What brands do you associate with?

What a ridiculous prompt today here in WordPression, but I’ll bite— “what brands do you associate with?”

None.

I hate the word brand. I hated it when I did branding professionally as a copywriter and creative director. It comes from cattle ranching: searing a rancher’s name into the butt of a cow with a their easily identifiable shape in wrought iron, heated damn near lava hot. If I wanted someone to sear me, I’d either get confrontational with a taser wielding enforcement officer or go knock on the doors of cattle sale barn friends in Springfield, Missouri.

Art that exists to merely enrich a businessman (or a church or a nonprofit) is about as close to nihilism as it gets in this sphere. Its a considerable step lower than making art for a king or a pope and if you can’t understand that, you aren’t thinking long and hard enough. Branding — from me or to me or through me or with me — is about as far to the direct opposition of meaningwrights and mythopoets and symbolic reflectors and makers of arts that beget new sciences conceivable without turning to downright iconoclasm and book burning.

That ain’t me.

Only thing I’m ever selling is membership here, my own work, the work of those we publish. IF you find a shred of evidence otherwise anywhere on here from an old post or something, let me know immediately and I will take it down: this site’s almost 15 now. It’s likely I had looser convictions on this when I was twenty. There’s probably a dusty old broke affiliate link in a corner just begging for mu gnarly old witch’s broom.

So no. I identify with zero brands. The moment someone points out a brand on my shirt such as the time my brother in law pointed out it was a Champion sweater and that’s apparently popular, the minute I hate it.

Being popular — being liked by specific companies — is about as far from what I structure my life around as conceivably possible in the blogverse.

Let alone sites that simply use WordPress to host legitimate articles, academic work, and art.