Before you get offended by those words you should know this: Anna Jarvis, the mother of Mother’s Day started the modern celebration of mothers in 1907, but later, when it was hijacked by commercialization, Ms. Jarvis turned on Mother’s Day and was even arrested for protesting against the holiday which now uses sentimentality to fill the bank accounts of florists and other companies all over the world.

If that sounds harsh, please remember, I am just relaying how Ms. Jarvis viewed the money making scheme that Mother’s Day has become. And now that the facts are out of the way, let us talk about real mothers.

We all have one, like it or not. Biologically, there is no other way to get a ticket to this planet. Mothers run the world, even according to scumbags and holy men. Few people ever worry about saying something that embarrasses their fathers. Mothers, on the other hand, are the ones we think about offending when we type a curse word in a blog post, dammit. Mothers are the ones who washed out our mouths with soap and sent us to bed without supper and fed us a fine meal even when they did not eat themselves. Mothers held us when we were afraid and reeled us in when we were too confident. Mothers went to talk to the teacher who hated us and defended us to the kids who accused us. Mothers took us to practice and stood screaming our names as we scored touchdowns or hit homeruns or drained three’s at the buzzer. Mothers were also there when we rode the pine and never got a grass stain on our uniforms.

“I love you, mama!” has been a constant refrain by famous sports figures since Joe Willie Namath guaranteed victory in the Super Bowl 43 years ago. So this year, let’s celebrate our mothers ­– by doing something for them every day, not just once a year above our quickly scrawled signatures on a Hallmark card.

Starting today, tell your mother you love her, not in an email, but in person or call her on the phone. Yes, call her every single day and tell her what she means to you, and do not use the same story twice. Do it for a year. She probably sacrificed a lot to get you where you are. The least you can do is say, “Thanks mom,” and give her specifics surrounding those two words. That is what she really wants, not a store-bought card or e-card or flowers or candy or a trinket. She wants your love. And that gift costs you nothing. Think for a second what loving you has cost her? Her career? Her health? Her time? Her life?  Or maybe it cost her nothing but her love, in which case it is still a pretty good bargain. Better than $75 for a box of long-stemmed roses.

My mother is no longer here. I called her around 6:30 pm every day for ten years after my father died. We talked about what she did that day and I told her that I loved her and why. It seldom took more than fifteen minutes. On Mother’s Day the year before she died, mom told me that Mother’s Day was nothing special to her. As her voice cracked, she said, “It’s the 364 other Mother’s Days during the year that makes being a mom so special.” She paused. “When that phone rings and I see your number, it’s worth more than all the roses in the world.”

At their core, advertising, branding, marketing and several other professions are built to do one thing: sell. Facebook may have connected nearly a billion people, but if it has a value, that value is intrinsically based on the ability to sell our lives as a product to companies willing to pay for a customize message that will tempt some of those billion users to click through and eventually buy something.

The other day I talked with a car salesman and his message sounded a lot like a social media or digital expert, or an ad guy, or a CMO.

“Engagement has always been the key to selling people stuff,” he said. “Although people talk about it like it fell off the back of a new F-150 last week, engagement is not a new practice, it’s just a new word for something we’ve always done: interact with people in relevant ways so we can sell them things. Now we have a lot more ways to get into their heads. And sometimes we get in there through the back door.”

He talked about selling a vehicle the way Zuckerberg talks about social connections, or Steve Jobs talked about the new iPad.

“We used to run and ad in the paper, or do a whacky TV or radio commercial. And we still do now and then. But if you want to sell somebody a vehicle – the biggest expenditure a person will likely have next to a house, wedding or funeral – it starts on their smartphone or iPad or computer. We used to sit around the front door of the dealership waiting for you to pull up in that old car you wanted to trade in. Now I’m emailing and texting and pulling people to our site and talking with them on Facebook and Twitter. I’m showing them inventory on Pinterest and giving them spiffs for checking in on Foursquare. I seldom even talk to people on the phone anymore unless it is to give directions or confirm a visit.” He sipped his cup of coffee. “You see what I’m saying here? Social media is a wonderful communications tool. A great way to engage. But when push comes to shove, for me, social media is about selling you something, plain and simple.”

Perhaps you believe this, or perhaps you think he sounds like a materialistic Philistine hijacking a precious and personal technology for crass purposes. Either way, his intense believe in social media made him sound more like Guy Kawasaki than Billy Bob the Car Dealer out on the turnpike.

“Orchestrating social media sales is, quite honestly, easier than it was before when we used to just sit here and wait for customers. Now we can go far outside the old boundaries and use these awesome tools to pull people in, have a conversation, find out who they really are and what they want and how we can fit a vehicle to their lifestyle. I’m really less a salesman than an arranger.”

The car salesman’s viewpoint was a stark contrast to a conversation I had with an engagement director at a branding firm.

“It’s all about the conversation, getting to know people, talking with them, providing value to their lives in new ways. It is less about selling them something than it is about giving them something.”

The car salesman heard that opinion and offered a comment.

“All of that is true. But at the end of that conversation, after you’ve given them something, your job depends on selling a customer something. That’s just the nature of business.”

The menu beside the cash register reads: The Burger, “One of the greatest burgers in the world you must have before you die.” – GQ Magazine. It adds to that: “Burger Bling.” – ABC News.

BGR, just outside Washington, D.C., is where President Obama goes when he wants a serious burger, which means Bill Clinton has probably been there too. Even if you do not agree with their politics, you cannot argue with their taste buds. The “exclusive, award-winning, blend of Prime, aged, all natural, hormone-free, grain-fed beef” definitely tastes different than most burgers. Perhaps the “buttery brioche bun”, baked especially for them, helps. Rosemary fries do not hurt. Whatever it is, the soda machine alone would make a Star Trek convention beat you down for a shot in line at lunch. On this contraption, you control every aspect of your drink from brand name to flavors from an iPad-ish screen.

I’ve been in a lot of burger joints in my life and few have ever framed this statement and hung it on the wall next to the front door: “You are about to eat the worst damned burger to ever ride between two buns.” They all claim superiority.

The burger, I mean “The Burger” at BGR takes the whole category to a new level. It comes in many versions beyond the basic. “The Cuban” is a favorite of Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post. The Greek won the “Throwdown With Bobby Flay” on Food Network. Everything on the menu has an accolade of some type. “The 9-Pounder” has starred on The Travel Channel, Food Network and an I.F.O.C eating contest (whatever that means). It is so big BGR needs 24 hours notice if you want to order it. Not exactly fast food.

Gourmet burgers are no new thing if you have been out to eat in the last five years. They are everywhere. Some people just do it better than others. BGR does that in every way, and in appreciation the joint is packed. Across from me right now is a dude that, from my angle, looks like Charlie Daniels after being shot in the face by a cheeseburger. There is an entire onion ring perched in his beard. His wife, while destroying a hormone-free burger, can hardly make that claim herself since she has a five o’clock shadow at 1 in the afternoon. A plains-clothes cop – I assume he is a cop since he is wearing a gun in a holster – stands in line behind three women dressed like they are at the opera. Two lawyer-looking men chat up the office slut over in the corner while a table filled with loud crew-cut men behind me yells opinions about the difference between Merlot and Pinot Noir. I’m here to tell you, that only happens in D.C.

This week, as we launched a new digital experience for Classified Moto, those old feelings came back. The adrenaline in Adam Ewing’s photographs came through my iPad screen. The raw elegance of big bikes, made by hand, each part fretted over, welded with love and driven with anticipation of finding a little piece of that feeling we all had when we saw our first bike.

I was asked to write a post about our new Classified Moto work, but it speaks for itself right here. Instead I want to say a few words about being able to live our dreams. That is what our friend and owner and founder and builder of Classified Moto, John Ryland, is doing. He was in the same business that I’ve been in all of my life. He began to build bikes in his backyard garage several years ago. Then one day, a bad thing turned into a good thing and John was able to do what he loved full time. Soon CNN and Uncrate and Jay Leno and Playboy and everyone else was talking about John’s artistic passion for bikes and his humble attitude towards a profession filled with badasses and tatted-up rebels. John does not fit the stereotype, of a biker or an ad guy. He does fit the stereotype of a man on a mission.

John Ryland is out there right now, scouring a junkyard for the perfect part or sweating behind a welding mask or putting his latest creation into a hairpin turn. And he is smiling that wicked grin. That’s what you do when you get to live your dream.

I know it is cheaper to print a menu on paper than hand an iPad to a table of hungry people in a restaurant. But if we go past the cost consideration, we just may get a glimpse of the future.

A device as sophisticated as an iPad is not needed for making a menu come to life at our table. All we need is a screen capable of playing HD video. Think of a miniature Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Click on an item and see it being prepared in a two-minute segment; in other words, a living menu.

Some sports bars already have a screen at your table. You can watch any game they have. You could also use that screen as a menu and watch any item they make.

This will eventually happen in a lot of places if not already. And it is not a leap to imagine those little screens replacing waiters at many restaurants because it does their job like the little screen at Sheetz. I’m surprised McDonald’s has not just gone past the person at the counter and installed a wall of easy order screens, certainly at the drive thru.

It will be yet another technological advancement that will cost on-the-ground, local, minimum wage American jobs. And that’s the whole idea.

This post is not about video menus at all. It is about building a non-minimum wage economy in this country. We need to use our immense American imaginations to create more than the minimum. We need the maximum.

Why occupy Wall Street in a protest when we can actually own Wall Street with our ideas?

What happens if we create computer programs that learn us instead of us learning them? What if we turn smartphones into the only device we need because the expandability and contextual nature of the little devices learn how to change to meet our needs instead of the other way around? What if we stopped talking about building smarter and more efficient homes, cars and cities and did it, starting tomorrow, right where you live? Why tolerate the massive waste and cost of buildings when WIFI can turn a bass boat into a corner office? Why have a campus when the Internet is a digital Harvard? What if we diffused our constant state of war in the Middle East by ending our pathetic addiction to their petroleum teets?

We call Steve Jobs a genius, but all he did was what we should be doing every day. Do not admire his genius. Admire his balls for creating an entire new economy from nothing but fearless ideas.

To do this, we have to have the balls to rethink education. There is no arguable reason that a student needs four years to go to college, much less the six years many schools are requiring now. High school could be shrunk to 3 years, perhaps two, if we paid teachers like we pay pro baseball players and held them just as accountable for their performance as we do Pro football cornerbacks. Internships could be the new higher education. But someone has to have the balls to do it.

We hear politicians and preachers tell us that God wants us to do this and that as a nation. But the biggest sin America is committing does not involve gay marriage or abortion or legalizing marijuana. Our embarrassing disgrace is the wasting and mismanagement of ideas.

We value rote test scores over ingenuity and originality. No wonder so many “geniuses” dropped out of college to change the world. They have to. Otherwise, they would have had the genius wholeheartedly beaten out of them one credit at a time, and then handed a diploma in exchange for their imagination and guts.

We do not need to take our country back. We need to take it forward. We do not need more minimum-wage jobs. We need more high-wage jobs. Encouraging and investing in big and small ideas are the only ways to make that happen. And corporate fear is the fastest way to help all of us get a minimum-wage job.

So lets go occupy something more important than Wall Street. Let’s go occupy our brains.

When you drive past a “Dead End” road sign on your way to the end of a peninsula, things can only get more interesting. Off to the left, in the middle of the ocean, a huge white home sits on a rock island just big enough to fit the foundation, its façade bathed in a stunning, peach sunset.

“That’s one of the seven homes of some CEO,” said a local, greeting us in a wary friendliness exhibited by people who live near water. “Brought it in on a barge and slid it over to the rock. Pretty exciting.”

She said this in a manner that told me she had, indeed, seen more exciting things, but she was being kind to me since I was infatuated by a house on a rock in the middle of the water that she sees every day of her life, just off the coast, just out of reach.

Trees are almost naked on each side of us. Hurricane Irene wrinkled up concrete and docks and decks and roads and first floors of homes all along the coast. The one on the rock, however, looks untouched. The irony is not lost on those who glance at it while cleaning up their middle class messes. Rich people do not just get better tax breaks than the rest of us, they get bigger lives to go with their bigger houses and bigger cars and bigger bank accounts.

I think about that while standing next to the “Dead End” sign, looking at a dead tree lying across a brown and dying yard as the sun goes away and night turns everything to shadows. As if on cue, my smartphone chirps a CNN news blurb: “Apple announces founder Steve Jobs…” I did not need to click the Breaking News app to read the rest of the story.

In the coming dark, with the wind turning into my face, I think about a very rich person who just wanted to do something bigger than making money. And I think he did it.

Social media is constantly changing and adding new sites. If you have an extra 3 minutes in your day, social media will find a way to use 4 of them. Now there is a way to measure your influence across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It is called Klout. Get it? Klout is as addictive as all the other digital places you can rub your fingers across. After all, it is all about your score. It’s social media as sports. I know people competiting with each other over Klout scores.

Rudy, our Jack Russell, has a Twitter page (@rudythejack) and a Facebook page (he does not give out info on this one). Klout has him pegged at 47, otherwise known as a “Specialist.” You can be a Thought Leader, Feeder, Socializer, Networker, etc. The moniker depends on the focus of your conversations. The highest number is 100. Rudy has a ways to go.

Rudy, being a dog, has no idea he even has a score with Klout or the credit bureaus or anyone else. I think he may know he is chasing Guy Kawasaki up there near the top, however. You would have to get IM’s from President Obama or pics from Congressman Weiner or retweets from Ashton Kutcher to hit the big numbers. Rudy just talks about dog stuff mostly.

Klout breaks it down for you. Being a specialist means: “You may not be a celebrity, but within your area of expertise your opinion is second to none.”

I’ve been on the receiving end of Rudy’s opinion. It is, indeed, second to none.

Klout goes on to say: “Your content is likely focused around a specific topic or industry with a focused, highly engaged audience.”

Truth.

Rudy’s focused audience of highly engaged dogs, cats, birds, horses and a turtle named Louie stay in touch with him constantly. I’ve seen the conversations. They are deep and involve all kinds of butt-sniffing, furniture-soiling, carpet-dumping, poop-eating, squirrel-chasing conversations. Rudy is a specialist in all of those areas – hence his title. It gets better.

Klout analyses Rudy’s engagement and influence with charts, graphs and probabilities. They are as cool as any PowerPoint presentations I have ever sat through, and better than most, to be honest. You would have to splurge for the paid LinkedIn to get info this solid.

One chart describes how Rudy’s “high-velocity content” will be acted on. Another indicates his ability to capture influencers, and yet another measures his true reach. It is safe to say the chipmunk in our backyard can attest to Rudy’s true reach without using a chart. He has Jack Russell teeth marks on his furry, little Alvin-ish ass.

Rudy’s current top 10 topics are (in order of influence):

1. Dogs  (makes sense)
2. #RVA   (where he lives, so that seems reasonable)
3. Blogging   (he seldom blogs, so this one is a bit hard to grasp)
4. Puppies   (yup, got it)
5. Cats   (Rudy hardly qualifies as a cat expert, but he does know a lot of cats, especially in the UK)
6. #UK   (see above)
7. Pets   (duh)
8. Furniture   (perhaps there are things I do not want to know about this one)
9. Television   (absolutely, he loves TV)
10. Investing  (see below)

Investing? What the hell? If Investing made Rudy’s top topics of influence, this may explain the economic crisis.

The reliable smell of gasoline, grease and motor oil makes me feel like I am in the old barn where my grandfather used to fix his John Deere tractor, except this room is filled with motorcycles. Metal springs and shocks lay organized under a workbench next to transmissions gears and brake rotors stacked like plates. The walls in one corner are covered in chalkboards and scribbled notes about how wheels can move people in more ways than just on a highway. This is John Ryland’s favorite place outside the seat of the Frankenstein’d Yamasaki – a Yamaha and Kawasaki welded together – sitting over by the fridge filled with juice and bottles of golden Miller High Life.

Working in a Richmond, Virginia ad agency, John had never really been a bike guy until three years ago when he began riding a little. Then he began building motorcycles from parts and frames he found in junkyards and classified ads. He called this part-time operation Classified Moto.

“I named it that because most of the bikes and parts I found were in the classifieds,” he says with a smile that does not end for several more sentences. “After a while people started wanting me to build them one.” He continues smiling, riding the memories of those first bikes.

Using his hands to create something more lasting than an ad campaign appealed to John. Calling it a hobby would be an insult to his devotion to turning steel into machines from ideas that kept him awake at night. He studied manuals and scoured YouTube and eventually found a calling that had been hiding under the outward appearance of an art director for years. Then a couple of months ago, he got laid off from his adverting job and his passion for motorcycles turned into something a little more urgent.

“If I hadn’t planned this for a long time, I wouldn’t be in a position to do what I’m doing now,” he said. “You have to be proactive.”

John is proactive to a fault. Orders started rolling in from Germany, Australia and California.

“That bike over there is for a woman in Georgia who’s never really ridden bikes,” he said. “I want my bikes to be approachable to everyone.”

John is hardly the stereotypical, tatted-up, badass biker portrayed in popular culture. He is a soft-spoken, salt and pepper-haired craftsman who talks about his unconventional creations like they are his children. He knows each one by name and jokes that because he has rescued these motorcycles from want ads and backyards, “when one falls over, it just adds to the character, making it more valuable.” He gently rubs the beautifully rusted surface of a gas tank, a patina resembling natural art. “Just like with people, scars are part of the story of each bike. That nick right there is from a trip to Colorado. That scratch happened on a ride in North Carolina. It’s like riding memories.” Then he catches himself. “I don’t sound like J. Peterman, do I?”

No, I assure him. His stories are better.

John’s machines are not American Chopper slick and polished. His bikes look like they could have been ridden by extras in the old movie “Road Warrior.” The design is brutally sparse and elegant. The work is not hidden. You see the steel and welding straight up and honest. These are two wheels of brutal beauty welded and hammered and loved into an approachable creation that doesn’t scream, but whispers. People walk past and look twice.

When he started making lamps out of shocks, rotors, gears and crankshafts, his wife had to start helping. Friends helped. VCU sculpture students show up to weld this and that. Posters and apparel ideas filled his laptop and now his website. His Posterous blog (http://johnryland.posterous.com) is being read daily by thousands of people all over the world. With all of that, this is still not an assembly line by any stretch of the imagination. This is a man doing what he loves in his backyard while people fall in love with his unpolished authenticity.

“It’s not exactly a normal situation here,” he said, sipping a Miller High Life. “I make motorcycles and lamps from the same parts.” He nodded like he was trying to figure out the dichotomy himself.

Last week, after meeting with Matt Crawford, Richmond motorcycle mechanic and famous author of “Shop Class as Soul Craft,” CNN called and wanted to do a piece about John on AC360:

http://bit.ly/jQN8vK

It has caused a sensation. But you would never know it by talking to John.

“I’m humbled. I work hard. And I’m lucky, I guess. But I make my luck. That’s what I want people to know.”

John does make his own luck, but right now, he’s busy making a killer bike and 28 lamps.

Blogging is not dying; it’s just getting tired. Have you noticed this trend? People are rambling and posting stuff from other blogs and repeating themselves. Sometimes they just post pics, and why not? No one reads anymore. Do you want to read three pages or watch a 40 second YouTube video showing a guy with a bottle rocket in his butt? Perhaps the days of blogging are numbered. Then again, if you write a blog, you’re hoping I’m wrong – especially if you get paid to blog (and I don’t).

Some blogs have a tight focus, a concise topic. Many are awesome. Blogs about business or branding or social media or financial advice thrive. Blogs filled with insane rhetoric do really well because they cater to our basest instincts. But do you really have something interesting to say every single day? Probably not. And with Twitter tugging at you using only 140 characters, it becomes easier to just slide over there and toss in a few comments or share a link or pic and get back to your paying life. That said, nothing will make you better at writing and expressing your thoughts than forcing yourself to post a blog regularly, no matter if anyone ever reads it (see video above).

The aggregator blog is extremely popular. You don’t even have to write anything. Just repost other’s posts. These are the blogs that cull cool stuff from all over the Internet and toss it up hourly like magazines at the grocery checkout. I am particularly addicted to these sites.

Unfortunately, I am not smart enough to aggregate or fill a niche with my posts. If you read my blog regularly, you already know that I have no focus whatsoever. I do everything wrong. One day I may attempt some deep insight into branding and the next day tell a story about my cousin being impaled by a 12-point buck. Or I may not even post anything for a week.

This randomness may explain why I’m not Seth Godin. And while I appreciate the kind folks who read my verbiage, I am at a loss as to why. Consultants and Web experts have told me to make my posts about something specific, like branding, since that’s the business I’m in. However, I do branding all day long. Do I want to go home at night and wax on about something covered better or worse in 39,498 other blogs?

See, that’s what happens with blogs; you can do whatever you want. You can entertain people, instruct them or bullshit and lie and skew the truth and tell your side as fact and who’s there to edit you? It’s your opinion, right? It’s your blog. These days whole TV networks are basically televised blogs. Flip over there and see one pissed-off guy grinding the Democrats into meatloaf and then two channels later, some equally pissed-off pundit is ripping Republicans like cheap wallpaper. You can take your pick of “facts.” That’s how blogs work. Grab a hold of the First Amendment and let’s go.

Websites are even better at tossing us the half-baked turkey and calling it grandma’s home cooking. And what website doesn’t have a blog or two or ten. Blogs have become like butts: everyone has one. Sadly, I have two, so I am a chief offender.

Blogs are not dying; just the opposite. Everything is like a blog these days. There are no facts, just opinions and spin. Screw Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, most journalists are really commentators, leaning the news one way or the other based on who’s cutting the check. Politicians’s blogs blow smoke so far up our asses our hair smells like beef jerky for a week. Company CEO’s lie so easily in their blogs it’s as if their bonus is connected to the amount of BS they can manufacture. Those mortgage companies forging signatures on foreclosure papers? That’s no different than a blogger making up stuff that seems like truth to people who aren’t paying attention. Blogging is the ultimate ode to “here’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” That’s kind of fun of it. After all, who doesn’t love a good lie, even if it is presented as the God’s honest truth?

So when you see Seth Godin saying something extremely smart in his blog – and he does every day – remember, there’s always some guy who wishes he was Seth Godin. But he’s not.