I’m not Dutch and the chunk of cast iron on the counter does not look like an oven unless you are a cowboy, but this thing can cook like Bobby Flay with a grudge. It will make a good cook out of anyone, even if you have no defined recipes, which, I believe, is the whole point: a Dutch oven is its own recipe.

It is wise before you start tossing stuff in any old pot to consider your options. Any investigation into the fine art if cast iron cookery will point you in the direction of Le Creuset’s $375 sacrebleu’d 101-year-warrantied French beauty. If you bought the first one in 1925 it would still be under warranty – until 2025. That is quite a serious piece of culinary cultural relevance right there.

I do not own a Le Creuset cast iron enameled Dutch oven. Mine cost only $48 and came through Amazon from a company called Lodge, an old-school cast iron manufacturer in Pittsburg, Tennessee. It has a lifetime warranty, beating the 101-year Le Creuset warranty, neither of which I would ever collect on no matter when I bought it. My grandmother left me a Lodge cast iron frying pan from the early 1900’s and my mother left one purchased in the 1940’s, most likely. I can attest to the ability of a Lodge to both sustain and possibly kill members of my family with equal proficiency depending on what’s cooking and how much fat is involved.

A Dutch oven recipe is ridiculously simple: Pour a cup of white wine over some raw chicken. Cheap wine is good. Cheap chicken is scary. So plurge on the chicken.

Chop up a handful of carrots and celery and a lemon or orange, your choice, and snug them all up beside the bird in a suitcase-packing arrangement. Thinly slice 4 garlic cloves and lay them on top with several sprigs of rosemary and thyme and couple of leaves of sage about the size of your ear. Salt and pepper to taste. I put in a little sugar just to make it a bit less healthy. If you are feeling adventurous, pour in some beer too. Why not? Put the heavy top on the thing and cook at 400º for about two and a half or three hours. That’s it.

During cooking, your house will smell better than your grandmother’s kitchen ever did. Open a window and neighbors and dogs and cats will be attracted. Since it is about 65º in January, I cracked the window and a cat is looking at me right now. Small children down the street will cry for their mamas, it smells so good. There is only one catch to this recipe: not many leftovers. It is simply that hard to stop eating it. And if any are left, it is wrong to not give some away.

Do beef brisket or pork loins or short ribs in one of these things and you will feel like Iron Chef Michael Symon in a full sweat. No matter what you cook, the results are always the same. It’s like a sad movie, you know up front it is going to be a tearjerker, and yet you still cry at the end.

My wife just walked by and read that and said my analogy makes no sense whatsoever, but I am still under the influence of the Dutch oven chicken so that is my excuse. I may cry right now, in fact – there is nothing left.

Recently I took my daughter – she was a wheelchair, sadly – to Bass Pro Shops for an outing after a couple of horrid months in the hospital. I love to go to Bass Pro Shops. For me, going there is a bit like walking through my childhood without the fire ants. It was just before Christmas and the place was packed. I did not expect people to move out of our way just because we had a wheelchair, but I also did not expect 350 pound men dressed like they had just fallen out of a deer stand to push us out of the way so they could jump in front of us to get into the elevator with friends who were loudly bitching about Obama taking their jobs.

A bit later, a woman sporting an impressive mullet nudged us out of her way as she was in a hurry to get to the fudge display in the little fake general store, leaving us in her stale tobacco-tinged wake, but not before glaring at my daughter as if being in a wheelchair was an impediment to her fudge-tracking fervor.

“Watch out.” She grumbled in a drawl that took five syllables before trailing off into a sound that may have either been a burp or a nasally snort.

“Excuse me,” I said, sarcastically. “You better hurry. They only have 40 pounds left.”

She gave me the Elvis lip curl, which all Southerners know can either be arrogance, disgust or gas.

So when did rednecks become so un-mannered? Manners used to be the one thing for which a redneck could be counted on. Holding open a door and saying “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” and letting women go first. Real rednecks had old school politeness. I am not talking about those Deliverance types. They were just crazy peckerwoods. Rednecks were a brand, a cultural lifestyle, a food group. Rednecks took pride in being down to earth. Not once did I notice basic Southern hospitality during our wheelchair visit. If this is what it has come to, I am ashamed I was once a redneck. I renounce the art form. Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be this.

It seems we need to get rid of this new fangled, angry, Fox News, fudge-aholic rudeneck and start teaching some proper redneck manners to these people. Here are six basic rules of redneckry:

1. Respect your elders, even if those elders drive slow, in the wrong lane and park crooked in handicapped spaces.

2. People in wheelchairs are usually there for a reason. Cut them a little slack.

3. Do not curse, burp or fart loudly, especially all at the same time.

4. Wait your turn, even if fudge, beer or camo’d thongs are on sale.

5. Do not have a Bible verse on a bumper sticker next to a pair of red, rubber bull balls hanging from your trailer hitch.

6. Stop using God as an excuse to hate people who are not like you. Remember, you will never find a velvet painting of Jesus wearing a camo robe.

After having typed that last one, I found this on the Internet:

If you want to lose weight, eat at the hospital. The selection is a lot like your high school cafeteria and tastes so bad you can probably shed 10 pounds a week just sliding your plastic tray across the metal rail, avoiding something that might be mashed potatoes or could be oatmeal or even grits. Hard to tell, even after you eat them. They always have meat, however. At least it appears to have once been part of an animal. I saw a piece of animal-shaped meat that resembled something I saw on Animal Planet from New Zealand. Cannot remember the name, however. A Tuatara, maybe?

Excuse me for a second. (mumbling in background)

Okay, I am feeling a little bad about the harsh words I just wrote up there. I just walked into the kitchen to get a cup of juice and my wife read that paragraph and said I was being just plain mean. I told her the hospital serves food like that to encourage people to lose weight. She did not buy it. She is sticking to me being mean as her verdict. She is looking at me right now with her “you’re mean” snarl. I’ve seen that look represent several other emotions over the years.

I told her I was going to say something good about it. She just walked away. To make good on my promise, here you go.

One day a week at the hospital is fried chicken day. You can tell even before you get to the cafeteria. You can smell it. Or at least if you are from south of Maryland you can. That aroma gets people worked up. Few things besides barbecue smell as good as fried chicken. It kills the hospital smell faster than you can say, “That pill cost what?” A huge crowd waits in line, hoping the thighs are not all that is left. The hospital’s fried chicken is not bad at all. See honey. I’m being nice. It just goes to show that it is hard to screw up fried chicken, even if you can screw up mashed potatoes.

It does beg the question: why is a hospital serving fried anything? The answer is pretty simple to me. They need customers; not just the cafeteria, the actual hospital. Eat enough fried chicken and you will be staring at a hospital bill one day, guaranteed. Or, perhaps you will never see the bill. Your survivors will.

I stood outside the cafeteria watching people roaming with plates of fried chicken wondering how long it would be before they are patients.

Then I got in line.

Hey, I’m from Alabama. You do not turn down fried chicken, even at the hospital.

He drapes his carcass on the backs of recliners and chairs and the couch for no good reason, as if anything else he does has a reason. Rudy is not a good cat imitator. Look at his face up there. You can tell his heart is just not in this thing. Yet he does it every day.

For nine years, he has chased cats and barked at them and run over at least one, hitting the scrapper like Brian Urlacher. Yet every time I turn around there is Rudy on the top of my old red recliner, almost purring.

Knowing Rudy’s personality and proclivities and snarly disposition towards any other animal with four legs, this strikes me as behavior three levels above odd, even for a dog who believes he can fly, climb trees, and make phone calls. Even the word ‘cat’ disturbs him. I once wrote C A T on a piece of paper and put it on the ground next to his water bowl and he growled at it for five minutes. I am not saying Rudy can read, but to punctuate his displeasure, he heisted a leg to it. Later, as a test, I wrote dog on a piece of paper and he walked over, sniffed it, then sat on it.

You hear me, Rudy? I am talking about you over here. Guess it is hard to hear much of anything when you’re all catted-up and licking your paws like Garfield on Valium.

“Could be he is just getting old.” says my wife.

Not likely. I found him practicing a meow the other day in front of the mirror. I swear. That is what it sounded like, a pathetic little lip-synced meeeeowww.

Rudy is smarter than a Congressman and twice as devious. He is trying to gain the cat’s trust. He has some plan in mind, I am sure. Since the cat looks in the window at least once a day, if not to torture Rudy, at least to flaunt his roaming-the-neighborhood freedom. Dogs have leash laws. Cats? Zip. They have full run of place. This injustice has always bothered Rudy.

Rudy is pretty sure the cat will buy this new act. In the past all the cat sees is Rudy’s tonsils flailing as Purina breath slams against the glass door. Now, what the cat sees is Rudy, leisurely perched on the back of a chair, bored and calm – like a cat. It is pathetic.

Right now, the cat is out there looking confused. Perhaps it is cynicism? Could be trust, but I doubt it. False hope is a sad thing to see, and it is hard to tell whose hope will be false first, Rudy or the cat. In the meantime, Rudy is snoring on the chair, with one eye open, waiting, grunting a wannabe purr under his breath: “Here, kitty, kitty.”

Want a better burger? Slap a fried egg on it. Looking for a way to turn regular old potato salad into a first place church prize winning side dish? Chop up a fried egg in there. Nestle a fried egg up against shrimp and grits or cuddle it under a catfish plate and wait for the compliments. Fried eggs are like optional equipment on a car. Just go ahead and add it and be done with it. You’ll enjoy the road a lot more with a fried egg riding beside you.

I’ve seen people put fried eggs on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sunny-side-up a lemon meringue pie. A woman in Opp, Alabama used to wrap wieners in fried eggs. Called it “pigs in a rooster jacket.” I’m telling you, if you want to impress a first date or your boss or turn and enemy into a friend, serve something with a fried egg on it. Keep in mind, though, if someone offers you a fried deviled egg, stay away from it. The devil part is in the details.

The strangest one I’ve seen is an entry in the Covington County Fair back in the 1970’s where a woman shellacked a fried egg, glued it to a small piece of plywood painted like a sunrise with the egg as the sun – and she won a blue ribbon. As She walked away with $7.50 in prize money, I saw the jealousy in the faces of the losers, of whom I was one.

“It is why people are so friendly in the South, fried eggs,” said a cook at a restaurant outside Tuscaloosa back in the spring. “A biscuit pinching a slice of country ham and a fried egg gets even angry people to smile.” Not sure it would get a Crimson Tide fan to believe that wasn’t a catch on the goal line in the LSU game, but you cannot blame an egg for that.

I do have to draw the line at one practice my uncle used to do. He put a fried egg on his fried chicken. To me that is just overkill of the lifespan of a hen. Do not mix the fried embryo with the full-grown crusty bird. “Just ain’t right,” as my daddy used to say. But then again, he ate that egg on my uncle’s fried chicken, so he must have been talking about something else. I still cannot do it. But I will eat a fried egg in chicken salad. So I am not much better now that I think about it.

Fried eggs are working folks’ food. How can you tell? Try to get a fancy place like Ruth’s Chris to ease a fried egg on over to the top of your steak. Will not happen. Promise. But go to a hole-in-the-wall joint owned by anybody named Earl or Mama or Big Hank and ask for a “yellow yoke in a white coat” and they’ll know exactly what you mean. I hope.

Recently it has come to my attention that one of Big River’s fellow tenants called us “circus people.” Granted, this comment was heard by one of our “circus” people while sitting in a restroom stall playing games on an iPhone, but that is usually where the truth comes out. Circus people. Really?

To be honest, our office does not look like a regular business; I will give them that concession. We have a surplus of glass and steel and concrete and rough-hewn timber and chairs made of leather and bark and giant stumps for table bases and a big boat hanging from the ceiling and more food than a Montana survival cult. There is probably beer in an ice chest over in the corner and several VCU Brand Center students hanging out and a few motorcycle parts greasing up the floor. Those Star Wars Light Sabers and all those left-wing-counter-culture-square-pegs-in-the-round-holes Apple devices do not help our misfit notoriety, to be sure, especially if you are a Microsoft drone who spends all day whacking your Dell. Nor does the open door policy to anyone looking to think differently or strangely or not at all debunk our circus train stature.

Fred is on the couch sometimes in the main conference room (we circus people call it “The Lodge”) with his shoes off, possibly sleeping, possibly solving a problem, possibly watching a basketball game. So what? Scott plays his guitar when the mood hits him. It is not like he is swinging on a trapeze from the ductwork. My wall does sort of look like the closet of a serial killer, and there is Noel’s homemade, cardboard periscope and Geoff’s huge fruit fly genus poster and Marcel’s severed Spock ear and Jimmy’s Phish paraphernalia and Dee’s bourbon-of-the-month stash and Kim’s Playboy magazines (those are for a client, I swear) and Margaret wearing sunglasses all day. Jeff has been known to remotely control people’s computers and Jan, while small, is not circus small by any means. We talk loudly sometimes. Okay, it could be considered screaming if you were out in the hall near our front door, but still, circus? I saw Water For Elephants. We’re not even close.

I walked down and looked at their offices the other day, the offices of the people who called us circus people. Standard equipment. Compared to their space and the untrained eye, perhaps ours looks a little like the circus, especially to a person sitting in a cube farm crunching numbers.

To give the devil his due, it could be the way we dress that has given us this P.T. Barnum-ish moniker. I don’t know about you, but I get up every morning, stand in my closet gazing at the stacks of sweatshirts and denim and wonder, “What would Bozo do?”

Seriously, I have never seen anyone at Big River wear giant polka dots. Well, there was that one time, but who am I to question what women wear when they leave home in a hurry? Normally we wear jeans, t-shirts, athletic shoes and, okay, maybe my checked bedroom slippers are a bit circusy, but there are a lot of clowns in business wearing suits too. Then there is Noel’s hat up there in that pic. I cannot defend that.

I think our circus rep probably happened in the elevator. We have done some strange things in there, all of them legal, however. We did not leave that big wad of gum in there no matter how many times we were accused.

The aforementioned restroom may have also sullied our honor, although the guys from the other company could compete with any pack of elephants or chimps in there. One guy left a half-eaten banana next to a toilet. One dumped his drink in the stall and tossed a few squares of paper into the massive puddle and ran. One laid his Subway sandwich on the sink while he was otherwise occupied. I found a spreadsheet in there on the floor next to a cookie with one bite taken out of it. These are just a few of the printable observations. Let us just say that in the restroom, the circus is losing this game 100-17. Yeah, I admit we scored 17. We have adhered some interesting verbiage to the walls in there. But usually it is just mildly offensive or insulting or juvenile. Look, we do ideas for a living. No company would ever want us to balance their books.

American business talks about innovation constantly – until it runs into creative people in a restroom or elevator. Then it scares them. If you go to any of those tech startups we all read about in the Wall Street Journal or Wired or Mashable or in the New York Times, you will see people wearing shorts and sandals and sleeping on the couch next to their dog. I used to bring my dog, Rudy, to work. Then one day he pooped right in the middle of the front door. I guess his business manners fall on the circus side of the corporate divide.

Sounds like Rudy may be visiting the office soon.

On my way home from the grocery store, after I called my son to excitedly tell him about the new donut shop that just opened next to the pharmacy, I caught site of the man beside the road. He was wrestling with a strand of blue LED Christmas lights. I have seen this guy putting up his lights before. The first time, probably three years ago, a little boy was assisting him. The second time there was a younger woman, as I recall. Now it was just him and a dog. What are the odds of seeing the same man putting up the same lights for three years in a row?

The tree was a Charlie Brown job leaning achingly to the west, limbs all knobby like an old man bowling. It was hardly the kind of tree that deserved decorating. As I passed, I noticed he was struggling a little to reach the higher limbs so I drove down to the intersection, pulled a uie and went back, pulling up in front of his house. I could tell it sort of scared him from his defensive motion, as if he thought I might be there to rob him of his festive LED’s. I have done a few things I am not proud of, but stealing Christmas lights from an old man decorating a tree in his front yard is not one of them.

The dog, a brown female mixture of at least three breeds I recognized, positioned herself between the man and me. She did not bark, her ears up, her tail straight, her eyes fixed on mine. She looked friendly, just weary, not unlike the old man, not unlike me on this particular day.

“Hi there,” I said in a way that I hoped would diffuse the oddness of my actions. “I know this is going to sound strange, but I’ve seen you do this for about three years and since these were the first LED lights I had ever seen back then, and you are still putting them on this tree –”

I could tell he was getting nervous that my introduction was taking so long.

“I kind of thought you looked like you could use some help,” I said quickly to get it out.

He stared at me like I was from the tax assessor’s office. “I ain’t following?” he said.

Awkwardness filled the space between him, the dog and me.

“Sir, a lot of people have been mighty kind to me and my family in the last month or so,” I said, thinking about the last six weeks of sitting in a chair, staring at monitors and tubes and wires connected to the fragile girl struggling to breathe under the sheets, wondering what would happen in the next hour that would change my life forever. I pinched the thought from my mind. He did not even know me. To him, I was the strangest stranger in the world.

“People have shown us more care and love than I ever figured I was owed. Saw you here, the lights, the tree, and thought I would pay it forward.”

From the confused look on his face I could tell he had not seen the movie. I tried to make my offer clearer.

“If you need some help putting these lights up, I’d be happy to give you a hand,” I said, feeling like I should have just kept going, admiring his scraggly, blue LED-lighted tree from afar.

Reluctance or reservation or just plain old remembering ran across his face. He looked at me. He looked at the tree. He looked down at his hands holding the strand and he nodded slowly. I took a step forward. He shook his head, squeezing a tiny branch between his calloused fingers.

“No. I appreciate you stopping by to help me, I really do,” he said. “But this is a little job I do by myself. My grandson and I planted this tree. It ain’t much, as you can see. Thought Irene was going to take it down. It’s still here, though.”

He paused, looking down at the dog.

“And as long as it’s here and I’m here, I’m going to keep putting these blue lights on it.” He smiled, draping some over a limb.

“He’s been gone a year now. Would have been seven.”

The words caught in his throat. I looked toward my car. I should never have stopped. It was more than I wanted to know. And yet saying the words out loud seemed to brace him.

“He liked these better than the red ones. ‘Blue Christmas’ he called them.”

It seemed like the old man was going to say something else, but he did not. He was finished talking. It was getting dark. A November breeze rustled the tree. The smell of a distant fireplace made the jostling lights seem even more like Christmas. I did not ask any more details. He did not offer. His details were probably not too different than mine.

Driving away, I thought about my little girl many years ago, her face illuminated by Christmas lights, her big buck-tooth grin pushing her cheeks into squinty eyes looking into the sky wondering if Santa was up there somewhere, heading this way, bringing something good.

I have strange dreams around holidays. The one about Santa and a family of elf zombies kept me freaked for days. The pumpkins and nuns dream still bothers me on Halloween. My most recent dream fits today’s holiday if you live in certain parts of the country where Thanksgiving parades are not sponsored by Macy’s, but do involve flatbed trucks decorated with paper mache and waving girls in some stage of winning a beauty pageant. I say this not to make fun of any regional group, mind you, but to prove that I have, indeed, decorated such a float and dated such a waving girl, and I figured this experience gives me a small amount of credibility on the subject.

In my dream I was on one of these floats wearing a camo’d pilgrim hat, a big belt buckle and – here’s the weird part, just in case you thought I had gotten to it already – I was deep-frying a cowpigdeerturducken while waving to people who looked at me as if I had either given a large contribution to the First Baptist Church or stolen that very same thing. Strange, not going to lie.

The dream sort of hung around for my morning Coke and Pop Tart and I almost told my wife, but thought better of it since she was busy with our own bird and already wonders what I dream about that makes me grunt and yodel now and then. It has bothered me all morning, to the point that I Googled “Cowpigdeerturducken” just now.

No such animal combo on the Internet. Zip. That is how dreams work. They mess with you at night with un-invented things even Google cannot find just so you will spend some of your day trying to understand a way to justify their unconscious stupidity.

Then again, in a Bass-Pro-Shopped world of Cajun marinade injectors and ten-gallon deep fryers, why has no Bubba ever tried to create the ultimate redneck feasty beast? A Cowpigdeerturducken would be a whole episode of Extreme Chef.

Finding a deep fryer big enough to do the job on a cow stuffed with a pig stuffed with a deer stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken would really be a 50-gallon drum perched over a bonfire, and even that might not do it. In my dream it was kind of like that. The whole float was a little greasy and slippery. That much boiling oil would be a dangerous job even for Paula Deen in a fireproof NASCAR uniform, although imagining Paula Deen in that uniform is not a dream I would admit to having.

None of this really matters, though. It was just a dream brought on by a biscuit I ate too late last night. No such thing as a cowpigdeerturducken, nope, just a weird dream. Besides, Gander Mountain and Bass Pro Shops sell everything from camo’d long johns to camo’d couches, but there are no camo’d pilgrim hats in either place. I checked their websites. And not one item big enough to help a man cook a cowpigdeerturducken. Part of me says thank God and the other part wonders why no one has done it yet.

As you watch the parade this Thanksgiving morning, imagine yourself on one of those floats dressed like Larry the Cable-Pilgrim, riding beside a sloshing drum of boiling oil frying a cowpigdeerturducken puckering into a crispy critter while you wave. And my wife wonders why I grunt and yodel in my sleep.

(NOTE: Even though I could not find a cowpigderturducken or a camo’d pilgrim hat on the Internet, I found that pic up there. That is the best I could do)

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.