WE'VE IMAGINED AND REIMAGINED OUR WORLD.
AND WE FORGOT WE HAVE TO LIVE IN IT.
A Collection of Modern Dilemmas and Untested Humanity.
Kindness Currency
Every citizen carried their worth on their skin.
Kindness here was a literal tender.
Sushi On Mars
“I have to believe that. Otherwise, what are we doing here?”
– Shigeru Takashiro
The Cure Of Us
Perfection was a lifestyle practiced like second nature.
There was no first nature.
The Blind Toast
What the soil knows,
the wine reveals.
DeathBall
Sometimes I wonder which is heavier—
the Colt in my holster or the worn whistle which hangs from my neck.
Prophetic Post
I am the place where humanity comes to be seen.
But I had never seen anyone like Maya.
Architecture Of Greed
The cheers fueled the desire.
The desire grew the real estate.
City Of Borrowed Minds
By the time I was thirteen, I knew too much.
By seventeen, I wanted to un-know it all.
Unwritten Fate
With every turn of a page, somewhere in the world,
the ink would bleed into reality.
Tomorrow’s Justice
I shouldn’t know these things.
No juror should.
The Forgotten Notes
“You play without pain,” it said,
its voice a strange blend of avian and human.
Human Override
The digital world speaks in ones and zeros.
Our world speaks in heartbeats and whispers.
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PAUL VINOD
Paul Vinod is an advertising Creative Director/Copywriter who’s walked the streets of NYC for over 20 years, and learned about creating stories on Madison Ave. He currently lives in Newtown, Pa with his wife Anne Paul – children’s book author and designer. They run a creative boutique and strategy agency.
Contact Paul at paulvinodbooks@gmail.com
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
For years, my words served a paycheck. They were crafted not to linger, but to persuade. Advertising, they call it.
The art of the fleeting phrase, the economy of language.
Why say ‘lackadaisical’ when ‘lazy’ will do?
Why ornament when a tagline is enough?
Long form writing had no place in my world.
And yet, this book—this unwieldy thing—arrived.
The stories within it are relics of my days in advertising.
The ones that never made it. The ideas too odd, too unruly to be shaped into commerce.
Still.
They are what I have felt in people and wished for them.
And in their own way, they are human maps of where we are and where we could be.
There is no single genre to contain them —
modern folk tales and science fiction, thrillers and legal drama, a Western noir even.
They formed freely like Playdoh, pressed and shaped by nothing but curiosity.
I did not know I needed to tell them until the telling began. And within them, tucked between the lines, are things that belong in my own journey—my contradictions, my wanderings. There are no flawless heroes here, only people, broken and whole in the same breath. Fearful and fearless, seeking and found, made and remade.
We are never just one thing.
In these pages, there are questions we don’t want to answer, questions often unasked, unvoiced. None of it was deliberate;
all of it is true. Ink is naked in that way. It reveals what we do not always mean to show.
These stories breathe. But they suck out the oxygen from our assumptions.
Read them in order or at random. One at a time or all at once.
They are yours now.
– Paul
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