We stand in an age where American language and culture have been canonized on the internet. The gospels, the battles, the bests and worsts of what we can produce are understood like the changing of the seasons, or gravity. This collective understanding is a five-hundred lightyear-deep mud puddle. In all its collected data, the internet and its self-proclaimed culture-keepers lust for organization, to catalog and clarify, and the same idiots running this library have developed Dewey decimal systems to keep all this trash in line.

In all the shared, memetic language lifted and placed to remind us, yup, we're assuredly adults, and we're all on topic, several pop culture gospels have been misread.

These are four things in TV and movies that have done more harm than good:

Entire empires are raised and leveled thanks to desperate, impulsive, guilty holiday shoppers. These are small-sized, low-priced items that make wonderful wallpaper throughout the nine-mile TJ Maxx checkout maze.

These gifts are Band-aids for the regretful.

They're no good for you. They're no good for their potential recipient. You need to avoid their jewel-sugared bullshit.

The North American continent wasn't really designed to accommodate one hundred million people criss-crossing the four winds to be elsewhere on the same day.

And yet, Thanksgiving demands we pack up and traverse this rat's nest of clogged arteries.

Why do we do play to this inconvenient obligation?

Ubiquitous phone photography has shrunk the world. Don't confuse this shrinking with automatic vanity.

So, hey, it doesn't take perfect eyesight to recognize every jerk in the world is toting a camera more powerful than space-race era NASA. Further examination may reveal that the younger the user, the more engaged the individual appears to be with the camera device attached to their mobile phone.

Gross, right?

Wrong. The world is shrunk. Humankind is not hardwired to be this engaged this often, communicating through electronic alchemy with strangers. The photograph makes us all realer. It makes you realer. It makes me realer.

It makes the surrounding world realer. I don't regret my inability to apologize: phone photography is one of man's greatest inventions.

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.