Philip Chard

When someone tells me they're afraid of the dark, usually, they are missing the mark. What scares them is not the blackness, but the horrors their imagination projects into it.

Don’t like the holidays much? Well, join the growing crowd who find that the commemoration of Christ’s birth (a la America) engenders little joy and heaps of temporary insanity.

Some of us are plagued by the suspicion that our daily labors are meaningless, or that we're missing whatever “right fit” there could be between our nature and the roles, vocations and avocations one can occupy in this world.

Truth is, underneath all those clothes, we are naked animals. The kind of animal, it seems, that works hard at not being seen in its own skin.

Each of us harbors our own unspoken set of rules about when and with whom swearing is acceptable.

There’s the climate disaster, the rise of oligarchy, Orwellian propaganda, needless wars... We’re drowning in a toxic mental soup of disheartening news, and many are struggling to come up for air.

It’s a bonafide therapeutic tool in the right hands and unadulterated snake oil in the wrong ones.

In Freudian psychology "Thanatos" is the death instinct, that which drives us toward aggression, destruction, self-harm and, ultimately, oblivion.

In your darkest moments, you may not feel hope, but somewhere in your future there may be an accident waiting to happen.

Frequently, people trade away their dreams, passions, autonomy and principles for promises of money, security and success, small comforts that rarely compensate for losing or repressing key elements of one's character and identity.