into the human mind like circuitry in a tall-stack server farm. We believe an overrun, thought-soaked marshland is the best possible brain, one action flooding over into another, finding its way to the sea.

Many actively fear focusing on a single task in life, at work, or with other people.

Why? Because long sentences make great scapegoats.

What does that mean? Let's dig deeper.

Nearing the interminable finish line to the rusty whip-fight that is the 2016 Presidential election, a thought occurred: the by the time the 2020 election arrives, I will be 36.

This means I would legally be old enough to be elected president. It also means the Millennial generation is within reach of putting one of their own into positions of power.

If Donald Trump can be recorded in 2005 explaining how to sexually assault a woman, imagine how much history will float to the surface when a Millennial, with all their elective information-sharing, runs for office.

What will people care about? What will you or I share in common with them?

I've finished drafting The Diffused States of America's second chapter. I haven't determined the delivery method for it yet. However, the chapter required intensive editing to keep the story sharp.

Lucky for you, I saved most of the passages that I altogether removed from the book.

Turns out they create a weird dream-state when presented out of context while still in chronological order. Enjoy the weirdness:

I have held many jobs in many industries. Interaction with business-owners is the connective thread between them. In the purest sense, I educate these business-owners market, sell, deliver, and grow their businesses.

I've worked at my current company for nearing five years now.

Imagine that: for the amount of time it takes somebody to complete high school—longer, considering there's no summer vacation in business—I've been speaking to people about their businesses.

All day. Every day.

There are certain maniacs that own businesses that would rather self-destruct than conceive they made a mistake.

Destiny is the game of the zeitgeist. It's the ghost of our time.

It rolls into town, beautiful, luscious, packed with things seen and unseen—and it's devoured. Following, we pick our teeth with its bones for the following six months, mouths watering at the thought of our next meal.

It's the Netflix of video games and that equivalency isn't because it's streamed (which it isn't). No, instead, Destiny is the Netflix of video games because it's binged, dissected, passed around, and its next content drop is anticipated.

Destiny: Rise of Iron is the greatest preview of the unnamed, eventual, inevitable Destiny 2 to date: